If You Lived Here You'd be Home by Now

What The Flap Over Health Care Tells Us About American Religion

2011-02-05T06:40:00.004-05:00

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Richard T. Hughes
Author, Christian America and the Kingdom of God
February 4, 2011

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson that the health care law is unconstitutional may ultimately lead to the law's demise, or it could turn out to be a bump in the road.

Either way, the continued flap over the health care law and the efforts to bring it down speak volumes about the state of religion in America. It tells us much about the state of American Christianity in particular, since that is this country's dominant faith. But it speaks even more clearly about the state of the Christian Right since so much opposition to the health care law comes from those quarters.

Christian Right advocates have seldom based their opposition in the sort of legal considerations that prompted Judge Vinson to rule the law unconstitutional. Rather, they typically advance the ideological argument that the federal government has no business making laws about health care at all. And that is the claim we will assess here.

We begin with the teachings of Jesus, for his message was clear.

He told his followers to care for the poor. In fact, providing for those he called "the least of these" was perhaps his highest priority. He didn't say how to get that job done. He just said, Do it.

But in this richest nation on earth, where 75 percent of its people claim to be Christian, the poor -- even the working poor -- routinely fall through the cracks. One would think that Christians in this country would utilize "any means necessary" to make sure that no one in this country is homeless or starving or naked or without basic healthcare.

It is true that many Christians, as individuals, are profoundly generous. That is beyond dispute. But if the job is too big for individuals, one would think those Christians would turn to their congregations. And they often do that, too. But if the job is too big for their congregations, one would think those Christians would turn to other agencies, including the one agency that has the ability to abolish poverty altogether: the federal government.

Indeed, one would think that the 75 percent of the nation's population that claims to follow Jesus would rejoice when the government creates a tool to provide healthcare for virtually all the nation's poor. And one would think that those same Christians would rise up in furious protest and righteous indignation when some politicians attempt to sabotage that tool -- and thereby sabotage the nation's poor.

But that seldom happens. In fact, many Christians denounce the health care law as a tool of the devil and support its repeal.

In light of what Jesus taught, I find that position puzzling.

In recent weeks, however, some Christians -- especially those aligned with the Christian Right -- have responded to my editorials that have advocated for the nation's poor. And their responses have helped me understand their position a little better.

What their letters reveal is the way they read the Bible through the lens of individualism and limited government and sacrifice the principles of Jesus on the altar of conservative economic ideology. No one has better framed the ideology that drives these Christians than Bradley Thompson, Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism at Clemson University. Thompson flatly rejects the themes that stand at the heart of biblical religion.

"Altruism teaches," Thompson said, "that selfishness is the ultimate form of evil and that selflessness is the highest moral good. It teaches that man's greatest moral duty is to sacrifice one's self to the needs of others."

That, of course, is exactly what Jesus taught but also what Thompson rejects. Thompson therefore blasts President Obama who called on Americans to "reaffirm the fundamental belief that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper." The idea that "I am my brother's keeper" means "in practice," Thompson claims, "[that] the hardworking must be sacrificed to the lazy. In other words, the best and the worst should be sacrificed to the lowest common denominator."

For Thompson, the struggle between the ideals of altruism -- which happen to be the ideals of biblical religion -- and the ideals of free-market conservatism define the "epic battle" of our age.

Thompson is right about that epic battle.

But as that battles rages, one would think that Christians would consistently line up on the side of the biblical vision that "I am my brother's and my sister's keeper." But that is often not the case.

In fact, when Christians read the Bible through the lens of American individualism, limited government, and free-market conservatism, there is no way they can acknowledge what the Bible teaches about social justice and compassion for the poor.

A man who responded to one of my editorials, for example, complained, "No where does the Lord, or his Son, Jesus Christ, say that government should take care of the poor and downtrodden."

Another wrote, "You keep mentioning 'justice, justice, justice,' by which you really mean 'social justice' or the government using its political power to create a welfare state."

And still another wrote, "Never did Christ advocate or command that we go out and form secular governments to take care of social needs, using other people's tax dollars." Based on that premise, she offered this rebuke: "That you believe you are doing the work of God when you are advancing the cause of socialism is very sad and very wrong."

And virtually all the people who took issue with my editorials agreed that the poor and the unemployed are lazy people who simply don't want to work. One, for example, wrote, "You mention various scriptures about helping the poor, but you never mention 2 Thessalonians 3:10," a passage that reads, "For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat."

Another put an even finer point on the principle that those who refuse to work should not eat, taking aim especially at "able bodied males." "The [Bible's] specific directions for helping people permanently," she said, "were limited to widows and orphans, never able bodied males, who were considered infidels if they ... didn't support their families."

Do these people actually believe that the masses of poor and unemployed in America really don't want to work?

What puzzles me most about the Christian Right is this: they are more than willing to use tax dollars to kill our nation's enemies, but they reject the use of tax dollars to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, and provide health care for those in greatest need.

Many years ago, in the context of American slavery, the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass drew a stark comparison between two kinds of religion. "Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ," he said, "I recognize the widest possible difference -- so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked."

"I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ," he continued. "I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity."

Some 100 years later, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King raised similar questions about Christians in the American South. "I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states," he said. "On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at her beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward ... [And] over and over again I have found myself asking, 'What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?'"

King continued: "Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave the clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when tired, bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?"

We must raise similar questions today about those Christians who say to their government, "You may use my tax dollars to kill and destroy, but you may not use my tax dollars to feed the hungry, house the homeless, clothe the naked, or provide health care for those in greatest need." Indeed, the contrast Frederick Douglass drew between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ still rings depressingly true.

But there is hope. For Jesus never asked his followers to embrace limited government or free-market capitalism. But he did ask his followers to care for the poor. That injunction resounds today as loudly and clearly as it did some twenty centuries ago.

The only question is this: how will America's Christians respond?

Richard T. Hughes is Distinguished Professor of Religion and Director of the Sider Institute for Anabaptist, Pietist, and Wesleyan Studies at Messiah College and the author of Christian America and the Kingdom of God.

2011-01-24T07:17:00.000-05:00

Spiritual But Not Religious?

by Larry Peers

Loyalty to religious congregations may seem to be waning among some people and many articulate their concern as a suspicion of the “organizational” aspects of religious communities or their leaders. This outlook might get expressed in a variety of ways, including the statement “I am spiritual, not religious” or checking “none” on a religious affiliation survey.

Rather than bemoan this apparent trend, I believe we can listen more deeply and learn from it. The fact of the matter is that not all of those who say they are “spiritual but not religious” are outside of our congregations. Some of them are sitting in our pews. I like to think that those who say they are “spiritual but not religious” at least have one oar still in the water. I also like to think that those who don’t have a current religious affiliation may find pathways to a religious community at some point in their lives. In fact, research shows that many do.

So, rather than throw up our hands in despair or give in to resignation, I believe that there is an enduring task for religious congregations—a task of connecting to those outside and inside our walls who seek spiritual nurturance. Those who say they are “spiritual, not religious” whether they are outside or inside our congregations may have the same yearnings as all the rest of us—a deeper spiritual life, a deeper relationship to God, or an integrity to their religious path that allows them to engage on their own terms towards ongoing spiritual growth.

If we listen to folks who claim to be “spiritual, not religious” we may discover that some of their critique may be useful to hear. In particular, our forms of doing things, our way of organizing may be inhibiting rather than facilitating belonging.

I know one Baptist church that offers its adult Sunday School classes at a time that works best for older retired folks but does not quite work for families with young children. We know churches that make volunteering unavailable to those who work evenings, have young children, travel for work, or don’t have lots of free time. We know Jews who have found their “spirituality” outside of the synagogue. Our forms—our ways of doing things—may inhibit our capacity as religious organizations for people to “belong” even when they strive to believe.

Religious affiliation is a fluid phenomenon these days. People do not necessarily stay in the faith tradition in which they were raised. People go in the direction where their heart, their spirit is leading them—and sometimes this is outside the congregation. And sometimes, it is outside because we have not remained as spiritually vital and creative as we can be within congregations.

Jews and Christians alike can identify with this critique by Rabbi Sydney Schwartz in Finding a Spiritual Home: How a New Generation of Jews Can Transform the American Synagogue:

The Jewish community has lost some of the most sensitive spiritual souls of this generation. They are Jews who were looking for God and found spiritual homes outside of Judaism. Their journeys traversed the Jewish community, but nothing there beckoned them. The creation of synagogue-communities in which the voices of seekers can be heard and their questions can be asked will challenge many loyalist Jews. It will upset and enrage them. But it would also enrich them.

Perhaps, we need to think of “spiritual” and “religious” not so much as polar opposites. Maybe the task before us is to recognize that there is something to cherish in each. So here are some suggestions for what your congregation can do to nurture the “spiritual” in the religious:

Ask, what are we offering that explicitly responds to the spiritual needs of those who are searching, questioning and/or want to have meaningful experiences of encounter with God, with others in an atmosphere of dialogue and discovery?
Do an audit of your programs and the times that you offer them. Does your schedule make it difficult for different ages and lifestyles to participate? I’ve noticed more and more creative programming in congregations these days. A parents group can be held during a children’s choir rehearsal, adult programs during religious school. Programs like “Messy Church” and “Tot Shabbat” allow parents and young children to experience liturgy together.
Are you an intentionally “practicing congregation”? Have you found ways for those who attend to enter into and cultivate practices that can nurture their spirit and that can deepen over time? Many who seek meditation, yoga or other experiences are seeking to develop a practice that speaks to their whole person. Some of our congregations are reviving centering prayer, experimenting with different ways of doing Torah study, or including service projects as reflective religious practice.
Ask, who owns our congregation? Is one generation in charge or do you have a cross-section of generations and perspectives that are allowing you to look at your congregation through multiple lenses?
Can you enrich your own offerings by joining with other congregations for some joint programming that you collectively sponsor? When appropriate, can you sponsor interfaith programs that allow the seeker to learn various perspectives on some common human dilemmas and issues (ethics, parenting, dealing with transitions, etc.)

These are only some of the questions that allow us to bridge the dichotomies often created between the “spiritual” and the “religious.”
Throughout religious history there have always been teachers who have sought to reinvigorate religious institutions with direct experiences of the holy, with renewed emphasis on the spiritual basis of our “organizing.” The challenges of our time may be distinctly different, but it is a perennial religious task to form and reform the “potter’s clay” of our religious institutions so that they can truly be “a house of prayer for all people.”

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Larry Peers is a senior consultant with the Alban Institute. "Spiritual But Not Religious" originally appeared as the Ask Alban column in the Fall 2010 issue of Congregations magazine. Copyright © 2010 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved.

The Arrogance of the Atheists: They Batter Believers in Religion with Smug Certainty

2010-12-29T08:21:00.001-05:00

Witkin/Bloomberg; via Reuters; Caulfield/Getty

Writers Christopher Hitchens (left, 'God is not Great') and Sam

Harris (center, 'The End of Faith') embody modern atheism,

says S.E. Cupp. Bill Maher (right) rips religion in his film 'Religulous.'

S.E. Cupp
December 29th 2010
Back in college, while I was busy pretending that a blottoed discussion of Nietzsche over $1 beers made me an intellectual giant, my fiftysomething father, who'd worked so hard to send me there, was quietly being saved. Having long eschewed any ties to his Southern Baptist upbringing, he suddenly found himself born again and on a quest to know God better.

As a longtime atheist, I was a little surprised. But eventually I came to be relieved by this development. While my friends' fathers were buying flashy sports cars and exchanging their wives for models, my own father was turning inward and asking: Is there more to life than this?

I was also proud of him for becoming a student again. As I watched him pore over C.S. Lewis, Lee Strobel and even neoatheist thinkers such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, I thought it amazing that he still wanted to learn something new.

It was a revelation I'd experience over and over again - meeting faithful believers and discovering that, no matter how long they'd been in the fold, many were still on a dogged quest for spiritual knowledge.

And it's why I decided to go back to school as well and study religion in a more meaningful way. It wasn't necessarily an acknowledgment of a higher power, but a realization that I knew little about the beliefs I had railed so arrogantly against.

Which brings me to the problem with modern atheism, embodied by the likes of Harris and Hitchens, authors of "The End of Faith" and "God Is Not Great," respectively. So often it seems like a conversation ender, not a conversation starter. And the loudest voices of today's militant atheism, for all their talk of rational thought, don't seem to want to do too much thinking at all. As James Wood wrote in The New Yorker, "The new atheists do not speak to the millions of people whose form of religion is far from the embodied certainties of contemporary literalism. Indeed, it is a settled assumption of this kind of atheism that there are no intelligent religious believers."

What spiritual quest are they on, except to put an abrupt end to those like my father's? For them, the science is settled, the data are conclusive and the book (no, not the Good Book) has been written. Time for everyone else to pack up and move on to other business, like, presumably, accumulating wealth and fulminating at the sight of the nearest Christmas tree.

The militant atheist wants nothing more than to spoil the believer's spiritual journey. That's both meanspirited and radically unenlightened.

Though more than 95% of the world finds some meaning in faith, God-hating comic Bill Maher shrugs this off as a "neurological disorder." His version of a quest for knowledge was a series of scathing jokes at the faithfuls' expense in the documentary "Religulous."

The latest incarnation of the thought-eschewing secularist is American Atheists spokesman Dave Silverman, who sums up the argument this way on atheistnexus.org: "Religion is my bitch." He has also tweeted, "Yes it is a myth. Deal with it. All delusions are myths."

It's these snarky and condescending rejections, not of faith itself but of those who profess it, that reflect a total unwillingness to learn something new about human nature, the world around us and even of science itself. While the neoatheists pay only cursory attention to dismantling arguments for God, they spend most of their time painting his followers as uncultured rubes. The fact that religion has inexplicably persisted, even despite Copernicus, Darwin and the Enlightenment, doesn't seem to have much sociological meaning for them.

The truth is, folks like Maher and Silverman don't want to know about actual belief - in fact, they are much more certain about the nature of the world than most actual believers, who understand that a measure of doubt is necessary for faith. They want to focus on the downfall of a gay pastor or the Nativity scene at a mall.

I wonder what they'd say to someone like Immaculee Ilibagiza, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who says that her faith in Jesus Christ got her through 91 days of hiding in a 3x4 foot bathroom while her family was murdered outside. Would they tell her she was crazy? Delusional? To just deal with it? I would hope not - but I am not sure.

When the esteemed theologian David Martyn Lloyd-Jones asked C.S. Lewis when he would write another book, Lewis responded, "When I understand the meaning of prayer." It was an acknowledgment that he - a thinker with a much sharper mind than, say, Maher's - didn't know everything. I implore my fellow atheists to take this humility to heart. There's still a lot to learn, but only if you're not too busy being a know-it-all.

secupp@redsecupp.com
S.E. Cupp, whose column appears on Wednesdays on NYDailynews.com and often in the print edition of the newspaper, is a political commentator and author of the book "Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media's Attack on Christianity." She is also co-author of "Why You're Wrong About The Right." S.E. has a regular feature at The Daily Caller and is a contributing editor at Townhall magazine. She lives in New York City.

/29/2010-12-29_the_arrogance_of_the_atheists_they_batter_believers_with_smug_certainty.html#ixzz19VQ7emfR

So, you really want to go to Seminary?

2010-11-16T17:08:00.001-05:00

2010-06-06T06:40:00.003-05:00

Speaking of Faith

I'm reading Krista Tippett's book, Speaking of Faith, a wonderful, rich, tapestry of interviews and observations about the galaxy of values and longings that underlie meaningfulness in human existence. Here is one line (among many) that deserves re-reading

As a journalist, I'm deeply aware of how strangely tricky it is to make goodness seem relevant, or at least as perversely thrilling as evil. But if I've learned anything it is that goodness prevails not in the absence of reasons to despair, but in spite of them…people who bring light into the world wrench it out of darkness and contend openly with darkness all of their days. They don't let despair have the last word, nor do they close their eyes to its pictures or deny the enormity of its facts. They say, 'Yes and,' and they wake up the next day and the day after that to act and live accordingly."

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Katie Melua & Eva Cassidy - What A Wonderful World

2010-06-01T23:23:00.000-05:00

"Chrash Helmets for Christians...

2010-06-01T23:03:00.000-05:00

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs,
sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest
idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does
no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the
floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a
Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet
hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should
issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our
pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the
waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

                                             --Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk

Mose and Amy Allison, singing "Was"

2010-05-28T20:16:00.000-05:00

Mose Allison is an American musical treasure. He is on tour right now and will be playing in Massachusetts, Friday, June 4 8:00pm

at Narrows Center for the Arts, Fall River.

Here he is playing one of his softer songs, sung by his daughter Amy. She has a voice that some hate and some love, but the fact that father and daughter did it together is sweet.

Tom Lehrer - National Brotherhood Week

2010-05-02T15:04:00.000-05:00

In keeping with Mark Twain's "War Prayer," which pointed out the hypocrisy of many of our sweet sounding prayers in war, this is Tom Lehrer, who pointed out the hypocrisy of National Brotherhood week back in the sixties when racism was rampant and ugly.

Since hypocrisy in war and race seem to have a long shelf life, these two pieces need to be brought back now and then to make us laugh (and cry).

2010-04-18T06:10:00.004-05:00

The Language of God from United Church of Christ on Vimeo.

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2010-03-04T21:03:00.000-05:00

Game-Changer
Susan Adams, 03.04.10, 6:00 PM ET
Forbes.com

Most MBAs would covet Scott James' old job. As a marketing manager at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., James, 38, banked a salary, bonus and stock option package worth $200,000; he traveled to glamorous spots like Tokyo and Sydney; and he enjoyed instant access to brilliant colleagues and seemingly limitless budgets.

But the trim, athletic weekend soccer player was not fulfilled. Especially after his first child was born in 2003, he started to struggle with what he describes as "a war in my soul." While his wife Susan, a social worker, could tell their son that she helped people for a living, James felt that he couldn't say the same for himself.

So he made a dramatic career switch, breaking free of Microsoft's golden handcuffs in 2003 and three years later starting a company called Fair Trade Sports, which makes balls for soccer, basketball, football and rugby using rubber cultivated in pesticide-free, sustainable plantations in India and Sri Lanka. The balls are hand-stitched by unionized Pakistani workers who earn a living wage, certified by a watchdog group called the Fair Trade Labeling Organization.

James says he modeled Fair Trade Sports on the salad dressing and cookie company set up by Paul Newman: Fair Trade is a for-profit enterprise, but pledges to give away all its after-tax profits to charity. Financed with $200,000 James socked away while working for Microsoft, the company starting doing business in late 2006. Last year it lost $15,000 on revenues of $400,000.

James expects to turn a profit this year, when he'll start to collect a nominal salary himself. He works from home and has no employees; contractors handle everything from sales to accounting. His business plan has his pay ratcheting up to $100,000 once the company is in the black. He will turn over the rest of the earnings to two nonprofits, Boys & Girls Club and Room to Read, which builds libraries in Asia and Africa.

A Notre Dame business school grad, James acknowledges that moving from marketing executive to entrepreneur was a bit of a leap. When he was deciding to leave Microsoft, he spent three months meeting with as many do-gooders as he could find in the Seattle area, including Paul Shoemaker of Social Venture Partners, a group that connects Seattle area donors with local charities, and the head of the Union Gospel Mission, a church organization that serves the homeless. Most had one message: He should take his marketing expertise and parlay it into fundraising. James wasn't interested. "I realized I should take my marketing and sales skills and apply that to a business scenario that would generate charitable dollars."

James didn't make the leap all at once. Several of the nonprofit folks he met recommended he check out a company called Pura Vida Coffee, a Seattle-based for-profit fair trade outfit. After his wife agreed to quit eating out and to scrimp by any means necessary, James took an 80% pay cut (to $40,000) and started work as Pura Vida's marketing head. The couple produces most of their own food, including eggs from the 14 chickens they keep on two acres they own with their home on Bainbridge Island, across Puget Sound from Seattle. The family has always had a big garden, which they farm together, but since James left Microsoft they've expanded it to what James calls a "food forest," including fruit trees and berry bushes.

While pushing Pura Vida's coffee, he immersed himself in the fair trade community. One day, he saw an online mention of a London company that was making fair-trade soccer balls. The note caught his eye: It was the first time he'd heard of a product that wasn't an agricultural commodity being certified as a fair-trade business. And as a passionate participant in Sunday Bainbridge Island pick-up soccer games, James felt personally inspired.

Since James had only been at the coffee company for a couple of years and was still learning the fair-trade marketing ropes, he filed the green soccer ball idea in the back of his mind for nearly a year. But eventually he pulled out the notes from the entrepreneurship class he took at Notre Dame and started writing a business plan.

James turned to an international nonprofit called the Forest Stewardship Council that certifies agricultural enterprises as environmentally friendly. The group helped him connect with rubber-growers in India and Sri Lanka that eschew pesticides and grow their rubber plants together with other crops, like tea bushes, so the land produces the greatest output. The Fair Trade Labeling Organization hooked him up with a factory in Sialkot, Pakistan, that has a policy of hiring workers who are 16 or older, and paying what it deems a living wage for the region.

So far 70% of Fair Trade Sports' balls are sold online, through the company's Web site and Amazon.com. But James is in discussion with Costco about introducing his products in five West Coast stores, and he's planning to approach Sports Authority. "We don't want the stores to rip and replace their other balls," he says, sounding like a marketing executive. "Everything green is so sexy right now, we want them to include our products as their green line."

Once he gets his wares into the chains, he's hoping that puts pressure on the likes of Nike, Puma, Adidas, Spalding and Wilson. His ultimate goal: to be put out of business. "If I can start a tiny sports ball company that then fosters change by one of the top five brands, and they take over what I'm doing," he says, "then I get to walk away claiming victory. Then I've used a small investment to effect massive positive change."

Happy Valentine's Day

2010-02-15T07:05:00.000-05:00

Offshore Outsourcing

2010-02-05T08:10:00.002-05:00

Sermon notes on John 6

2009-12-06T19:24:00.004-05:00

John 6:1-21
Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year B
Proper 12/ Ordinary time 17, Year B

As some of you know, I’m putting together a book of sermon notes on passages in the Bible, and I just finished this draft of the chapter about the feeding story in John. I’d be interested in your comments.
Blessings,
Stan

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It’s often overlooked that the three most important interests in Jesus’ ministry were education, health care and food security.[1] The last of these three is never seen more clearly than in the feeding stories of the Gospels.

The first thing that is important to know about the feeding stories is that they are among the most significant in the gospels. Feeding is the only miracle that is shared in all four gospels, and two of them may have told it twice. Both John and Mark have two feeding stories each. So, either (a) both of them thought the story was so important that they wanted to share it twice (which would attest to its significance to the early church) or (b) Jesus did more feeding than most of us had assumed (which would attest to its significance in the ministry of Jesus).

The story is laden with symbolism, some of which is apparent to “normal” readers (whatever that means), and some are not. I’ll point out a few of the most important, but John starts right at the very beginning adding little interesting messages.

Notice, for example, that it begins with Jesus getting off of a boat at the Sea of Galilee. All of the four gospels agree on this. But John adds that it was also known as the Sea of Tiberias. Why did he do that? Probably because Tiberias was one of the most hated and politically volatile cities in Palestine, and he wants the reader to take note of that. It had been in existence for only a few short years, built by Herod Antipas in 20 c.e. at the edge of the Sea of Galilee (and Jesus’ ministry was probably somewhere around 30 c.e.). What made it a hated name and avoided by many locals was that it was built upon a local Jewish graveyard and was therefore considered unclean to observant Jews. Only people from outside of Israel (and sellouts within Israel) would ever dare living there.

Additionally, between the time of its founding and the time of Jesus, it grew rapidly to become the largest city in Israel, surpassing even Sephorrus, which had itself only been built a few decades earlier. This meant that in less than a hundred years Israel had three major cities, all demanding resources from the surrounding farms and villages. Among other things, this put increasing demands on the food supply of the region and contributed to an upswing in hunger throughout Israel. It was in turn exacerbated by the pro-city economic policies of Antipas, which forced rural farmers to either give up some of their produce to feed the cities or pay a tribute on what they did not give. So, the more they grew the more they had to pay in tribute to the powerful urban centers. Farmers could lower the amount of tax they paid by not growing as many crops, but that would also lower the amount of food they had for their own personal consumption. They lost either way. Bible scholar Obery Hendricks, describes the economic life of first century farmer this way:

Most peasant farmers had land holdings of less than six acres, of which on average only 1.5 acres was available for cultivation, hardly enough to support a family. That is, if they were fortunate enough to have saved their farms from outright seizure by the Romans, or from dispossession for tax default, or from the machinations of the Herodians and their cronies who, it is estimated, owned one-half to two-thirds of the land in Galilee. To make ends meet, most farmers either had to hire themselves out for wages to supplement their meager crops, or go into debt, which was usually a worse alternative. Tenant farmers and share-croppers often fared even worse, ending up in prison or enslaved by their creditors. [2]

When food production went down, it did two things. First it simply lowered the amount of fruits, vegetables, and grains that could be consumed and made the region grow incrementally more hungry. Second, and more interestingly, when huge percentages of the grains were taken out of system, it made the prices of the remaining grains go up. It’s simple Econ 101: when there is more of something the price goes down and when there is less of something it goes up. So, there was less food to go around and the food that was grown cost more to purchase for the families who didn’t have direct access to it themselves.

In many ways this is a story that could be told of many in the world today. Following the global economic “reforms” of the 1970s and ‘80s, much of the farming in poor and developing countries of the global south was reoriented from production for local consumption to production for exports. In some instances they were pushed to sell larger and larger portions of their wheat or other grains to the government or middle people which would then export it to the wealthy, usually northern, countries. In some instances they would cease food production altogether and grow instead something like hemp or coffee. In this activity, a great many people made--and still do make--a lot of money, but it should be noted that the same two principles that exacerbated hunger in ancient Israel still held: taking food off of the market meant that there was less of it, and what remained went up in price. So, over all, while many people benefitted from globalization and the rise of the global “free” market, by and large the poor farmers of the world became more poor.

When the ancient farmers of Israel were unable to pay the tax, they did have access to a convenient loan program from the large wealthy land owners to the small poor ones, to tide them over—but it was often as high as fifty to sixty percent interest! With this vicious combination of taxes and loans, whenever there was a bad harvest either from drought or unseasonable rains, many farmers would simply lose everything and have to sell themselves as slaves to their creditors. High rates of interest were one of the key tools used for creating poverty and debt slavery in the ancient world. This too has a contemporary parallel. Leaders of third world countries in the global south took out huge loans in the 1970s, under the belief that they could export enough to the north to pay them back. In the eighties, two things happened at once to destroy that dream. First, the wealthy countries of the global north went into a recession and cut back on purchases of the products that the poor countries were trying to sell, driving prices downward. Second, partly because of the recession and partly because of the US Federal Reserve tightening credit, the interest on the loans went up. So, the costs for their loans went up and their income to pay on them went down. Poor countries fell into an economic black hole from which they have still not quite recovered. To keep them paying on their loans, the wealthy and powerful countries, and the multi-lateral banks that they control (like the World Bank and the IMF), made stringent, draconian demands on the poor countries that many people of faith and conscience today believe to be a modern version of slavery. Different, but in many ways similar to the demands imposed on small farmers in ancient Israel by Antipas and large land owners.

All of this background is tied closely to the feeding story and is related to why John wanted you to know that this took place close to the hated city of Tiberias. Have you ever wondered why it was that everywhere that Jesus went he was swarmed by great crowds of people? Where did they come from? When he is in the towns, you may not see the thousands, but there are still hoards of people flocking after him. Even allowing for some exaggeration from the Gospel writers, it still is an interesting phenomenon. Where did they come from? These stories were for the most part in the middle of the day. Don’t they have jobs?

The answer is “no.” These were people who were driven off of their land by poverty and hunger and oppression by their rulers. They often were not able to pay the demanded tribute and feed themselves at the same time and got desperately into debt and finally lost their farms.[3] Some in fact moved back onto their own farms as indebted workers, but many just became homeless, beggars, prostitutes, thieves, and day laborers. When they heard of Jesus, teaching, healing and feeding in the region or neighborhood they flocked to see him. So, when he got out of the boat at the beginning of our story, and the crowds saw him, they clamored for him, wanting to see or experience some of the healing signs that they had heard had taken place through him.

Notice that out of the blue, John mentions in passing that this took place near the Passover. Why did he think that was important to mention here? Of course part of it was probably because he wants the reader to think of Jesus as the new Moses, who also delivered bread (manna) from a mountain (Exod. 16:4, cf. John 6:31-33). But it is also likely that once again John wants us to feel the politically charged atmosphere surrounding this event. In a fairly consistent way, whenever John makes note of an event being close to a Jewish festival, he has Jesus present some kind of controversial teaching that subverts and undermines a traditional teaching that is held by the religious authorities, and the result is often a confrontation with those authorities (cf. 1:13ff; 7:2ff; 10:22ff; 12:1ff)”[4] While in this instance the religious authorities do not show up until after the feeding story, the provocative, confrontational nature of the feeding is nonetheless clear here as well.

