The following tells of a a brief ceremony that took place on Memorial Day in Washington, DC, along with a meditation on the day’s lectionary, delivered as a sermon at the Kenwood Community Church in the Sonoma Valley.
June 5, 2011
7th Sunday after Easter
Scriptures from Acts and Ephesians at bottom.
Today I will note what has taken place in history
Talk about Memorial Day
Take note of today’s scriptures
Relate the scriptures to Memorial Day and
Conclude by reading you a story
The theme of this sermon is conflict and conflict resolution, remembrance and forgetting, honoring and forgiving and moving on. It will end with the story of a baptism of sorts, a new beginning.
During this past week in history in 1941, in the Atlantic Ocean some hundreds of miles south and west of England, the British Navy caught up with and sank the Battleship Bismarck. Coming during the darkest days of World War II when Britain stood alone, it was a great morale-boosting victory.
Just to show you how quickly history moves sometimes, the Normandy Invasion took place on June 6, 1944, just three years later; one year after that, the war was over.
Looking back a bit further, our American Civil War both began and ended about this time of year, around 150 years ago. Sesquicentennial celebrations are unfolding. There will be Civil War material all over television and in bookstores for the next several years. Approximately 100 new books about the Civil War come out every year and have done so for the past 50, without end in sight. In a way, we are still fighting the Civil War, fighting over its meaning and significance and will continue to do so for a long time to come.
In the Christian calendar, Today is the 7th Sunday after Easter. The lectionary for today gives us the last words of Jesus to his disciples before being taken up into heaven. I decided to add what were the last words of Paul, these words about girding for battle and so on conclude that his letter to the Ephesians. He was tried and executed not long afterward. Then, in honor of Memorial Day, I decided to add some thoughts about Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War to this morning’s meditations.
I just arrived here in the wine country after spending about four months in Washington, DC. You cannot escape from thinking about the Civil War in Washington. There are statues of a Civil War generals and admirals all over town, in traffic circles and parks; yet more across the river in Arlington National Cemetery, along with the graves of thousands and thousands of Civil War dead, both Union and Confederate.
At the beginning of May, on the day after the death of Osama bin Laden, I attended a lecture by Harvard President Drew Faust at the Kennedy Center. She received an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The award came with a lecture opportunity and she delivered a long meditation on the Civil War, her academic subject, and war itself. Why is war so interesting, she asked? She offered, tentatively, a variety of answers, saying essentially, as I remember, that war is a terrifying and fascinating mystery wherein people do the best of which they are capable, and the worst. And there are consequences, important world-changing consequences.
She quoted Robert E Lee: “It is well that war is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it.” What inspired Lee was seeing all these men, I believe before the battle of Fredericksburg, advancing in lines, colors flying, subjecting themselves to severe discipline in the face of great danger. Many participants in great battles, from enlisted men to generals, have remarked afterwards on the great beauty of the lead-up to the battle. It is awe-inspiring.
President Faust could also have quoted General Sherman’s advice to the graduates of the Michigan Military Academy in 1879: “I’ve been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It’s entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that some day you can use the skill you have acquired here. You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is Hell!”
Of course Robert E. Lee knew this just as well. Everyone in the military knows this.
I celebrated Memorial Day by visiting the Lincoln Memorial and attending a service at the Monument to the First Division. This monument is one of my favorites: a slender eighty-foot column of pink granite surmounted by a golden angel with a flag atop an orb. A plumed helmet crowns the angel's head. One might think it is Michael, the Archangel, but the guidebooks say she is Victory. Modeled after French statue from 1830. Sculptor is Daniel Chester French, who did the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. As the symbol of the division is a big, red numeral one, there is a numeral one-shaped flower bed at the base of the monument, always planted during the growing season with red flowers, tulips in the spring, some other red flowers throughout the summer and into the fall.
I arrived early and rested under the shade of a tree. It was already close to unbearably hot at 10:30. The ceremony started right on time at 11 with a jaunty tune played on a bugle. A few people stayed in the shade, but the sight of several dozen frail veterans, their wives and some widows sitting solidly in the sunshine made me decide to join them and in some way honor those who had endured much worse. The color guard came forward, the chaplain prayed and the speaker stepped to the podium. Retired General Ken Hunzeker promised to be brief as he mopped his brow with a towel. I chatted with him briefly before the service, a large, imposing gentleman. If he were to give me an order, it would never even occur to me not to follow it. What I remember most was stories of three of the Division’s Medal of Honor winners, one of whom fell on a grenade somewhere in Iraq to save his comrades.
The guard retired the colors. The soldiers back in the shade snapped off a twenty-one gun salute. Three quick bursts: Blam! Blam! Blam!
The sound echoed off the buildings. The bugler played taps.
Sun. Heat. Not even the suggestion of a breeze, just the wonderful stillness that follows something important. Finally we arose from our seats and sought the solace of the shade.
The military in services like this functions as a national priesthood, a religious order that connects us to Americans past, present and future. For those few moments, you are certain that you, through your nation, will live forever. God willing, this ceremony will repeat itself every Memorial Day and Veterans Day from now until Jesus comes again.
And now finally, the scriptures. The scriptures today deal with loss and promise. The disciples have lost Jesus. He was executed. Then he miraculously returned and they are about to lose him again. It’s like the last meeting of the class before the exam. Any last questions? So they ask him a huge geo-political, world-historical question:
"Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?"
This is a fantastic story; patently unbelievable in most of its details – unless you have faith - but in this one detail it is true to history as we know it: 1st Century Jews undoubtedly had this question on their minds: When are we going to get our country back?
Jesus replies: "It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."
And those are his last words. After uttering them, he takes off, literally. As we all know, the disciples fled and cowered in the upper room for a while and then the Holy Spirit came upon them and they spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth. We’re their successors and we’re still spreading the Gospel, as best we can.
Today’s letter by Paul to the Ephesians, a powerful much-quoted passage, is also a valedictory:
10 Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might. 11 Put on the full armor of God, that you may be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.
He uses the language of warfare to exhort his readers, then and now, to fight an even more important battle than the battles we remember on Memorial Day. He has in mind the spiritual battle we all fight within ourselves, the battle to take control of all the forces and temptations in our own minds; not just to fight the enemy without, but to fight the enemy within, namely our own selves, our own hatreds, and projections and regrets. And so on.
The American Civil War was, among other things, a religious conflict. The soldiers who fought were perhaps the most religiously literate soldiers ever to go into battle. Thousands of them died with Bibles in their pockets. Cease-fires were arranged so the American Bible Society could distribute Bibles to both sides. And this, I don’t need to tell you, was a great tragedy and a matter for some reflection and soul-searching, which President Lincoln provided in the greatest sermon ever delivered in America, which is known more commonly as his Second Inaugural Address, delivered just a month or so before the Civil War ended and he was assassinated.
Lincoln said, in essence, that this war was about over; the boots-on-the-ground, musket and cannon-fire war -- that was about over. But now another was about to begin, a spiritual war within every American to enable us to live as one nation again. And to win this war, this war to come, this inner, spiritual war, said Lincoln, we must confess that this shooting war was caused by all of us. It had to happen. Let there be no gloating or sulking at the outcome and move on:
“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
How do you get over disappointment, hurt, traumatic injury? No one knows for sure. You can search in the self-help section of bookstores; consult the finest psychologists, psychiatrists, clergy, healers; take workshops and seminars. The advice you will get from them is rather hit or miss and will probably boil down to what Lincoln said anyway: assume that this disappointment, hurt, conflict, war - whatever – had to happen for some reason in the divine economy that we cannot begin to understand. It is not a perfect world. Sometimes it just hurts to be alive. Let us therefore do something to make ourselves feel better and strive on to finish the work we are in.
Now I have story to read, by a great travel writer, Colin Thubron, from his book In Siberia. He traveled throughout Siberia about fifteen years ago, shortly after the break-up of the old Soviet Union. One day he found himself in Omsk, a city just east of the Urals, and was invited along to a ceremonial blessing of waters, some time in June of 1997 or so. Listen:
“Next morning, outside the big, unlovely cathedral, which in Stalin’s day had been a cinema, I found a coach-load of pilgrims setting off for a rural monastery. They welcomed me on board. The monastic foundations were only just being laid, they said, and they were going to attend the blessing of its waters. In 1987 and excavator at the site had unearthed a mass grave, and the place was revealed as a complex of labor camps, abandoned at Stalin’s death. The inmates, mostly intelligentsia, had died of pneumonia and dysentery from working in the fields, and their graves still scattered its earth.
As out bus bowled through ramshackle villages, the pilgrims relayed the story with murmers of motherly pity. They were elderly women, for the most part, indestructible babushkas in flower-printed dresses and canvas shoes, whose gnarled hands were closed over prayer-books and bead-strings, and whose headscarves enshrined faces of genial toughness. When a fresh-faced cantor began chanting a hymn in the front of the bus, their voices rose in answer one after another, like old memories, reedy and melodious from their heavy bodies, until the whole bus was filled with their singing.
We reached a birch grove. It was one of those ordinary rural spots whose particular darkness you would never guess. As the women disembarked, still singing, the strains of other chanting echoed from a chapel beyond the trees. It was the first of four shrines which would one day stake out the corners of an immense compound. Inside, a white-veiled choir was lilting the sad divisions of the liturgy. As the pilgrims visited their favourite icons, a forest-fire of votive candle-flames sprang up beneath the standing cross, and two or three bubushkas shuddered to their knees.