Here is where the story gets very interesting (I bet you thought it was interesting already). When the crowd comes up the hill toward Jesus and his disciples, he leans over to Philip and asks, “Where can we go to buy enough bread to feed these people?” He already knew the answer to that question when he asked it, but he did it anyway to see what Philip would say. And Philip comes up with the straightforward economic reality: No place. Nowhere. It’s impossible. He says that to feed these people would take six months of wages, and nobody--certainly not the rag tag crowd that followed Jesus--had that kind of money. Even if Judas had not been skimming donations from the till, they still couldn’t do it. Six months wages (or eight or ten, depending on the various translations) are guesses. In the Greek it says two hundred denarii. A Denarias was about one day’s wage for a common laborer, so Philip is saying it would take two hundred days worth of work to feed these people. That’s a pretty precise statement. Why not be more general as numbers often are in the Bible? Philip’s precision is interesting. I think that in addition to just simply saying that this is a chunk of change, it is likely that Philip is also making an exasperated statement about the outrageousness of the escalating prices in his day. He’s making a statement about the impossibility of buying food to live on in an age of stagnating wages and inflationary prices. And if so, he is certainly correct.

As an aside, I also find it interesting that Jesus asked the “where” question, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” But Philip answers a different question, “How much will it cost to buy bread for these people to eat?” Jesus question assumes that they will buy bread and can buy bread. Philip’s answer makes it clear that he doesn’t think they can buy that much bread, no matter where the bakery is.

Before Jesus could say anything, Andrew, Peter’s brother says—also sounding exasperated and futile—”Well, we have a boy here who has some fish and bread.” It’s not altogether clear in English, but his choice of words indicates that he also thinks this is a lost cause. The words “boy” and “fish” are diminutive, that is, a “small boy” and a “small amount of fish.” Also, the use of the term “barley” loaves has a negative connotation because only the very poor and the very desperate would lower themselves to eating this tasteless bread. Translated into more clear English, he’s saying “We’ve got bubkes here, zilch. Our resources are tiny. The market’s gone to Hades and just to illustrate that for you, look at what we got: a little kid with a couple of fish and some really smelly barley, which taste awful and I’m not going there.”

Then Jesus does an odd thing. But before we get to it, let me say what Jesus did not do. He did not offer communion. That is, when he took the loaves, broke them, gave thanks, and gave them…, he was not imitating some form of pre-communion, even though the Gospel writers, writing many years later, certainly had it in mind, and even though approximately 487 gazillion preachers have said he did. Whatever else he was thinking of up there on the mountain, it is all but one hundred percent certain that Jesus did not have the Celebration of Holy Eucharist on his mind while he was breaking bread and handing it out. If he did, what would be the point? The crowd that gathered there that day would have no idea what he was talking about. Almost every Bible scholar on the planet (with the possible exception of my cat, but that may just be her) believes that the Gospel writers retrofitted that theology back into the actions of Jesus because that was what they were thinking of, not Jesus.

Now what was Jesus thinking of? If the accounts can be accepted, he was looking out onto a sea of faces, all poor and almost all hungry. They represented the wide swath of the bottom of Israelite society of the day. They were probably far more than 5,000 people, because in those days they only counted men, not women and not children. So a good guess would be at least ten thousand, perhaps as many as twenty. Again, if the crowd estimates can be accepted, by any accounting that would be an incredible amount of people.

Look again at the four acts described before the actual feeding itself: he “took,” “gave thanks,”[5] “broke,” and “gave.” While these probably are not images that prophesy upcoming Holy Communion, they probably are images that hearken back to traditional Hebrew gestures of a gracious host welcoming guests to his banquet table (except that Jesus’ guest list was a bit larger than most).

Think about the first two words, “took” and “blessed.” These are welcoming acts, and in a typical first century Jewish family, these are the acts of hosting. The last two, “broke” and “gave” are acts of serving and they are acts done by a slave (or worse, a wife). Notice that before Jesus either welcomes or serves, he has everyone in the crowd “recline” (anepeson [anapípto]), which is the posture one takes in a banquet, not an ordinary meal. To recline means that the host has to lean down to serve you. It is also the posture that Jesus takes later in the last supper, when he also serves. In doing this, Jesus in a subtle, almost radical way, has symbolically taken on the role of both master and slave, husband and wife, and welcomes everyone to the table.[6] When he does that, the participants almost certainly realized that something very special was about to happen.

So far, he is doing two things. First he is embodying the majestic vision of the “messianic banquet” of the Hebrew prophets, who were in turn envisioning the Jubilee, when all of God’s creation that has been broken and disfigured by human corruption and greed, will be returned back to the order of harmony and justice that God had originally intended. In the days of God’s final dispensation, a celebration of justice and equality will break out all over the land, and it will be symbolized by the one thing that most common people lack: food. There will be a great and glorious banquet on the mountain tops, which will be attended by all who can walk or crawl (and some who can do neither).

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
   a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
       of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
                                                                            — Isaiah 25:6

Most significant for a Christian interpretation of this act is that throughout his ministry, Jesus many times—here included—became the vision of the banquet. He acted it out in his behaviors with others and embodied its salvific meaning. He had, in fact, a reputation as a “glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Mt 11:19). It was considered a criticism by his enemies, but a beacon of what God intended for the earth to his supporters. He “welcomes sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:1–2) and in so doing he becomes God’s magisterial welcome mat to sinners (which we should remember, included people who were sick, contagious, old, non-Jews, immigrants, criminals, and women) to enter in and become a part of the true end for humanity, the “kingdom” of God. The Last Supper, instead of pointing backward to this feeding story, was actually pointing forward to the coming eschatological banquet when he says, “I will never again drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom” (Matt. 26:29; Mark 14:25; Luke 22:18; cf. Luke 22:28–30).

Second, Jesus is also not just symbolically being the new realm of God embodied on earth, he is modeling a way to create it. “The Kingdom of God is within you,” he once told them, and here is what it looks like. Notice how he does that. He holds up the little boy and distributes his paltry offering in front of everyone, and suddenly there is an abundance of food. There are a number of scholars today who believe that what happened in the various feeding stories was much less magical than they sound in the preaching of most sermons, but far more miraculous.

It’s very likely that what happened was something like this: Jesus took the little boy and he set him in front of the crowd and said, “Hey, hey, all of you. Listen up. Look up here, focus. Okay. Now I know that all of you are very poor. All of you have felt like you have been caught up in the economic crash that drove up the prices of food and drove down your income. We all know that. And all of you are afraid that you don’t have enough even to survive on your own and you’re afraid to spend anything. Now, I’m not going to give you a long lecture about Keynesian economics and how major economic actors need to step in and invest and spend and loan until the smaller actors can get their faith and trust and security back. Rome may get around to something like that one of these days, but until then, I’m going to try something else. Something that might work in the long haul. Something that might bring in the Kingdom you’ve all heard so much about. I’m going to put this kid out here--with his frankly dismal offering--for all of you to look at. He’s offering to give us everything he’s got and I want you to see that. And then I’m going to break up his bread and give thanks to God for it and start distributing it to all of you, and…well, let’s see what happens. Alright? So bow your heads I’m going to pray” and he starts praying.

And then, I think, as the bits and pieces of food are handed down the aisle, one person starts to think to himself, “Y’ know, the wife did make me this sandwich and packed me this thermos of coffee, and I probably don’t need all of it, so I’ll break it in half and pass it down with the barley.” And then the next guy says, “Well, I do have this banana that I forgot to check at the gate when I came in, and I don’t need all of it,” so he breaks it in half and passes it down. And then there’s the guy who picked up the box of Oreos at the Seven Eleven that morning on the way out of town to the rally. And the one who won the turkey at the meat raffle at the Grange meeting last night. And the one who remembers he still has a piece of that fruit cake left over from a party last year that never went bad. And so on, all down the line, until all the loaves and fishes had been passed around and the disciples gathered up twelve baskets full of leftovers and party favors.

Goodness. Now that would be a miracle!

[1] The list is probably slightly exaggerated, but close enough to make the point.
[2] Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How They Have Been Corrupted (Doubleday, 2006) p.
[3] See Amy Jill-Levine, “Visions of Kingdoms” the Oxford History of the Biblical World, Ed. Michael D. Coogan (Oxford University Press: 1998), p. 364.
[4] Homiletics, “Jesus Doesn’t Use IVR!” July 30, 2006.
[5] Actually the synoptics say “blessed” (eulogēsen); John’s Gospel says “gave thanks” (eucharistēsas), but the difference is not great enough here to quibble.
[6] In the words of John Dominic Crossan, “Long before he was the ‘host,’ he was the hostess.” The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), p. 404.

"The Lake House"

2009-11-06T13:11:00.004-05:00

Above Ground: An Anthology of Living Fiction

2009-10-10T21:31:00.006-05:00

Now Available on Amazon.com from Harvard Square Editions
(Including a story by Stan Duncan)

See our video trailer about the book:

(Or follow this link to the original.

Teddy's Letters

2009-08-29T21:47:00.012-05:00

.
Back in the eighties I led a number of delegations to Central America. Usually they were for US church groups. some were for a human rights organization.

We always went to El Salvador and Nicaragua and a third country, which would change from year to year. This was during the days when the Reagan Administration was supporting the rebels against the government in Nicaragua and the government against the rebels in El Salvador. Our delegations would talk to human rights organizations, faith groups, government officials, displaced people, etc. and give people in the US a sense of what was really going on down there because the media seemed so baffling about it all.

On one of my early trips a social worker from Ponca City, Oklahoma, recommended that I write Ted Kennedy's office and ask him if he would send along a letter of safe passage, just in case we got in a difficult--that is, dangerous--situation. I hadn't thought about that, but I did write to him and weeks later I got a personal letter from the Senator saying "to whom it may concern" that Stan Duncan was a big deal and was traveling under his guidance and that I should be taken care of and treated with respect in any situation that might come up. It was great.

Every year after that, just before my trip I would write him again and every year dutifully he would compose a similar letter. I never met him and he never met me, but we had a funny relationship. I was his pet project, the guy he would write the annual letter for and he always asked how I was doing and how the trips went. I'd always write back saying the trip was fine and all was well, but never much more than that. He was, after all, Edward Moore Kennedy, the senior United States Senator from Massachusetts, and I was just some kid from Oklahoma who was freelancing trying to save the world, and trying to keep from getting killed while doing it.

I didn't need his letters all that often, but every now and then it felt good to have one with me just in case. I would take it out and show to a guard or official when they were getting a little testy or suspicious about our intentions. We were there usually as a church group, and that should have been safe, but every now and then we traveled into an area that we weren't totally certain about. It was important to me to take my delegations "behind the scenes" in some of these areas to help them get a look at what was really happening, because our tax dollars were paying for much of the carnage across the region. And the governments of many of those countries, especially El Salvador and Guatemala were not fond of our doing that at all.

There was one time, however--it was March, 1988. I was up in the Suchitoto region of northern El Salvador. Which was the center of the rebellion and all gringos, doctors, teachers, development workers and human rights representatives were ordered out. I had been living in El Salvador for about six months at that time, ostensibly doing research on economic development projects, but also still doing human rights documentation, this time with journalists from Australia, Britain, and Scotland. We were interviewing refugees from the villages that had been the scenes of bloody massacres by the Salvadoran military. We got into the region by bus, pickup, foot, and on one occasion hiding under bags of grain on a supply boat going up a river. We were able to get some good interviews, notes, and pictures, and I was very pleased about that, but on the way back government troops stopped our bus and took us in. They confiscated all of our bags (which included all of our documentation) and destroyed everything (including a Bible that had been given to me by my aunt when I graduated from high school). And they kept all of us in jail for three days. I don't know about the others--we were kept in different quarters--but I was terrified. The military guards working with me did not treat me badly, but they grilled me day after day about why I was there and what I was doing and who I worked for. I couldn't just say that I was there documenting their own human rights abuses, so I continued my line about doing economic development research.

That wasn't totally untrue. There were a number of re-population villages in the area that I had in fact been looking at--those were villages made up of people who had fled into Honduras from the fighting in El Salvador and were now coming back and "re-populating" new villages. They were a form of economic development model and I claimed I was there to study them. But they didn't quite believe it (and with good reason).

Finally after my third day there someone came to see me who could speak English. I think he had just arrived at the compound because I had not seen him before. He asked me all of the same questions all over again with an increasingly impatient, angry, ominous tone. This time, since he probably could read, I hauled out Teddy Kennedy's letter. He looked at it silently for a long time (I remember wondering if he was having trouble with some of the words). Then when he got to the end he grew even more angry. He tore it in half and threw it to the ground saying that this was nothing, it means nothing, it was irrelevant to their questing, and they still needed to know the truth about why I was there or I would never go home.

He turned and walked out of the room and left me alone. I picked up the pieces of the letter, folded them up, put them back into my back pack, and started to sit down, but before I could do that the door came open again and the guards that I had been interrogated by for the last two days came in and escorted me out of the compound and, without saying a word, pushed me into the street. I was free. Moments later, while I was still standing there trying to understand what had happened, my friends were pushed out the same door and there we all were.

We were exhilarated about being out and alive and through the ordeal. We jumped up and down screaming and laughing and decided to celebrate by going to a local bar and having a beer.

But unfortunately I never thought much about the letter after that. I've told this story a number of times to all of my friends, but one person I never told it to was Ted Kennedy. I have never written him to thank him for saving our lives.

It's true that he may not have. It's possible that we would eventually have been set free, after all back in those days the worst thing that the Salvadoran government wanted to be known for was killing off a citizen of the country that was giving it one million dollars a day in aid.

On the other hand, you never know. Our situation looked pretty grim for a while and who knows how many days would have gone by? Each day the guards were growing angrier and angrier at us and at our stone wall of silence about why we were there and what we were really up to.

There's a real chance that none of us would have made it home alive had it not been for that yearly letter that Kennedy sent with me, saying (incredulously) that I was an important somebody and that I was to be taken care of and treated with respect, with the implied threat that if I was not, then there would have hell to pay from the Kennedy office.

I never thanked him. I never saw him. I never called up or wrote or dropped by, and never told him that I might not be alive today had it not been for his help. After that trip I came back to the United State and moved to Boston and became a student again at Harvard. I started a new life and a new career and never remembered to express the gratitude I owed him for his help. And now I can't.

Except that in an improbable, unlikely, and slightly impossible way, it is just slightly possible that the big ball of life and fire and laughter and compassion and humor and drive and strength that he was for so many years might still be with us in another way and in another realm. Who knows? And if that is so, and if he is perhaps mysteriously or spiritually or cosmically listening in, then perhaps it is time to finally say thanks.

I never did that when you were alive, Teddy. I never thought about it until you were no longer alive. But the truth is, I may well be one of the hundreds of thousands of people across the country and the world whom you helped over the years in simple and easy, and sometimes heavy and profound ways. I wish I had said it earlier, but at least I'm saying it now. I might not be able to be here writing this had it not been for you. Thank you. Thank you.

The Gospel Truth

2009-08-16T15:43:00.003-05:00

Susan Werner is a talented and profound songwriter, lyricist, and occasional person of faith. Here are a few scenes of her concert tour promoting her 2007 CD, "The Gospel Truth."

And here are excerpts from a television program in which Susan Werner and her Massachusetts-based Jazz Quartet perform at the National Heritage Museum Theater. Includes interview with Susan Werner about songwriting and live performances.

Dancing to Church Music

2009-07-28T08:38:00.003-05:00

This fall, Harvard Square Editions is publishing an anthology of short fiction which includes an excerpt from my novella, Dancing to Church Music. If you want to purchase a copy of the book, click on the link at the very end. I'm shamelessly hawking the book because all of the proceeds go to support the work of JubileeUSA and Doctors Without Borders, two fine organizations that have saved lives all over the world for decades.
Enjoy (we hope),
Stan

Summary of what has taken place before excerpt begins:

In her very last days of pregnancy, and her last day of life, Mary Minton was dancing, as she always did, in the shallows of the Poteau River, by her home in Heavener, Oklahoma but today the skies were filled with storms and lightning struck the water. Her husband, Bobby, pulled her ashore and tried and failed to save her life, but in the midst of the storm and rain and water and lightening, their son, Panis Angelicas Menton was born.

“Panny” grew to be tall and broad with incredible strength, but his mind could never go beyond eight or ten and eventually he dropped out of school and spent his time making friends down at the lumber yard at Charlie Wilson’s coffee bar. Then one day his father, who had worked in the coal mines outside of town for far too long, coughed and wheezed and bled and died and then joined his beloved wife in heaven.

The town took care of Panny after that. Martha Johnson found him a place to stay. Charlie Wilson gave him a place to work. And the story’s narrator, Rev. Ben McLean, welcomed him home at the church where he had gone with his father, and he would sing and sway and pray as though possessed by the ghosts of his parents and was filled with the spirit of church music.

Everyone in Heavener loved him except Buddy Hanson, arguably the wealthiest and certainly the most unpleasant man in town. His wife Betty didn’t like Panny because she was uppity and Panny was slow and unkempt. Buddy seemed to dislike him simply because Buddy was mean. He hated Panny early on and when he grew up, Buddy campaigned to drive Panny out of town. It wasn’t legal, it wasn’t moral, but since Buddy was neither it didn’t matter. It was his crusade until that day when they made a bet.

CHAPTER SIX

For reasons I never quite understood, after a while Buddy’s verbal attacks began to take on a more vicious tone. Everyone worried about it but most were either frightened of Buddy’s power in the community or they felt helpless to make him stop. It’s one thing to recognize a wrong. It’s another to know how to fight it. And the fact that at one time or another Buddy had employed about half of the men in town at one of his businesses made people look at his attacks with a degree of real fear.

I occasionally complained to people that they should stand up to Buddy more often, but I realize now that I never did much to stop him either. I tried to talk him down once, but when he turned on me I was as frightened as anybody. He towered over me and outweighed me by fifty pounds. And there was an aura of loosely harnessed rage around him that made my soul grow numb when I thought of really taking him on. So, I was as guilty as anyone about allowing the tragedy to unfold.

Charlie Wilson was the only person I knew who was not afraid of Buddy. I don’t know why. Perhaps his own embattled past was so scarred that he wasn’t worried about what anyone else could ever do to him. Perhaps he just was braver than the rest of us. Long before I moved to town, Charlie had gained some notoriety for one day kicking Buddy out the door and into the street after he refused to keep his hands off of the store’s new clerk. Barbara had just been hired on to help take some of the work off of the other salespeople, and Buddy — who was solidly married at the time — was instantly attracted to her. He started hanging around the coffee bar for hours at a time, talking, flirting, and occasionally laying his hands on her in inappropriate ways. Finally Charlie told Buddy that he’d have to leave her alone or get out. “Buddy,” he said, “There are a whole lot of decent and respectful ways a man is supposed to treat a woman and then there are your ways. You keep this up and that thing you keep threatening her with won’t be able to function for a month.”

“Charlie, my friend,” Buddy said, smiling wickedly and taking a threatening step toward him. “This here girl likes it, and you know that. You been down this road too and you know all about that.”

Charlie said, “She don’t want it, and we don’t want you in here pushing my help around.”

Buddy laughed. “But she does want it.” Buddy turned to Barbara with a sickening smile. “You know you do darlin’. You know that in just a little bit you’re gonna give in and we’re gonna go and have a good time together. Ain’t we?” He closed his eyes as though dreaming of the possibilities.

At that moment Charlie did what nobody had ever seen him do or ever expected him to do. He kicked his foot up and drove it straight into Buddy’s crotch. Buddy’s eyes exploded open in pain. He dropped to the ground clutching his groin. Charlie stepped over him and grabbed the back of his shirt and began pulling him toward the door. Buddy managed to unsteadily get to his feet at the door but Charlie kicked him again, this time in his stomach, and he fell straight out the door and into the street. Huge applause erupted from the customers in the store.

After that time there was a warring truce that settled over the two men. Years later when I came to town and first heard the story, I complimented Charlie for it one day while we were drinking coffee. I told him I was proud of him for standing up and showing Buddy that there were limits. Charlie himself, however, thought their fight had been a failure. “Naw,” he said. “Any slug can beat someone up and make them back off. It takes real brains to change a piece of scum like Buddy Hanson without making one of you go limping off clutching your crotch.”

I agreed, and wished that I had said that first, but at the same time I didn’t really have the wisdom to know what kind of “real thinking” could ever nonviolently make a man like him change. The truth was there wasn’t too much that any of us could have done to stop him; that is without at the same time doing great harm to our own livelihood. Buddy’s power in town was immense, and he seemed increasingly obsessed with dedicating that power to the malignant task of destroying the life of another human being, piece by piece.

The one time I tried to stand between Buddy and Panny it didn’t go well. He had been poking Panny with his finger and yelling at him, and, gentle as he was, Panny looked like he was about to fight back. That was just what Hanson wanted.

“Mr. Hanson,” I said pushing the two apart, “you’ve got no right to pick on Panny like that. No right at all.”

Buddy pulled back, but he was more amused than afraid. He laughed. “You watch it, preacher,” he said, pointing the same beefy finger at me now. “You ain’t no credit to this town yourself, and you know it.” He turned slowly and walked away, chuckling quietly to himself. I caught my breath and got over the incident, but two days later I received a notice that my credit at his dry goods store had been cancelled. It wasn’t a tremendous inconvenience, but it taught me a lesson about where his heart was. I knew at that moment that Buddy was no longer after Panny because of some real or imagined indignity. It had become personal. He was doing it now because he enjoyed it.

After what seemed like dozens of these confrontations, Buddy one day decided to raise the stakes. At least he appeared to have decided that. He may have just taken advantage of a situation that came his way. It happened on a day when Charlie was out of town and Buddy was once again taunting Panny to see if he could get a rise out of him. I came in late to the argument, but Panny had already taken several slings in silence before eventually beginning to cry, which of course egged Buddy on even further.

Panny had accidentally broken out a front window in Charlie’s store with his broom. A crowd of ten-year-olds had come in to buy some pop on their way back from a field trip for the school. They were running all over the place. Panny started chasing them around the store like he was one of them. He shouldn’t have done it. He was too big and too clumsy. When he swung his broom at one of them in fun it slid out of his hand and into the main window, showering glass all over the porch and the front of the showroom. One of the little boys was hit with a piece of glass. He wasn’t hurt badly, but the teacher called his parents and quickly took the rest of the children out of the store. Two of them left crying.

Charlie’s men got to work quickly cleaning up the glass, but everybody was shaken by it. We all knew that Panny was awkward and broke things now and then, but usually nothing much came of it and Charlie let it go. The parents of the little boy who was hurt were upset, but they decided not to do anything. They knew he hadn’t meant it. Buddy Hanson, on the other hand, was furious. Predictably furious. When he heard what had happened he rushed into the store, waving his arms and jabbing his finger at Panny again. “You could kill one of the children in this town,” he screamed. “You’re dangerous! You take a simple tool like a broom and you turn it into a weapon. I’m tired of you hiding behind Charlie Wilson’s dress. That man’s got to fire you and get you outa town, ‘cause this ain’t no place for big, worthless, dangerous retards like you.” His eyes blazed with a fire that was part fury and part entertainment.

He pushed into Panny, backing him up further and further until he was against the wall. Panny’s hands were alongside him, cupping the wall’s surface. For a long time he didn’t speak at all. It was as if he didn’t really understand the charges, and in fact, he probably didn’t.

“You don’t pull your own weight. This whole town supports you, ‘cause you cain’t do nuthin’ on your own, and that ain’t right. You’re a charity case. You cain’t do anything constructive and wouldn’t be alive today except that some of these social-worker-types have taken care of you. You’re a leech. You couldn’t survive on your own. You’re just weak.”

By this time Panny had tears in his eyes, but was still trying to look strong. “I’m not bad,” he said. “I’m sorry about them kids.”

“Sorry?” Buddy raged in joy at the opening of a new front into which he could thrust a spear. “Well, I’m sorry too. I’m sorry you’re alive. This town has been in nothing but turmoil ever since that daddy of yours moved you to town and made us look at your fat pig face. I’m sorry all of us here ever had to be born on the same planet as you.”

“I mean,” Panny stammered, “I’m sorry if I can’t do them big things like you do. I don’t mean nothin’.” He wasn’t totally clear on the meaning of the words in the insults, but he could tell they were intended to hurt and he was easily hurt. Having never known his mother, and having lost his father early, Panny had an ongoing look of mourning on his face under the best of conditions. And when he was receiving one of Buddy Hanson’s brutal onslaughts, he had a look of receding into a secret place where only he and his now-heavenly family lived and where he could be safe.

Buddy turned away, feigning disgust, but personally delighted that he had gotten tears to flow. Just as he turned, I opened the front door and saw the two of them in the center of the room, and also saw fifteen to twenty men standing around them in embarrassed silence. Buddy looked at me while directing his final words to Panny. I think we were as much his audience as Panny. “A worthless piece of crap’s all you are,” he said. “The weakest, pansiest, limp-wristed bag of crap in this town, and you cain’t do nuthin’. Aside of hurtin’ little kids, you cain’t do nuthin’, and it’ll be a great day for all of us when the state finally finds you out and takes you away from here.” With great drama he brushed past me and reached for the door.

Before he opened it, Panny finally spoke. “But I can do some things,” he said, his voice frail and frightened. “I’m a lot stronger’n you are.”

He shouldn’t have said that. Buddy stopped. He turned back, smiling. “What’d you say?”

“Lemmel says I’m the strongest man in this town, and he’s strong hisself.” Lemmel Burns owned a Citgo Station down on Route 59 on the way to Hodgens, and was himself a pretty good sized man. “I lifted up his car for him a couple times at his station when he needed to put blocks under it. I done that twice for him and Lemmel says he never seen no one could do that.” Panny still had his head down like he’d been reprimanded, but he held his ground.

Buddy looked at the crowd at the coffee bar and then to Panny. His mouth smiled, but his eyes squinted, as though a small portion of him secretly wondered if Panny was telling the truth. Panny’s reputation for strength was all over town, but no one knew just what he could do, and he never seemed stable enough on his feet to actually do much.

I looked up at him. “Can you really do that, Panny?” I asked quietly, remembering a time I had seen him lift Alice Cameron’s entire porch with leverage pole so that she could fit new cinder blocks under it. “Was it a big car?”

Panny looked up slightly. “Well, it was pretty good sized. And I held it up a pretty good while, so’s Lemmel could get them blocks underneath it, but I done it a couple a times. You go ask Lemmel if I’m not telling the truth.”

Buddy said slowly, “How big a car?”

“Oh, not as big as them big cars, them vans and like that, but pretty big.” He smiled, beginning to feel slightly pleased. “I lifted a truck once. It was one of them little Japanese guys, but it was bigger’n a car. I pulled it all the way across the gas station driveway. All the way across. And then I picked it up. I picked it up.”

Buddy’s eyes were gleaming. I didn’t like the way he was enjoying this. “My wife’s pickup’s one of those Japanese fairy cars. Not worth shit, but she likes it.” He glanced around the showroom with a malevolent smile across his face. “How far you think you could pull it?”

“I pulled that truck of Lemmel’s there all the way out front the gas station from out back, that way. And it was pretty big.”

Buddy rubbed his face, thinking. “Boy,” he said with a whisper just loud enough that everyone in the showroom could hear him. “I think you’re lying. I think you’re scared and you’re lying through your teeth. You’re a sorry stupid retard and all you can do is lie about things there ain’t no way you could do. And I also think you need to get the hell out of this town, because there’s no way on earth that you can pull a truck all the way across town.”

I walked over and held my hands up. “Listen, guys, I don’t know where this is going, but this is as far as it ought to go.” I gave Panny a gentle nudge toward the coffee bar. “Panny,” I said, “I’m thirsty. Why don’t you fish me out a Coke from the icebox and then let’s talk about something else for a while?” But Panny was transfixed by the look of violence energizing Buddy’s face, and Buddy was in no mood to pull back now that he thought he’d found a new tool with which to inflict pain on Panny.

“Boy,” he said, his voice rising. “On the off chance that you ain’t just a pile of crap, I’m gonna make you a deal that might make you a rich man.”

Panny was amazed. “How?”

Buddy laughed and a little stream of saliva flew from his mouth. “You meet me here next Saturday morning; let’s say nine o’clock, right outside, down in front of the Methodist Church. I’ll have my wife’s truck with me. What about it?” I unconsciously looked out the window. An hour or so earlier I had seen Betty driving her little blue Datsun pickup truck through town. I looked to see if it was still around to remind me how big it was. My recollection was it was little, but still far too large for any of us to handle.

“What do you want me to do?” Panny asked Buddy.

“Well,” Buddy said, his voice smoothing with false friendliness, “what I want you to do is to make me a little bet.”

“What’s that?” Panny asked.