Towards noon a procession unwound from the church and started across the pasturelands towards the unblessed waters. It moved with a shuffling, dislocated pomp. Behind its uplifted cross, whose gilded plaques wobbled unhinged, Archbishop Feodosy advanced in a blaze of turquoise and crimson, his globular crown webbed in jewels. He marked off each stride with the stab of a dragon-headed stave, and his chest glinted with purple- and gold-embossed frontlets, and a clash of enameled crosses. He looked huge. Beside him went the celebrant and behind him tripped a huddle of young priests in mauve, and the trio of raspberry-silk deacons.
I fell in with the pilgrims following. It was oddly comforting. An agnostic among believers, I felt close to them. I too wanted their waters blessed. I wanted that tormented earth quitened, the past acknowledged and shriven. I helped the old woman beside me carry her bottles. My feeling of hypocrisy, of masquerading on others’ faith evaporated. As I took her arm over the puddles and our procession stretched across the wet grass, Russia’s atheist past seemed no more than an overcast day in the long Orthodox summer, and the whole country appeared to be reverting instinctively, painlessly, to its old nature. This wandering ceremonial, I felt, sprang not from an evangelical revolution but from a simple cultural relapse into the timeless personality of the motherland – the hierarchical, half-magic trust of its forefathers, the natural way to be.
We reached a place where a silver pipe, propped on an old lorry tyre, was spilling warm water into a pool. A blond deacon, like a Nordic Christ planted the processional cross on the far side, and the archbishop, the priests, acolytes and pilgrims, the babushkas and their bags and bottles, a few war veterans and one mesmerized foreigner formed a wavering crescent round the water’s rim.
The celebrant, clutching a jeweled cross, was ordered to wade in. From time to time he glanced up at the archbishop, who gave no signal for him to stop. Deeper and deeper he went, while his vestments fanned out over the surface, their mauve silk waterlogged to indigo, until he was spread out below up like an outlandish bird. At last Feodosy lifted his finger. The priest floundered, gaped up at us – or at the sky – in momentary despair, recovered his balance and went motionless. Then, with a ghastly frown, he traced a trembling cross beneath the water.
A deep, collective seemed to escape the pilgrims. Again the cavalcade unfurled around the pool, while the archbishop, grasping a silver chalice, sprinkled the surface with its own water, and the wobbly cross led the way back.
But the babushkas stayed put. As the procession glimmered and died through the darkness of the trees, and the archbishop went safely out of sight, a new excitement brewed up. They began to peel off their thick stockings and fling away their shoes. They were all ready. They tugged empty bottles labeled Fanta or Coca-Cole from their bags. Then they clambered or slid down the muddy banks and waded into the newly blessed water. At first they only scooped it from the shallows. It was mineral water, muddied and warm. They drank in deep gulps from their cupped hands, and winched themselves back to stow the bottles on shore.
Then it all went to their heads. Six or seven old women flung off first their cardigans, then their kerchiefs and skirts, until at last, stripped down to flowery underpants and bras, they made headlong for the waters. All inhibition was lost. Their massive legs, welted in varicose veins, carried them juddering down the banks. Their thighs tapered to small, rather delicate feet. Little gold crosses were lost between their breasts. They plunged mountainously in. I stood above them in astonishment, wondering if I was meant to be here. But they were shouting and jubilant. They cradled the water in their hands and dashed it over their faces. Holiness had turned liquid, palpable. You could rink it, drown in it, bring it home like flowers for the sick.
Two of the boldest women – cheery, barrel-chested ancients – made for the gushing silver pipe and thrust their heads under it. They sloshed its torrent exultantly over one another, then submerged in it and drank it wholesale. They shouted at their friends still on land, until one or two even of the young girls lifted their skirts and edged in. Bottle after bottle was filled and lugged to shore. But it was the young, not the old, who hesitated. The old were in high spirits. One of them shouted at me to join them, but I was caught between laughter and tears. These were women who survived all the Stalin years, the deprivation, the institutional suffering, into a life of widowhood and breadline pensions, and their exuberance struck me dumb. Perhaps in this sacred and chaotic water-hole the world seemed finally to make sense to them, and all this aching, weary flesh at last found absolution.”
Whatever your disappointments have been, whatever hardships you have overcome, whatever your hurts, whether they were physical, or emotional -- may this summer ahead be warm and healing; may you all find absolution.
Acts 1:6-10__So when they had come together, they asked him, "Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?" He replied, "It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up towards heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up towards heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven."
Ephesians 6:10-20
10 Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might. 11 Put on the full armor of God, that you may be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places. 13 Therefore, take up the full armor of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. 14 Stand firm therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, 15 and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; 16 in addition to all, taking up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming missiles of the evil one. 17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. 18 With all prayer and petition pray at all times in the Spirit, and with this in view, be on the alert with all perseverance and petition for all the saints, 19 and pray on my behalf, that utterance may be given to me in the opening of my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, 20 for which I am an ambassador in chains; that in proclaiming it I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.
Monday, June 27, 2011
Monday, December 6, 2010
The English-Speaking World and the Middle-East
The following is the first of two sermons this Advent on the relationship between the lands of the Bible and our own land.
Kenwood Community Church
Kenwood, California
December 5, 2010
In this sermon I will note some great writers who were born this week, then come to focus on an event that happened 93 years ago next week, introduce a few historical characters, then come to focus on this Sunday’s lesson from Isaiah and see how this prophecy ripples through history to our time today.
This has been a week of birthdays for great writers.
Mark Twain was born this week in 1835 and died in 1910. His autobiography has just been published and the literary world is agog. Twain left a will requiring that these writings would not be published for 100 years and lo, here we are. His autobiography is selling like crazy.
Joan Didion, a very interesting and quirky and writer was born in Sacramento, California in 1934.
CS Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898. He wrote "When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
Madeline L’Engle was also born this past week, in New York City in 1918. She couldn’t get anything published. 26 publishers rejected the manuscript for A Wrinkle in Time, a wonderful story of angels and cherubim and time travel and the importance of making a commitment.
These are all great people and great accomplishments and themes that could kick off an Advent sermon, but the event upon which I wish to focus occurred on December 11, 1917, which of course is next week, but close enough. On that date, General Sir Edmund Allenby, Commander of His Majesty’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force, composed of soldiers from the British Isles and India, entered Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate. Although he was a cavalry officer, he dismounted and together with his officers, entered the city on foot in order to contrast British ways and attitudes to those of the Germans, for Kaiser Wilhelm had visited Jerusalem in 1898, entering upon a horse accompanied by mounted cavalry wearing spiked helmets and all the accoutrements of the German military. It probably never occurred to this Kaiser that since Jesus rode into Jerusalem, it might be a good idea for ordinary mortals to walk.
For generations and generations Jerusalem had been the dream of schoolboys, the subject of poetry and the goal of Crusader Armies. But they seldom got there. Only the first wave of Crusaders got there at all and were expelled within a century. Richard the Lion-Hearted only caught a glimpse of the Holy City, then had to return to England. His army was badly mauled and he was sick in bed with dysentery. His great adversary Saladin, courteously sent him fresh water and sherbet to calm his stomach during their negotiations, at the end of which Richard and his army were permitted to depart in peace. After that, the occasional pilgrim from England made it to Jerusalem. Even by the time of William Blake, who wrote a wonderful poem titled Jerusalem, visitors from the west were few and far between. It was just too difficult and dangerous to get there.
Then, suddenly, 700 years after King Richard, the British Army dispersed the Turkish defenders and entered the Holy City on December 11, 1917. In terms of the horrible slaughter on the western front, this success by General Allenby was unimportant, but it was a welcome victory of immense symbolic significance for a people weary of war and in desperate need of good news. Every church bell in England rang.
General Sir Edmund Allenby, known to his friends as “The Bull” because he was a large, burly fellow, decided to symbolize British rule by walking into the Holy City. He gave assurances to all religious groups in the city that their holy places would be respected. This is how we like to think of it: the kindly, benevolent, fair-minded English-speaking peoples defeat the militaristic, arrogant, goose-stepping Germans and spread the influence of Anglo-Saxon justice a little bit further. We have extended our sway benignly, with great sensitivity and to the mutual benefit of all, or so we like to think. I personally like to think this because my father served in India during World War II. The British officers in on the Royal Air Force base where he served in Calcutta, and from which he flew over the Himalayas into China, must have been kind to this young American officer who had never before left the Midwest, for Dad always spoke highly of the British military. Dad several times described for me the route by which he returned by air from Calcutta after the war. It was an airport-to-airport tour of the old British Empire: from Calcutta to Delhi, to Karachi, to Khartoum to Cairo; leaving British control briefly to stopover in Vienna, then to London to Newfoundland to New York to Cincinnati where he met his fiancé, my mother, and they were married. I also spent a year in England during college and was fortunate to be basically adopted by an English family for the Christmas holidays. I’ll admit to being a hopeless Anglophile.
Unfortunately, history has shown us that the British military and government, whether with good intentions or bad, were far from perfect and could not make over the Middle East. Some 80 years later, we and our British and European allies are still trying and we still do not know whether we shall succeed or fail or accomplish something in between.
Now let me introduce this sermon’s second great historical character: Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, one of the foremost authorities on the Middle East in the early 20th Century. She died in 1926 after having explored and charted a great swath of Arabia, from remotest Syria to the waters of the Persian Gulf. The maps she made were used by the British military during World War I. She traveled well, usually with enough camels, servants, and aides-de-camp to dine every evening at table with linen napery, China plate, crystal wine goblets and fine silver. There was a reason for the show: she impressed the various Arab chieftains when she came a-calling and got good information after entertaining them well.
After the war, she made Baghdad her permanent home, helped to write a constitution, organize elections, draw borders and found the Iraqi National Museum. She was a woman of great common sense, who summed up her experience of nation-building in Iraq as follows:
“No one knows exactly what they – the people who live there - do want, least of all themselves, except that they don’t want us.”
“I suppose we have underestimated the fact that this country - Iraq - is really a mess of tribes which can’t as yet be reduced to any system. The Turks didn’t govern and we have tried to govern . . . and failed.”
Now I am not bringing these characters up – a general and a lady – and Jerusalem and Iraq in order to criticize or to praise what our government has been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan this past decade. I am bringing all this up in order to help us understand Isaiah and his prophecies and to attempt to understand the remarkable relationship between the Middle East and out own country.
We look to that part of the world as a source of endless frustration and at the same time - inspiration. The lands mentioned in the Bible have both lifted up and broken our hearts for centuries.
We Americans share a dream, a dream of good, decent and orderly government. It’s a good dream; and this dream comes, remarkably enough, from the Middle East, from the events related in the Bible, from Abraham, Moses, Isaiah and of course Jesus.
Every year about this time we re- read the prophesies of Isaiah, who lived an almost impossibly long time ago, 2700 years. His prophecies were ancient when Jesus walked the earth. The Jerusalem in which he lived had already been destroyed and rebuilt. Yet his prophecies stir our hearts every year:
A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse,_
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
_The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
_ the spirit of wisdom and understanding,_
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord._
We believe this shoot from the stock of Jesse, the father of David, was Jesus. He was of the house and lineage of David. His life and death are the events around which out lives still revolve. We believe these lines point unmistakably to him:
His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.__
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,_
or decide by what his ears hear;_
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,_
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;_
he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,_
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked._
He will be the wonderful counselor, Almighty God, everlasting father, Prince of Peace.
And the government will be upon his shoulder.
This is quite an idea: idea that there is a moral force behind within the universe, working its way with and through history, a force that once walked the earth like we do and now is still in some way we do not quite fathom still involved in everything that happens on earth. It is an idea that provides comfort through thick and thin. I’ll admit that it is at times hard to believe it, but it is much worse, if not disastrous, to disbelieve it entirely.
Now let me introduce yet another character, a couple of characters, related to another event that took place this time of year.
69 years ago next Tuesday. Japanese planes without warning bombed Pearl Harbor. December 7, 1941.
Just a few days later, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, under great secrecy, boarded a swift battleship and arrived in the United States to be the guest of President Roosevelt for three weeks during the Christmas season. The two men had met the previous summer, in secret, aboard a battleship off the coast of Newfoundland. They cemented their relationship and that of their two countries with a solemn religious service aboard ship, where Holy Scripture was read and hymns sung.
They continued in like fashion throughout the holidays. During the Christmas Eve tree lighting on the White House south lawn, the Marine Band performed "Joy to the World" and the "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's "The Messiah." On Christmas Day, FDR took Churchill to Foundry Methodist Church on 16th Street, about a mile from the White House. There for the first time in his life, Churchill heard "O Little Town of Bethlehem," the lovely hymn that declares:
"Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light;
the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight."
Both President and Prime Minister were greatly moved and inspired by the service. Winston Churchill later wrote of it:
"Certainly there was much to fortify the faith of all who believe in the moral governance of the universe."
I think you for tolerating my history lesson this morning. Perhaps you find this praise of all things Anglo-America and patriotism a bit much. It is indeed a bit of a stretch, overbearing, possibly dangerous to identify you or your country or your government too closely with the moral governance of the universe.
But ask yourself: do you want to live in a society that makes no such claim at all? Will we be better off if we abandon the concept of moral governance altogether?
We Christians believe that there is a moral governor of the universe. We believe that this moral governor, the savior, the anointed one, was born in a manger in Bethlehem, not far from Jerusalem. This moral governor was as vulnerable throughout his life as we are - that is precisely whence his moral authority comes. We believe that the moral governor of the universe was real and is real, has died, has risen and will come again.
I’ll admit that this is not easy to believe, but what is the alternative?
We try to align ourselves with the moral governance of the universe. We ask to be held accountable if we do not. We ask ourselves:
What would Jesus do? What would the moral governor of the universe have us do?
These are good questions. Just because there are no obvious answers does not mean that these are not good questions.
We are attempting to make peace on earth, in difficult places. The outcome is as uncertain as ever. Yet we look to the same person for inspiration, for comfort, to the governor of the universe, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, the chosen one, the Lord. It is he whom we celebrate this season, and every season.
Kenwood Community Church
Kenwood, California
December 5, 2010
In this sermon I will note some great writers who were born this week, then come to focus on an event that happened 93 years ago next week, introduce a few historical characters, then come to focus on this Sunday’s lesson from Isaiah and see how this prophecy ripples through history to our time today.
This has been a week of birthdays for great writers.
Mark Twain was born this week in 1835 and died in 1910. His autobiography has just been published and the literary world is agog. Twain left a will requiring that these writings would not be published for 100 years and lo, here we are. His autobiography is selling like crazy.
Joan Didion, a very interesting and quirky and writer was born in Sacramento, California in 1934.
CS Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898. He wrote "When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
Madeline L’Engle was also born this past week, in New York City in 1918. She couldn’t get anything published. 26 publishers rejected the manuscript for A Wrinkle in Time, a wonderful story of angels and cherubim and time travel and the importance of making a commitment.
These are all great people and great accomplishments and themes that could kick off an Advent sermon, but the event upon which I wish to focus occurred on December 11, 1917, which of course is next week, but close enough. On that date, General Sir Edmund Allenby, Commander of His Majesty’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force, composed of soldiers from the British Isles and India, entered Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate. Although he was a cavalry officer, he dismounted and together with his officers, entered the city on foot in order to contrast British ways and attitudes to those of the Germans, for Kaiser Wilhelm had visited Jerusalem in 1898, entering upon a horse accompanied by mounted cavalry wearing spiked helmets and all the accoutrements of the German military. It probably never occurred to this Kaiser that since Jesus rode into Jerusalem, it might be a good idea for ordinary mortals to walk.
For generations and generations Jerusalem had been the dream of schoolboys, the subject of poetry and the goal of Crusader Armies. But they seldom got there. Only the first wave of Crusaders got there at all and were expelled within a century. Richard the Lion-Hearted only caught a glimpse of the Holy City, then had to return to England. His army was badly mauled and he was sick in bed with dysentery. His great adversary Saladin, courteously sent him fresh water and sherbet to calm his stomach during their negotiations, at the end of which Richard and his army were permitted to depart in peace. After that, the occasional pilgrim from England made it to Jerusalem. Even by the time of William Blake, who wrote a wonderful poem titled Jerusalem, visitors from the west were few and far between. It was just too difficult and dangerous to get there.
Then, suddenly, 700 years after King Richard, the British Army dispersed the Turkish defenders and entered the Holy City on December 11, 1917. In terms of the horrible slaughter on the western front, this success by General Allenby was unimportant, but it was a welcome victory of immense symbolic significance for a people weary of war and in desperate need of good news. Every church bell in England rang.
General Sir Edmund Allenby, known to his friends as “The Bull” because he was a large, burly fellow, decided to symbolize British rule by walking into the Holy City. He gave assurances to all religious groups in the city that their holy places would be respected. This is how we like to think of it: the kindly, benevolent, fair-minded English-speaking peoples defeat the militaristic, arrogant, goose-stepping Germans and spread the influence of Anglo-Saxon justice a little bit further. We have extended our sway benignly, with great sensitivity and to the mutual benefit of all, or so we like to think. I personally like to think this because my father served in India during World War II. The British officers in on the Royal Air Force base where he served in Calcutta, and from which he flew over the Himalayas into China, must have been kind to this young American officer who had never before left the Midwest, for Dad always spoke highly of the British military. Dad several times described for me the route by which he returned by air from Calcutta after the war. It was an airport-to-airport tour of the old British Empire: from Calcutta to Delhi, to Karachi, to Khartoum to Cairo; leaving British control briefly to stopover in Vienna, then to London to Newfoundland to New York to Cincinnati where he met his fiancé, my mother, and they were married. I also spent a year in England during college and was fortunate to be basically adopted by an English family for the Christmas holidays. I’ll admit to being a hopeless Anglophile.
Unfortunately, history has shown us that the British military and government, whether with good intentions or bad, were far from perfect and could not make over the Middle East. Some 80 years later, we and our British and European allies are still trying and we still do not know whether we shall succeed or fail or accomplish something in between.