“Well, if you are really telling the truth about this superman business, then you can prove it to all of us by pulling my wife’s truck all the way down First Street. And if you do it, then …” he paused for a moment to think it through and to decide whether he really wanted to say what he was about to say. “Then the bet is that I’ll give you her truck. I been needing to get rid of it for a long time anyway.”

Panny’s eyes grew large. I suspect he knew there wasn’t a chance in hell that he could actually ever drive the thing, but the idea of his even owning a car was an amazement beyond anything he could ever imagine. “What else do I need to do?” he said, incredulously.

“What else?” Buddy clapped his hands and roared with laughter. “Boy, that’s all you have to do. Just haul the stupid thing down through the center of town, from one end of — let’s say — First Street down to the other, and if you can do that, then it’s yours. It’s a simple proposition. I’m a simple man.”

Panny couldn’t believe it and I couldn’t either. “What’s the catch, Buddy?” I asked.

“There ain’t no catch,” he said innocently, though there was no way I could believe him. “Just pull the truck all the way across the center of town, one end of First Street to the other, and I’ll give him the goddam thing. That’s it. It’s easy money.” He turned back to Panny as though he just thought of something. “Well, here’s one thing, but it’s not like a real ‘catch.’”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Well, if he can pull the truck, he gets it fair and square, and that’s all there is to it. I’m a man of my word. However,” he was struggling to suppress glee, “if he doesn’t, then he’s gotta pack up and finally get out of this town.”

I knew it. “Then it’s off,” I said. “Panny won’t do it. You know that there’s no place Panny can go. You know he couldn’t just go and live somewhere else. He’s got nowhere to go.”

“No, no, no, Preacher, that’s not true,” he said. “There’s them group homes for retards up in the cities. I seen ‘em. And then there’s his mother’s kin up in Tulsa. One of them’s not too old to take him. He’s got places he can go. You can’t keep him here if he loses a bet fair and square and gets shamed out of town for lyin’ about being some superhuman retard.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I won’t let him.”

“And you ain’t his momma, and you cain’t stop him,” he said.

Panny had been watching us argue with bewilderment. He cupped my shoulder with his huge hand, and looked at me plaintively. “Reverend Ben,” he said, “I can pull his truck.”

I looked back at him, trying to get him to understand. “Panny, don’t do this,” I said. “You know Buddy just wants to trick you.”

“But I can pull his truck,” Panny said again. “He cain’t hurt me just by me pulling his truck.”

“Yes he can,” I said.

“You let the boy decide,” said Buddy.

“I don’t know how he’ll hurt you,” I said, “but we all know that he’ll try to do it.”

“But I want to pull his truck,” Panny said, growing a little defensive. He clearly — and I thought wrongly — saw it as an occasion for vindication, for finally proving some of the self worth that his worst enemy on earth had always denied him. Perhaps, too, he felt that showing off his abilities in a major feat like this one would somehow exonerate him from the humiliation of the incident with the children.

“Deal!” shouted Buddy clapping his hands again. “It’s a deal.” He swung around and announced to the others, “You all heard it. The lying pig said he’d do it.” He turned back to Panny. “This coming Saturday, then. We’ll be here at nine o’clock. You’ll get a chance,” he turned back to Panny, “you’ll get a chance to prove that you’re the lying little brainless shit we always said you were.” Voices in the crowd groaned in misery at his glee. “And we get a chance to get you out of town and out of our hair forever like we all shoulda had years ago. So, if all goes well, we’re all gonna be happy.”

I’ve sometimes wished that I was smarter. If I was, then perhaps I could have understood what drove and motivated Buddy’s hatred. Why would someone so powerful and rich get so much pleasure from attempting to destroy someone like Panny, so simple and almost harmless? But whatever its reasons, it was very real and very powerful, and it felt evil.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THAT SATURDAY MORNING people began gathering down at the center of town long before nine o’clock, afraid of what might happen, but wanting to be there to see it nonetheless. Looking up and down our little First Street, I almost thought that Panny could pull this off. For one thing, I had seen his feat at Alice Cameron’s house with the porch, so I knew something about his tremendous strength. And also I believed him when he said that he had been able to pull a pickup across the driveway of Lemmel’s gas station. And Heavener’s First Street was only about a block and a half long. From what I could tell, it began in front of First Methodist Church at one end, where Buddy had said that Panny would start, and it went on down to about where the Eagles Club was at the other end. Beyond that the pavement narrowed, and it became a neighborhood with houses for another couple of blocks, until the street bumped up against the motel at the edge of town and then merged with highway 59 going south toward Waldron, Arkansas. So if the weather was good, and his strength held out, and everything else broke his way, then Panny might just get through this thing, and what’s more, he might even become some kind of hero. Even more important, if all that happened, then Buddy Hanson would suffer some of the humiliation that he blessed so many others with for so many years.

The more I stood there, however, the more I began to understand that things were unlikely to break Panny’s way. For one thing, the weather that morning looked like it would intentionally add to the test. The air was thick and dark, and thunder roared in the mountains around us like angry church bells. Clouds, heavy and wet, hung ominously in the skies. Still, we thought, if it could just hold off for the next hour or so, Panny might surprise everyone and pull it off.

About fifteen cars were parked along the sides of the street, and about twice that many people were standing on the sidewalks looking uncomfortable. Others were arriving on foot from side streets. It was beginning to look like the entire community had come out. Lemmel Burns was one of them. He parked his now-famous Toyota pickup — the one that Panny had claimed to have pulled — right in front of Charlie’s store for everyone to look at. It had become a conversation starter by the weekend, and he knew it. He had a big sign fastened to its side that read, “Burns’ Gas, Auto and Lawn Mower Repair — Fillin’ and Fixin’ Since 1965.” He had the tailgate down in the back and was distributing coffee from a huge urn and hot “sticky buns” from the Wood ‘n’ Rail restaurant. Oh my God, I thought. This was clearly turning into a freak show, and that was the last thing I wanted for Panny.

At about 8:45 Buddy drove up in a van with three of his men and parked at the north end of First Street, in the Methodist Church parking lot. Pulling up close behind was David Lipton, a tall thin Choctaw Indian who had been town clerk and was just recently elected mayor. David arrived just after Buddy did, but sat in his car for a long time looking very hesitant about getting out and facing the crowd. When he finally pulled himself from his car he was wearing a black suit, as though he was attending an official function.

Charlie Wilson and I were huddled together in the cold, drinking some of Lemmel’s coffee under the awning of the First National Bank on the corner near the church. “What’s that boy Lipton doing here?” Charlie asked no one in particular.

“I don’t know,” I said. “And what’s with the suit?”

The men in Buddy’s truck got out and began marking off a starting line with bright orange ribbons tied between poles stuck in cement barrels beginning at the parking lot of the church. David stood off to the side watching somberly. I wondered if maybe Buddy had arranged for him to be there to help give the event a veneer of official respectability. While the men were working, Buddy saw us watching him from across the street and gave us a wide grin and wave. “S’gonna be a great day,” he called out. I looked back at him weakly; Charlie spit on the sidewalk. When they finished marking one end of town, the men got back in the truck and drove down First to set up the second set. But as a surprise to all of us, they drove far past the last building and at least two blocks further into the neighborhood.

Charlie jumped out into the street watching them and then turned and yelled at Buddy, “What the hell they think they’re doing way up there?” He knew what extending the length of the pull could mean for Panny. “The end of First’s right down here.” He pointed up at the end of the street where the Eagles Club stood.

Buddy waved again off in the distance with a look of great enjoyment, and with an expansive gesture motioned over to David, now looking even more uncomfortable in his role there.

“What’s this all about?” Charlie asked him.

“It’s true, Charlie,” said David. “I’m sorry, but he’s right.” He pulled a file folder from a briefcase he held under his arm.

“What’s true?” I said.

“The actual end of First Street is about two blocks up what most of us call Division Street.” He took out a photocopy of what looked to be a hand-drawn street map that was dated 1909 in large ornate script at the bottom. “See,” he said, “First Street actually goes two blocks on, and Division doesn’t start until way up here by the motel. I don’t know when the town fathers started calling ‘First Street’ by the name of ‘Division Street’ way down here in the center, but Buddy’s technically right. If he wants to tell you that Panny has to pull the truck two more blocks up there, in order to pull it all the way through the end of First Street, then legally he’s right.”

“Damn,” said Charlie.

“Yeah, I’m sorry, Charlie, but it’s true. Buddy may not be acting completely moral about all this, but he’s not lying to you. This street legally extends another two blocks further than we usually think of it as going. The businesses in town just didn’t ever build down there, and eventually houses filled it in.”

“‘Completely moral’?” Charlie was fuming. “The man lied to us.” He turned to Buddy with fire in his eyes and strode toward him enraged. I was afraid he was going to take a swing at him. “You got any more tricks or bald-faced lies you want to pull out of your sleeve before we get this thing over with?” He was walking and screaming at the same time.

Buddy was both taller and heavier than Charlie and never afraid of a fight. But he was enjoying himself far too much to be troubled by Charlie’s outrage. “Charlie, my friend,” he said, grinning with a broad false graciousness. “It’s all in fun. We’re all just out here to have a good time.”

“Bull!” yelled Charlie, pushing threateningly at Buddy’s chest. “You’re a goddamn liar, and you know it.”

I didn’t know whether I should get between them or let them fight it out for good, but just then we heard a horn honk and the crowd’s attention turned back toward the Methodist Church. Alice Cameron’s Ranchero was turning the corner and pulling into the parking lot at the bank. When it stopped, the motor died, and the door on the passenger side opened hesitantly, and I saw Panny Minton’s head emerge. When he got out he waved hesitantly at the several of us in the street, and we awkwardly waved back.

Alice got out of the other side. “Panny!” she yelled at him. She held up a wadded black windbreaker. “Don’t forget your jacket. Looks like it’s gonna rain.” Good old Alice, I thought. What a friend. With a wide swing of her arm she threw it up and over the car and Panny caught it on the other side. He teetered uneasily on his ungainly feet and stumbled when he caught it. Not a good sign, I thought.

I had been hoping that he would appear that day fit and excited and ready to show the crowd — and Buddy Hanson — what he could do, but I was disappointed. He looked awful. His hair was a mess and his overalls looked slept in, as I suspected they had been. I doubt that he had gotten any sleep the night before. He looked more frightened and forlorn than I had ever seen him before. Panny may not have had the intellectual resources to understand all of the intricacies of Buddy’s plans for him, but something in him knew well that this simple-sounding wager held critical importance. There was something fearful and dark about this morning’s solemn gathering and I’m sure he could see it in our faces. He didn’t know — as none of us really knew — the full extent and meaning of Buddy’s demented love of hatred, but he could tell that much of his life and his future rested on how this day would end.

Just then we heard a yell from the edge of the crowd, and we turned to see a second and very different truck slowly driving toward us. It was huge and black and swallowed the road as it approached. I recognized this truck, but only from pictures. It had just come out in 1972, and this was the first time I had seen one in real life. It was a brand-new, solid black, and very big Dodge pickup. They called it a “Sweptline.” It weighed at least three-quarters of a ton and maybe more. It had four doors instead of two and had a slide-on camper in the back that gave it a swollen, ominous look, like a house on wheels, and which probably added another four hundred pounds.

“Whose is that?” someone said. I was sure that most people in Heavener wouldn’t be driving down the middle of the street like that on this particular Saturday morning unless they were planning on being part of the show. It stopped right beside us. The brake engaged inside, the door swung open, and Betty Hanson stepped out. She was dressed up like she was ready to go to church. She had on a fine, formal dark-blue dress with white fringe on the collar and sleeves. Along with that she had an almost comical, matching fringed umbrella, just in case it rained. She swung her umbrella at all of us, smiling innocently. She looked as if she had been invited to judge a beauty contest.

“Hey Betty,” I yelled up at her. “What’s with this … this school bus you’re driving there?”

She looked back at it beaming. “It’s my new truck,” she said.

“What?” the crowd roared in one voice.

“Buddy always told me I shouldn’t be driving that little thing.” She glowed with naïve reverence at her new pickup. “It wasn’t safe.”

Buddy was ecstatic. “Ain’t she a beaut?” he crowed, rubbing the palm of his hand across its front fender. “This here’s a club cab. It’s like a whole house in there. She’s got three-sixty horsepower and a four-hundred cubic-inch V8. It’ll outrun and out-pull anything. There ain’t much like it on the road anywheres.”

Suddenly it became clear to us what was going on. This was to be the truck that Panny would be expected to pull all the way across downtown Heavener, a distance that only moments before had mysteriously doubled from two blocks to four, in weather that was looking increasingly treacherous. Even those who out of fear or respect or stupidity still looked up to Buddy Hansen must have now realized that the deal had been rigged. Buddy had no intention of letting this be a fair contest. When Charlie understood what was happening, he couldn’t stand it anymore and without a word he swung his fist at Buddy and hit him in the face. Startled and caught off guard, Buddy crumpled to the ground. He quickly rolled over and up to his hands and knees, and looked ready to spring back like an animal. Charlie leaned tautly forward like he was about to kick him down again.

“Charlie!” I yelled. “Don’t do it.”

He pulled back, proud of what he had done. “I wouldn’t waste the mud on my boot,” he said to Buddy. “A pig like you deserves to be down on his knees.”

I got between them and held my hands up to them both. “Alright, guys, this whole mess has gone on long enough.” I looked around to get a sense of the crowd around us. Half seemed mad at Buddy’s deceitfulness and half wanted to see a fight. “I’ve got an idea,” I said to them. “This whole thing was a bad idea. It’s a rotten day, and the weather is awful. It’s clear that Buddy has rigged the contest, and it’s clear that Panny can’t do it. He shouldn’t even try it. Let’s just call it all off. I don’t see any point in humiliating Panny Minton and giving this jerk any more satisfaction.”

“Now preacher,” Buddy said, his voice booming into the crowd of onlookers, “I done nothing wrong and you know it. I didn’t change the weather; I didn’t make up the maps. Not my fault if you boys never knew nothin’ about how long the streets were in your own town.”

Charlie said, “You’re dishonest scum, and I know that. And I don’t ever want to see you come into my store again unless they’re carrying you in a box.”

“Buddy,” I said, straining to sound reasonable in a situation that had veered far off from reasonable. “What about this truck? This isn’t the truck we agreed to.”

He laughed. “Yeah, well it is different, but I ain’t lying about it. It is my wife’s truck, new and legal. I been meaning to get my wife a new truck for some time. I done nothing wrong by picking this week to finally get around to it.”

“Buddy,” I said, “either you do this thing with the smaller truck or the whole deal’s off.”

From the corner of my eye I could see Panny standing at the edge of the onlookers. I didn’t want him to hear us bartering for his future, because I was afraid of what he might say. I turned slightly away from him and lowered my voice as I spoke. “Buddy, the truth is you know Panny can’t pull a truck like this one in weather like this. He just can’t do it. Nobody could do that. You gotta change trucks or we call it all off.”

Then I heard Panny’s words from over my shoulder and my heart sank. “Yes I can,” he said quietly. He was looking right at Buddy. “I can pull his truck. I done more’n that a buncha times before.”

“Panny,” I said, turning and feeling increasingly frustrated, “no you can’t do this. You really can’t. It’d be too hard for anyone. I know how strong you are, but this is a big truck and the distance is way too much.”

But Panny was defiant. There was honor at stake, misplaced and futile, perhaps, but still honor. “I can do it,” he said. “I can pull any truck he’s got.”

Buddy was, of course, delighted. He looked around at the crowd. “You see that, men? How can this be a bad contest if both of us principals in it agree to its parts?”

“I want to pull the truck, Reverend Ben,” Panny said. “What’s wrong with me pulling Buddy’s truck?”

By that time Alice had slithered her way into the crowd and was looking up at Panny. “Panny,” she said, speaking just to him, but with a voice that all the rest of us could hear. “Do you really think you can pull that thing?”

He looked down at her and I realized again just how large a man the person we often called “little Panny” actually was. He was taller than most of the people in the street that day, and he towered over Alice. I didn’t really think he could pull a three-quarter-ton truck for six blocks during what could turn out to be a nasty rainstorm, but if there was anyone in town who could even come close, it was probably Panny Minton. “Sure I can,” he said to her, eyes wide open and without a hint of doubt in his voice. “I done more’n this over at Lemmel’s many times.”

Alice looked at me and I knew I was defeated. “If Panny says he can do it,” she said, “we should let him try.” At that I let out all of the breath that had been building in my chest. Maybe, I thought, at this point I should also feel a little proud. There wasn’t another person in this town, save maybe Charlie Wilson, who ever had the gall to stand up to Buddy Hanson. And now here was “little” Panny doing it for us. The one we all tried so hard to protect and take care of. Here he was in his own crazy, simple way performing the greatest act of bravery we’d ever seen. Maybe we should just let him try it, and maybe in his own fuzzy, unclear logic he wouldn’t even realize that he didn’t make it. But then the dark side of the wager — that if he loses he has to agree to get out of town, possibly meaning being institutionalized in the city, among strangers, cut off from the friends he had — kept me from feeling totally good about the decision. I looked back at Charlie who was also conflicted over the turn.

“What do you think? I asked him.

There was pain and resignation in his eyes. “Well, Ben, what can we do? We can’t stop him if he agrees to go through with it.”

Buddy clapped his hands. “So, we’re in business!” He whooped in glee. “The game’s on, boys.” He held up his hands over his head expansively to the crowd like a winning prizefighter. “All right you boys, let’s get this contest rolling. The weather’s looking bad and we only have just so much time for this worthless leech to show us what he can—or cain’t—do, as the case may be.” He took Panny by the arm and started back toward the Methodist Church, and most of the crowd followed them. When everyone had rumbled away it was only Charlie, Alice, and me still standing silently in the street watching them.

“We let him down,” Charlie said. “We did it. We killed him, you know.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“The only way to really stop an evil bastard like that is to take him on, dead on, drive straight into his belly and stop him. But we didn’t do that. We’re all cowards, and I’m no better than anybody else.”

I tried to look positive. “Well, you did what you could do.”

“Naw. The only one here with any guts is Panny. He’s the only one knows what to do with evil: take it on, on its own terms, head to head, risk everything, and then beat it. He’s the only one with any courage here today.” He looked tired and beaten. I wondered how much of that statement was about Panny’s story and how much was about his own.

As the crowd began to swarm around the truck in the Methodist parking lot, Alice stayed behind for a moment staring down at them. “By the way,” she asked, speaking to no one in particular, “how many of us exactly was Buddy calling ‘boys’?”

I looked down at her and smiled. I was so glad she was there.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE AIR WAS GROWING THICK AND WET. Thunder roared in the mountains around us in angry disapproval. Buddy, clearly enjoying his role as the destroyer of human dignity, backed his new and towering truck up into the parking lot of the Methodist Church, which opened onto the street. The church was wet and grey, and looked almost remorseful for its culpability in the sins of the day. He shut off the motor and took it out of gear. Two of his men put bricks in front of the tires to keep it from rolling into the street. He slid out and slammed the door shut with great drama. One of the other men crawled under the front of the truck and tied a thick rope onto the drive chain. He pulled it out as far as he could on both sides and wrapped it around the front bumper. Buddy stood in front of the truck and took hold of the rope and gave it a strong pull on both sides to test it. It held. “Done!” he shouted. “We got the truck. We got the rope. Now let’s get that lazy-ass kid over here to try to pull this thing.” It started to rain.

Panny stood silently in front of the crowd, focused now, and more intent than I had ever seen him before. I think he knew exactly what was at stake that morning — both for his future and for ours. And I think he knew exactly what everyone silently expected would be the outcome. He may not have understood why all of this had come to pass — hell, none of the rest of us did either — but he certainly could understand the weight of what Buddy had brought down upon him that morning. He stepped forward firmly, almost regally to the front of Betty’s new truck. He looked over the top of it. With the tips of his fingers he rubbed a portion of its shiny black hood. Assuming that the world was still capable of grace and magic, by the end of the day this truck might be his. He smiled a soft courteous smile that gave his face a look of wisdom — or at least age — that startled those of us standing close by.

Buddy’s men had tied two large knots close together in the front of the rope for Panny to hold onto for grip. He picked it up and studied it like an athlete considering his equipment. He turned the rope over in his huge hands, weighing it, feeling it, bouncing it in his palms. Then he lifted it up and stepped inside the loop, his back to the grill. He placed his chest in between the two knots and leaned against it, testing its strength. Buddy said, “You ready yet?” He paused for a moment longer, then looked at Buddy and nodded. The men pulled the bricks out from in front of the tires and the truck began to roll slowly forward down the slight slope of the parking lot driveway and out into the street.

Buddy leaped into the air clapping his hands once again, and yelled at the top of his voice, “He’s off!”

CHAPTER NINE

BY THIS TIME WELL OVER A HUNDRED PEOPLE had gathered in the street to see the event. They lined the sidewalks or looked out from windows in the stores, staying as close as they could to the action, yet out of the way of the increasing rain. As Panny moved forward their cheers grew louder. Panny knew many of them well, and their support seemed to encourage him. His face had a straight-ahead, determined look, but occasionally I could see him glance from side to side to see who had come out to be with him in this, the most important the ordeal of his life. Can a community’s love and support save us, I wondered? Can the strength of their psychic concern translate into physical strength? It was a wonderful idea, I thought, but at bottom I doubted it. As much as we cheered and tried to be with him, ultimately Panny was alone in his endeavor and we couldn’t pull the truck for him.

He inched slowly forward. He passed the First National Bank on the corner and the drugstore after that. He was approaching Tate’s clothing store. A crowd of about fifty who left the sides and endured the rain marched alongside him, cheering his name in encouragement. “Pan-ny, Pan-ny,” they shouted, building in excitement in spite of the rain. “Pan-ny, Pan-ny.” They sounded like they were at a football game cheering for the home team. Out in front, by about four or five yards, rode Buddy in the van from the charcoal plant. The double doors in the back were open and he sat inside on a lawn chair, looking out, drinking coffee, and silently studying Panny’s progress. I truly believe, at least in these early stages, that he was slightly worried that Panny might be able to pull it off. There was a slight intensity in his face that might have belied his earlier cockiness.

For a few raw moments at the beginning of the ordeal, Panny’s tremendous strength seemed to be more powerful than the weight of the truck or the force of the storm that was falling down upon him. He crept slowly ahead, steadily and firmly, leaning into the thick rope across his chest. The rain pounded and its sound competed with the cheers of the people who encircled him. Panny strained, bending out almost straight against the weight, with everything he had in him, slowly pulling this mass of metal and glass and rubber down the street. Please God, I thought, give him strength that even Panny doesn’t think he has. The consequences for his future and for our little town’s moral future were too great. He trudged forward, pulling against time and the rope, marching in the midst of a growing cluster of people, yet still completely alone. I felt warm tears on my cheek mixed with cold splashes of rain. The thought of the disaster that this would mean for his entire life if he failed tore at me.

After about half an hour he reached the mid-point of what we knew of as First Street, just before the front of Charlie Wilson’s store. The crew inside was glued against the window, whistling and beating on it with knuckles and palms in encouragement. Panny looked at them and smiled as he stole more inches. Charlie himself looked more convinced that Panny could do it and he slapped me on the back so hard I felt a welt growing on my shoulder.

“The damn kid might make it,” he said, hitting me again and pushing me on ahead.

Alice also was alongside us, hiding from the rain under a sheet of plastic. “You think he might do it?” I called, laughing at her.

“He just might,” she said, and offered a part of her plastic sheet to me for cover.

I think Panny himself began to believe it by then because occasionally he would relax his hold on the rope and wave his fingers briefly at some of the gathering fans. Once he even briefly broke his determined look and smiled when Alice caught up with him and patted him on the back for his work so far. “Keep on goin’ Panny,” she said. “We’re all here with you, and we love you.” That seemed to give him strength, and he leaned even more heavily into the rope.

At forty-five minutes of pulling he reached the Eagles lodge, not far from where we all had thought that First Street ended. He was still moving, but more slowly now. This was the distance he had first believed he could accomplish and, as we learned only that morning, it was about half as far as he needed to go. Panny was strong but not magic, and I couldn’t see how he could keep up this level of strength for the rest of the journey.

The rain agreed, and it turned thick and heavy. It fell in roaring sheets and our ability to see much more than the drama before us became increasingly difficult. Amazingly, as Panny pulled past the businesses and into the neighborhood, the crowds actually got larger. People started coming out of the stores where they had been hiding to keep warm and dry and now joined his entourage. At least two hundred people now, maybe three, surrounded him, cheering, screaming, singing, and pushing him onward with their enthusiasm. It became a party, a dancing, clapping, stomping party, celebrating the clash and smash and triumph of will. The driving rain became the music. The cheers were the rhythm. Above us in the drenching skies, the ghosts of parents Mary and Bobby were twirling and swirling and singing to the music of the rain, reveling in the outrageousness of the affair. The rain became a river, and music poured forth from it like an enormous waterfall.

Panny, filled with their spirit, pulled even harder, perhaps slightly slower, but still almost regally. He seemed poised to prove us wrong, supporters and detractors alike. He waved, we cheered. He smiled, we screamed. He could do this, we thought. He could win. We jumped up and down, arm in arm, dancing with his progress. Drenched in rain, someone began singing “Shall We Gather at the River,” and we laughed and sang along at the incredible miracle of it all. He was doing it. He was defeating Buddy Hanson once and for all and the conniving evil that he had become. It could happen. He could do it. He could win.

But then he fell. It was about a block past the end of First Street proper, about six or seven houses into the neighborhood. He slipped, actually. The rain was blinding, and none of us could see very well. Somehow on the slippery asphalt just past “F” Street, he stumbled and fell, and the rope and the truck slid backward. Even in the thunderous rain I could hear the crowd gasp. The truck didn’t slide back far, but it scared us. Most of all, it showed us that Panny was tiring, and this was the first time since we began over an hour earlier that his movement was not totally forward.

He got up quickly, staggering and exhausted. He looked around him as though hoping that he could get started again before anyone noticed. But everyone had seen it. It took some of the enthusiasm out of us as much as it took the energy out of him. But he positioned himself once again between the two knots on the rope, leaned his chest against it, and started forward. The cheers came back. Maybe it was just a small setback, we thought. Just a temporary slowdown.

But then he fell again. This time he had only gone about two houses before it happened. This time it was very clear to us that it wasn’t just the rain and slippery asphalt. It was, in fact, that he was growing weary. He was drained. This had been going on at its most damaging, punishing level for nearly two hours, in what had become torrential rains, and there was little left in him. Looking down the street, we could see that he still had over two blocks to go. As strong as he was, he simply couldn’t do it.

Even so, the crowd stayed with him, and we still yelled our encouragement, but after the second fall there was a slight sound of despair in our voices that I knew he could sense. He still smiled at us on occasion after that, but it was a grim fateful smile. I think he knew he was failing. There wasn’t any human way that he could make it to the end. The road was too long and the weight was too heavy. He knew he would never finish it. But in spite of the impossibility, he still slogged on.

We continued cheering but with increasingly less joy in our hearts. Like trying to act sunny with a dying relative, we continued, but no one could look at the weariness in his face and the remaining distance and believe that at the end of the day he would be the owner of that big black truck. Instead, our voices were hollow. We knew that the only thing that waited for him at the end of the contest was disaster and that Panny’s simple life with friends and family in Heavener was about to come to an end.

He continued pulling for perhaps another half hour after that. Panny was trudging and the crowd was following, all of us moving faithlessly, praying for magic, but expecting tragedy. Life had not been good to us that day. God, I thought, must have stepped aside to allow us humans to make a mess of things, and to permit ruin to fall upon a harmless, decent man who deserved more out of life than this.

And then it finally happened. I was out in front of him with about ten other people. We were still making noise and doing what we could to keep him focused but knowing that he had little left in him. His eyes were empty. His heart was empty. He had a look of fatigue and desolation that looked like he had already given up. It was a deep resignation of failure and defeat. His legs were quivering with strain. He looked at me as though praying that I would somehow rescue him from his fate, but there was nothing I could do. He opened his mouth as though starting to speak, but then his foot slipped again, and he went down again. Straight down. So tired and so weak that this time he didn’t even try to break his fall. And this time he simply lay there. He was exhausted. It was over.

“THAT’S IT!” It was Buddy’s voice, and it was like a shriek at a touchdown. “That settles it! The boy’s done. He couldn’t do it. He lied to us all, and now we all know it.” His voice was hoarse and other worldly as though coming from a deep and demonic place. “So, let’s clean up this mess here and get my truck on back home. I’ve got work to do. Don’t have time to stand around here in all this rain with you fellas.” He was marching around with his chest stuck out. “Let’s get movin.’” But none of us moved. We were tired, physically and psychically. Something in our souls had been bruised that day, and we didn’t have the energy to go home. There was something in Panny’s failure that took us all down with it. We had failed him by allowing this travesty to take place, and when he fell he took all of our own guilt down with it.

I got down next to Panny and tried to help him up, but he was dead weight and I couldn’t lift him. “Charlie,” I said. “Get some people over here. I think he’s hurt.”

Charlie knelt down and started pointing to faces in the crowd. “Bill, Pete, Sandy, get over here. This boy might be hurt.” Suddenly we were surrounded with people wanting to help. Together we pulled him up to his feet. He could stand but just barely. He looked dazed. It was clear he was spent and would have to be carried back.

That’s when something strange happened. No one knows exactly who started it, but it just happened. Two of the men around him — I don’t recall who they were — were helping pull Panny up, but as they did, they lifted him higher than just up on his feet. Someone else in the crowd gave him a big push upwards on the butt, and suddenly he was thrust up in the air and on top of their shoulders. Another two or three got underneath his legs and they all held him up. Soon others joined in, locking arms and they held him high like he was a winner of a race. Those who had been walking away from the dwindling crowd now looked back and saw him up there, being carried on the shoulders of friends, looking vaguely as though he had accomplished some great feat. And then someone in the crowd began to cheer. At first it felt wrong, like a cheer filled with pity and dark humor. But then others joined in and it took on its own life. It began to sound like an authentic cheer, a winner’s-circle cheer. A “Damn it, Panny won this race!” cheer.

Buddy, who had been strutting and looking like he was in charge, looked stricken. “What are you ...What the …” he sputtered.

“Winner!” They cried out, bouncing Panny in the air. “Winner. He did it! He did it!” Dozens of others who had drifted away in grief turned back and joined in. “Pan-ny! Pan-ny! Pan-ny!” It became a celebration, one that invented itself as it moved. “PAN-NY! WIN-NER! PAN-NY! WIN-NER!” Panny himself, as surprised as anyone, began to smile. Uncertain as to what was happening, but a smile. They tossed his huge bulk into the air and then caught him again, and marched him back down First Street, as though carrying a hero. As they marched, hundreds more joined in, many of whom had left the scene when he began failing, and were just now realizing how things had come out. “WIN-NER! WIN-NER! WIN-NER!” They threw him again high in the air. Now he was no longer just smiling, but laughing.

Buddy was furious. He stomped to the front of the parade and tried to yell down the participants. But no one would listen. “This is enough!” he said. “You men know what happened. Put that trash-eating boy down and let’s us settle this thing square.” But the crowd ignored him. They pushed forward, carrying Panny and dancing in the street, and Buddy was knocked backwards onto the ground under their feet. The celebration passed him by.

The day was raw and wet. We were strangely ecstatic. Panny was in heaven. The entire town now seemed to have come out into the rain to join in the mantra: “WIN-NER! WIN-NER! PAN-NY, PAN-NY!” and it was truly so. It was so, because we declared it to be so. We were the voters, and we were the witnesses, and we proclaimed this truth to be true. By declaration of the people who loved him, he had won. And as they told the story many times for many years afterwards, the good people of Heavener, Oklahoma, had seen him do it with their very own eyes. Whenever anyone would ask, they would always repeat the events of the day with great pride — how Panis Angelicas Minton had pulled a two-ton truck three miles down a road in driving rain, all through town, down to the extended finish line, and had beaten and humiliated Buddy Hanson, and how they all had been lifted up with him high in the air, in the glorious celebration at the end. “WIN-NER!”

I stayed back for a while and just watched them as they carried Panny down First Street, jumping and leaping and praising the day — Panny on top, being held like a champion, swaying to the music. The supporters were cheering. Panny was smiling. The rain was a hymn and they were a choir. A hymn of redemption, a hymn of deliverance, and the whole town sang it together. The waters flowed down from the skies like a river, from the mountains of heaven, from the throne of God. It cleansed the streets as it flowed, and healed the people within them. It appeared to me, from back where I stood, for all the world that Bobby and Mary were also there, twirling and singing just above the revelers. And, held in their arms, held in their love, it looked to me for all the world that Panny Angelicas Minton was dancing.

Paper Clips

2009-07-22T10:10:00.001-05:00

A beautiful story of some ordinary kids who did something extraordinary and touched lives on two continents.

The Fire on Poteau Mountain

2009-06-05T14:10:00.005-05:00

For the next few weeks I will be posting stories from my book, The Fire on Poteau Mountain, a collection of interlocking short stories all set in the mountains of Southeastern Oklahoma in the early 1970s. The one central character (introduced in the following story for the first time), is a young pastor named Ben McLean who stumbles into ministry following a family crisis and then pastors here in his first church filled with self and theological doubt. Send me comments. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Click on the title above to order a copy of the complete book.

Stan

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The Fire on Poteau Mountain

Andy Monroe felt guiltier than any person I ever knew. And there wasn’t much that either of us could do to about it. He couldn’t make it better. I couldn’t make it better. He just felt guilty. I remember sitting with him in my living room, listening to him painfully tell me his story, wishing I could fix his problem, but knowing that I couldn’t. When he finished, he stared silently, almost peacefully (if that wasn’t impossible given the circumstances), out of my living room window onto the tops of trees and houses and a nice view of the valley and town down below us, and he was broken and lifeless with the weight he was carrying.

That was all a long time ago now, though I’m grateful I can still remember it so clearly. It was back when he should have been worrying about Richard Nixon, or integration, or the war, or bell bottoms. That’s what the rest of the people his age would have been thinking about in those days. My age too, actually, for I wasn’t that much older than he was. But Andy Monroe had other things on his mind. After months of worrying and running, all he could think about by the time he came to see me and to tell me his story, was his guilt. And he had plenty of it.

I fumbled for things to say to him, but I was new in the ministry in those days, and there wasn’t a thing that I could think of to tell him. There are times when platitudes are good, and times when they are not. This was a not-good-time. For over an hour he had yelled, and cried, and even pleaded to God for some kind of divine resolution to the whole mess, and now he was just quiet—definitely a not-good-time for platitudes.

“What are you going to do now?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said, his eyes still looking out my window. The trees were beginning to turn, and the bright greens were slowly changing to gold and red. Poteau Mountain was just across the valley from the little church parsonage where we were sitting. I was the minister of the church, which was next door, and he had come by hoping for some kind of theological magic words that would make his story have a happy ending. But I was young too then, and didn’t have much more wisdom on his horrors than he did.

Actually, if he hadn’t been so miserable, he would have enjoyed looking through my window that day. The mountain could be dazzling that time of the year. The leaves were turning red and they gave the impression that the whole side of the mountain was on fire. Soon winter would come, and the scene would be stripped bare and harsh. The mountain would begin to look as cold and gray as I’m sure his soul felt.

“I kind of thought I would ask you what I should do next,” he said. “What should I do?”

*****

Andy lived just down the street from me—he and Donna and little Alice, who would be about thirty something today, but was only a year or so old back then. I knew his parents too, and they were good people. His daddy worked for the fire department up in Poteau, and his mother was a nurse in the clinic. They were one of the first families I met when I moved to town. Andy had grown up in the youth group, and later was a counselor himself at the camp down at Lake Texoma. He had been a sweet kid, and very responsible. Everyone liked him. When he went off to college and started bringing Donna home with him on weekends, everyone was pleased. She seemed like such a nice young woman. And you could really see that they loved each other. They looked like a picture postcard together. Andy had grown tall and strong with gentle good looks, and she was petite and as cute as she could be. Her family were all Methodists, and his family kidded her like she was from some strange foreign religion. Andy’s father had told her, “That’s okay, we’re all broadminded people today, we’ll take in most anybody.” She knew they loved her.

They got married as soon as they finished college. I did the wedding, and I was proud to do it. Then they moved back here into a little rent house up on Morris Creek Road, and just about everyone wished the best for them. We all figured they’d just settle down and raise kids and be pillars of Heavener.

But life started getting complicated on them about then. The thing was, there wasn’t much work in Heavener in those days. Andy had gotten a teaching certificate in math, and he’d hoped he could get on at the high school someday, or maybe up at the junior college. But that could take a long time, and meanwhile there wasn’t much else he could do around town with that kind of degree. There wasn’t any real industry, and the railroad offices had closed and moved out of town. Finally he did get a job taking care of the accounts for one of the Blanchard’s Feed and Seed stores which was out on the highway next to the Wood-n-Rail Restaurant. I know he didn’t like it much, but it was about all he could find back then, and the Blanchard’s folks thought he was wonderful. They weren’t used to someone just walking in off the streets who was good with math and knew how to keep books. He worked there pretty steady for about a year, just about enough for him and Donna to start getting on their feet, and then the Blanchard’s people decided to shut down the store. It just wasn’t cost effective, they said, to keep a bunch of these little stores open all across southern Oklahoma. So they consolidated our store and two or three others into one place over in Durant, about a four-hour drive from there across some god-awful roads. They liked Andy’s work so much they offered him the option of continuing his old job temporarily in the store in Durant while they got the new—much bigger—place set up. It was a crummy option for Andy. It meant being away from home for days at a time just after Alice had been born. But what could they do? He and Donna talked about it, worried about it, and—I hoped—even prayed about it for several days, and finally made the decision that Andy would take the job.

So in April of that year, 1972, Andy packed up his ‘65 VW Beetle, with not much more than his clothes and a shaving kit, and drove himself for half a day’s ride down through the Kiamichi Mountains to spend the summer and the better part of the fall in Durant, Oklahoma.

Durant is a much bigger town than Heavener, and it had a busier downtown than we did. Their Blanchard’s was right in the center of town, next to the bank and the post office, in an old dime store that had gone under. Andy was lucky, in that he was able to find a fairly nice sleeping room up over the bank, so he didn’t have to walk very far, and it was pretty cheap. There was also a little diner, named “Barry’s,” across the street from Blanchard’s that most everybody at the store ate in, so Andy kind of adopted the place and ate most all of his meals there.

At first he tried to come home every weekend, but it was a brutal drive, and he was sure his Beetle couldn’t keep it up. So it wasn’t long before he and Donna decided that he would try to get home only around once every month, or on times when there was a special occasion. It wasn’t a good arrangement, but it was all he could handle, and they needed the money.

His work load wasn’t so much hard as boring. Pretty much every day was the same. Get up. Shower and dress. Eat breakfast at the little diner across the street. Fiddle with the books until noon. Eat at the diner for lunch. In the evening, he’d leave work, make the deposit at the bank, eat supper at the diner again, and then go back up to his room over the bank and watch TV until he fell asleep. In the beginning it was very bad, but after a while some of the badness began to wear off and it became just interminably boring and something he had to endure.

Because his visits to “Barry’s” were such a part of his routine, he eventually got to know all of the staff by name, and they all knew him. Actually, they were about the only social life he had during those months he worked in Durant. In the mornings the entire staff was Barry himself, the owner. He was tall and bony, about forty to forty-five years old. He was a Korean War vet and had a long shiny scar from a shrapnel wound on his right forearm that itched when the summer heat made him sweat. He would arrive there before anyone else to get the deep-fry turned on and the grills hot, and about then Andy would come in, often the first customer. During lunch the waitress was Opal, a wobbly but venerable antique, who had been wanting to retire for years, but Barry wouldn’t let her because she was the only person on staff who could command respect from all of his customers. She had gotten into a fight once, some years earlier, with a drunk over his bill, which he claimed he had paid but she knew he hadn’t. He pulled a knife on her and demanded she empty the cash register, so she grabbed a sugar shaker and cold cocked the guy and dragged his body into the alley. After that Barry never had any trouble with any other customer again. At supper time Barry’s son, David, came on. He was home for the summer from his sixth or seventh year at SMU, and was working at the family diner while he decided what his third major in the fall would be. He was pleasant enough, but his hair was too long, and he liked to unbutton his shirt to his navel, so some of the customers didn’t like him.

Eventually, out of a combination of boredom and an inability to sleep well, Andy started dropping by Barry’s place later on at night to read a book and drink coffee, and that’s when he got to know the night staff too.

The late-shift waitress came on at 10 p.m.. She was a woman in her early-twenties named Sylvia. She was a simple person with plain features and pale skin, and straight brown hair. She wasn’t as colorful as some of the other work crew, but she was endearing in her earnestness, and Andy enjoyed kidding around with her. She took it well. Sylvia had been married once before, but her husband had run off and left her with a little boy named Aaron. The two of them were now back living with her parents who took care of Aaron while she worked nights at Barry’s.

Usually the place was empty when he got there, and it never filled up again until about eleven or twelve when the movies let out. Often, outside of Sylvia and a guy in the back who he never saw, Andy had the place to himself while he was there.

After Andy had been a regular for a couple of weeks, Sylvia started sitting at Andy’s booth during her breaks, and they would talk for a while. It felt a little funny for him to be doing that, talking with a woman so far away from his wife and daughter. But it was just talk, he thought, and he felt comfortable talking with her, so he didn’t feel like he was doing anything wrong. He really loved Donna, and really missed her. So, just talking with someone while he was away and lonely didn’t mean anything and she wouldn’t mind, he thought, if she knew about it. However, when he talked with Donna on the phone, he never mentioned it.

Several weeks and several harmless conversations later, sitting in Andy’s booth during Sylvia’s breaks, Sylvia asked Andy if he would walk her home after she got off work because she was nervous with all the things going on in the streets these days. He said yes, of course, because after all it was the decent thing to do. It was not that far away, but it was dark, and he supposed it could have been dangerous. So it happened that about 2:15 in the morning, on a Saturday night in mid-July in 1972, after everybody was gone from Barry’s diner, and she had gotten the place all cleaned up, Andy Monroe walked Sylvia home. Up Route 78 where the diner was, over to Second Street at the Traveler’s Insurance building, right for about two blocks up to Beach, then left and two doors down on the right to her house, and when they got to her house she invited him in for a cup of coffee and he stayed the night.

The next time he talked to Donna he again didn’t say anything about Sylvia, but this time he had more not to not say anything about. And so with the next phone call also. And on and on for the next few months: visiting Barry’s, walking Sylvia home, and then staying the night. In one way he was lucky. Her parents had fixed up a garage apartment for Sylvia and Aaron when they moved back home, so that they could have some privacy of their own. And that meant that Andy could come in late and leave early, and her parents wouldn’t even know that he had been there. It was a terrible thing to be doing, and he knew it, and he felt awful guilty about it too, but it also felt very easy and very comfortable, and for a long while he didn’t do anything about it. He just continued walking Sylvia home and staying the night just like they weren’t doing anything wrong, and then feeling terrible about it later. He did feel terrible, and also ashamed, but each night it seemed so very easy and very comfortable.

Eventually, however, after too many months of their weekly schedule, the shame began to override the comfort. He decided he couldn’t do it anymore. He had to stop. In spite of what he was doing, at heart he was s good man, and after a while he began to be aware of the overwhelming wrongness of what he was doing. He truly cared for Sylvia, but more importantly he deeply loved Donna, and if he didn’t do something about it soon, that wrongness would begin hurt all of them. Donna, he was sure, could also feel that something wasn’t right, though she probably wasn’t sure what it was she was feeling. So one night when Sylvia sat down in his booth at Barry’s diner during one of her breaks, he took a deep breath and told her that their going home together was going to have to stop.

Sylvia cried, and he nearly cried, and it was very hard on both of them, but when he went back to his own room that night he knew that he had done the right thing. They talked about it twice more after that, and she begged him to reconsider, but he couldn’t. Breaking it off now was the only thing that would be fair to all of them in the long run. He had been honest with her about his feelings for Donna and honest with himself, and true—well, relatively true—to Donna. He felt better about himself than he had felt in years, because he really did stop seeing her. He never went back to the diner at night again, even though he often wanted to.

He went home that weekend more jubilant than he had felt in a long time. It was really good to see Donna. To Andy she looked radiant. He was so much in love. He had allowed himself to slide into a terrible pit, but pulled back before any long term damage was done. The relationship was not worth losing the love of a wonderful woman for. When he arrived late Friday night he looked in on little Alice, and he cried. He loved her so much, and to think he had almost risked losing her and all of their future together.

Come December after that, Andy got word from the school system in Heavener that Elizabeth Tarbell was going to be retiring earlier than she had planned, due to a couple of mild strokes which had slowed her down more than she had expected. They wanted to know if he would be willing to start teaching math in the high school in January. Was he willing? he said. He was elated! It was the best news they could have ever heard. The pay wouldn’t be all that great in the beginning, but it was steady, and it was doing what he loved, and finally he and Donna could begin to really start their lives together. He immediately turned in his resignation to Blanchard’s and moved back to Heavener to get ready to teach school.

I remember when he got that good news. One Sunday morning during announcement time at church I asked if anyone had anything they wanted to share with the rest of us, and he and Donna stood up together and said that Andy had finally gotten the teaching job he’d wanted and he was moving home for good. We were so glad for him that the whole congregation stood up and applauded. It was a glorious time for all of us. They were such sweet kids. We all loved them and wanted the best for them, and we thought that finally they were going to be able to have it.

I reminded Andy of that time when he was sitting in my living room looking out of my window at the leaves turning red, and the mountain across the valley, and he smiled grimly. “Things didn’t turn out to be so wonderful after all, did they?” he said.

“No,” I said, returning his humorless smile, hurting for him, but feeling inadequate to his needs. “They sometimes don’t.”

A few months later—as I recall it was when we were rehearsing for the Easter cantata at the church and the Dogwoods and Red Buds were beginning to open up and make all of Heavener look really fabulous—Andy got his first call from Durant. It was Sylvia. She said she was pregnant. When she told him that, he felt an odd sense that his heart was no longer beating, and he felt faint. He said, I thought you were protected. I thought you were taking a pill or something. No, she said, I said I would eventually be protected. I said if we were going to continue doing this, I’d have to start taking a pill or something.

She wanted to know what he was going to do about their situation. He told her he couldn’t do anything about it, that he was married, and he couldn’t leave his wife. She said, but we’re going to have a baby. He said, but I can’t do anything, I haven’t got anything. I can’t do anything. She said, but we’re going to have a baby.

He hung up the phone and went quietly out to his car and drove out of town and up Morris Creek Road to the top of Poteau Mountain. When he got there he pulled into the Heavener State Park with its scenic overlooks and manicured lawns, and picnic tables with canopies shaped like hang gliders, and he stopped the car. He turned off the motor and opened the door and intended to get out, but his legs couldn’t do it. Instead he stayed in his seat and started crying. All alone, a deep, loud, lonely cry. He felt a loneliness like he was in an endless darkened hallway in which he had inadvertently locked all of the exits and misplaced the keys. What could he do, he thought? He had really screwed up this time. He had ruined Sylvia’s life, and probably Donna’s and Alice’s, not to mention all of their families, who would be humiliated, and a not-yet-born baby who was going to be affected eventually. They were all going to be hurt by this. He didn’t really love Sylvia, but still somehow he hadn’t been totally insincere in his feelings for her either. He didn’t want her to go through this alone, but he didn’t know how to help her without telling someone what he had done and ruining his own life also. He didn’t have any money to give her, and he was too frightened to bring himself to tell Donna or anyone else what had happened.

He spent the next two months living in the darkest terror he had ever experienced. Each day he allowed only the peripheral parts of his life to be taken up with being a teacher and father and husband, while the important portions were consumed by waiting. Waiting for the inevitable second call from Durant, the one that would tell him what she had decided, or what the ultimatum would be, or what the threat would be. Or what further unimaginable horror would fall down upon him because of his senseless transgression. He knew that eventually the call would come and that he should be prepared for it, but he knew he wouldn’t be. He didn’t know how to be prepared for it. All he could do was to live in fear of it. Day after day, he imagined the sound of a phone ringing, and when it did he would lunge for it like a teenager.

Finally the call came. It came about two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon.

Donna was upstairs napping with Alice, but he caught it on the first ring, so he didn’t think she heard it. It was a fairly safe time to talk, and he was glad that the call had come then, but it wasn’t from Sylvia. It was from her parents. They apologized for calling, they said, because they didn’t really know him, but they were calling because they wanted to know if he was the young man who had been seeing their daughter? Or if not, did he know who it was. He paused for a moment and thought carefully about their question. They didn’t seem to know who he was. He must be just one or many that they were calling on behalf of their daughter. Finally, and very, very slowly, he said no, he wasn’t the one. And, no, he didn’t know who the friend was that they were asking about. In fact, he said, feeling each word as it emerged from his mouth, he didn’t really even know their daughter very well. He had only met her once or twice when he was a customer at Barry’s, and didn’t really know her well at all.

He wasn’t sure why he was lying to them. He wasn’t sure what they were wanting, but he didn’t think that right now was the best time to tell them the truth. He asked why they wanted to know. They said only that they were checking all of her acquaintances because of something that happened, but if he was not the one, then they wouldn’t bother him any further. But what, he said, was the thing that happened? They said they would rather not go into it. If he was not the young man they were looking for, then they didn’t want to talk about it. And they hung up.

Andy felt a cool chill running through his body. It was a warm day and it was warm in the house, but he was chilled all over. He called back to Durant to the diner. He got Opal on the phone. Did anyone there know what happened? No, she said, she didn’t know anything. But she did know that Sylvia’s parents had been talking to Barry that morning, and that he was over at their house right then, so he probably knew something. He would be back soon and could return the call if Andy wanted him to. Andy said no, that he was going to be hard to reach for the rest of the day, but that he’d try to call Barry again later.

He drove over to the Wood-n-Rail restaurant and waited in agony with a cup of coffee next to the phone for over an hour while his body chills grew worse and his hands began to shake. The waitress noticed it, and asked him if he was alright, but he told her he had a cold. When he finally made the call back to the diner again, Barry was there. Yes, he said, he had been over to the house. Yes, he did know what happened. But why was Andy interested? No reason, Andy said. The family had just called him and he was curious. They hadn’t said why. Barry sounded suspicious. While he had been at their house, they had mentioned their phone call to Andy and how he had said that he didn’t even know Sylvia. So why, Barry wanted to know now, was Andy calling him and asking what had happened to her? Andy held his mouth with his free hand to keep his quivering teeth steady while he talked. He repeated again that he was just curious. He just wanted to know what happened. That’s all. Just curious. Just curious. Then Barry—still sounding unconvinced—told him what he knew.

It had been a mess, Barry said. A real mess. About three months ago she must have found out that she was pregnant. Barry was pretty sure he could see it at the diner, but she wasn’t telling anybody, so Barry didn’t say anything. He guessed she was trying to keep it from her folks. Then about a week ago she took some time off. Said she was going on a vacation. But what she did was, she and a couple of her friends went into Oklahoma City, and they took a room in a motel there, and then they did all sorts of things to her to see if they could get her to have a miscarriage. They stuck hangers and things inside her to see if they could scrape it out of there. They didn’t know what they were doing. They were just kids. It was a mess. She should have gone to a doctor right then when she started bleeding, he said, but she thought that that was what was supposed to happen with an abortion. By the time she got home she was in bad shape. Her parents didn’t know exactly what had happened, but they knew it was something terrible. So they took her to the hospital, but she wasn’t doing good at all. She’d lost too much blood by then and had gotten infected. She stayed in there for about two-three days, sometimes conscious, sometimes not, and then she caught pneumonia. Then, early one morning, before her parents had had a chance to get there, before the nurses had changed shifts and checked in on her, before the doctor had made his rounds, she died. It was awful, Barry said. She just laid there and died. It shouldn’t have happened. A young thing her age didn’t need to die. It was awful. It was just plain awful.

Andy doesn’t remember hanging up the phone, though he must have. He doesn’t remember leaving the restaurant either, though he must have done that as well. He only remembers being cold. Unbearably cold. And very, very tired. He remembers going home somehow and carefully taking off his clothes and going to bed. But he didn’t sleep. He was tired with a deep emotional tiredness, but the constant waves of freezing winds, blowing in through the open summer windows kept him awake. He was still there, shaking and exhausted, hours later when Donna came up to check on him. She thought he was sick and took his temperature to see if he had a fever. But he didn’t. He was just very cold and very tired and couldn’t speak. He lay there all that evening and that night and through the next morning into the afternoon before he was able to get up again. And even then he didn’t walk well. He couldn’t think of any real reason why he would ever want to walk well again. What was the point? Only living people needed to walk, he thought, and there was nothing in his body that was still living, or deserved to be.

Twice in the next week he got calls from Sylvia’s parents, asking more questions, and suggesting ever more firmly that he might have been the young man they had never met, but who they knew had been seeing their daughter. No, he said, his voice never sounding steady, never sounding convincing, I barely knew your daughter. And please stop calling me about it. But they did call. Week after week they called, each time with more questions. Two times they called while he was at school and Donna answered the phone, but they did not tell her why they called, they simply left their names and said they would call again. Were they taunting him, he thought? Were they intentionally torturing him? When they got Andy, they said Barry tells us you were in the diner every night and you knew her well. Andy said, Barry doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I was in there seldom, and he was never there when I was, so how could he know? In another call they said the night cook thinks the person he saw sitting with Sylvia fits Barry’s description of what you look like. That’s crazy, Andy said, screaming into the phone, and please stop calling me. You are causing me to be very upset. But, they said in this phone call and the next and in all the ones that followed, if you are in fact the person we are looking for, then you have caused a lot more harm to us than just making someone upset.

They called back again and again for over a month, each call with a different accusation or question, or a different plea for him to come forward with the truth. And to each he gave the same plea of innocence. Answering the phone before Donna became the only subject he could focus his mind on. Terror became the only companion he could confide in. The calls came like tolls of a death bell, marking off the pieces of his life that no longer functioned. He grew more and more frantic with each call, finally praying that they would somehow prove that he was lying and force him to end the charade. Please, he said to himself and not to Sylvia’s parents, stop me from lying so that I can be punished and finally rest from the hell that this has become.

And then one week the calls stopped. He didn’t notice at first. He thought maybe they had paused to find another technique to get at him, but then a second week passed with no calls also. Perhaps, he thought, they were trying to gather more evidence. Perhaps they were getting more witnesses. Maybe they had gone to the police and the police were gathering their own evidence. Maybe, he thought with rising anxiety, that the next contact would be from the police station, or worse yet, a knock on the door, asking him to come down to the station.

But the calls simply stopped. Sylvia’s parents simply stopped trying to find out if Andy had been the person in their daughter’s life who had played a role in her horrible death. He never found out why. They didn’t tell him why they stopped. They just stopped.

In the silence of no calls, in the painful waiting, and fearful fantasizing of what might happen next, Andy grew sick again. He went to bed and stayed there most of the time. He missed classes for more than three weeks, which was not a good precedent to set for his first semester on the job. He couldn’t say exactly what he had, but he was sure that he was sick with something that was very bad. They found a substitute for him, but everybody at school who knew him and liked him was worried. I remember his long sick spell. It reminded me of the way binge drinkers would look fine for weeks and then tie one on and never be seen for a month. But Andy didn’t seem like the type. I wished at the time that I had had the wisdom to see into his despair and do something to help him, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t able to figure what it was that was destroying him.

Even after he was able to get himself up out of bed and sort of back at the school again, he was never totally well, just somewhat less ill. He taught his classes and graded some papers. He could converse a bit with Donna and go through some of the gestures of playing with Alice, but most of the time, his mind and soul were possessed with Sylvia’s ghost. He would meet her when he was in the shower and was rubbing the soap over his chest and her hand would join his, rubbing the soap lower and lower down his stomach to his groin. He tried not to see her hand doing it, but every day she did it to him and she wouldn’t stop. He would see her when he was sitting at the dinner table and she would take her break and sit down beside him. He tried to make her sit somewhere else, but she wouldn’t do it. She would only sit next to him. He would occasionally see her in the mornings when he was in the bathroom and, with his continually shaky hands, he would cut himself shaving. And when he did so, she would stand beside him holding up her bleeding baby and the blood from the baby would drip down his neck and onto his hands and into the sink. He tried to get her to go away, but she wouldn’t. She was possessed with showing him that baby, and he was possessed with having to look at it.

His sickness continued for weeks, maybe months, he couldn’t remember exactly. It was a sickness unto death, though not as much like death as he would have liked. He prayed to God with a conviction he never had before that somehow he could make amends for the steps that had ruined so much of his life and all of Sylvia’s. He prayed for punishment or blood atonement or anything else in all of God’s creation that would balance his crime, so that he could at last rest. He even tried to will himself to die but he couldn’t do it. He stood one day for over an hour at the peak of a rock outcropping at the peak of the hang glider’s launch, up on Poteau Mountain, looking down onto the sharp drop below, trying to decide if a physical death was worse than a living one. He finally went home, not entirely sure.

He prayed every day that God would take his life, so that he wouldn’t have to bear such grief and remorse and fear of phone calls and letters and ghosts of Sylvia’s bloody baby dripping into his sink each morning when he shaved. But God didn’t do it. Instead Andy survived. His body went on with life as though it had not sinned, as though it wasn’t guilty. He prayed for death, but instead got life.