Now let me introduce this sermon’s second great historical character: Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, one of the foremost authorities on the Middle East in the early 20th Century. She died in 1926 after having explored and charted a great swath of Arabia, from remotest Syria to the waters of the Persian Gulf. The maps she made were used by the British military during World War I. She traveled well, usually with enough camels, servants, and aides-de-camp to dine every evening at table with linen napery, China plate, crystal wine goblets and fine silver. There was a reason for the show: she impressed the various Arab chieftains when she came a-calling and got good information after entertaining them well.
After the war, she made Baghdad her permanent home, helped to write a constitution, organize elections, draw borders and found the Iraqi National Museum. She was a woman of great common sense, who summed up her experience of nation-building in Iraq as follows:
“No one knows exactly what they – the people who live there - do want, least of all themselves, except that they don’t want us.”
“I suppose we have underestimated the fact that this country - Iraq - is really a mess of tribes which can’t as yet be reduced to any system. The Turks didn’t govern and we have tried to govern . . . and failed.”
Now I am not bringing these characters up – a general and a lady – and Jerusalem and Iraq in order to criticize or to praise what our government has been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan this past decade. I am bringing all this up in order to help us understand Isaiah and his prophecies and to attempt to understand the remarkable relationship between the Middle East and out own country.
We look to that part of the world as a source of endless frustration and at the same time - inspiration. The lands mentioned in the Bible have both lifted up and broken our hearts for centuries.
We Americans share a dream, a dream of good, decent and orderly government. It’s a good dream; and this dream comes, remarkably enough, from the Middle East, from the events related in the Bible, from Abraham, Moses, Isaiah and of course Jesus.
Every year about this time we re- read the prophesies of Isaiah, who lived an almost impossibly long time ago, 2700 years. His prophecies were ancient when Jesus walked the earth. The Jerusalem in which he lived had already been destroyed and rebuilt. Yet his prophecies stir our hearts every year:
A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse,_
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
_The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
_ the spirit of wisdom and understanding,_
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord._
We believe this shoot from the stock of Jesse, the father of David, was Jesus. He was of the house and lineage of David. His life and death are the events around which out lives still revolve. We believe these lines point unmistakably to him:
His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.__
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,_
or decide by what his ears hear;_
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,_
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;_
he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,_
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked._
He will be the wonderful counselor, Almighty God, everlasting father, Prince of Peace.
And the government will be upon his shoulder.
This is quite an idea: idea that there is a moral force behind within the universe, working its way with and through history, a force that once walked the earth like we do and now is still in some way we do not quite fathom still involved in everything that happens on earth. It is an idea that provides comfort through thick and thin. I’ll admit that it is at times hard to believe it, but it is much worse, if not disastrous, to disbelieve it entirely.
Now let me introduce yet another character, a couple of characters, related to another event that took place this time of year.
69 years ago next Tuesday. Japanese planes without warning bombed Pearl Harbor. December 7, 1941.
Just a few days later, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, under great secrecy, boarded a swift battleship and arrived in the United States to be the guest of President Roosevelt for three weeks during the Christmas season. The two men had met the previous summer, in secret, aboard a battleship off the coast of Newfoundland. They cemented their relationship and that of their two countries with a solemn religious service aboard ship, where Holy Scripture was read and hymns sung.
They continued in like fashion throughout the holidays. During the Christmas Eve tree lighting on the White House south lawn, the Marine Band performed "Joy to the World" and the "Hallelujah Chorus" from Handel's "The Messiah." On Christmas Day, FDR took Churchill to Foundry Methodist Church on 16th Street, about a mile from the White House. There for the first time in his life, Churchill heard "O Little Town of Bethlehem," the lovely hymn that declares:
"Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting light;
the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight."
Both President and Prime Minister were greatly moved and inspired by the service. Winston Churchill later wrote of it:
"Certainly there was much to fortify the faith of all who believe in the moral governance of the universe."
I think you for tolerating my history lesson this morning. Perhaps you find this praise of all things Anglo-America and patriotism a bit much. It is indeed a bit of a stretch, overbearing, possibly dangerous to identify you or your country or your government too closely with the moral governance of the universe.
But ask yourself: do you want to live in a society that makes no such claim at all? Will we be better off if we abandon the concept of moral governance altogether?
We Christians believe that there is a moral governor of the universe. We believe that this moral governor, the savior, the anointed one, was born in a manger in Bethlehem, not far from Jerusalem. This moral governor was as vulnerable throughout his life as we are - that is precisely whence his moral authority comes. We believe that the moral governor of the universe was real and is real, has died, has risen and will come again.
I’ll admit that this is not easy to believe, but what is the alternative?
We try to align ourselves with the moral governance of the universe. We ask to be held accountable if we do not. We ask ourselves:
What would Jesus do? What would the moral governor of the universe have us do?
These are good questions. Just because there are no obvious answers does not mean that these are not good questions.
We are attempting to make peace on earth, in difficult places. The outcome is as uncertain as ever. Yet we look to the same person for inspiration, for comfort, to the governor of the universe, Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, the chosen one, the Lord. It is he whom we celebrate this season, and every season.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
California Journal
St. Helena, California
Friday, September 3, 2010.
The first Friday of the month. Cheers St. Helena, an opportunity to stroll downtown and taste wine from local vintners, takes place tonight from 6 to 9. Several thousand locals and visitors will turn out this balmy late summer evening to walk up and down Main Street sipping glasses of local wine. Pay $35, get a paper bracelet and you get to taste as much as you want.
I saw Todd White, the organizer, at the bocce ball courts last night. He was in an expansive mood as he asked how my last job interview went and poured himself a glass of wine. Wine goes with everything here. On Halloween parents have a glass in hand as their kids go trick-or-treating. The kids get candy, the parents get a pour of wine. Attend a party and thirty, forty, fifty bottles of wine are on the table. One rarely sees a bottle of beer, even more rarely a bottle of distilled spirits. Bottles from Napa, bottles from Sonoma, Mendocino, bottles with fancy labels, bottles with no labels at all (the cork might tell you who made it), bottles people produced themselves, bottles given to them at work.
During the twenty weeks of the year when people play bocce, team members lay out enormous spreads of food and dine while they play, a clutch of wine bottles on every table. Some players even roll while holding a wine glass in their free hand, making a sort of jaunty, devil-may-care statement. One team lays out table cloths over two tables, sets down plates, cutlery, glowing lanterns, and dines after the match by lamplight.
Todd moved here from Atlanta, operates a winery and likes to make things happen. The first Cheers happened in April of 2009. Despite the rain people turned out – several thousand. Merchants and restauranteurs were thrilled to have the business and Todd become a sort of local celebrity.
One evening I dined at the bar at Cook, a small restaurant on Main Street and my favorite hangout. I often walk in there alone, sit at the bar and within minutes find myself in conversation with people I’ve never seen before. After a while, we’re swapping winery stories, then swapping wine. Here, have some of this.
Swirl, sniff, inhale, sip, slurp, swallow. Inhale. Exhale. Mmmmm. Nice. Now have some of this . . . .
That evening I found myself talking to a stunning young woman from back East, who was traveling with her mother. Her mother was just barely less beautiful. Both women were well-dressed and had enough precious gems on them to fund a small bank. They were enjoying their vacation. The owner of their B&B up the street told them to come here. He eats here all the time, they explained. Ah, Todd White, I say, a peach of a fellow. Everyone knows Todd.
There are no degrees of separation here.
After a while they turned and asked what a lot of people ask: The Napa Valley is obviously a great place to vacation, and we're having a great time, but what's it like to live here? Like, what do y’all do here? I mean, besides eat and drink?
Well,uh . . . um . . . hmmm . . . . We, uh, eat, we drink, we hang out, we dig each other; um, hike, bike, play bocce ball (you know Joe DiMaggio’s dad played bocce ball, worried that little Joey played this silly base-a-ball) - swim. Some of us are pretty serious runners and bikers, I guess. You know, I often feel like I’m a character in an extended Winnie-the-Pooh story. Different characters show up from time to time, like Kanga and Roo coming to the forest, and are enfolded into this enchanted fairyland of a place. That’s the way it’s been for me. We tell stories, we hang out, we enjoy. You know, we don’t really do much here . . . And we're very happy.
Todd’s operation has gotten smoother with each passing month. As I sit here in the Bakery on Main Street, white-clad members of the Cheers crew cruise up and down on new bicycles that look like the old Schwinn I had as a kid. One stops to post a map of St. Helena to a tree. The map lists port-o-potties, places to buy tickets, where the bands play. Tubs full of ice and free bottles of water appear, along with extra trash and recycling bins. Security for the operation is light, but efficient. Reports of out and out drunkeness have been few in past months.
A couple of Mormon elders walk by. Two fund-raisers for Oxfam-America walk into the Bakery for coffee. I wave to a friend making a cell phone call outside of his office as I leave. I will be standing where he is with a bunch of other Rotarians this evening to talk about Rotary. Small town America gets ready for the festival.
* * * * * * * * *
That evening people thronged the sidewalks. Rotarians from distant cities stopped by to say hello. Afterward I went with Cindy and Dave to a Mexican place for tacos. We talked briefly above the din of how we each got here. Cindy came up just for a summer some four years ago to get away from Los Angeles and decided to stay. Dave came up from LA over a decade before. Neither wants to live anywhere else at this point. I decided to spend time doing massage and bodywork in some Bay Area spa several summers ago, flung out dozens of resumes and got a response from one in St. Helena. I had never heard of the town before, although I must have driven through it. I still spend winters in Washington, but for the rest of the year, this is home.