I remember watching him one Sunday morning during those horrible days, and wondering what on earth could have happened to him. While all the rest of us were joyously standing and singing sweet Gospel hymns of the glory of God and the love of Jesus, Andy was looking solitary and cadaverous under an unbelievable pall of sorrow. I remember being startled by how gray and old his face looked. Like a man in the last throws of life who pined for death but did not know how to find his way into a cemetery.

I tried to catch him after church that day to see about getting together during the week to talk, but he rushed past me in a daze, barely noticing his family in tow in back of him. I also called his house a couple of times after that, but each time Donna told me that he had taken ill—he seemed always ill—and couldn’t come to the phone. At the time I had no real idea just how deep his illness really was.

*****

Finally he came to see me, and now he was in my living room telling me his story. When he finished at last we both sat silent for several moments and I felt exhausted by his insurmountable pain. I noticed again how lined and ashen his face had become in the few short months since his misery began. After a moment I looked away from his face to the window and saw that the mountain on the other side of the valley was burning.

Poteau Mountain is long and narrow like a carpet roll that runs from Heavener in Oklahoma all the way to Mena in Arkansas. Every year about this time Herbert Ward, who owns this side of the mountain, sets a fire on his property, to burn off the ticks and mosquitoes and to clear the underbrush. The first time I saw him do that I thought I was watching the end of the world. Poteau Mountain from our end is a huge arch that is scarred and gashed with fences and scenic overlooks, and the hang glider launch. The fire creates an eerie yellow-to-red fringe that fans out from the center toward the horizon of the mountain. When the fire reaches the edge it waves and boils and taunts the eyes hauntingly.

While Andy had been sitting in front of my window telling me his story, the sun had gone down. We both sat in silence for some time watching the fire overcome the lives of the insects and underbrush on the top of Poteau Mountain. It seemed wicked, and deadly, and yet cleansing.

“I’ve prayed a lot these past months,” Andy finally said, as the fire crept steadily across the mountain’s arch before us.

“I’m not surprised,” I said. “What did you pray for?”

“I prayed that I would get caught, that God would punish me, and that I would have to pay for what I had done. That I would go to jail and get it resolved somehow, and it would be over with. But that never happened. Her family finally quit calling me and nothing else happened. I’ve gotten away with it, and now it looks like nothing else is going to happen. So I suppose that sets me free, right?”

He looked at me and I looked at him with his embattled, mournful face, raw from months of wiping tears. He didn’t look free.

“Then I prayed that God would take me,” he said, looking back at the burning mountain across the valley. “Just kill me and get it over with. That’s what I deserve, isn’t it? Isn’t that fair? But that didn’t happen either. Does God mean to just let me go?

I thought for a long time about his question while we sat in my darkening living room, lit only by fire from the burning mountain and I’ve thought about it many times since, never with any peace or certainty. I was so very young then, and so very new to ministry. What seemed to me then as a question impossible to answer, I now view as a part of the vastness of the inscrutability of God. Sometimes the good die young, but sometimes they die old. Sometimes evil is victorious, but sometimes it is heroically vanquished. And sometimes young men whose guilt overwhelms them and drives them to long for punishment into death are instead set free, condemned to liberty, sentenced to suffer with memories and ghosts and even with life itself. Who can put their hand in those events and know for certain that God is truly present or truly absent?

“Is that the punishment?” Andy was saying again. God just lets me go?”

I watched the light flicker against his face, making it appear to be on fire like the mountain. “I expect so,” I said at last, and in spite of its inadequacy, I would probably say the same thing today.

*****

I don’t hear too much about Heavener these days, the place I once knew and loved when I was young. I have heard that little Alice has grown up beautiful and talented and now lives and works up in Kansas City. I’ve also heard that Andy and Donna separated a few years back, though I didn’t learn why, and I understand that he has had a stroke and doesn’t get out much. And Herbert Ward died not long ago, and with him, I suppose, went the last of the fires he used to set along the sides of Poteau Mountain to burn and cleanse the land. Occasionally, however, I can still look out of a window, usually the front window of whatever house I happen to be living in at the time, and I still think I see mountains on fire. They burn whenever I remember people like Andy and Sylvia and the rest. They burn at times on Sunday mornings when I stand before my gathered congregation, holding high the bread and cup, praying for grace and peace, and I see wounded, broken faces, looking up for meaning purpose in a world that’s gone crazy. When they work, fires like that will burn the wheat from the chaff, the old from the new, the ill from the well. But when they don’t, they just burn. Some of us, and maybe Andy is one of them, seem to get burned up by their fires, and then they’re gone. And then we never hear of them again.

Baby Preacher

2009-04-22T13:04:00.002-05:00

Say it isn't so...

Visit to Acteal, Chiapas, Mexico

2009-04-09T06:56:00.002-05:00

A visit by delegation from Equal Exchange, Church of the Brethren, the United Church of Christ, and Witness for Peace to Acteal, a pacifist religious community in Chiapas, Mexico, and the site of a horrific mass murder of 16 children, 20 women (many pregnant), and 9 men in 1997 by unknown paramilitaries widely assumed to be related to government forces.

I See Friends Shaking Hands...

2009-02-18T21:55:00.002-05:00

Magical video based on my favorite song

Where does it come from?

2009-02-17T08:47:00.003-05:00

I was just reading an article on immigration (which can be found here). It was on how the clergy around the US are getting involved in the immigration issue. It was a very positive, hopeful article, but two or three things stood out for me.

First, in its final paragraphs it mentioned a recent survey and series of focus groups that had been held to assess community feelings about immigrants. Among other things, it found that "religious leaders were looked to as trusted sources of information on the issues, and could have a profound influence on residents' views."

The second thing was earlier in the article, when they talked about church leaders organizing in Utah to forestall a particularly harsh immigration bill that was being debated in the State house. Even leading Mormon spokespersons came out against it, calling instead for a more humane compassionate response to immigrants. However, polls taken in the state showed overwhelming support for a far more punishing position. The bill passed easily.

What these two observations say to me is that when people say they respect their clergy and that they are their respected leaders and mentors, and that they look to them for more and ethical guidance, what they mean is that they love the nice people in their houses of worship and if those people believe with their views they will listen to them, and if they don't they won't. The truth is that the average "religious" person gets far more of his or her values from the media and their peers than they do from their beloved clergy person.

I have members of my church who were raised in a liberal church, who had nothing but liberal ministers and moderate-to-liberal church school teachers for at least fifty years that I can trace back, but who are still right wing ideologues. How can you explain that? Where does it come from?

One thing you can say about that is that peoples' values do not come from their faith community. Beyond that I can't say much.

Stan Going Away, September, 2008

2008-11-13T10:10:00.007-05:00

Click on the picture below to go to scenes (mainly) from my last weeks and months as pastor of the United Church of Christ in Abington, Massachusetts, from photos taken by Judy O'Bryan. Wonderful people. I love them all.

Even then...

2008-06-11T18:57:00.002-05:00

Even if my strength fails me
and my appetite goes away,
Even if my bones ache with a pain
that the drugs can never touch,
Even if the blessed tests come back again and again,
and the charts tell me that I have failed the task of
banishing the dark gray Kryptonite from within my spine,

Even if I fall and fall again and the doctor,
who is younger than my youngest child,
tells me I will never walk again,
Even if my bowels collapse and nothing short of the
indignity of a large young woman
who shouts my name and pronounces it wrong,
must wipe me clean and change my clothes,
day after day after day,

Even if all of the doors of life are closed again and again
and the tests come back again and again,
and my time has passed, and I know that will eventually die,
perhaps finally and completely…

Even then, I will not give in. I will not give in to the beastly
reality that is closing in around me.
I will not let the darkness of the future decide for me whether I
am permitted to smile.
I will not allow the “sting” of death force me to give up my
claim, my right, my inheritance, of joy.

Muslims in America

2008-02-21T20:53:00.003-05:00

In these days it is very important to see and hear positive images of Muslims. This wonderful video was the winner of the 2007 US Muslim Film Contest. Enjoy.

What Would King Say Today?

2008-01-25T09:36:00.000-05:00

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. waves to the crowd after delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28, 1963.

"On Religion" January, 26, 2008, The Patriot Ledger

My church recently had a special service honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. It is a somber reading of some of his most powerful speeches and writings interspersed with the story of his life and times. The service is very moving, very emotional, and we do it every year. It’s hard to believe that only one generation ago, in our own country, people were being shot, bombed, killed, hanged, arrested, and beaten all because of a dream that all God’s children get a berth on the boat. It’s a dream that we all should have shared to begin with, not one that some young black southern preacher had to fight and die to tell us.

At the same time in the daily papers we read about Episcopal churches fighting painfully over the ordination of a gay bishop; American Baptists losing more congregations because the denomination is not more strongly opposed to homosexuality; and a congregation in Marshfield that is debating becoming independent because its national synod has voted to support same-sex marriage. What would King say to this issue that splits and tears at so many of our churches today?

Homosexuality was in the closet in King’s day so it’s hard to know for certain. There are, however, a few clues as to what his personal views might have been. Perhaps the most relevant is that his widow, Coretta Scott King, often said that he clearly was supportive of gay rights.

After his death she campaigned for gay rights up to her dying day, and believed that she was carrying on Martin’s ministry. As an odd tribute to that cause, her funeral was picketed by the famously bigoted Westboro Baptist Church who marched outside with signs saying ‘‘No Fags in King’s Dream.’’

In a speech in 1998, at the 30th anniversary of his death, Coretta linked King’s ministry to the work of liberation for gays and lesbians.

‘‘I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people and I should stick to the issue of racial justice,’’ she told the audience. ‘‘But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brother- and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.’’

Another interesting clue is that several of King’s supporters were gay.

In fact, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell once threatened King that he would accuse him of having an affair with one of them if he didn’t call off a protest of a Democratic convention. But the accusation was so silly that Powell finally dropped it.

The most famous gay person among King’s advisors was Bayard Rustin. He was a consummate organizer and the driving force behind the 1963 march on Washington. He was also openly gay and had once been jailed on a ‘‘morals’’ charge, which meant that he had been accused of having a male lover. Against tremendous pressure, King stood by him to the very end.

Over the years huge numbers of people pushed King to drop Rustin from his inner circle, but he refused. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover leaked wire taps and memos about Rustin’s homosexuality hoping it would tarnish the civil rights movement. Senator Strom Thurman denounced him as a sexual pervert from the Senate floor. Even President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy demanded that King drop Rustin. Even the Christian ministers who supported him and the board members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference pushed him to drop Rustin. But he refused. A good person is a good person, King would say. Regardless of who he was or what he was. It was not his role to judge.

One of the most important theological themes throughout King’s life was his belief in what he called the ‘‘beloved community,’’ his way of describing the vision that God had for all of creation. God did not intend that the Earth be embroiled in wars, bigotry, economic disparity, or ethnic cleansing, but a ‘‘holy mountain’’ where ‘‘they will not hurt or destroy.’’

He once said that for us to survive as a people, ‘‘our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation.’’ And that is because ‘‘we are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.’’ In his first article, back in 1956 at the height of the Montgomery bus boycott, he stated that the goals of the newly formed SCLC were ‘‘reconciliation ... redemption, the creation of the beloved community.’’ It’s hard to believe that he could believe in such a sweeping vision of God’s inclusiveness and at the same time believe that some people in God’s creation were more ‘‘equal’’ than others. Soon after he wrote those words he invited Rustin to come down to Montgomery and assist him in organizing the boycott.

Again, it is difficult to be certain of the non-public beliefs of a man who died so many years ago, but it’s also hard to believe that someone who had a heart so big would be able to close it to those who had a sexual orientation different from his own. In 1968 he preached a powerful ‘‘sermon’’ at Riverside Church in New York City, announcing his opposition to the ongoing war in Vietnam. He closed with these words, which quote from Isaiah 40: ‘‘Our only hope lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world ...With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo ... and thereby speed the day when ‘every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; and the crooked shall be straight and the rough places plain.’’’

Service for Martin Luther King Sunday

2008-01-12T21:54:00.001-05:00

January 20, 2008

Hold Fast To The Dream

A Presentation for Two Readers and Choir

of the Life and Words, of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King

by Stan G. Duncan

Note: to download a printable version of this resource, click here. And for a printable sample version of a bulletin insert for worshipers, click here.

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the help and advice of Joe Bradley, Tinker Monroe, Laura Delaplain, Erma LaPierre, René LaPierre, and Beverly Latif Duncan for their work in either presenting or critiquing earlier drafts of this manuscript, and the adult choirs of the Congregational Church of South Hadley Falls and the United Church of Christ in Abington, Massachusetts for their roles in its first performances.

Introductory Notes

“Hold Fast to the Dream” was first written for a Sunday morning service of worship, perhaps taking the place of the Sermon. Later it was expanded to make it adaptable for a longer presentation of the type that might be used as an afternoon or evening event in which the music and readings comprised the entire program. For example, the Sunday of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is often the same Sunday as Martin Luther King Sunday, and would be a good occasion for a presentation such as this. The expanded portions are set off by double lines. When doing the short form, simply skip those sections. In the expanded form, add them.

A word on music. Many of the hymns suggested in “Hold Fast to the Dream” can be found in various hymnals and other collections. Most are in public domain and will be free. One fine collection that contains all of the music here is Sing For Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through its Songs, by Guy and Candie Carawan (Bethlehem, PA: Sing Out Corporation, 1990). However, before using music from this or any other collection in a public presentation of “Hold Fast to the Dream,” you should first contact the publishers for permission. Normally there will be little difficulty gaining permission to use their work. But, if for some reason you are unable to attain the music or apply for permission, the song, “We Shall Over Come” can be nicely substituted throughout with little loss to the overall program. In this text, both “We Shall Over Come” and a second option (which can be found in Sing For Freedom and other collections) are always given whenever a piece of music is suggested.

Note that preceding each of the readings, there is a heading which usually contains a title, date, and place of its delivery. For most of the readings, these headings are for the benefit of the readers only. The context usually introduces the reading adequately. One exception is the excerpt from the proclamation for Martin Luther King day at the end. This is not introduced in the text and will be confusing without the title given. However, the titles can also be useful if a particular reading is taken out of this presentation and used separately in another occasion as a smaller individual reading.

It should also be noted that the proclamation at the very end has troubled some people who have participated in this presentation. The president who said these words was Ronald Reagan, who frequently opposed King's work philosophically and also opposed the founding of “Martin Luther King Day,” for which these words were written. Some, therefore, have felt it hypocritical to use his words to honor Rev. King. To be sensitive to that criticism, here are three options. First, in this version we have introduced the proclamation by saying (truthfully) that these words were written, not by the president, but for him to read (by speech writer Peggy Noonan), and the name of the president is not mentioned. A second option is to simply end with the last words of King to Abernathy as he lay dying. The dramatic conclusion is a good ending by itself. Finally, if anyone in your troupe is creative, feel free to write a conclusion of your own with our blessing.

Early Years

NARRATOR:

On one very cold and very cloudy Saturday morning, January 15, 1929, just three months after the beginning of the worst economic depression in the history of the United States, Alberta Williams King and her husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., gave birth to their first child.

They named him Martin, after his father, and he would grow up to make it one of the most famous names in all of American history. Little Martin Luther King Jr. would, in his lifetime, change the way people understood democracy, religion, race relations, and human relations, throughout the entire world.

Young Martin grew up in a relatively middle class home but in a very segregated At-lanta, Georgia. Though he never wanted for food or clothing, he knew that whenever he walked out of his door into white America, he would always be considered “colored,” and therefore always second class.

He could not buy a Coke or a hamburger at any of the downtown stores. He could not sit at a lunch counter. He could not drink water at the “whites only” water fountains, he could not use the “whites only” restrooms, and he could not ride on the “whites only” elevators. If he went to a theater he would have to enter from the “colored” entrance. If he rode a bus he would have to sit in the back, in the “colored” seats, and if he wanted to go swimming, golfing, or play tennis, he simply couldn’t because all of the pools, courses, or courts had “whites only” signs in front of them.

Here are some of his own reflections on what it was like to grow up in a segregated world.

KING: (“Growing Up Negro”)

[Growing up] a Negro in America is not a comfortable existence. It means being a part of the company of the bruised, the battered, the scarred, and the defeated. Being a Ne-gro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your own chil-dren grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitation, and then be-ing hated for being an orphan. Being a Negro in America means listening to suburban politicians talk eloquently against open housing while arguing in the same breath that they are not racists. It means being harried by day and haunted by night by a nagging sense of nobodiness and constantly fighting to be saved from the poison of bitterness. It means the ache and anguish of living in so many situations where hopes unborn have died.

CHOIR: “We Shall Overcome,” verse 1

We shall overcome,

we shall overcome,

we shall overcome some day.

Oh, deep in my heart,

I do believe,

that we shall overcome some day.

NARRATOR: [Music over, melody only, of “We Shall Overcome”]

When he graduated from high school, he went on to Morehouse College in Atlanta, then Crozier Seminary in Pennsylvania. There he made straight “A”s and received a scholar-ship to go on to graduate school. He chose Boston University School of Theology, where he again made straight “A”s and received a Ph.D. in Theology.

In later years it was discovered that King copied several quotations from another disser-tation into his own without citing them correctly. The act was unfortunate because it has allowed critics to unfairly smear his intelligence in spite of his obvious brilliance.

In Boston he met a young woman named Coretta Christine Scott, who was a graduate student at the New England Conservatory of Music.

At first he was unsure about her because he’d heard that she wasn’t too religious; and she was unsure about him because she had heard that he was too short. But after they got to know one another, he grew to believe that her faith was not showy but deeper on the inside than anyone’s he ever knew. As for her concerns, he never grew any taller on the outside, but on the inside he became a giant.

And on June 18, 1953 they were married.

MONTGOMERY

NARRATOR:

Six months later, in January of 1954, King was invited to come to Montgomery, Ala-bama, to interview for pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, what would become his first full-time pastorate. And on April 14, he accepted the call to the church.

May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court in Brown vs. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.

November 17, after Martin and Coretta had arrived and begun to get settled in with their church and new home, their first child, Yolanda, was born.

And on December 1, as he was making plans for a series of sermons on the coming of the Christ Child at Christmas, a black seamstress in Montgomery, named Rosa Parks, after a long day at work, refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus. She had taken the first seat in the “colored” section of the back of the bus, but the bus filled up, and by law whites could demand that any black person give up their seat at any time. And she had done so before, but today she was tired. She also thought to herself that the Supreme Court has just desegregated the public schools, so if desegregation is good enough for children, it is good enough for adults. So she refused to give up her seat. The bus driver called the police, the police came and arrested her, and the town exploded.

Montgomery was one of the most racially divided cities in the south in those days, and treatment of blacks on buses was especially terrible. Once a black blind man took too long getting on, so the driver closed the door with his leg in it and dragged him for two blocks. Another time a black man argued with the driver over the fare and the police came and shot him dead for arguing with a white man.

Blacks were wanting to riot and whites were wanting to kill blacks who were wanting to riot. The black community elected young father, young preacher, young seminary graduate Martin Luther King to organize them to respond to the crisis.

Over two thousand people rallied in front of a church that night to decide what they would do. The air was tense and explosive. It was a dangerous night for both blacks and whites. Rev. Martin Luther King stood up to speak to them that night and here are some of the words that he said. [music stops]

KING: (Montgomery Bus Boycott Speech)

(December 5, 1955, at the Holt St. Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama)

We are here this evening for serious business. We’re here in a general sense because first and foremost, we are American citizens, and we are determined to acquire our citi-zenship to the fullness of its meaning. We are here also because of our deep-seated be-lief that democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth.

But we are here in a specific sense because of the bus situation in Montgomery....And we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, then the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a Utopian dreamer who never came down to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie...

But in our protests, there will be no cross burnings. No white person will be taken from his home by a hooded Negro mob and brutally murdered. There will be no threats and intimidation. We will be guided by the highest principles of law and order...the deepest principles of our Christian faith. Love must be our regulating ideal....If we fail to do this our protest will end up as a meaningless drama on the stage of history, and its memory will be shrouded with the ugly garments of shame. In spite of the mistreatment that we have confronted, we must not become bitter and end up by hating our white brothers. Let no people pull you down so low as to make you hate them.

NARRATOR:

[Music over]

Instead of a riot, they organized a boycott of the Montgomery buses, with car pools tak-ing people to work. Non violently they brought the city to its knees. The city took them to court arguing for segregation all the way to the Supreme Court. Finally, after over a year of attacks and threats and thousands of daily hate letters and phone calls, after his home was bombed and the police refused to investigate, and after King himself was ar-rested and jailed twice for speeding and had to pay hundreds of dollars in fines and had his auto insurance policy revoked, after the movement had to spend tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and bail, after all of this and more, the Supreme Court declared that segregation of public transportation facilities was unconstitutional.

CHOIR: “We Shall Overcome” verse 2.

We’ll go hand in hand,

We’ll go hand in hand, some day.

Oh, deep in my heart,

I do believe,

that we shall overcome some day.

Or: “If You Miss Me From the Back of the Bus.”

If you miss me at the back of the Bus,

and you can’t find me nowhere,

Come on up to the front of the bus,

I’ll be riding up there,

I’ll be riding up there.

Come on up to the front of the bus.

I’ll be riding up there.

SIT-INS

NARRATOR:

[Music over]

King and his movement became internationally famous after that. Together with Ralph Abernathy and others, they founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and began organizing voter registration throughout the South. At that time, less than ten percent of blacks in America were registered to vote, and in most cases in the South, they were not allowed to register.

In 1960 four black college students in Greensboro North Carolina went into a “Whites only” department store and tried to sit down at the lunch counter and be served. They were arrested, but they took it to court and a nation wide protest movement called “Sit ins” began.

In October of that year, Rev. King and several others joined a “sit-in” in Atlanta, Geor-gia and demanded to be served food just like white people. They too were arrested. Later all were freed but King, who was found to be on “parole” for a traffic violation, and he was sentenced to four months of hard labor in the Reidsville State Prison, the harshest maximum-security facility in the South.

While in prison, wearing leg irons, eating rancid food, in an unheated room infested with bugs, Martin wrote this letter to his wife, Coretta:

[music stops]

KING: (Letter to Coretta)

(October 26, 1960, in Georgia’s maximum security prison for a traffic violation after being arrested at a sit-in in Atlanta, Georgia.)

October 26, 1960

Hello Darling,

Today I find myself a long way from you and the children...I know this whole experi-ence is very difficult for you to adjust to, especially in your condition of pregnancy, but as I said to you yesterday this is the cross that we must bear for the freedom of our peo-ple....

I have the faith to believe that this excessive suffering that is now coming to our family will in some little way serve to make Atlanta a better city, Georgia a better state, and America a better country.

Just how, I do not know yet, but I have faith to believe it will. If I am correct then our suffering is not in vain.

I understand that everybody—white and colored—can have visitors this coming Sun-day. I hope you can find some way to come down....

Give my best regards to all the family. Please ask them not to worry about me. I will adjust to whatever comes in terms of pain. Hope to see you Sunday.

Eternally yours,

Martin

NARRATOR:

[Music over]

But King did not spend the four months in prison. As it happened, a young U.S. Senator and presidential candidate named John F. Kennedy personally called the judge who had sentenced him and talked him into reversing his decision. Interestingly, when he got out he held a press conference and praised Senator Kennedy for his help. The word spread of Kennedy’s help, and a few days later he received hundreds of thousands of votes from black voters who had never voted in an election in their entire lives. Kennedy won that presidential election by only 110,000 votes.

CONGREGATION AND CHOIR: “Amen, Amen”

Or:

CHOIR: “We Shall Overcome” verse 3,

We are not afraid

We are not afraid, some day.

Oh, deep in my heart,

I do believe,

that we shall overcome some day.

Or:

“Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” verses 1,2.

Paul and Silas bound in Jail

Had no money for to pay their bail

Keep your eyes on the prize, Hold on.

Hold on.

Keep your eyes on the prize,

Hold on.

Paul and Silas began to shout,

the jail door opened and they walked out.

Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on....

BIRMINGHAM

NARRATOR:

[music over]

The reputation of Martin Luther King and the movement grew larger and larger through the early sixties. There were more sit-ins, there were more boycotts, there were more protests, all slowly tearing down the most visible excesses of the walls of oppression and discrimination in America. Through it all King began to increasingly see that the struggle was no longer just for civil rights, but that it had become a movement for hu-man rights. For when one part of humanity is held down and repressed, then all of hu-manity is harmed and made less because of it.

But perhaps the turning point in his life, and the life of the movement, took place in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama.

Birmingham was arguably the most oppressive and thoroughly segregated city in the nation in those days. It had such a long history of brutality and violence against its black citizens, that it was known by some as the “American Johannesburg.” The homes of blacks in one section of town were bombed by whites so often it got the name “Dyna-mite Hill.”

Birmingham was so bad that it banned a story book about friendly white and black rab-bits. It also banned what they called, “nigger music” on white stations. By that they meant Ray Charles. King once said that about the only thing in town that both blacks and whites shared together were the streets and the sewer system.

The police commissioner of Birmingham was Eugene Connor, known as “Bull” Connor in the area. He was an angry forceful racist who openly bragged about how many blacks he had beaten and killed in his lifetime. He promised that “blood would run in the streets” before Birmingham would desegregate its public facilities.

On April 3, 1963, the protest of Birmingham began, with boycotts, lunch-counter sit-ins, and daily marches, all done quietly and calmly, completely non violently. “Bull” Connor began arresting protesters but hundreds more came. Over the weeks the Bir-mingham jail had over three thousand people in it and yet more still came. King himself was one of those arrested early in the marches. Ironically he was taken to jail on April 13, Good Friday, one hundred years to the day from when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. King spent the next ten days running the campaign from in the Birmingham Jail.

While there, he had been given a newspaper in which a number of white clergy, Chris-tian and Jewish, had written a public letter criticizing him for pushing integration too quickly. He sat down in his cell and on pieces of newspaper, rags, toilet tissue, and backs of envelopes, he wrote a public response. His response became known as the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and has become one of the most famous statements about non violent civil disobedience written in this century. And here is a portion of what he said.

[music ends]

KING: (“Letter from Birmingham Jail”)

(April 16, 1963, while imprisoned in the Birmingham City Jail for protesting the segre-gation of eating facilities. In response to a letter in the newspaper by local Protestant and Jewish clergy who criticized him for pushing integration too quickly.)

April 16, 1963

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in Birmingham jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.”...Since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

[You are right when you note that we are outsiders coming in to your community, but we have come to Birmingham because there is terrible injustice here and we must re-spond like the Apostle Paul did to the Macedonian call for help.] Moreover, I am cogni-zant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects us all indi-rectly....Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

[You also mentioned the demonstrations in Birmingham, which you deplored, but you did not mention the horrible conditions that made them necessary: the unsolved bomb-ings, the killings, the whole ugly record of brutality that made Negro life here so grossly unjust. You advised us to negotiate our problems with the city fathers, something that we have frequently attempted to do, only to have them break their promises time and again.] As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community.

[You told us that our protests were “untimely” and that we should trust you and “wait.” For centuries the Negro has heard “wait,” and “wait” has nearly always meant “Never.”] We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights...Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of seg-regation to say, “wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will, and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers [and sisters] smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television;...when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is ask-ing: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are)...; and your wife and mother are never given the respected title of “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “no-bodiness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

NARRATOR:

[Music over]

Outside, “Bull” Connor seemed intent on proving that racism could be even more evil than King had described it in his letter. He had firemen turn fire hoses on the marchers, which sent columns of water crashing into children and adults, knocking them down, ripping their clothing, smashing them against the sides of buildings, sweeping them off of the streets, bloodying their bodies and throwing them into parks and alleys. Then he let loose German shepherd dogs trained to attack and bite and tear at running people. Day after day television cameras showed a shocked world the horrors, but day after day the carnage continued, and day after day the marchers continued marching for freedom.

The turning point occurred on Sunday, May 5, 1963, when three thousand children went on a prayer vigil to the Birmingham jail, where King and others were being held. When they arrived, the police threatened them and screamed at them, but all they did was kneel in prayer. Finally, one of the protesters stood up from his prayer and said to them, “We’re not turning back. We haven’t done anything wrong. All we want is our free-dom....How do you feel doing these things?”

“Bull” Connor yelled at his men to turn on the hoses, but nobody moved. The children continued praying. His men were silent. He yelled again, but they dropped their hoses. One of the firemen began crying. “We can’t continue to do this,” one of them said. The children continued silently praying. Nobody spoke again, and nobody got hurt. That event was the moral turning point of the struggle. Soon after that, the businesses of Birmingham finally agreed to integrate.

“The Storm is Passing Over”

Or: “We Shall Overcome,” verse 4.

Our God will see us through,

Our God will see us through, some day.

Oh, deep in my heart,

I do believe,

that we shall over come some day.

Or: “Keep your Eyes on the Prize,” Verses 3, 4, 5.

The only Chain that we can stand,

is the chain of hand in hand...

Keep your eyes on the prize, Hold on.

Hold on.

Keep your eyes on the prize, Hold on.