Friday, September 3, 2010.
The first Friday of the month. Cheers St. Helena, an opportunity to stroll downtown and taste wine from local vintners, takes place tonight from 6 to 9. Several thousand locals and visitors will turn out this balmy late summer evening to walk up and down Main Street sipping glasses of local wine. Pay $35, get a paper bracelet and you get to taste as much as you want.
I saw Todd White, the organizer, at the bocce ball courts last night. He was in an expansive mood as he asked how my last job interview went and poured himself a glass of wine. Wine goes with everything here. On Halloween parents have a glass in hand as their kids go trick-or-treating. The kids get candy, the parents get a pour of wine. Attend a party and thirty, forty, fifty bottles of wine are on the table. One rarely sees a bottle of beer, even more rarely a bottle of distilled spirits. Bottles from Napa, bottles from Sonoma, Mendocino, bottles with fancy labels, bottles with no labels at all (the cork might tell you who made it), bottles people produced themselves, bottles given to them at work.
During the twenty weeks of the year when people play bocce, team members lay out enormous spreads of food and dine while they play, a clutch of wine bottles on every table. Some players even roll while holding a wine glass in their free hand, making a sort of jaunty, devil-may-care statement. One team lays out table cloths over two tables, sets down plates, cutlery, glowing lanterns, and dines after the match by lamplight.
Todd moved here from Atlanta, operates a winery and likes to make things happen. The first Cheers happened in April of 2009. Despite the rain people turned out – several thousand. Merchants and restauranteurs were thrilled to have the business and Todd become a sort of local celebrity.
One evening I dined at the bar at Cook, a small restaurant on Main Street and my favorite hangout. I often walk in there alone, sit at the bar and within minutes find myself in conversation with people I’ve never seen before. After a while, we’re swapping winery stories, then swapping wine. Here, have some of this.
Swirl, sniff, inhale, sip, slurp, swallow. Inhale. Exhale. Mmmmm. Nice. Now have some of this . . . .
That evening I found myself talking to a stunning young woman from back East, who was traveling with her mother. Her mother was just barely less beautiful. Both women were well-dressed and had enough precious gems on them to fund a small bank. They were enjoying their vacation. The owner of their B&B up the street told them to come here. He eats here all the time, they explained. Ah, Todd White, I say, a peach of a fellow. Everyone knows Todd.
There are no degrees of separation here.
After a while they turned and asked what a lot of people ask: The Napa Valley is obviously a great place to vacation, and we're having a great time, but what's it like to live here? Like, what do y’all do here? I mean, besides eat and drink?
Well,uh . . . um . . . hmmm . . . . We, uh, eat, we drink, we hang out, we dig each other; um, hike, bike, play bocce ball (you know Joe DiMaggio’s dad played bocce ball, worried that little Joey played this silly base-a-ball) - swim. Some of us are pretty serious runners and bikers, I guess. You know, I often feel like I’m a character in an extended Winnie-the-Pooh story. Different characters show up from time to time, like Kanga and Roo coming to the forest, and are enfolded into this enchanted fairyland of a place. That’s the way it’s been for me. We tell stories, we hang out, we enjoy. You know, we don’t really do much here . . . And we're very happy.
Todd’s operation has gotten smoother with each passing month. As I sit here in the Bakery on Main Street, white-clad members of the Cheers crew cruise up and down on new bicycles that look like the old Schwinn I had as a kid. One stops to post a map of St. Helena to a tree. The map lists port-o-potties, places to buy tickets, where the bands play. Tubs full of ice and free bottles of water appear, along with extra trash and recycling bins. Security for the operation is light, but efficient. Reports of out and out drunkeness have been few in past months.
A couple of Mormon elders walk by. Two fund-raisers for Oxfam-America walk into the Bakery for coffee. I wave to a friend making a cell phone call outside of his office as I leave. I will be standing where he is with a bunch of other Rotarians this evening to talk about Rotary. Small town America gets ready for the festival.
* * * * * * * * *
That evening people thronged the sidewalks. Rotarians from distant cities stopped by to say hello. Afterward I went with Cindy and Dave to a Mexican place for tacos. We talked briefly above the din of how we each got here. Cindy came up just for a summer some four years ago to get away from Los Angeles and decided to stay. Dave came up from LA over a decade before. Neither wants to live anywhere else at this point. I decided to spend time doing massage and bodywork in some Bay Area spa several summers ago, flung out dozens of resumes and got a response from one in St. Helena. I had never heard of the town before, although I must have driven through it. I still spend winters in Washington, but for the rest of the year, this is home.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Christmas 2009/Epiphany 2010
In Search of a Sense of Place
California Journal
At Christmas time in the year of Our Lord 2009, I was still in the Napa Valley, in the city of Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine, having lingered there longer than ever before the flight east. The only return flight I could get with my frequent flyer ticket was on New Year’s Eve; San Francisco non-stop to Dulles. My airplane caught a 125 mph tailwind on the way in, making for a four-hour flight from the West Coast. Upon arrival, I took a short cab ride on a rainy, cold night to one of those great Washington young people’s group homes that always throws a party on New Year’s Eve, to celebrate the evening with numerous people from one of two churches I attend here. Thus my transition from West to East was swift and merry.
Way back in April when I first arrived, people told me that if I wanted to really understand the soul of St. Helena, I should go over to Crane Park any week night and blend into the crowd at the eight bocce ball courts. I indeed found quite a crowd, not to mention picnic tables covered with cheeses, olives, spreads, crackers, cold cuts, pasta, flatbreads, salads, dips, elaborate desserts and, of course, bottles of wine; mostly from Napa, bottles from tasting rooms, bottles from private cellars, bottles with unusual labels, bottles with no labels at all. The Grgich Hills Winery team showed up once a week with an entire washing machine flat of stemware and a dozen bottles from the tasting room. Oh my. Strike up a conversation and soon a glass is placed in your hand, wine poured, delicacies offered. Mmmm. Such generosity with food and wine I have never before enjoyed.
Eventually I joined a team (sponsored by the Episcopal Church, which I often attend): The Holy Rollers. We weren’t particularly good, but we ate well, and improved as the season wore on, finishing sixth out of ten. The last evening for bocce occurred about a month ago. We lost the first two games to a much better team, but came back to win the last one, which was a kick.
St. Helena really is a friendly little town. One can walk into Cook, the small restaurant on Main Street beloved of locals, have a seat at the bar, and find oneself engrossed in conversation. One’s glass is not infrequently filled with whatever someone brought. The menu is rather limited, a simple, type-written sheet of paper, but I have grown to love the place. The chef comes to me for treatments at the spa and I know all the staff by name. Market, another good small restaurant with a longer menu, is up the street. Eddie, the greeter and seater, a peach of a fellow, will remember your name after a couple of visits. I have never lived in a place where it is so easy to meet strangers.
I have been blessed with wonderful clients at Health Spa Napa Valley, even though the economic situation has reduced the number quite precipitously. Most clients come in, say relatively little and get on the table. I breathe deeply and begin. I move my hands, forearms and elbows from head and shoulders down to the feet and back up. Slowly. Repeat. Breathe. I’ve decided that a good massage really is a work of art, something more like a musical composition than a medical treatment, a concerto for the human body in three parts, face down, face up and sideways. The tune we play together depends on the instrument: some people are flutes, some violins, horns, cellos, occasionally a bass violin or grand piano. Most depart with a thank you and a smile on their faces and I move on to the next, or go for a swim before heading off to the bocce ball courts, or Cook, for an evening of conviviality.
Sometimes something magical happens; a deep exhalation, a sigh, a release, a shudder. Clients occasionally teach me something, or reward me with something intangible beyond the cash payment. One client this summer was a defensive safety on a top ten college team in the 1960s. He liked to talk, so we talked football; and beyond football to sportsmanship, honesty, the life lessons taught by competition. I have done advanced academic work in the general field of moral philosophy, but he was the teacher in this conversation, as much by his attitude as anything else.
This season’s liturgical highlight was a Chanticleer concert at a big old Catholic church in Petaluma. They entered the darkened church in tuxedos, carrying lighted tapers and singing a Gregorian Chant, followed immediately by Josquin Desprez’s Ave Maria:
Ave Maria, Gratia, plena,
Dominus tecum, Virgo serena.
The darkened church, the illuminated altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the height and depth of the voices, blending, soaring, welling, gently but surely shaking the rafters and the foundation; thoughts of my mother, all mothers, all parents, the Holy Family, all families, all children, all caring, all loving, all yearning, all suffering, all striving . . . Somewhere deep inside the voices released the wellspring of tears yet made life a glorious blessing.
O Mater Dei, memento mei. Amen.
A few days later I drove down the coast to Esalen for Christmas week. A week at Esalen is always good, but this was even better than usual, a workshop called SoulMotion, led by Scott and Zuza Engler. For most of our six hours of “class” each day we simply moved to music, slowly working out all the kinks and tightness of our workaday lives. We ate good food, amid much exuberant conversation. We soaked in the famous hot springs perched fifty feet above the ocean. Periodically in class, we would pause to share in small groups or in the larger group. After a few days the sharings emerged from deeper and deeper places.
In an abnormally cold Washington this January, I am warmed by good memories.
California Journal
At Christmas time in the year of Our Lord 2009, I was still in the Napa Valley, in the city of Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine, having lingered there longer than ever before the flight east. The only return flight I could get with my frequent flyer ticket was on New Year’s Eve; San Francisco non-stop to Dulles. My airplane caught a 125 mph tailwind on the way in, making for a four-hour flight from the West Coast. Upon arrival, I took a short cab ride on a rainy, cold night to one of those great Washington young people’s group homes that always throws a party on New Year’s Eve, to celebrate the evening with numerous people from one of two churches I attend here. Thus my transition from West to East was swift and merry.
Way back in April when I first arrived, people told me that if I wanted to really understand the soul of St. Helena, I should go over to Crane Park any week night and blend into the crowd at the eight bocce ball courts. I indeed found quite a crowd, not to mention picnic tables covered with cheeses, olives, spreads, crackers, cold cuts, pasta, flatbreads, salads, dips, elaborate desserts and, of course, bottles of wine; mostly from Napa, bottles from tasting rooms, bottles from private cellars, bottles with unusual labels, bottles with no labels at all. The Grgich Hills Winery team showed up once a week with an entire washing machine flat of stemware and a dozen bottles from the tasting room. Oh my. Strike up a conversation and soon a glass is placed in your hand, wine poured, delicacies offered. Mmmm. Such generosity with food and wine I have never before enjoyed.
Eventually I joined a team (sponsored by the Episcopal Church, which I often attend): The Holy Rollers. We weren’t particularly good, but we ate well, and improved as the season wore on, finishing sixth out of ten. The last evening for bocce occurred about a month ago. We lost the first two games to a much better team, but came back to win the last one, which was a kick.
St. Helena really is a friendly little town. One can walk into Cook, the small restaurant on Main Street beloved of locals, have a seat at the bar, and find oneself engrossed in conversation. One’s glass is not infrequently filled with whatever someone brought. The menu is rather limited, a simple, type-written sheet of paper, but I have grown to love the place. The chef comes to me for treatments at the spa and I know all the staff by name. Market, another good small restaurant with a longer menu, is up the street. Eddie, the greeter and seater, a peach of a fellow, will remember your name after a couple of visits. I have never lived in a place where it is so easy to meet strangers.
I have been blessed with wonderful clients at Health Spa Napa Valley, even though the economic situation has reduced the number quite precipitously. Most clients come in, say relatively little and get on the table. I breathe deeply and begin. I move my hands, forearms and elbows from head and shoulders down to the feet and back up. Slowly. Repeat. Breathe. I’ve decided that a good massage really is a work of art, something more like a musical composition than a medical treatment, a concerto for the human body in three parts, face down, face up and sideways. The tune we play together depends on the instrument: some people are flutes, some violins, horns, cellos, occasionally a bass violin or grand piano. Most depart with a thank you and a smile on their faces and I move on to the next, or go for a swim before heading off to the bocce ball courts, or Cook, for an evening of conviviality.
Sometimes something magical happens; a deep exhalation, a sigh, a release, a shudder. Clients occasionally teach me something, or reward me with something intangible beyond the cash payment. One client this summer was a defensive safety on a top ten college team in the 1960s. He liked to talk, so we talked football; and beyond football to sportsmanship, honesty, the life lessons taught by competition. I have done advanced academic work in the general field of moral philosophy, but he was the teacher in this conversation, as much by his attitude as anything else.
This season’s liturgical highlight was a Chanticleer concert at a big old Catholic church in Petaluma. They entered the darkened church in tuxedos, carrying lighted tapers and singing a Gregorian Chant, followed immediately by Josquin Desprez’s Ave Maria:
Ave Maria, Gratia, plena,
Dominus tecum, Virgo serena.
The darkened church, the illuminated altar to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the height and depth of the voices, blending, soaring, welling, gently but surely shaking the rafters and the foundation; thoughts of my mother, all mothers, all parents, the Holy Family, all families, all children, all caring, all loving, all yearning, all suffering, all striving . . . Somewhere deep inside the voices released the wellspring of tears yet made life a glorious blessing.
O Mater Dei, memento mei. Amen.
A few days later I drove down the coast to Esalen for Christmas week. A week at Esalen is always good, but this was even better than usual, a workshop called SoulMotion, led by Scott and Zuza Engler. For most of our six hours of “class” each day we simply moved to music, slowly working out all the kinks and tightness of our workaday lives. We ate good food, amid much exuberant conversation. We soaked in the famous hot springs perched fifty feet above the ocean. Periodically in class, we would pause to share in small groups or in the larger group. After a few days the sharings emerged from deeper and deeper places.
In an abnormally cold Washington this January, I am warmed by good memories.
Monday, May 25, 2009
A Memorial Day Sermon
Seventh Sunday after Easter
First Presbyterian Church
Saint Helena, California
The scriptures today [texts below] focus on the appointment of another apostle to replace Judas and, in the Gospel, a prayer by Jesus to the Father on behalf of those left behind to do his work, namely his disciples then and all the disciples to come. These are appropriate scriptures for Memorial Day, a day set aside in this country to remember those who served in time of war. They are also appropriate scriptures to help us remember and give thanks for all those who came before us, all the saints of our by now extremely long Christian history, those people who have made our gathering this morning possible.
2,000 years ago Jesus, the carpenter from Galilee, the son of Mary, the son of God, commissioned his first disciples and sent them into the world. Of course he did many other things. He healed the sick, he preached, he told little stories, he multiplied loaves and fishes, he was crucified, died and was buried. On the third day he rose again. Etc.
We all know this story, know it so well that we can recite it. Oftentimes in church we do, in the form of the Nicene Creed or something like it. If it were not for the witnesses, we would not know this story; we would know nothing of Jesus of Nazareth. We are here this morning because our parents, probably, taught us to pray, brought us to church or Sunday School or both. There is probably more to it than that. We probably received some instruction or inspiration as young adults and adults, from a teacher, from a chaplain, from an inspiring minister and congregation, whether early in life or later, and so here we are.
In an even wider picture, long before we were here and well beyond the relatively small circle of our families, other witnesses have made us possible, literally some 2,000 years and hundreds of millions of people worth of Christian experience and in the US of A, roughly 200 years of national experience. We are Christians and we are Americans – most of us, I presume – if there is a foreign national among us this morning, I hope you feel welcome on this Memorial Day Weekend, which we began to celebrate a few years after our Civil War, which officially ended exactly 144 years ago. It effectively ended with the surrender of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in early April, but it took a few weeks more to wrap things up. President Andrew Johnson declared hostilities at end on May 10th, whereupon planning began for the Grand Review of the Armies, which turned out to be the biggest parade that has ever taken place in Washington. It took two whole days to parade roughly 150,000 soldiers from the Capitol to the White House reviewing stand; one day for the armies of the eastern theater and another whole day for the westerners, and that parade took place on May 23rd and 24th, 1865. My great grandfather, Hiram Young of the 88th Indiana Infantry, was part of General Sherman’s Army and took part in that parade.
Likewise World War II came to a conclusion in May of 1945, 64 years ago; at least fighting stopped in the European Theater in early May after Hitler shot himself on April 30. Various German commanders tried to surrender to the British or the Americans and not to the Russians. Cease-fires were agreed to but General Eisenhower insisted that the surrender be unconditional and complete to all allied armed services simultaneously (as had been agreed by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin) and this finally happened on May 8th. There were victory parades of course, in Moscow, in Berlin, in London shortly thereafter. The official American parade took place in New York in January of 1946.
This shows you how much the world had changed in a mere 80 years. In May of 1865, the soldiers marched to Washington. It took a week or two, they camped along the banks of the Potomac, had their parade and went home. That was that. In May of 1945, soldiers still had to disarm millions of enemy soldiers, occupy and police hostile territory, set up a government, feed millions of hungry people and by the way, get ready to invade Japan. The war in the Pacific continued. I’m wearing a little replica of my Dad’s theater ribbon today, the Chine-Burma-India Theater, where the war continued and where my Dad continued to serve, in Calcutta, India, until 1946.
Memorial Day took place officially first on May 30, 1868 to honor the Civil War dead. It had its beginnings of course all over the United States – some time in May around the anniversary of the end of the war, and has evolved into a day to honor all of those who died in all of our nation’s wars. How could we not set aside some time to remember our great Civil War and the great, in effect World Civil War and those who brought these wars to a conclusion? And further, to think about the causes of wars and what we the living must do to avoid them in the future? Thus I placed the quotations from two great Americans in the bulletin this morning [texts below]. More on those quotations in a minute, but first let me add a contemporary quotation to our meditations this morning.