The only thing that we did wrong,

was stay in the wilderness too long.

Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on....

The only thing we did right,

was the day we started to fight.

Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on....

WASHINGTON

NARRATOR:

[music-over]

The next few years were a whirlwind. In the space of just one year the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in Birmingham was unconstitutional. Martin Luther King was invited to have an audience with Pope Paul VI at the Vatican, and he led a successful 125,000 person “Walk for Freedom” in Detroit. He received the Nobel Prize for Peace. He was named Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year.” Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. And on August 28, 1963, he took part in the largest civil rights demonstration in history, in Washington DC. At that march, King was the major speaker and gave one of the most powerful and lasting statements in his life on his phi-losophy and hopes and his dreams for all of America.

[music ends]

KING: (“I Have a Dream”)

(August 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC)

...I say to you today, my friends...even though we face the difficulties of today and to-morrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day, on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brother-hood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oa-sis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its gover-nor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day “every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plains, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

And this will be the day. This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning “My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let Freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of that old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we’re free at last!”

CHOIR: “Free At Last”

Or: “I Want to be Ready”

Or: “We Shall Overcome,” verse 5.

The truth shall make us free,

The truth shall make us free, some day.

Oh, deep in my heart,

I do believe,

that we shall overcome some day.

MEMPHIS

NARRATOR:

[music over]

Over the next few years the dream of King seemed to go bad. Protesters who promoted violence seemed to be on the rise and people who promoted love and peace among all people seemed to be on the decline. Riots in Watts, Detroit, Newark, and others seemed to undermine all that he had worked for. More and more of the momentum of the early civil rights movement seemed to be slipping away.

Increasingly during this time King was growing to believe that race is only one of the issues which was at the core of America’s problems. Its violent nature and general dis-regard for poor people seemed to him to be the larger issues which stood over race. So for the Summer of 1968 he planned to hold the biggest march on Washington ever. This time the march would not be specifically about black people or civil rights, but also about poverty. He called it the “Poor People’s Campaign.” This would be a chance, he thought to reframe the movement in a much broader context, and to regain its moral tone and direction that had seemed to be waning in recent years.

But right in the middle of his plans for the march, he was asked to come to Memphis, Tennessee, to lend support to striking sanitation workers. Even though his schedule was brutal and he was too tired, too bus, and was getting sick with the flu, he agreed to go. When he arrived, he had grown so ill he was unable to prepare a formal speech and he even tried to beg off of talking to the group at a pre-strike rally. His friend Ralph Aber-nathy agreed to go address the group instead, but when he got there he found two thou-sand people clamoring to hear Rev. King speak, not Ralph Abernathy. So he went to a phone and called King saying that if he had any energy left, could he come out to these people and at least say a few words to them. King relented. He drove to the church that night in driving rain, stumbled weakly to the podium, and without notes or manuscript or any idea of what he was about to say, he delivered one of the most stirring speeches of his life. He gave what has become known as the “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” Speech. These are some of the words that he said, on April 3, 1968.

[music ends]

KING: (“I’ve Been To The Mountain Top”)

(Last speech, before a rally in support of the Memphis garbage strike, April 3, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. He was assassinated the following day, April 4.)

...We have been forced to a point where we’re going to have to grapple with the prob-lems that people have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn’t force them to do it. Survival forces us to grapple with them. For years now people have been talking about war and peace. But now no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world, it is nonviolence or nonexistence.

[Begin music over of “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.”]

That is where we are today. And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn’t done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed.

...If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could under-stand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn’t committed themselves to that over there. but somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so, just as I say we aren’t going to let any dog or water hose turn us around, we aren’t going to let any in-junction turn us around. We are going on.

...Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determina-tion. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge, to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you.

...I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountain top. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And God’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the prom-ised land. And I’m happy tonight, I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any-one. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

NARRATOR:

[No music]

The next day, April 4, 1968, King and Abernathy and several others spent most of the day in their room at the Lorraine Motel planning for the big events of the next few days. He met with some of the organizers of the march, and tried to streamline events so that they would not get out of hand. He met with a group of violent black youths to see if he could talk them into laying down their clubs and rocks and working with him as non-violent marshals of the march. They refused. He met with Andrew Young, who spent most of the day in court making arrangements so that the march would be considered a legal protest. He even took time to visit with his brother AD who was visiting in town, and together they got on separate phones and called their mother.

Around five, they all began to change clothes and get ready for dinner. They were going to the home of a local pastor who had invited all of them over for dinner. A few mo-ments before six, the pastor arrived and people began to gather outside to leave. King stood at the doorway and yelled in to Abernathy, “Are you ready?” Abernathy said back, “Let me put on some after shave lotion.” King said, “Ok. I’ll be standing out here on the balcony.”

At 6:05 that evening, Martin Luther King, Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, and several others were standing on the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, waiting to go to dinner. The car that was to drive them pulled up. He recog-nized the driver as Ben Branch, the young man who was to sing for them after the din-ner. He yelled down. “Ben,” he said, “Make sure you play ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’ at the meeting tonight. Sing it real pretty.” Ben yelled back, “Okay, Doc, I will.”

Just then they heard the sound of a shot ringing out. The sound of a .30-06 high pow-ered rifle. King slammed backwards against the wall of the balcony and then fell for-ward onto the balcony floor. Ralph Abernathy rushed out to him. Someone else found a pillow to put under his head. A secret service agent held a towel to the wound in his neck to try and stop the bleeding. Others were running up the stairs, some were running for cover, some were screaming.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

During the next few minutes Ralph held the head of his dearest, closest friend in his lap while waiting for an ambulance to arrive, and watching the life bleed out of him. He spoke to Martin several times during those minutes, but Martin could only respond with his eyes. Years later Ralph said that he heard much from those eyes that night. Martin Luther King looked at him very awake, and very alert, and with his eyes he seemed to be speaking very clearly. He was saying, “Ralph, it isn’t over. It’s only in other people’s hands now. Don’t give up. Never give up. Never give up. Never give up. Never give up.” ...And then he died.

PROCLAMATION FOR MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DAY, 1986

Written to be read by the President of the United States, November 2, 1986. Read, or compose your own conclusion using local allusions.

“Let all Americans continue to carry forward the banner that...fell from Dr. King’s hands. Today, all over America, libraries, hospitals, parks and thoroughfares proudly bear his name. His likeness appears on more than 100 postage stamps issued by dozens of nations around the globe. Today we honor him with speeches and monuments. But let us do more. Let all Americans of every race and creed and color work together to build in this blessed land a shining city of...justice and harmony. This is the monument Dr. King would have wanted most of all.”

CHOIR: “We Shall Overcome,” verse 6.

We shall live in peace,

We shall live in peace, some day.

Oh, deep in my heart,

I do believe,

that we shall over come some day.

Or “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” verses 1,2,3.

Precious Lord, take my hand,

lead me on, let me stand,

I am tired, I am weak, I am worn;

Through the storm, through the night,

lead me on to the light:

Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

When my way grows drear,

precious Lord, linger near,

when my life is almost gone,

Hear me cry, hear my call,

hold my hand, lest I fall:

Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

When the shadows appear

and the night draws near,

and the day is past and gone,

At the river I stand,

guide my feet, hold my hand:

Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ayres, Alex. The Wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Meridian Books, 1993.

Carawan, Guy and Candie, eds. Sing For Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through its Songs. Bethlehem, PA: Sing Out Corporation, 1990.

Garrow, David. “The Intellectual Development of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Influences and Commentaries,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, (Vol. XL, No. 4, 1986).

King, Coretta Scott, ed. The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: New Market Press, 1987.

Oates, Stephen B. Let the Trumpet Sound: the Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Harper & Row, 1994.

And a little cat shall lead them

2008-01-12T18:47:00.000-05:00

The Patriot Ledger

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Epiphany Sunday, or “Three Kings Sunday” just passed us last week. It’s a day that always reminds me of my cats. Years ago, when I first got married, I inherited a couple of cats, and I just hated them. I was raised with dogs and always thought of cats as sort of a fake pet, not really worthy of attention. In fact, I hate to say it now because they eventually grew on me, but in those days I spent a lot of time just making fun of them and putting them down in front of our friends and family.

One Christmas Eve about 10 years ago, some of my wife’s family came to visit, and among them was her little niece, Rachel. That night we had an early dinner (because I had to do the Christmas Eve service) and while we ate, I remember going on and on about the useless felines that inhabited the house. Rachel was aghast. She had kittens of her own and she loved our cats, and here I was rudely telling stories about them.

After dinner we all went over to the church for the service, which was lovely. We sang and prayed and welcomed the Christ child into Bethlehem and into our hearts. I spoke of how amazing it was that God would choose Mary and Joseph for this miracle: two nearly-homeless, unmarried kids, from south Israel who were just coming through town to pay their taxes. Neither came from good families and neither ever amounted to much (Joseph probably died young because we never hear much about him again). But God chooses the outcast, the denigrated, and the lowly to be the bearers of his Good News, and there you have it. Paul says that the wisdom of the crucifixion is completely lost on the smart, the rich and the powerful. They just don’t get it. Those who do get it tend to be the ordinary people: fishermen, tax collectors, street people, or, as we used to say, “the lame, the least and the lost.” Today, the world thinks it can function without a sense of the presence of God. It thinks that churches are dinosaurs and that all the joy and harmony that anyone needs can be found in buying a new HDTV or iPhone, or overrated DVD. But they’re wrong. The more we think we can be happy or fulfilled all by ourselves, by our own accomplishments, the more we misunderstand the message of the birth of Jesus. That was my sermon. I’ve done better, but I thought it was pretty good.

The next day when we were all gathered around the tree giving out presents in the name of the one who gave his all for us, I noticed something different about the lovely crèche on the side board in the living room that two of my parishioners had made for us. It just didn’t look right somehow. We were busy all morning opening gifts and drinking coffee, but I kept looking back over to the side board because something just seemed different. Finally I realized that all of the animals had been turned around. “Now what?” I thought.

Finally, when we broke for a late morning brunch, I went over to take a closer look and realized that everything had been turned around. The donkeys and camels were now looking up and around into the room. The wise men were standing next to them pondering the sky or a star or whatever. Even the shepherds were now out at the edges of the manger peering intently away from the crib that should have been the center of attention. But when I looked more closely, I saw that not only had some things been moved, new things had been added. There, right next to the crib full of straw and the baby Jesus, were two little clay cats that we received as a gift years earlier, which are normally kept in another room on a dresser. Someone had moved them into the manger and made them look right into the crib, with their little kitty noses almost touching the baby. What on earth had happened? I looked around for the culprit and caught little Rachel staring at me and giggling uncontrollably.

“What have you done,” I yelled accusingly.

“I was just doing what you said,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You said that in the Bible the meaning of Jesus was hidden from the smart people. That the big people don’t understand him and the little ones do.” “Uh, sort of...” I said very cautiously, not know exactly where this was going.

“So, that’s why I turned all of your people and animals away from the baby Jesus.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Everybody but the cats.” “Well,” she said. “If they are as bad as you say they are, that means that God wants only that cats will get it.” And last week, that little conversation was again on my mind as I looked forward to Epiphany and the visit of the so-called “Wise” men. The wisdom of the world seems increasingly dismissive of the wisdom of the cross. They - we - just don’t get it. All of us who claim to be Christian love to praise the baby in the manger and then go about the business of lifting up the powerful and putting down the weak, of making the rich richer and the poor poorer. May we pray this New Year, as we never have before, that the wisdom of the lame, the weak and the cats might come into our lives and guide us forever.

Christian or Christ follower

2007-12-01T21:46:00.000-05:00

Geraldine at Breakfast Time

2007-11-24T20:12:00.000-05:00

I’m a Christian, Therefore I Believe in Same-Gender Marriage

2007-07-02T08:18:00.000-05:00

Legal rights for gay couples are back in the news again. In addition to the recent vote in the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention to not consider an amendment limiting marriage to between a man and a woman, there were also similar votes in both New Jersey and (gasp) the country of Colombia to grant legal marriage rights to gay couples. And surrounding all three votes were religious people protesting, saying that the moves would violate the teachings of the Bible.

When I hear of my brothers and sisters in the faith protesting full equality for gay people in the name of the Bible, it reminds me of a fake brochure that was going around a few years ago. On the cover were the words, “Open this for everything Jesus ever said about Homosexuality.”

And, of course, if you opened it up, it was blank, absolutely blank.

It’s true. Jesus never said a single word about gays or lesbians or same-gender marriage, or any of the other social issues that so many people seem to be possessed with today.

There are, of course, other places in the Bible that talk about various forms of same-gender coupling. The Apostle Paul, for example, in one of his letters, condemned a particularly horrendous practice in ancient Rome where an older rich male would take in a young boy and have him castrated and then use him as a sex toy. Well, I wouldn’t approve of that either.

And then there are the famous passages in Leviticus 18 and 20, that are often used by people to excoriate Gays. Chapter 18 says that it is an “abomination” if a man “lies” with someone who is “of his own flesh” (with the odd exception of his sister or daughter), or neighbors, or animals or another man. Then chapter 20 says that if a male is caught doing any of those things, then all of them—men, women, and animals—should be taken to the edge of town and killed, some by fire, some with rocks. Um, in my most religious moments, I don’t think I would want to enact those provisions into law.

Now, it’s not as though Jesus didn’t have strong opinions on other things. He railed against people who were wealthy or powerful, or who oppressed the poor, the sick and the weak. But he never said a word about two women who met playing bridge and fell in love and then wanted to seal their love in holy matrimony.

He talked a lot about welcoming in those who were —as we might say today—“marginalized”: Samaritans, lepers, and even women (men were not supposed to even talk to a woman, though Jesus often did). But he never said anything about two young men who meet in college and fall in love but can never tell anyone because their church has told them that their love is a sin.

Jesus’ sense of radical openness to all kinds of people was very controversial in his day and it still is today. He said to go out into the highways and byways and bring in the kinds of people that most of us would not want to have in our family and seat at our table. In fact, that attitude of his was probably one of the things that got him killed. And following in his footsteps today isn’t easy.

But I’m not a Christian because what Jesus said was easy. I’m a Christian because what he said was true.

When I hear people like Jerry Falwell, may he rest in peace, or Pat Robertson, or Franklin Graham, or James Dobson, all say that we should keep whole groups of people from getting married, I don’t know where they’re going with that, but I think I’m going with Jesus.

When I hear so many politicians—most of whom are Christians or at least religious—say that it’s legal for Brittney Spears to have a one-day marriage because she got drunk in a bar, but that we need to re-write the constitution to protect us from the two gay guys who lived across the street from my mother and took care of her when she was old and sick, I think I’m going with Jesus.

When the chips are down and the going gets rough, and people are claiming that we need to protect ourselves from a dangerous wave of tolerance, and openness, and acceptance, I think I’m going with Jesus.

I'm a Christian, therefore I think I have to believe in same-gender marriage.

Opinions and the News

2007-07-02T08:02:00.000-05:00

I was listening to the news the other day and I heard a startling thing. It seems that in an age in which we have an over abundance of news sources from TV, Radio, blogs, Internet, etc., a growing number of Americans know less and less about the news.

A media polling company called the “Pew Center for the People and the Press,” asked a bunch of people nation-wide some basic questions and then compared their answers to similar questions asked ten years ago. For example, they asked “Who is the Vice-President of the United States?” The answer, of course, is Dick Cheney. But in 1989 74% of the people knew the answer (Dan Quayle) and today it’s down to 69%. When asked the name of their governor in 1989, 74% knew and today only 66%. In fact, more people knew Arnold Schwarzenegger (93%) than Lewis Libby, Robert Gates, and Harry Reid combined.

That’s pretty significant. It’s one thing for well-intentioned people to disagree on the interpretation of facts, but when we don’t even know the facts, how do we function as a democracy? They cited a number of other issues (which party controls the Congress, is the Supreme Court Chief Justice a liberal or a conservative, and does the US have a trade deficit), and in all of these the percentage of people who got it right went down from 1989 to today.

A couple of years ago another polling organization called the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) did a similar survey of our grasp of facts in the news but this time added questions about where people get their news. The results were startling. People were asked about three things. First, did we ever find links between Iraq and al Qaeda (answer: no we didn’t)? Second, were weapons of mass destruction ever found in Iraq (no, they weren’t)? Third, did global public opinion support the US in the invasion of Iraq (not one country in the world broke fifty percent in support for our invasion)? Did the CIA or the State Department ever say that we were in any imminent danger from Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction (no, neither one did)?

All of these items were clear, objective facts and were reported on extensively in the news. However, the scary truth is that 60% of Americans got a majority or all of them wrong.

Again, it is one thing to say, “well, even though we don’t have any evidence of danger from Iraq, or there is no evidence of a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, I still believe we should go to war for a variety of other reasons.” That is an informed decision based on information. But most Americans are making decisions based on wrong information. How does that happen in a democracy? How can we function as a democracy when most of our people do not know the basic facts behind the big issues of the day that our nation is debating and voting on?

Here are some other things that the majority of Americans got wrong: a big majority (93%) believe that labor and environmental standards should be written into our international trade agreements with other countries. And by a big majority they believe that President Bush agrees with them on that (by 84%). In fact he opposes adding both labor and environmental standards to trade deals.

Americans also support the US being part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (68%), the International Criminal Court (75%), the treaty banning land mines (66%), and the Kyoto treaty on climate change (54%), and they all believe by significant majorities that the president agrees with them in these things. But in fact he opposes all of them.

Whether we support this or that issue is not my point. My point is that it is frightening that we are so consistently wrong in what we think the basic facts are.

Another part of the Pew surveys looked at where we get our news, and this was also interesting. It seems that if you get your news from Fox news, then you tend to get the basic facts of an issue (say, about whether Osama and Saddam were in cahoots together) wrong a whopping 80% of the time! And if you get your news from public radio or public television (NPR or PBS), then you get the facts wrong about 23% of the time. In other words, if you get your news from Fox, then you are highly likely to still believe that Saddam was somehow behind the attacks of 911 or that Osama Bin Ladin had training camps in Iraq. But if you get your information from NPR and PBS, then you probably know better.

But my original fear is this: These basic facts in the news are not subject to debate. Not one weapons inspector, either from the US or the UN, ever said that they found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There was never any credible evidence of links between Saddam and Osama; even the President has now said so. So, how can we be an informed electorate if we consistently believe things that are clearly untrue about big issues? How can our democracy function if we consistently argue and debate using bad information? What kind of role modeling are we setting for our children and grand children?

Remember

2007-05-16T20:52:00.000-05:00

A FEW WEEKS AGO I was sitting in the church office putting together a wedding bulletin for Barbara Hurley and Denis Childs. And a song came on the radio. It was from the musical “Try to remember” from “The Fantasticks.” Actually I never saw the musical, but I loved the Diana Ross version, where she sings that song and merges it with “The way we were.”

There was a line at the end that went something like,

“Deep in December, it’s nice to remember,

The fire of September that made us mellow.

Deep in December, our hearts should remember

And follow.”

Do you remember that? I couldn’t help but think, after hearing it, of all of the wonderful memories this aging old building brings to mind. If you added up all of the weddings I’ve done here, it’s got to be well over a hundred. Perhaps two hundred. And what of the ministers before me. It must be thousands.

I remember every one. Some were brief, some beautiful, some were long, some were short. But all were glorious and in the end the groom was handsome and the bride was beautiful

And what about baptisms? Again hundreds. All sweet and dear. Occasionally a baby would cry or throw up on my robe (sometimes worse), but we always got through them. We always felt better after having done them. And the parents always felt a little closer to me, to God, and this church because of them. Remember?

This church has ministered and had ministry done in it for almost three hundred years. The sanctuary has been filled and refilled thousands of times. The choir has soared in song and renewed us and redeemed us with music. How many choir directors have we had? How many different choirs? Include children’s choirs, bell choirs. Count choirs from the other two churches that came together to make this church and you have hundreds of choirs and thousands of people who made music and lifted spirits. Do you remember that?

Here’s a tough one. I wonder how many children and adults have been through our education program. I personally know of hundreds of people who have sat in my Bible Studies and movie, literature, prayer classes. What about the children’s classes? This church was one of the very first in the entire country to initiate a Christian education program. Did you know that? It was invented in Great Britain in the 1830s and in this church in the 1940s. In the hundreds of thousands of churches nation-wide, there are only three or four who have been educating people in the name of Jesus Christ longer than we.

Now try to remember some of the people who folded newsletters, or greeted you at the door on a Sunday morning, or painted rooms in the CE building, or cooked, served, set up, took down, for a chowder supper or Thanksgiving supper, or worked in a rummage sale or Fall Fiesta, or served on a Board or committee, or chaired a meeting, or took notes at a meeting, or took clothes over to Main Spring house, or collected foods for the Interfaith AIDS ministry, or preached in this church, or washed out the communion cups, or took kids on a field trip, gave a program at the Women’s Fellowship, or…on and on.

“Deep in December (or January) our hearts should remember, and Follow.”

Our beloved old church is going through some pretty hard times right now. Our membership is growing, but not as fast as our expenses and it is taking a toll on us by forcing us to spend down our endowment to make ends meet. In the next few weeks we will be hearing of plans to try to stabilize the finances and, yes, it will mean that you and I and all the rest will have to give more money. We have to grow more and we have to give more. There aren’t many more ways upward than those.

But when I think of all of the deep sacrifices that so many have made here for generations and generations, it doesn’t feel like something that I “have” to do. It feels like something that I want to do with joy. God’s word has come out of this beautiful congregation in many forms and in many ways, and will continue to do so. With your help, and God’s help, we will stand at the threshold of a new era and a new generation and go forward. We will stand there and look back at the lovely, glorious, times and ministries we’ve had and we will remember, and then we will look forward to Jesus and we will follow.

Rev. Stan

Thoughts on Ted Haggard

2006-12-09T23:08:00.000-05:00

Last month Ted Haggard, one of the most politically connected, evangelical pastors in America, admitted to buying drugs and having sex with a male prostitute. I tried not to talk about it at the time because I believe strongly that pastors should not push their political beliefs and Haggard believes very strongly that pastors should push their political beliefs. But like everyone else, I do have a few thoughts on the issue.

My first thought is that as Christians, we should not get into the habit of judging people who have fallen. It's hard to say that when he was such a hypocrite, but it's best to keep him in perspective. Even though most of us (hopefully) don't have as huge a gap between what we claim to believe and what we actually practice as Haggard did, isn't it true to some extent that "all of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23)?

"There is part of my life," he said when finally caught, "that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life." While he was inwardly wrestling with his own gayness, he was outwardly condemning people who were gay. There is a sad self-loathing in his words.

My second thought is about the damage that this kind of thing will do to the Body of Christ, which has already been damaged greatly in recent years. It both hurts believers (especially those who tend to worship their leaders) and it reinforces non believers (those who are glad to see one more reason to hate religion).

But it also drives away the good people who have a legitimate spiritual hunger and are wondering if the church might be a place where they can be helped. I remember years ago when Jim and Tammy Fay Bakker went down in flames over a sex and finance scandal (they confessed to each other one night that both had had affairs, and then discovered that their separate affairs had been with the same man). And I remember when Jimmy Swaggart was caught buying dope and sex from a prostitute (of the heterosexual persuasion, however). Not long after those occurrences, I saw a survey in the paper that found that following the collapse of these religious rock stars, positive attitudes of Americans toward religion declined by about ten percent. In other words, we all suffer when they go down. In the eyes of the average American, the poor pastor down the street who faithfully does his or her job and preaches the gospel, is just as bad as the powerful religious (and these days political) person who talks weekly to the White House and monthly pays for sex.

In the long run, nobody wins. The spiritual seekers give up on organized religion; church attendance in America takes a dive; and the polarization in America between believers and non believers gets worse.

One last observation about how some of Haggard's colleagues responded to the mess. Shortly after the story broke, four evangelical leaders were interviewed on CNN about the scandal. The interviewer asked them to assess the damage this might do to the movement. Every one of them denied that Haggard was much of anything, or that they even knew him, or that he had much influence either in religion or politics (On this last claim, it's helpful to remember that he pastored a 17,000 member church, was the president of the National Evangelical Association, and held weekly political strategy-session phone calls with Carl Rove). Their hypocrisy on the matter was hard on the stomach.

But their response paled in comparison to two other mega-church pastors. One was in Virginia and the other in California. In separate articles they both said that the blame for the scandal needed to be shared with Haggard's wife. They said that, had she not "let herself go" he would not have strayed. If a man's wife allows herself to become unappealing to her husband, then the man should not be held totally accountable if his eye wanders and he is forced to get his satisfaction somewhere else.

While it is true what I said about trying not to judge others, comments like those are the lowest of the low. It's hard not to say that there is should be special place in hell for people who would lower themselves to that kind of statement.

The Relations We Have

2006-11-05T15:50:00.000-05:00

My mother died this past summer. It was early in the morning on the fourth of July, and it was painless, in her sleep.

She lived in Oklahoma, and had been sliding into death for some time. Last December I had made a nostalgic trip out there to help shut down her home and move her into assisted living. So while her final passing wasn't unexpected, I had hoped that she might have at least a few more years in her new surroundings.

In fact, we had talked just days before she died about the possibility of my getting to Minneapolis where my son lives. I would take pictures of my new grand baby, I told her, and then come down and show them to her. She loved the idea and laughed a rare laugh about it.

I will miss that laugh and I will miss her. She was a dear who didn't deserve the kind of life she suffered for the past several years. In little more than a decade, she had lost her businesses, her husband, her sight, her home, and finally her health. There is, perhaps, no such thing as a "good" death, but in many cases there is at least a "sigh of relief" death, and this was one of them.

Ironically, just as we received the news about my mother, my wife and I were packing to go to Maine, to hold a memorial service and scatter the ashes of her mother who had passed away just a few weeks earlier. I had to leave my wife's emotional family gathering early to fly home for one of my own.

Back at home the next night, painfully waiting for my plane to Oklahoma, I picked up my messages and found out that I needed to call my congressman about an upcoming Congressional vote on Third World debt cancellation. A missions rally wanted me to come and speak. There were reminders for stewardship, Trustees, and counseling center meetings coming up, and several dear people in the congregation had grown ill and were needing a visit from me.

While I was receiving these messages, though, all I could really feel was fatigue. I didn't have the energy to call anybody. I didn't want to go anywhere. I didn't want to see anybody. Even a pastor gets tired on occasion. When I was younger I was either bullet proof or dishonest, but I seemed better able to handle these things.

As I've aged I've become a bleeder, and today the pain of others too easily becomes my own. It's a casualty of love, I think. Maybe longevity. Maybe both.

When I got to Oklahoma we had a lovely service out at the cemetery. It was very simple and only family and friends came. The minister said prayers and read scripture and we all wept.

Mom's dearest friend in the world was there. He owns a party store and brought balloons for each of us, which we held during the service. We tied one to the casket that held her "earthly tent," and looked at it somberly during the readings.

At one point my mother's balloon got loose from the casket and shot out from under the canopy, straight off into the distance, still visible for several minutes.

"My God," said my cousin sitting next to me. "It's your Mom. It's her spirit going off, saying goodbye."

After the service and the meal that followed, I took some time to drive by and see some friends I've known and loved for many lifetimes but too often taken for granted.

They're always down there and I'm always up here, and I've just assumed that they would always be around. But one day they won't be, and this may have been the last time I could just drive by and say hello. We hugged and cried and shared old stories.

There was something mysteriously redemptive about the visit. It's very healing to be hugged by someone who loves you for just having shown up. It's a gift of God, the grace of God.

In a world that is going increasingly crazy, friends and family are the connecting links to the Holy Spirit. The older I get, the more I realize that the relationships we have are the relationships we have. They're hard to create but easy to squander.

Life is precious. It's on loan from God for only a short amount of time and you never know when you're due to give it back.

Maybe learning to bleed is the first step toward appreciating life and learning to love. And maybe there are worse things to happen to us than becoming casualties of love.

It's Funny How Things Come Out

2006-09-15T20:42:00.000-05:00

I was thinking the other day about how our early experiences so often will influence the way we believe and behave for the rest of our lives. I have a friend, for example, whose father left her family when she was very young, and she never met him again until she was in her mid forties. Because of that she has always had trouble referring to God as "Father." When someone puts the words "God" and "Father" together she thinks of a man who beats his wife and abandons his kids. Somehow that doesn't work too well as a concept for God. She says that while her father thought he was simply abandoning a family and gaining his freedom, in actual fact he was helping create a social liberal and religious feminist.

You never know how God is going to use the things that happen to us for purposes that you would never have expected.

A couple of years ago I was at a national meeting of the global economic justice organization "Jubilee USA." They are the ones who campaign to get international financial institutions to cancel some of the crushing debts that are crippling the economies of poor countries. We were sharing some of the early influences that influenced us to be involved with this kind of campaign. I thought and thought and finally told the story of a time when I was a kid back in Oklahoma City, when African Americans were moving into our middle class white neighborhood. My parents were angry and they decided that we had to get out of there to protect our property values. So we moved across town to a new (and better protected) middle class white neighborhood and I stayed there until I graduated from high school.

Now, I was just a kid and didn't know much about racism. But I did know that moving away from my friends was awful. There was a cute black girl in my home room who flirted with me and made me blush and I missed her. And there was a great guy in my shop class who was also black and who could always make a better lamp than I could.

I didn't have any complicated philosophy of race and class in those days. I just missed my friends, and I was furious that I had been ripped from my home and turned into a stranger in a new school so that we could maintain our pure race and our high property values. And now fifty years late I found myself at a national meeting studying how to keep poor farmers in developing countries from being ripped from their homes and turned into immigrants, rebels, or sweat shop workers so that we in the US could maintain our high standards of living. I had never told that story before, but as I told it now, I realized that it had had a tremendous impact on me for the rest of my life.

We went around the room with each person adding their story until at the very end our group leader shared hers. She was an African American teacher, who leads these groups as a "ministry." Her story took place when she was growing up in an all-white neighborhood in another state. One day she was playing with one of her blond-haired dolls in her front yard when a car stopped suddenly in the street and a man got out and ran up to her and jerked the doll out of her hands and yelled at her. He said "What's a N— girl like you doing playing with a white baby like that?" Then he looked in his hands and realized that he was holding a doll. It just looked like a white baby. He was humiliated at the mistake and he stormed angrily back to his car and drove away. She broke into tears. It was the first time that this little girl, now our adult group leader, had ever realized that she could be judged for her race, and the image stuck with her for all these years. It became one of the central powerful images of her life. It's funny how the events of our childhood can drive us into all sorts of opinions and vocations many years later when we are adults. That man in the car thought he was teaching a lesson to a little black girl about her rightful place in God's racial hierarchy. But instead he was helping create an intentional, progressive woman who spends all of her waking hours helping people recognize and overcome their own racism.

Just then something seemed very strange about her story. I said, "where are you from? Originally." She said, "Oklahoma City." I said, "What part?" She said "The Northeast section. The 'colored' section." She smiled embarrassedly at describing it that way. I stood up and looked at her very closely. "Did I ever have you in Home Room in the seventh grade?"

It's funny how the things that happen to us at an early age can stay with us, and effect us, and return to us, for the rest of our entire lives.

If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now

2006-09-15T20:41:00.000-05:00

It's Funny How Things Come Out

You never know how God is going to use the things that happen to us for purposes that you would never have expected.

It's funny how the things that happen to us at an early age can stay with us, and effect us, and return to us, for the rest of our entire lives.

Lead Picture

2006-08-08T21:52:00.000-05:00

Crime in the Sonora

2006-06-26T19:21:00.000-05:00

When I hear Congress debating putting up walls or sending troops to our southern borders to keep out the immigrants, it makes me think of two young people I heard about a couple of months ago when I was in Chiapas, Mexico. I never actually met them, but I knew their families. They were kids actually, named Jasmine Diaz and Daniel Hernandez. They were eighteen-years-old and they were engaged to be married. Their parents were wonderful, hard working people, and their families had been growing corn and beans and coffee in that region for over a hundred years.

However, after the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, the US began exporting our cheap subsidized corn to Mexico and it undercut the price of their local corn and it destroyed corn production for thousands of people. Also, because of global over-production and the west's demand for cheap coffee, prices that growers get for their coffee beans have dropped to a thirty-year low. According to World Bank numbers, the collapse of coffee has caused over 600,000 innocent people to lose their farms, their homes, their livelihoods.

Some of those people were from Jasmine's family. Their living conditions had gotten so bad that one day last summer they finally decided they had to do something. Their options weren't good. They could join the rebels, they could migrate to the sweat shops, they could grow cocaine, or they could put together a delegation to make that dangerous and terrifying journey north into the United States to find work. Typically if they got in they'd all rent a room together, take turns sleeping and working, eat as little as possible, and then send money back home. One day's work, picking vegetables in Southern California, at below minimum wage, could feed a family of six in Chiapas for a week.

So, they got six volunteers, all good workers, all young men, who would go north and try to get in. However, one problem was that Daniel was one of those going and he and Jasmine had just gotten engaged. They said they just couldn't stand being apart from each other. Maybe they both could find jobs; maybe they could afford a place together. Maybe they could finally get married…who knows? So the family agreed and they added Jasmine to the group, and then they all left.

They walked down their high remote mountain and made their way on foot for three weeks up the coast, along the spine of the westward side of the Sierra Madre mountains until, exhausted and broke, and they stopped at the town of Altar, about 60 miles south of the border, where they hired Bolivar Cerbando Morales-Galvez to be their coyote. Coyotes are those often unsavory, unscrupulous people who make their livings dealing in bodies. For a fee they will smuggle people like Jasmine and Daniel and their family across the border into the new world.

There are actually several routes into the US from Altar. The most popular is through the town of Sasabe, because there's less sand and more shade, and the journey is not as brutal. Another one is shorter, but straight up through the Sonora Desert. Jasmine and her family didn't have the twelve to fifteen hundred dollars their coyote usually charges people, so he took what they had, and then led them through the Sonora.

But it was a mistake. They were too weak, the journey had been too long, and the heat was too evil. And after three days they couldn't go any further. They begged their coyote to call ahead on his Satellite mobile phone for help, but he wouldn't do it. Finally about 100 miles southwest of Tucson on the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation, most of them collapsed. They couldn't make it, and the Coyote abandoned them. Three of Jasmine's uncles, who were still strong enough, went on ahead and searched for help. They turned themselves in to some border guards in Gila's Bend, and then led the guards back to their friends.

When they arrived they found all of them in critical condition, dying from dehydration. Two of them recovered quickly. Two more were in intensive care for a while. But young Jasmine died.

I don't know how to solve the complex and difficult story of immigration in America. I can't begin to work through all of the legal and historical issues that brought us to where we are today. But what I do know is that Jasmine Dias and Daniel Hernandez are not our enemies. They didn't come here to hurt us, or take our jobs, or soak up our tax dollars. They came here because they were hungry, because they were desperate, and because they loved each other. And I know that little Jasmine died for our sins. She died so that we could continue to worship a market system that destroys families and crushes human beings far away so that we can live well here…a system that forces down prices so that we can drink cheap coffee, and forces up immigration so that our farmers can have cheap labor. I know that whatever the judge did to the coyote who abandoned them in the Sonora desert, at the end of the day, you and I and all of our families are co-conspirators in the crime.

Never Place a Comma...

2006-06-10T19:26:00.000-05:00

The story is told that years ago when comedienne Gracie Allen was close to dying, her husband, George Burns, was in such grief and sorrow that he could barely speak or function. They had been together since their 20s and had spent nearly their entire adult lives together. Burns told her that not only did he not want her to die, but that he also did not want to stay here without her. It was the end of everything he had loved and trusted in life.

Gracie was a devout Catholic but George was a doubting Jew. He had lost his faith in his teens when his father, who was a cantor at the synagogue, died in the flu epidemic of 1903. But just before she died, after a long illness culminating in a heart attack, Gracie, the believer, wrote a note of comfort to her theologically suspicious husband. In it she said simply, "George, never put a period where God has put a comma." He would later share those profound little words with numerous friends throughout the rest of his life. Because of that they have traveled around the world and my own church denomination has even recently adopted them as its national vision.

Notice that she didn't say, "don't worry, George, God will not let me die." She didn't say, "God will do a magic trick and make all of this right again." That would have been a lie. What she did say, I think, was that we should not close the book, throw in the towel, and give up living when something awful happens, even if that something is the loss of a spouse or friend or even the pending loss of our own lives. When we are living in the midst of our grief, we tend to believe that life itself is broken and can never be mended. We tend to put a period at the end of those events and say that sorrow and loss are the conclusion of living itself. But they aren't. God sees those events as commas, not periods. Hard times, tough times, but not end times.

I think of her simple words now and then when I see someone who has gone through incredible suffering and loss, yet manages to go forward in life and experience some of the real possibilities for joy that are in life. I think to myself that that person has really "got it."

When I was growing up in Oklahoma City, there was an "old" woman in my church (probably in her 50s) who was involved in the Civil Rights campaign. She worked to integrate our local church, she lobbied our congressional delegation for the Civil Rights Act, and she participated in "sit-ins" and marched in demonstrations. She did more than any other white person who I ever knew to make Oklahoma City a more equal and more humane place.

But at the same time she was someone who had gone through some incredible personal pain. She had lost her husband to lung cancer and two sons to the war in Vietnam. And she also spent a great deal of her time caring for a daughter who had moved home at age 30 with some kind of congenital disease that was slowly draining her life away.

A few years ago I was back home again and someone asked me to participate in the annual "CROP Walk," which is a walk to raise money to alleviate world hunger sponsored by Church World Service.

I said sure.

We seldom have those up in New England, so I was glad to join in. Sure enough, on that bright sunny Saturday afternoon I happened to see my old friend walking along regally in the crowd. She was now looking almost ancient and she had a cane, but I still recognized her. I joined her for a while as she limped and occasionally winced, but still beamed with pride that she was able to be out there at all. It was so good to see her again and I told her so, but I knew that this had to be painful.

"Why are you even out here? What keeps you coming out for things like this?" I asked her.

I'll never forget what she said.

She first laughed, a big face-crinkling laugh. "I don't really know," she said. "But maybe when you've been through hell yourself you learn to identify and sympathize with the hell of someone else."

I don't know if George Burns ever participated in a protest march after the pain he endured from the slow death of his beloved wife. Or if he joined in a crusade to end war and racism and poverty, though I would like to think he did. What I do know is that after Gracie had died he often would tell his friends that her words, that God never gives us periods, only commas, was the one true thing that allowed him to keep his faith - or perhaps rejuvenate his faith - for all of the years after she left.

God doesn't cause the sufferings that we experience in our lives. Just being alive creates most of those. But God does give us the gift of presence and support, of companionship and care. God gives us the ability to know that bumps on the road are not walls, and that on the other side of the bumps are the possibilities of years of love, beauty and peace.

Intelligent Debate

2005-10-31T05:44:00.000-05:00

Right now, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, there is a drama unfolding that may alter the future of the United States in ways not seen in generations. In October, 2004, the Dover, Pennsylvania, School Board voted to require a statement to be read before ninth grade biology classes stating in part that "The theory [of evolution] is not a fact. Gaps in the theory exist for which there is no evidence." It went on to recommend that they consult a book put out by a Christian publishing company in Richardson, Texas, which is critical of evolution. According to School Board member, Alan Bonsell, the statement was the result of months of discussion on how "to bring prayer and faith back into the school."

At issue is a concept called "Intelligent Design" which has become the common term for "Creationism" after the 1987 Supreme Court decision banning the teaching of Creationism in public schools. Intelligent Design and Creationism argue that the world is too complex to have evolved by evolution and natural selection and must, therefore, have been designed by someone with vast intelligence .

Not long after the statement was introduced in the classrooms, six parents filed suit against the school system claiming that it was promoting a religious belief in public schools and was violating the establishment clause of the Constitution.

This whole debate is deeply troubling to me. I'm from the south and was raised in what used to be known as a "fundamentalist" Christian church. We went to church twice on Sundays and prayer meetings on Wednesdays. I sang in the choir and led a Christian singing group. I also led revivals, preached in them and organized them. And, for what it is worth, I still believe that God lives and moves and changes things on this planet and in our lives.

However, in spite of all of that and in spite of my love of Jesus Christ as my savior today, I could not back then and cannot today, understand why anyone would ever want religion to go to battle against science to prove that the world was created by God instead of through evolution.

I am concerned that if the Dover School Board wins its case, and the theory of Creationism/Intelligent Design is promoted and accepted as a scientific theory on par with the theory of evolution, it would ultimately do tremendous damage to the concept of faith and the task of Christians to proclaim the Gospel.

According to my tradition, faith is the "assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1). If it ever came to pass that science could prove the existence of God or prove that God created the world in seven days, then the whole nature of faith as we know it would be turned on its head.

Faith comes about through a leap beyond the stability of knowable facts into the riskiness of trust in God. It is drawn forth from us by a love that cannot be measured or quantified. It brings about in us a sense of conviction, a sense of being pulled toward trust in and loyalty to the God who is beyond the limits of knowledge and facts.

To me, the idea of a public school teaching my kids that a paleontologist can prove the existence of that deep, vast, and mysterious God by studying fossil forms in the rock record, is very unsettling. It would undermine the basic task of churches to help people find an intangible inner strength with which to cope with the growing madness and chaos of modern life.

The philosophy of "Intelligent Design" implies strongly that evidence of the mysterious ground of our very being, that we call God, can be discovered by studying such things as the amino acid sequences of key proteins. That encourages us to believe that that which we worship can be known by the mind and the senses instead of the heart and the spirit. This desire to demonstrate God concretely is an ancient idolatry that was panned by the prophets and condemned by the church because it takes away the gray areas of religion and denies us the soul-strengthening struggle with doubt that is a necessary forerunner for faithful conviction.

When I was in high school a counselor at a Christian summer camp once helped me out when I was trying to make sense out of the resurrection. I told him I didn't understand it and that it was hard to believe. He told me that that was just the point. It wasn't supposed to be easy. Part of our job as Christians, he said, was to reach and stretch and wrestle with the teachings of the Bible and theology. If it was easy then we'd all be comfortable and stay in the same place developmentally all of our lives, and never grow in our faith or the complexity of our beliefs.

One of the things that makes me nervous about Intelligent Design today is that if it is accepted in our school systems and in our culture, we may well create a whole generation of Protestant, Catholic, Muslim and Jewish children who will grow up thinking that belief in God is easy.

Karla Had a Baby

2005-09-11T15:53:00.001-05:00

She called us first on Sunday, but we missed the call and had to call her back. She wasn't home, so we left a message and she called us back but we were out. We called again, and she called again and we called back until finally we broke through the maddening phone tag and she could make her announcement: "He arrived!" she yelled. "He was early, but he's beautiful." Karla had a baby.

We danced, we cried, we celebrated. It was a glorious day. How big is he, how much does he weigh? When did he come? We wanted to ask every question we could think of. We wanted to fly down and hold him and love him and welcome him into the world. It was the best, it was the finest, it was the greatest news.

But at the same time that she called we were also watching the TV news. London was bombed, Iraq was in flames, Niger was starving. Hundreds of our young people and thousands of Iraqis were dying day after day after day. Violent acts of terror stalked the world with continuing ferocity and were driving our country deeper and deeper into a fearful, reactionary shell of defensiveness and rigidity. Darfour was melting in an endless malevolent civil war that threatened to drag down the whole of northern Africa. And Karla had a baby.

At one level I can't understand why people have babies. In a world so full of heartache and hate and oppression, what meaning can there be in a young couple who want to defy global reports and believe in birthing life in the midst of carnage? The future is so unsure. The potential for disaster is so high. The inevitability of sorrow so certain. But magically and mysteriously, people seem to have an innate spiritual urge to look at each other with hope and love and awe and believe that one more new child in the world will be a good thing.

In my ministry I have known countless people who were ill or old or hurt or lonely. Often they are courageous people, whose strength has humbled me. Scarred, diseased, or abandoned. Some of them have been in tremendous pain. Life is just fragile, and it's frail, and at any minute it can be taken away from any of us. On the face of it, then, what real logic, what real meaning, is there in propagating the species at all? And yet, Karla had a baby.

Is it a statement of faith? A proclamation of hope? A claim that the future can be sustained by love? Who knows. There's no accounting for faith. There's no reality-based reason for it anymore. Most of us in the west no longer have children to work the farms for us. Or to take care of us in our old age. There's no practical need. No sensible need. No financial need. But, still we do it: with a mysterious, irrational, built-in belief that love is worth gambling on and that tomorrow can be better than today, people have babies. How can you explain that?

Perhaps God, in a burst of whimsy and inspiration, built into the DNA of human creation, the suspicion that love can trump fear. Perhaps God created us to defy logic and live as though hope is in fact rational. Perhaps it is one part of the mysterious and elusive gift of grace, that God gives to us the ability to see what facts deny: that life is worth living, that love is worth sharing, and babies are worth birthing.

There's no data to back up hope. No explanation for it. Life itself creaks along, turning and twisting with peaks and valleys, toward an ultimate end. Under the best of situations it is full of slips and falls, and accidents and diseases, that finally take us down. Under the worst of situations it can be riddled with hunger, oppression, war and death. There are joys along the way, but from a market-based, cost-benefit analysis, nobody gets out alive and in the end we all lose. So why try? Why love? Why keep going?

And yet, Karla had a baby.

Victor and Hugo: Life and Faith and the Price of Coffee

2005-07-31T21:41:00.000-05:00

(Reprinted from Zion's Herald magazine, September, 2005)

For several years I used to travel each summer to Guatemala with a big red-haired farmer in my congregation named Hugo. He sponsored children through World Vision and took me along to translate for him. One of his kids was named Elvia and she lived high up the Ipala volcano in the Chiquimula province, just this side of the Honduran border. Elvia lived in a dirt floor, one-room home on a wide spot next to the road with her two parents, three siblings and their families and their three children, and two neighbor children. Her older brothers and families live with them because no one can afford to live on their own; the neighbor kids live with them because their parents died in an accident and Elvia's family took them in.

Our first visit was lovely. Her father, Victor, stayed home to greet us and Hugo gave out toys and clothes to the kids. We noticed, however, that a new baby, born to Elvia's older sister looked frail and thin. She had a greenish tint to her skin and never smiled. "Bad water," Victor told us. "And not enough medicines."

Victor and his family are desperately poor. I asked him one time about the coffee farm he works on and he gestured far across the valley and up another mountain. I was amazed. "How far is that?" I asked. He laughed and shook his head. He didn't know, but it had to be a three to four-hour walk. "Every day?" I asked. He laughed again. Of course it was. Why was I so foolish as to ask?

Coffee is a huge portion of Guatemala's economy. It accounts for 12% of Guatemala's entire national income and constitutes 30-35% of its exports. More than 12% of Guatemala's workers are employed in the industry. Around the world coffee is the most frequently traded commodity in the world after oil. It is handled by half a billion people and consumed by more people than drive cars. In recent years it has become a cash cow for specialty shops like Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. In the early nineties, however, prices paid to local coffee farmers turned steadily downward and are now at what some estimate to be a one-hundred-year low. It was a catastrophe for farmers but meant little to consumers. The price of our coffee never even went up with inflation.

The next year, Hugo and I returned to Guatemala and again trekked up the volcano to see Elvia and her family. During the year Hugo had arranged to send crates of chickens to the family. "For protein," he had said. "Half are 'layers' and half are 'fryers.' So they can eat some and get eggs from the others."

When we arrived, however, we found that all the chickens were gone. A disease had come through. The children had gotten sick and the chickens died. The little baby was still ill. Though her mother cradled her in her arms and sang to her silently, the baby stared vacantly into the distance. Her hair was still thin and yellow.

I asked Victor what had happened. He said he didn't know. A development organization had given them medicine and they took it but it was gone and the baby is still very sick. "Can you afford any on your own?" I asked him.

"No," he said. "We don't have the money for the medicines. Last year the foreman paid me less than he paid me the year before. And this year less than last."

"Why is that?"

He shook his head. He didn't know.

"What will you do?" I asked.

He smiled, but he did not laugh. "I will work harder."

Victor is not wrong about his declining pay. In 2001 farmers around Chiquimula were earning 25 quetzales ($6.00) per day but now they earn between 10 and 15 quetzales ($2.50 to $4.00), which is not enough to survive on. The World Bank estimates that between thirty to sixty million coffee farmers around the world lost their livelihoods because of the crisis. Major coffee regions are in tatters. In Colombia, famous for Juan Valdez commercials, coffee has fallen from first to fourth in its exports, and the federation that produced the commercials is bankrupt. In Ethiopia, the historic birthplace of coffee, coffee has shrunk from 70 percent of its export earnings to 30 percent.

And the "collateral" damage is enormous. Some coffee workers move to the cities to seek jobs in sweat shops so that North Americans can buy ten-dollar shirts. Some flee their country seeking a better life, often dying along the way. Remember the twenty-four Mexicans found suffocated in a boxcar in Iowa a few years ago? More than half were out-of-work coffee farmers.

Others manage to stay on their lands by growing illegal crops. In Colombia, it's coca and poppies. In Africa, it's Khat, an amphetamine-type drug that is illegal in the US and many European countries. It earns about $9 a bushel while coffee brings about $.01. If your family were hungry, what would you do?

Still others have turned their plowshares into swords and joined revolutionary movements. In Chiapas, Mexico, the Zapatista rebels evolved as a direct protest against the state-sponsored reduction in prices paid to coffee farmers. In Colombia, thousands joined the leftist rebels and right wing paramilitaries when farmers lost their incomes. In addition country income itself suffers. In Ethiopia the drop in coffee prices has cost the country $1.12 billion in lost export revenue in the past five years alone. That money could have built thousands of health centers or schools. And the crisis has set back much of the progress achieved by debt-reduction activists in recent years. Ethiopia spent years under the belt-tightening rules of the IMF in order to qualify for $58 million in debt cancellation in 2001. Yet in the same period it lost almost twice that amount from the decline in coffee revenues.

On our way home, Hugo fretted over how to do more to help his kids. "I can send more money," he said. "I can set up a trust, so that whatever happens to me they'll get help." Hugo looked as strong as a bear, but his hips and right thigh were slowly being eaten up with cancer and he knew that one day he would no longer be able to make the journey up into Chiquimula. I tried to walk him through what I knew about the causes of the global crisis and its effects on people like Victor and his family, most of which Hugo could not help with trusts and more gifts. But in the end he said he didn't know anything about that. That was just politics, he said, and he didn't get involved with politics.

The causes of the coffee crisis are legion and have more to do with human sin than "laws" of economics. From the sixties through the eighties there was an International Coffee Agreement that kept coffee prices at a relatively stable price, and most farmers, while poor, at least made a living. The U.S. supported the agreement because it kept poor people in Latin America from getting so hungry that they would consider Cuba a role model and overthrow their oppressive governments. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, the geopolitical need to feed poor people declined, so we changed policy. We pulled out of the agreement (effectively killing it) and almost overnight, new producers jumped into the market and prices paid to local farmers began declining.

It seems to be an almost-intentional policy among wealthy countries, and lending institutions like the World Bank, to keep production high and prices low. It is the basis of the reigning model of economic globalization. During the nineties the IMF and other regional banks made hundreds of loans to develop coffee plantations but with each new coffee farm, more coffee was produced, which drove down prices and drove down farmer incomes.

A dramatic example of this was in the early 1990s when the IMF arranged massive loans by regional banks to help bring Vietnam into the global coffee market. In less than a decade Vietnam moved from being a tiny producer to number two. That so increased the glut of coffee on the market that soon nobody, not even Vietnam, was making money. By 2000, the Vietnamese government was burning hundreds of thousands of hectares of coffee to help drive prices back up—but it was too late. In addition to overproduction, Vietnam also suffered ecologically. During the 1990s, over 400,000 people rushed to the Dak Lak province to plant what they called the "dollar tree." Hundreds of thousands of hectares of ancestral forests were cut down and intensive irrigation led to soil erosion and water shortages. Natural rivers ran dry and underground water levels dropped. When drought struck in 1998, 200 reservoirs dried up and water supplies were drained. And 90% of families in Dak Lak did not have access to sufficient water.

Corporations can also contribute to the damage. For example, in the late 1990s, Nestlé, the world's largest coffee buyer, told its Mexican clients that it was moving to Vietnam where labor was cheaper, so Vietnam increased production by 55,000 tons. But Mexico offered to lower prices paid to coffee growers, so Nestlé purchased only 4,500 tones of Vietnam's coffee and otherwise remained in Mexico. So, Mexican farmers lost because of a cut in prices and Vietnamese farmers lost because of over production and Nestlé made a killing.

In the summer of 2003 I took my last trip to Guatemala with Hugo. His doctor said the cancer was growing and didn't recommend he make the trip. But Hugo had to go. He had his idea for a trust and wanted to tell the family. We took several others from the church with us on that trip, and it was a good thing because he was in a lot of pain, and more than once we had to help him in or out of the truck or down a hill. It was hard, but he was tough, and we managed to make the painful drive one last time up into the mountains so he could see his kids. They knew him well by this time and they all poured out to see him. He was in tears, but he was happy.

I saw Victor again standing by himself away from the crowd, and I asked how his coffee farming was going. He smiled but looked ahead at Hugo playing with the children, including their frail little girl who looked better now, but still not well. Too much damage had occurred at too early an age for her to ever be truly healthy. "Mister Hugo loves our children," he said. "And he wants to help us. But we can no longer farm here and we are going away."

"Where?" I asked.

"There are many of us. We cannot farm here and feed our families. We will ride on the bus to the city where there are jobs in the factories. They hire men who are strong and work hard."

I looked at him with dismay. He looked old and weary. He would never be hired in a factory. What would happen is that his sons would take care of him, and he would be humiliated.

"We cannot feed our families here anymore," he said.

On the way home I told Hugo about my conversation with Victor and he grew silent. Finally he said, "That Victor's a good man. He's a hard worker and doesn't deserve this." Hugo had a lot of respect for Victor and it was a shame that they never got to know each other well because neither could speak the other's language. As two old farmers with big families and big hearts they would have had a lot to talk about.

"I've got to send more money," he said.

"I don't think that would help," I said. "Every year they make less than the year before. You can't just pay for their whole lives."

"But they can't just lose everything." His face tensed for a moment, like someone in pain, and he rubbed his thigh. "Tell me again about that fair trade thing."

Fair trade coffee is actually just one of many ways that people can help farmers in Victor's situation. Oxfam, for example, has promoted a package of proposals under a "Coffee Rescue Plan," such as getting roasters to pay higher wages and reducing the stock of existing coffee. Another campaign worked for years to get the U.S. to rejoin the International Coffee Organization so that its influence could be used to reinstate something like the old coffee price stabilization agreement. The U.S. did rejoin the organization in 2004, but so far has refused to agree to any coffee revitalization program that is not conditioned on laissez faire, free-market principles.

However, the fair trade movement remains the most accessible way for most people to feel they are having a direct impact on the crisis, as well as learning more about it. In a fair trade arrangement, a coffee company will partner directly with farmer co-ops in developing countries, which eliminates the "middle people," and in so doing guarantees a stable living wage. In addition, to be certified the cooperative must do such things as promote democratic principles of governance, gender equality, humane working conditions, and environmental sustainability.

The oldest fair trade company in America is Equal Exchange in Massachusetts. They began back in the eighties and they also have a interfaith outreach program that is a major part of the company. They form partnerships with faith groups and congregations, who in turn sell and promote fair trade products.

By winter Hugo was sick in bed most of the time, and by summer he was too frail to make the trip back to Guatemala. Then, in the early winter, when his church was preparing to welcome the birth of the son of God, and prince of peace, Hugo died. He never found a way to solve all the problems for the family he learned to love so much up on a volcano in Chiquimula.

Not long after that our church joined with Equal Exchange to begin selling Fair Trade products. We put up a big display in the parish hall, ordered a bunch of their coffee, chocolate, and teas, and have been selling them on Sundays ever since. I doubt that our little project will ever help Victor and his family in Chiquimula, who finally had to move away and lost everything they ever had. But I'm certain we've helped other people like them. And I'm certain that somehow in the mystery of pain and love and life and death, that Hugo knows about our little coffee display out in the parish hall, and wherever he is, I think he's glad.

If You Lived Here, You´d Be Home By Now

2005-07-29T20:34:00.000-05:00

I had intended to tell a story that was autobiographical, but instead I think I’ll tell one that’s about me.

The autobiographical story that I won’t tell had to do with a time when I used to work at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and commuted with about 1.5 million others back and forth from Arlington every day. On the way home, just after we would leave the downtown area, and pull out onto Memorial Drive along the Charles River, traffic would invariably grind to a halt and I would stop right in front of a set of “toney” condominiums that had a big sign out front extolling its virtues to the commuters. In addition to reasonable prices and views of the Charles, it also said, a bit smugly, “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now.”

I hated that sign. I hated it most because it was true. On my way home, I would pass dozens of stop lights, hundreds of buses and thousands of cars, but if I had only lived closer to the “center” I would have found my home already.

And it was really true of me personally. I spent years and years of my life searching for some kind of enriching, exciting experience that would bring me happiness or fulfillment or peace, or who knows what, but the truth always was that if I could just learn to live closer to the “center,” where Christ has always resided, waiting for me, then I’d have been “home by now.”

A couple of years ago someone told me that vandals had slipped onto the condo’s grounds late at night and thrown black and white paint all over the sign. It was defaced so badly that the owners were considering taking it down. The police surmised that teenagers had done it, but I never believed that. I always figured that it was a bunch of middle aged white guys in suits who snuck in there in the dead of night and threw copy machine toner and “white out” all over it.