We are all aware that President Obama journeyed to Northern Indiana exactly a week ago to receive an honorary degree and give the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame. I followed this story with great interest for any number of reasons, not the least of which are the facts that my father graduated from the University of Notre Dame du Lac in 1935 and I spent part of a summer there in 1997 as a Pew Evangelical Younger Scholar. I grew up in the Roman Catholic Church, maintain great affection for it and am proud to be part of the extended family of Notre Dame. President Obama’s speech has received much attention, deservedly so, but let me quote from the other President on the platform that day, the President of Notre Dame, Father John Jenkins, who introduced the President of the US. He directly addressed the core issue raised by a celebration of Memorial Day or any national celebration:
More than any problem in the arts or sciences - engineering or medicine – easing the hateful divisions between human beings is the supreme challenge of this age. If we can solve this problem, we have a chance to come together and solve all the others.
A Catholic university – and its graduates – are specially called, and I believe specially equipped, to help meet this challenge.
As a Catholic university, we are part of the Church – members of the “mystical body of Christ” animated by our faith in the Gospel. Yet we are also – most of us – citizens of the United States – this extraordinary evolving expression of human freedom. We are called to serve each community of which we’re a part, and this call is captured in the motto over the door of the east nave of the Basilica: “God, Country, Notre Dame.”
There are some extraordinary phrases in these three paragraphs:
“As a Catholic university, we are part of the Church - members of the “mystical body of Christ” animated by our faith in the Gospel.”
He did not say “As a Catholic University, we are part of the Roman Catholic Church,” which of course is a true statement; he said “As a Catholic university, we are part of the Church – members of the “mystical body of Christ.”
In other words, there is one Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. They were part of it at commencement at Notre Dame. We are in it now. The Episcopalians down the street – they’re in it, too. The Catholics one street over, they, too are in it. Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, we’re all in it. All of us: we’re the church. That’s what Father Jenkins said. God bless him.
“Yet we are also – most of us – citizens of the United States – this extraordinary evolving expression of human freedom.
This young President of ND has catapulted himself into the very thick of a very important and longstanding conversation about the meaning of America. The poetic phrase, this brilliant use of assonance, three initial e’s - in characterizing the United States, “this extraordinary evolving expression of human freedom” puts him in the company of Abraham Lincoln, of George Marshall, of Thomas Jefferson – he’s with the immortals.
Then he clinchesd it:
“We are called to serve each community of which we’re a part, and this call is captured in the motto over the door of the east nave of the Basilica: ‘God, Country, Notre Dame.’”
With this introduction, President Jenkins challenged members of the ND community, members of the Roman Catholic Church, members of The Church, citizens of the United States and, in effect, citizens of the world, to respect one another despite our differences., not by ignoring our differences but by celebrating them:
God, country, Notre Dame. God, country, whatever your tertiary institution, California, Saint Helena, the Presbyterian Church, your neighborhood mosque or temple.
Our ability to listen respectfully to one another as Christians, as citizens of the United States, as citizens of the world, to be free, yet responsible people – that is the issue. As W. H. Auden put it in his poem at the beginning of World War II, “we must love one another or die.”
At only one time in our national history did we experience the breakdown of civility and we rightly call it the Civil War. A mere 80 year later the Second World War broke out, a war that threatened the existence of civility everywhere. Bearing in mind the words of President Father Jenkins, let us
ponder the quotations by Lincoln and Marshall in the bulletin, what Lincoln said in the midst of the Civil War and what General of the Army George C. Marshall said in the middle of the Second World War.
Upon the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg in November of 1863, several months after the battle, Lincoln reassured the American people, despite the carnage of this war
“ . . . that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
He could have promised better economic times or greater power upon the world stage; these things indeed came. But he promised a new birth of freedom for all Americans, and, by implication, all people on earth.
George Marshall expanded on this theme some 80 years later:
“We are determined that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle, our flag will be recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming force on the other.”
Thus 425 years after Martin Luther propounded his views on Christian freedom, which sowed the seeds of the American Revolution, the American Army liberated Luther’s homeland from anti-Christian Nazism. Shortly thereafter the United States of America issued billions of dollars worth of loans and aid to ensure that the new Germany would not fall under the sway of another tyranny. After World War II, we did not create a desert and call it peace. This is what Marshall meant by saying that our flag would be recognized as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming force on the other.
This marked the entrance of America on to the stage of world power; and there we have been, for better or worse, ever since. To still say today that our flag is a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming force on the other . . . well, that is audacious to say the least, but that is a good characterization of what we are attempting.
Now if we are to have any hope of effectively wielding power throughout the world, we have to model the civil exercise of freedom at home. Not that we agree about everything, but that we can decently agree to disagree. A week ago, the Notre Dame community modeled this behavior. I don’t see how any university could have done any better. I assume that there were a few arrests of a few rumbustious souls, but acts of incivility were minimal. Those who disagreed with Presidents Jenkins and/or Obama were allowed their say. Some 2,000 people held their own exercises in one of the university’s quadrangles. Alumni threatened to withdraw their contributions. Bishops wrote him nasty letters. Well, such is the life of a university president.
The way President Jenkins endured the heat for extending his invitation and the way the student and alumni body at the Commencement responded to both Presidents made the University of Notre Dame an example for all of us to admire this Memorial Day Weekend.
Has this sort of thing happened before? One other example of surprising hospitality occurred a while ago when Jerry Falwell, the sort of clergyman we liberal Protestants love to hate, invited Ted Kennedy to the campus of Liberty University.
When have we liberals exercised this sort of hospitality? Well, yes, but I think we all could do this sort of thing more often. Yale, of course, invited alumnus George Bush to campus a few years ago, early in his presidency, igniting some sort of uproar. For my favorite case of liberal magnanimity I have to reach back in my memory to over forty years ago when the Harvard Lampoon invited John Wayne to Harvard at the height of the Vietnam War. The editor of the Lampoon drove John Wayne into Harvard Square on top of an army vehicle, where he was pelted with snow balls. He laughingly threw them back; gave a speech, took questions and made clever and funny responses. I don’t think anyone had any idea that the Duke had this sort of skill set in him. It did not affect the war, but comic relief in the gray February of 1967 was most welcome.
I am open to further education on the matter, but I fear that we theological liberals have not been as magnanimous as we could be and we have not had much sense of humor.
This memorial Day we ponder being Christian and being American. We ponder remarks by the now famous President Jenkins of Notre Dame, Abraham Lincoln, George Marshall, and, of course the words and example of Jesus. What can we conclude?
Whenever I am at a loss for a conclusion when the topic is the meaning of America, I usually turn to our own Walt Saint Paul Whitman. Listen to the following words from Leaves of Grass in the context of everything we have thought about this morning having to do with presidents and Americans and how we behave towards one another and how we act in the world:
“Other states indicate themselves in their deputies . . . . but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors . . . but always most in the common people. Their manners speech dress friendships -- the freshness and candor of their physiognomy -- the picturesque looseness of their carriage . . . their deathless attachment to freedom -- their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean -- the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states -- the fierceness of their roused resentment -- their curiosity and welcome of novelty -- their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy -- . . . the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors -- the fluency of their speech. . . their good temper and open-handedness -- the terrible significance of their elections -- the President's taking off his hat to them not they to him -- these too are unrhymed poetry.
The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.
It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.”
This memorial Day we remember with thanksgiving those who have come before us; we particularly remember those whose sacrifice has made this nation possible; we celebrate that we the people are the body of Christ and the greatest poem ever written; and it’s not fully written yet.
First Presbyterian Church
Saint Helena, California
The scriptures today [texts below] focus on the appointment of another apostle to replace Judas and, in the Gospel, a prayer by Jesus to the Father on behalf of those left behind to do his work, namely his disciples then and all the disciples to come. These are appropriate scriptures for Memorial Day, a day set aside in this country to remember those who served in time of war. They are also appropriate scriptures to help us remember and give thanks for all those who came before us, all the saints of our by now extremely long Christian history, those people who have made our gathering this morning possible.
2,000 years ago Jesus, the carpenter from Galilee, the son of Mary, the son of God, commissioned his first disciples and sent them into the world. Of course he did many other things. He healed the sick, he preached, he told little stories, he multiplied loaves and fishes, he was crucified, died and was buried. On the third day he rose again. Etc.
We all know this story, know it so well that we can recite it. Oftentimes in church we do, in the form of the Nicene Creed or something like it. If it were not for the witnesses, we would not know this story; we would know nothing of Jesus of Nazareth. We are here this morning because our parents, probably, taught us to pray, brought us to church or Sunday School or both. There is probably more to it than that. We probably received some instruction or inspiration as young adults and adults, from a teacher, from a chaplain, from an inspiring minister and congregation, whether early in life or later, and so here we are.
In an even wider picture, long before we were here and well beyond the relatively small circle of our families, other witnesses have made us possible, literally some 2,000 years and hundreds of millions of people worth of Christian experience and in the US of A, roughly 200 years of national experience. We are Christians and we are Americans – most of us, I presume – if there is a foreign national among us this morning, I hope you feel welcome on this Memorial Day Weekend, which we began to celebrate a few years after our Civil War, which officially ended exactly 144 years ago. It effectively ended with the surrender of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in early April, but it took a few weeks more to wrap things up. President Andrew Johnson declared hostilities at end on May 10th, whereupon planning began for the Grand Review of the Armies, which turned out to be the biggest parade that has ever taken place in Washington. It took two whole days to parade roughly 150,000 soldiers from the Capitol to the White House reviewing stand; one day for the armies of the eastern theater and another whole day for the westerners, and that parade took place on May 23rd and 24th, 1865. My great grandfather, Hiram Young of the 88th Indiana Infantry, was part of General Sherman’s Army and took part in that parade.