Do you remember the ancient Medieval legend of the Holy Grail, the one about the guy who spent his entire life searching for the magical Grail used at the Last supper? I don’t want to write in footnotes, but Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of myths, has said that the story of the quest for the Grail is the quintessential myth of western civilization. On the other hand, Robert Johnson, a Jungian psychoanalyst, has said that more than that, it is the quintessential male myth. I’m no expert, but I’m inclined to go with Johnson on that one.

According to the story, the Grail is the very cup that Christ drank from, and it supposedly contained drops of blood taken from his side when he died. If someone found it, he (and it has to be a “he” if this is to be a male myth) would receive total self-discovery and spiritual self-awareness. The legend is that a young boy named Parsifal, who lived on the grounds of the castle where it was kept, stumbled across the Grail one night and almost touched it. He came within inches of it. But the closer he got to touching the mysterious source of self-discovery, the more frightened he became. So he turned and ran away, out of the castle, out into the woods, and didn’t look back until he was totally lost.

He was remorseful that he had turned away in fear and so he spent the rest of his life trying to find his way back home again to the hidden castle one more time to touch the grail and finally get it right. He traveled for years in search of the Grail. He became a knight and was famous throughout the land, wearing dashing (and very thick) armor, and vanquishing every foe of truth and beauty. He carried a mighty shield and spear, and beat every enemy in battle. He was even honored by King Arthur himself for his bravery. But in the end, he still could not find his way back home and to the Grail.

Finally, when he grew very old, tired, defeated, and lost, he stumbled into a monastery on Good Friday. He is weak and discouraged and decides that his life will never be complete because he had never found the Holy Grail, the source of all meaning. He asked them if he could just take Communion with the simple monks and live with them in peace. When he told the monks his story, a wise man of the monastery stepped forward and said simply, “The grail? Oh, it’s just down the road about two kilometers, turn left, and across the bridge. It’s not far.”

Parsifal was shocked. “Do you mean,” he said, “that I could have gone just a little bit further and finally found it?”

“I don’t know,” says the monk. “You have to know where to look. We’ve seen you pass by our gates about thirty times over the past few years. We wondered what you were up to. It seems you’ve been riding around in circles pretty much all your life.”

He collapsed in joy and heartache. He’d been circling the castle that kept the Grail all this time, but didn’t know it. He’d never been more than fifteen miles from the grail ever since he began his search. It seems he had done everything to find self-realization except look close to home.

I’m not sure, but I think the point of the story was that if he had only known where he really lived, he’d have been home by now.

My Mother´s Friends

2005-06-29T20:54:00.000-05:00

One year ago this July I took an emergency flight back home to Oklahoma for the unexpected death and funeral of my mother. She was old and frail and blind, and finally one day she gave up and gave in and moved on to her heavenly home with God.

While I was there I took some time to walk up and down her street and say good-bye to her neighbors one the last time. I had known many of these people from my childhood. Across the street lived two old gay men whom I had never met, but always appreciated because my mother told me how kind they had been to her after she had an accident and was no longer able to drive. Then when she eventually became blind they started mowing her lawn, cleaning her gutters, and raking her leaves. One time when a truck pulled up and people started hauling things out of her garage, they ran over to stop what they thought was theft of their friend's household property. As it happened, the truck was from her church, and the goods were for a rummage sale, but she never forgot their attempt to rescue what she called "the old 'widder' in distress."

I knocked on their door, but no one answered so I moved on to the next house where I saw the father of a young girl I had known as a teen. I asked him what had happened to the guys next door and he said "well that's an interesting story." Evidently over the years new families had moved into the neighborhood who didn't know the two men and who were not like the older crowd, and they were upset that the neighborhood had allowed "queers" to live so close by. Young parents, inspired by teachings of a variety of TV preachers, were worried that these old men might be a danger to their children. So they began organizing and talking, and finally the two felt the pressure and moved away. I asked the neighbor if they had ever actually done anything wrong and he said no. Actually, he said, "they were pretty good fellas." But "they were queer and all, and they say that's bad, so I guess it is."

All of this came back to me when, on July 4, Independence Day, I was in Atlanta Georgia, watching thousands of members of my church, the United Church of Christ, vote to affirm "equal marriage rights for all people, regardless of gender." That means, as most of us would have put it, "same sex marriage."

I know, of course, that votes such as this are not binding on local congregations, and that the General Synod "speaks to the churches, not for the churches." On the other hand, it was a pretty inclusive looking crowd, and their opinion probably approximates that of the majority of our members nationwide. I looked around the room during the debate and saw a wide range of faces. Young people, old people, gay and straight, "red and yellow, black and white" (as the hymn puts it), from all across the U.S. They wrestled with the issue for two days, first in committee and then on the floor, with debate, amendments, rephrasing, and then prayer. They were attempting to discern how God might be still speaking to us in an increasingly complex and brutal world. And what the vast majority finally concluded was that no matter what one could say about the differentness of same gender marriage, they couldn't quite be convinced of the wrongness of it. How could God create human beings and then tell them not to love one another?
I confess that I agree with that. At one level I didn't have a horse in that race. I'm happily and heterosexually married and I wasn't even a delegate to the Synod. But on the other hand I kept thinking of those two nice guys who looked out for my mother. The Bible says very little about homosexuality and some of the references are frankly unclear. Jesus is totally silent on it. What he is not silent on is the need to love, accept and care for all people. Bring in the poor, the hungry, the outcast, the sick, the beggars, the alienated, lonely and marginalized. Jesus condemns wealth and war and divorce, but never two old men who love each other and mow the lawns for neighboring widows.

When I left the assembly hall that day, I was frankly nervous. I would have to go back to my church and explain this extremely difficult decision to the good people in my congregation who had not been there and who might only know of it through headlines and sound bites. The delegates took a leap of faith that day, hoping and praying that their actions were discerning the will of a still-speaking God. But we're all mortal and imperfect. We act in faith and pray that we will be forgiven if we are wrong.

But I was encouraged by the words of a pastor friend of mine from Texas who told me that when he dies and stands before the pearly gates and hears a list of all his sins and failings, he expects to hear a very long list. But, all in all, he would rather be judged for being too open minded than too closed. "If I'm going to make a mistake," he said, "I suspect God would rather it be a mistake of letting too many people into the kingdom than too few."

And you know, I think I agree with that too.

And Did You See Him Smile?

2005-06-29T20:52:00.000-05:00

I read about my friend Ron Freeman in the paper last week. There he was there smiling out at us on CBS news and looking real fine. Ron always wanted to be famous.

It’s no wonder fame was so important to him. To hear Ron tell it, his father spent half his life telling him how unimportant he was and how he’d never amount to anything. He once told me that the most important thing in his entire life was for him to do something that would make the whole country sit up and take notice. He even admitted that the only reason he ever went to college was to become a lawyer and run for office and eventually become president.

That dream didn’t make, however. When he was in college he and some friends took off up to Gatlinburg to go skiing and on their way home Sunday night they hit another car. Ron was fine, but two of his friends died and the mother and child in the other car died. Ron was driving. He was drunk. It was the third time he’d been stopped while being drunk. The judge gave him six months time in Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary.

That probably would have been the end of the story if he hadn’t run off. But Ron said he couldn’t stand it in a place like that and one day he just snuck off.

When he got away, he got a job, changed his name (to “Freeman” because that’s what he was now), got married and settled down. He even joined the local Presbyterian Church and taught a Sunday School on occasion. That also might have been the end of it except that Ron still needed to be famous. As a free man he ran for the legislature and put his picture all over Knoxville and somebody recognized it. In the thick of the campaign he was arrested again. This time he was given seven years, and this time he was sent to the maximum security prison in Nashville.

When I met him there as a chaplain, he was still doing time and still trying to think of something he could do that would make him famous. He had just gotten married again and was writing a book about his life. If people could just read about him, he said, he could become famous for sure. People from all over the country might read his book and know about the plight of prisoners and he might do some good with it and, of course, he might become a little famous with it in the process.

When I moved back to Oklahoma he was being moved back to Brushy Mountain. That’s a terrible place to be. It ‘s far up in the mountains and his wife couldn’t visit him very often. In the last letter I ever got from him, Ron said he wasn’t sure he could last in such a place much longer. He said being in prison was wasting his life and there were important big things he should be doing out in the free world.

That’s the last thing I ever hear about Ron until last week. He had finally gotten himself famous. He and a bunch of guys tied up a guard and broke out of Brushy Mountain. One turned himself in almost as soon as they got out. Three more got captured within a day or so. The two that were left got cornered in an abandoned house somewhere up in Kentucky and the police shot their way in. After all the shooting was over one of the two was captured, Ron was killed.

I wished, when I heard about it, that I had answered his letter. I wished that I had said something to him that would have made him want to stay. I wished that years ago I could have convinced the judge that Ron wasn’t really a criminal but just a guy that got in trouble. I wished...

Oh well, maybe Ron is happy now, since he finally got himself famous. Maybe he finally got what he wanted, pictured up there in the television set, looking down at the rest of the world, looking at us with a smile.

In My Father’s House

2005-06-29T20:18:00.000-05:00

April 16, 2005

Some years ago my father—at a time when we least expected it—had a stroke. He survived, and then with tremendous effort managed to carve out a diminished, but still productive, life for himself. But then he had another. And another. And another. Each one slowly draining him down to a level of being and existence he never imagined would happen to him. And then finally he had the last one. At first it didn’t take his life, but it certainly took his soul.

I remember the night, weeks later, when we finally gathered around his bed in tears and torment for the meeting that every family dreads, and we discussed aloud for the first time whether we should let him go or keep him here, not wanting to admit that it was over. Our grief and fear was like a physical presence around us that we could feel and touch. That night we cried and prayed and hugged and looked deep into his eyes for a sign that there was something still there, still present, still hearing. But there was nothing. We could find only a deep and terrifying absence, an emptiness. The natural arc of his bodily functions was bending toward the end, and our love and memories were holding him back. The doctor, a friend of the family and a man of great faith himself, stood with us, about to lose an old friend, and said that the future was in God’s hands now and that he could do no more to help my father. My brother, an atheist since childhood, held our hands and prayed words he never knew he had, and felt the mystery of the presence of God in a way that can only come when one is overwhelmed with the horror of the pending death of a father he loved and could never conceive of life without.

We prayed for a wisdom that was larger and more pro-found than we in our weakness could envision on our own. We asked God whether and why and how this body should continue when the life in my father’s eyes had grown vacant and cold.

And finally we made the decision, an awful, revulsive decision, to release his body to God and allow him finally to join the company of saints in everlasting peace. It was terrible, it was wrenching, and we’ve prayed continually since that time that we were right.

Today we look back on our decision that grueling, difficult night as a moment of sacred wonder. We stood frail and helpless at the door of death and touched the face of God. And in the process we felt loved, and held, and com-forted. For us at that time and that place it was right to tell the doctor to ‘let him go,’ to let his body take its natural course, and I think, in the deep and everlasting mystery of life and beyond life, that my father somehow knows that, and agrees with us, and is glad.

And I also think how lucky we were. Not blessed, for that would be like God was playing favorites, but just lucky. We were just lucky to live in an age in which only a very few people could conceive that our personal painful decisions might be regulated by federal law. We were lucky that our difficult intimate choices were pushed onto us before we had a Congress that believed it right to tell families how and when to let their loved ones die with dignity.

And I pray that God will forgive us for allowing such madness to be promoted today in God’s name.

Warmth in the Cold Places

2004-11-29T21:28:00.000-05:00

This year my wife and I celebrated Thanksgiving with her family coming over to visit. My own family is scattered over four states and the District of Columbia, so we seldom see them all together in the same place. Thanksgiving this year with Bev’s family was fun, but I still miss the old days.

When I was growing up Thanksgiving was an event more full of liturgy and tradition than many worship services, and in some ways just as faithful. We ate the same things in the same order, in the same room, telling the same jokes and stories, for decades, then generations. We never tired of them and their repetition seemed to touch us in ways too deep for us to understand.

My Grandfather would always act like he was too hungry for just his own meal, and make passes at everybody else’s plate. My mother would invariably eat too much and then tell one of us to call her a dirty name so she could get mad and chase the name caller around the block and work off the food. My brother would always lean back in his chair at the end of the meal and say, “I wonder what the poor folks are doing,” implying that only the wealthy could possess such bounty as our Thanksgiving feast, and that we must have become rich to have had it. And during the clean up, my uncle would always waddle through the kitchen clutching his stomach in mock pain saying, “Gobble, gobble, gobble,” as though the abundance of his consumption had turned him into the bird itself.

We kids would roar with laughter each time we heard him do his turkey imitation. No matter how often he did it, year after year. We loved it, and we loved him for doing it. For there was something sacredly “family” about repeating the ritual time after time.

There is an ancient rabbinical story of a Jewish village that went through an historic ritual every year in order for God to hear their prayers. There are variations on the story, but in the one I know the people would go out into the forest, build a fire, lay out sacred stones, sprinkle water on the stones, say prayers, repeat liturgies, wait, and eventually God would hear them and answer their prayers. Over the years the people got old, the rabbi died, they couldn’t carry the stones, they couldn’t build a fire, they didn’t know what to do with the water. But they knew that something important happens to them in the forest so they still went out in their infirmity to the sacred place. They would sit down wearily, look at each other, repeat a few ancient words, say some prayers and wait. And eventually God would be there and hear their prayers. And they smiled and felt loved.

I think about that story often in my church work. We don’t always know why we still do the things we do, but they still move us. They still help us feel the presence of the “Holy” in ways that our logical minds can’t explain. There is something mysterious about ritual and tradition-whether raising the body and blood of Jesus Christ, or clucking like a turkey on Thanksgiving-that changes us and comforts us, and gives us warmth in the cold places of our hearts. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

I enjoyed our big day with Bev’s family. They are fine people and I’m learning some of the rituals with which they celebrate their own version of this “eucharistic” meal. And they’re good rituals, full of life, and they always bring a smile. But they weren’t the liturgies from home, the ones I was raised on and the ones I passed on, and I missed that.

I called up Karla last week just before the big day. She’s thirty now, and my youngest, and she lives in Washington, DC. She, too, is far from home and this year she will be sharing thanksgiving with her fiancé and his family, and all of her someday-in-laws. She’ll fit right in, though, because she’s good that way. She’s special and they’ll love her.

“I wish I could be with you,” I said.

“Me too,” she said. “I sometimes miss the old days.”

“I do too,” I said. “But it’ll be fun. You’ll have a wonderful time.”

“I know,” she said.

I thought for a moment, and then I had to say it: “But, you know, you’ll probably eat so much that you’ll have to have someone call you a dirty name so you can chase them around the block to work off the food.”

She laughed. “Well, that’s how it is,” she said. “’Gobble, gobble, gobble.’”

I laughed. And she laughed. And I loved her. And God heard our prayers.

La Ceiba

2004-07-29T20:24:00.000-05:00

October 1998

Last week a town that I used to call home, and many people in it that I knew and loved, died.

I lived in a sweet little seaport town called “La Ceiba,” on the northern Caribbean coast of Honduras. It is named after a tropical tree named the “Ceiba” which has huge branches which-according to the legend-hold down the earth and keep it secure. We had one Ceiba in town, and it was breath taking. It was in a park that I passed when I walked from my apartment to the beach. A friend of mine owned a small house on the beach and when I had free time I walked to her house and laid on the sand and listened to live reggae concerts in an outdoor cabana not far away. On the way, I would stop and admire the massive Ceiba tree, in all its glory, holding down the ground. It was so large that it was hard to imagine anything that could dislodge its hold on the earth.

My job in those days was doing research on the work of development agencies in Honduras for a masters thesis I was writing in economics. But in the process I met and loved, and now miss, an enormous number of people and places.

I lived in a tiny upstairs apartment on Colon Avenue, in a gorgeous old Spanish villa with terraces and patios and hanging plants. My landlord was Maurico Benza, a dignified Spaniard with a pencil thin black mustache and a wonderful bow tie. I loved him because he reminded me of all of the Hollywood movie depictions of old world Spanish aristocracy.

Next door was my barber, Alfonso, who was an immigrant from Italy. He and I got along great because neither of us knew enough Spanish to use big words.

Down the street from Alfonso was the Parque Infantil, the “Children’s Park.” When I would get home early, I liked to go by there and sit on a bench and watch the kids play while I fed the pigeons. And across the street from the park was my favorite lunch place, La Pizza Barrata, “The Cheap Pizza.”

Periodically a homeless man named Jorge would offer to sell me items that he had acquired in his travels, like maps, post cards, and movie tickets. One time he sold me a discount coupon at The Cheap Pizza. We shared the pizza and had a great time. I loaned him twenty Limpiras one time to buy a litter box for his cat. Months later I got a letter from him apologizing for the delay in repaying the loan. In the envelope was twenty Limpiras’ worth of discount pizza coupons.

Just outside of town was a clinic set up by Dr. Joyce Baker, a United Church of Christ missionary in Honduras. For thirty years she has lived, ministered, and raised her family among the poor in Honduras.

I also met a woman who hosts American doctors, as they come to give free medical help to the poor. And a man who came La Ceiba as a Peace Corp worker but stayed on to teach teaching poor kids how to start their own businesses. And a retired banker from Tegucigalpa who came to teach literature out on the islands. And a nurse from Maine who spent her vacations inoculating dogs from infectious diseases. And there were more. I met more good and wise people than I could ever remember. And they are all friends of mine who I miss.

On Monday, October 26, Hurricane Mitch ran over the top of Ceiba. It stalled for six days dropping as much as four inches of rain per hour. Fifty rivers over flowed their banks. Every building from the shore through the Parque Infantil were entirely covered by water. My friend’s home on the beach is gone. The villa is gone. The Dunkin Donuts is gone. The barber shop, Cheap Pizza, and the park are all gone. The mighty Ceiba, securing the earth, disappeared. The clinics, that Dr. Baker had labored to build for twenty years, are all gone. Destroyed.

On Saturday, the rain hit Tegucigalpa. It flooded the city, taking cars, trucks, trees, homes, roads, bridges, and dragged them all down through the water. Sky scrapers caved into the river. Super markets, office complexes, theaters, factories, hospitals, shopping malls, schools, and churches, all caved in. Homes with real people with real hopes and dreams, washed away. Farms, horses, animals, and bodies, all flowed down the river.

One out of every three buildings in the country no longer exist. Every major road is destroyed, Every airport. Every major power line. Seventy percent of the economic production is ruined. At least twelve thousand people, real people, so far have died, thirteen thousand people are unaccounted for, most of whom will eventually die. Over one million people are in shelters.

On Sunday a rain-filled crater lake in Nicaragua lake burst open causing mud slides that covered thirty-two square miles and destroyed four towns, killing thousands. Today the scene looks like the surface of the moon, with bodies sticking out of the mud and the sounds of babies crying. They found so many corpses that the government is burying them in the dozens with bulldozers.

One reason I retell this story is to grieve over the loss of a lot of friends who I will never see again. I can barely stand to think about them. The second is to say as a statement of faith, that God did not create Hurricane Mitch. There is a cruel theology that says that if someone dies it is because God did it, either to punish us, or to teach us a lesson. “God had a reason for ‘taking’ my mother” (or father or whoever). But that belief is wrong. God doesn’t kill people. Storms, accidents, and human sin kill people. God is not in the destruction, but in the healing. God is not in the destroying, but in the mending.

God did not cause a teenage drunken driver to kill my father, when he was with his bride to be on their way home from a party the day before their wedding. Nor did God cause my step-father to suffer a series of ghastly strokes that weakened him for five terrifying years until he could only die to find relief.

God is in the midst of suffering, but as its resolution, not its cause. God is in the relief workers, the doctors, the volunteers, and in the heroic acts of people who saved their neighbors and rescued survivors. God’s act of creation is for good, and when the creation falls, God is in the midst of the pain working for the best possible outcome of the destruction.

I’ve worried and cried for my friends. I’ve tried to contact them, but for an interminable time into the future there will be no phones and no mail. I’ve also prayed for them, not with anger, but with hope, that they can find God’s strength and experience courage in it, whether in this world or the next. Perhaps in one sense God is like the mighty Ceiba tree that has watched over the community for generations. News reports say that when the waters receded, they found it still there. Beaten, but still standing. A group of survivors cheered when they heard that. Perhaps in its own way it gave strength to the community because it stood for something larger and more majestic than individual lives and storms, In the end it was wounded right along side of them; it suffered in the midst of all of their suffering, but in the end, it never released its hold on the earth.

An El Salvadoran Advent, 1987

2003-07-29T20:21:00.000-05:00

I’ve always thought of this as an Easter story, but it happened in Advent. You tell me which it is. Years ago, I was living in El Salvador and visiting a village in the northern part of the country. It was a world and place very different from this one. The United States was involved in wars in Central America, and I was involved in wars inside me over whether to stay in the church or become an economist working in the third world.

I was traveling with a tall, red-haired, lapsed Catholic, named Warick Frye, who was a journalist from Australia. We were there doing research on “repopulation villages.” Those were towns being resettled by people who had been driven out of the country by the military during the early years of repression. Frye was doing a photo essay, and I was writing a book, but I think in a mysterious way I was also there searching for something deeper, something perhaps more spiritual. The people of the repopulated town we were visiting had been hiding in foreign refugee camps for over a decade, but they finally decided that they could only bring about true peace by returning to their roots, by coming home. They renamed their village, appropriately, Las Vueltas, “The (place of)Return.”

We stumbled into Las Vueltas somewhat by accident. We had been studying another town some miles away and had heard that the army had mined all of the roads around the town, and that if we left, we’d have to hike over a mountain to get out. It was one of the most terrifying times of my life. A guide volunteered to take the two of us and a supply of food through the woods and up over the mountain. It was cold and wet and windy, and we were not dressed nor in shape for the walk. For two excruciating days we walked, until finally dropping down into what we thought would be the safety of Las Vueltas.

When we arrived, we were exhausted and surprised to find them welcoming us like visiting dignitaries. The mayor and half his council came out to greet us. What they told us was that this “free” village and the land around it had just been sold out from under the populace by the government to an international agribusiness corporation for the planting and export of corn. The village had known of the sale for some time but didn’t believe their government would do such a thing, so they voted to stay and hold their ground. Frye and I arrived, weary and wet, the very day the final deadline passed.

Their hope was that if they sent word back to the capital, that there were internacionistas, “internationals” staying with them, the government might back off on its threats to shut the town down. That’s why they were so happy to see us, but we found out later that their happiness was ill-founded.

For lodging (and perhaps safety) we were escorted to the local Catholic church where we were warmly received by a wonderful nun named Sister Loretta. She said she didn’t want to alarm us, but the strongest, sturdiest building in the compound was the sanctuary, and she had set us up with some cots to stay there. We were alarmed.

She brought us some food, and blankets, and warm hugs. And she wished us God’s peace. “It’s Advent,” she said. “The Christ Child is journeying to us. This time above all other times, pray for peace.” Frye, the atheist, and I the questioner, both asked why? Would it change what might happen tonight? She smiled. “No,” she said. “But it might change your hearts.”

She left, and had barely returned to her own quarters when an incredible explosion went off in the street, and for a moment the sanctuary was bathed in light. It was followed by a second and a third, all huge explosions and flashes of light. We rushed outside and saw a bank not thirty feet away from us in ruins. The sky was dotted with the lights of helicopters swooping down onto the town. The duly elected government of El Salvador was attacking its own citizens to drive them out of their homes.

Frye and I ran back into the church. Our cots were useless. The small church had little furniture and few places for refuge. “Let’s try under the altar,” he said. “You’re the religious one, maybe you can make it do some good.” My religious credentials didn’t seem particularly strong to me at that point but I joined him under it anyway. It was solid thick marble—the only thing in the sanctuary of value or strength. Hanging above it was a giant crucifix, a plaster Jesus on a cross, that stood at least ten feet tall. We crouched under the altar.

For hours we heard the same terrifying pounding in the streets, punctuated by sounds of people running and occasionally crying, and dogs barking. I hid there t overwhelming horror of my life, in a tight ball, occasionally adding my own cries to those of the streets. Later we learned that nearly the entire village fled for the night and hid in creek beds and behind boulders, and that miraculously no one died. But at the time all I could be aware of was the sounds of screaming and running, and the explosions that were endless and relentless. Every moment grew more frightening than the last. The longer the destruction went on, the less likely it seemed that we could possibly live through it.

Once there was a pause for several minutes and we cautiously started to crawl out of our sacred refuge. But just then there was another blinding explosion and the front doors of the church blew off their hinges and into the sanctuary. Window glass shattered and flew across the room. We dove back under the altar just as the giant crucifix came loose from one of its wires and swung down crashing into the marble side. There was another, and the body of Christ on the cross broke free of its wires, and fell down beside us, creating almost another wall of protection from the ravages of the outside, and he stayed there for the rest of the night.

On into the night, in terror and exhaustion, we heard bombs pounding and pounding, shaking the walls of the church when they grew near. Again and again, on and on, endlessly they exploded, as I hid in horror under a marble altar at the plaster feet of Jesus. Not knowing what to do, I shook, and crouched, and cried, and finally prayed. I prayed for a peace that I could never have prayed for in a calm suburb of North America. I prayed for a peace that I would never have been able to understand until that night, a peace that might not change the world, but that might change me in the midst of it.

And eventually I found myself resting, calming, even in the midst of the endless evil falling around us. In my weariness, I squirmed over to the crucifix and leaned against it. I rested my head in the curve of Jesus’ foot. I put my chin on a plaster spike ringed by a trickle of plaster blood where it entered Jesus’ foot. And I slept.

I don’t know how long I slept, but it was a long, deep, and restful sleep. A sleep driven by a mixture of exhaustion and fear and peace. I somehow felt, in a way that I still can’t explain, that whatever happened, it would all be okay. Finally, sometime into the morning I was aroused. I looked up and saw sunlight shining in through the windows of the sanctuary. Sister Loretta and several others were busy cleaning up the debris. The villagers all across the town were returning to their homes and opening their shops, showing their government that they were not afraid. They were showing that by returning home they had found their peace. Perhaps so had I. Frye was standing over me holding a broom and smiling grandly. “Hey, guy, wake up,” he said. “It’s morning. You’re alive. There’s work to do. It’s Advent.”

I Hope He’s Happy Down There

2003-05-29T20:50:00.000-05:00

I have a good friend who Bev and I met at Divinity School a few years ago. He was a prosperous business man, who in mid-life decided to become a minister. He will probably make an extraordinary minister. He’s strong, yet sensitive; passionate about his beliefs, yet understanding of others. He’s also a dedicated Red Sox fan, which can’t hurt. One thing about him that he doesn’t talk about too much is that he is also “gay,” a gentle euphemism some people use for being homosexual.

The first church he served was a large prosperous one in a Boston suburb. He got off to a fairly good start. Good sermons, good programs, good youth work. However, after a few months he decided that he should be honest and tell them about his controversial sexual orientation. I think he figured that since homosexuality is such an emotional, polarizing subject, it would be better to tell the truth than to continue lying and someday be found out. In a sermon one day he talked about the struggles, the secrecy, the ridicule, and the nasty looks he often got from people when they knew. He told it all.

I don’t know how well the sermon was received with the congregation. Some time after that he was working with his sexton in the church’s fellowship hall. They were changing light bulbs. My friend held the ladder while the sexton climbed it to reach the lights. When they finished, they both carried the ladder back to the storage closet. As I recall, they were talking about the sermon and my friend’s homosexuality. The sexton was fairly quiet during the conversation, but by itself, that didn’t seem odd. But suddenly, without warning, the sexton rammed the ladder forward and pinned my friend’s head against the wall. Then the sexton began hitting him and kicking him repeatedly until he finally fell to the ground. He remembers screaming but he couldn’t get away. The sexton was a big man and he continued swinging his fists at my friend in rage until he finally was unconscious. He doesn’t remember anything after that for some time, but he understands from the stories told by people who came in to stop the fight that the sexton continued hitting him again and again long after he was unconsciousness on the floor.

He was in the hospital for several days after that from broken bones, lacerations, and a serious concussion in his head. And he was in bed for several days more eating with a straw and trying to learn to walk again. When he finally returned to the church everyone tried to be very nice. The sexton was punished, the people forgave him, everyone was sympathetic, everything was back to normal, but not long after that my friend left the church. He moved away and took a tiny little church in a tiny town down along the Mexican border and so far as I know, that’s where he is today.

I thought about him today because I’ve heard so many stories recently about churches firing ministers who were gay, or denominations de-churching local congregations when they hired someone who was gay. And, of course, our nation continues to debate whether it is right to allow homosexuals to serve their country in the military or hold office or buy property, or join major political parties. Maybe I have also remembered his story because it’s hard to argue about “those people” in the abstract when I can remember my friend’s face after he got out of the hospital.

I hope my friend is happy down there on the border. With his skills and gifts he could be an extraordinary minister. I wonder if he has gotten the courage to tell them the truth yet.