Likewise World War II came to a conclusion in May of 1945, 64 years ago; at least fighting stopped in the European Theater in early May after Hitler shot himself on April 30. Various German commanders tried to surrender to the British or the Americans and not to the Russians. Cease-fires were agreed to but General Eisenhower insisted that the surrender be unconditional and complete to all allied armed services simultaneously (as had been agreed by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin) and this finally happened on May 8th. There were victory parades of course, in Moscow, in Berlin, in London shortly thereafter. The official American parade took place in New York in January of 1946.
This shows you how much the world had changed in a mere 80 years. In May of 1865, the soldiers marched to Washington. It took a week or two, they camped along the banks of the Potomac, had their parade and went home. That was that. In May of 1945, soldiers still had to disarm millions of enemy soldiers, occupy and police hostile territory, set up a government, feed millions of hungry people and by the way, get ready to invade Japan. The war in the Pacific continued. I’m wearing a little replica of my Dad’s theater ribbon today, the Chine-Burma-India Theater, where the war continued and where my Dad continued to serve, in Calcutta, India, until 1946.
Memorial Day took place officially first on May 30, 1868 to honor the Civil War dead. It had its beginnings of course all over the United States – some time in May around the anniversary of the end of the war, and has evolved into a day to honor all of those who died in all of our nation’s wars. How could we not set aside some time to remember our great Civil War and the great, in effect World Civil War and those who brought these wars to a conclusion? And further, to think about the causes of wars and what we the living must do to avoid them in the future? Thus I placed the quotations from two great Americans in the bulletin this morning [texts below]. More on those quotations in a minute, but first let me add a contemporary quotation to our meditations this morning.
We are all aware that President Obama journeyed to Northern Indiana exactly a week ago to receive an honorary degree and give the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame. I followed this story with great interest for any number of reasons, not the least of which are the facts that my father graduated from the University of Notre Dame du Lac in 1935 and I spent part of a summer there in 1997 as a Pew Evangelical Younger Scholar. I grew up in the Roman Catholic Church, maintain great affection for it and am proud to be part of the extended family of Notre Dame. President Obama’s speech has received much attention, deservedly so, but let me quote from the other President on the platform that day, the President of Notre Dame, Father John Jenkins, who introduced the President of the US. He directly addressed the core issue raised by a celebration of Memorial Day or any national celebration:
More than any problem in the arts or sciences - engineering or medicine – easing the hateful divisions between human beings is the supreme challenge of this age. If we can solve this problem, we have a chance to come together and solve all the others.
A Catholic university – and its graduates – are specially called, and I believe specially equipped, to help meet this challenge.
As a Catholic university, we are part of the Church – members of the “mystical body of Christ” animated by our faith in the Gospel. Yet we are also – most of us – citizens of the United States – this extraordinary evolving expression of human freedom. We are called to serve each community of which we’re a part, and this call is captured in the motto over the door of the east nave of the Basilica: “God, Country, Notre Dame.”
There are some extraordinary phrases in these three paragraphs:
“As a Catholic university, we are part of the Church - members of the “mystical body of Christ” animated by our faith in the Gospel.”
He did not say “As a Catholic University, we are part of the Roman Catholic Church,” which of course is a true statement; he said “As a Catholic university, we are part of the Church – members of the “mystical body of Christ.”
In other words, there is one Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. They were part of it at commencement at Notre Dame. We are in it now. The Episcopalians down the street – they’re in it, too. The Catholics one street over, they, too are in it. Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, we’re all in it. All of us: we’re the church. That’s what Father Jenkins said. God bless him.
“Yet we are also – most of us – citizens of the United States – this extraordinary evolving expression of human freedom.
This young President of ND has catapulted himself into the very thick of a very important and longstanding conversation about the meaning of America. The poetic phrase, this brilliant use of assonance, three initial e’s - in characterizing the United States, “this extraordinary evolving expression of human freedom” puts him in the company of Abraham Lincoln, of George Marshall, of Thomas Jefferson – he’s with the immortals.
Then he clinchesd it:
“We are called to serve each community of which we’re a part, and this call is captured in the motto over the door of the east nave of the Basilica: ‘God, Country, Notre Dame.’”
With this introduction, President Jenkins challenged members of the ND community, members of the Roman Catholic Church, members of The Church, citizens of the United States and, in effect, citizens of the world, to respect one another despite our differences., not by ignoring our differences but by celebrating them:
God, country, Notre Dame. God, country, whatever your tertiary institution, California, Saint Helena, the Presbyterian Church, your neighborhood mosque or temple.
Our ability to listen respectfully to one another as Christians, as citizens of the United States, as citizens of the world, to be free, yet responsible people – that is the issue. As W. H. Auden put it in his poem at the beginning of World War II, “we must love one another or die.”
At only one time in our national history did we experience the breakdown of civility and we rightly call it the Civil War. A mere 80 year later the Second World War broke out, a war that threatened the existence of civility everywhere. Bearing in mind the words of President Father Jenkins, let us
ponder the quotations by Lincoln and Marshall in the bulletin, what Lincoln said in the midst of the Civil War and what General of the Army George C. Marshall said in the middle of the Second World War.
Upon the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg in November of 1863, several months after the battle, Lincoln reassured the American people, despite the carnage of this war
“ . . . that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
He could have promised better economic times or greater power upon the world stage; these things indeed came. But he promised a new birth of freedom for all Americans, and, by implication, all people on earth.
George Marshall expanded on this theme some 80 years later:
“We are determined that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle, our flag will be recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming force on the other.”
Thus 425 years after Martin Luther propounded his views on Christian freedom, which sowed the seeds of the American Revolution, the American Army liberated Luther’s homeland from anti-Christian Nazism. Shortly thereafter the United States of America issued billions of dollars worth of loans and aid to ensure that the new Germany would not fall under the sway of another tyranny. After World War II, we did not create a desert and call it peace. This is what Marshall meant by saying that our flag would be recognized as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming force on the other.
This marked the entrance of America on to the stage of world power; and there we have been, for better or worse, ever since. To still say today that our flag is a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of overwhelming force on the other . . . well, that is audacious to say the least, but that is a good characterization of what we are attempting.
Now if we are to have any hope of effectively wielding power throughout the world, we have to model the civil exercise of freedom at home. Not that we agree about everything, but that we can decently agree to disagree. A week ago, the Notre Dame community modeled this behavior. I don’t see how any university could have done any better. I assume that there were a few arrests of a few rumbustious souls, but acts of incivility were minimal. Those who disagreed with Presidents Jenkins and/or Obama were allowed their say. Some 2,000 people held their own exercises in one of the university’s quadrangles. Alumni threatened to withdraw their contributions. Bishops wrote him nasty letters. Well, such is the life of a university president.
The way President Jenkins endured the heat for extending his invitation and the way the student and alumni body at the Commencement responded to both Presidents made the University of Notre Dame an example for all of us to admire this Memorial Day Weekend.
Has this sort of thing happened before? One other example of surprising hospitality occurred a while ago when Jerry Falwell, the sort of clergyman we liberal Protestants love to hate, invited Ted Kennedy to the campus of Liberty University.
When have we liberals exercised this sort of hospitality? Well, yes, but I think we all could do this sort of thing more often. Yale, of course, invited alumnus George Bush to campus a few years ago, early in his presidency, igniting some sort of uproar. For my favorite case of liberal magnanimity I have to reach back in my memory to over forty years ago when the Harvard Lampoon invited John Wayne to Harvard at the height of the Vietnam War. The editor of the Lampoon drove John Wayne into Harvard Square on top of an army vehicle, where he was pelted with snow balls. He laughingly threw them back; gave a speech, took questions and made clever and funny responses. I don’t think anyone had any idea that the Duke had this sort of skill set in him. It did not affect the war, but comic relief in the gray February of 1967 was most welcome.
I am open to further education on the matter, but I fear that we theological liberals have not been as magnanimous as we could be and we have not had much sense of humor.
This memorial Day we ponder being Christian and being American. We ponder remarks by the now famous President Jenkins of Notre Dame, Abraham Lincoln, George Marshall, and, of course the words and example of Jesus. What can we conclude?
Whenever I am at a loss for a conclusion when the topic is the meaning of America, I usually turn to our own Walt Saint Paul Whitman. Listen to the following words from Leaves of Grass in the context of everything we have thought about this morning having to do with presidents and Americans and how we behave towards one another and how we act in the world:
“Other states indicate themselves in their deputies . . . . but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors . . . but always most in the common people. Their manners speech dress friendships -- the freshness and candor of their physiognomy -- the picturesque looseness of their carriage . . . their deathless attachment to freedom -- their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean -- the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states -- the fierceness of their roused resentment -- their curiosity and welcome of novelty -- their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy -- . . . the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors -- the fluency of their speech. . . their good temper and open-handedness -- the terrible significance of their elections -- the President's taking off his hat to them not they to him -- these too are unrhymed poetry.
The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.
It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.”
This memorial Day we remember with thanksgiving those who have come before us; we particularly remember those whose sacrifice has made this nation possible; we celebrate that we the people are the body of Christ and the greatest poem ever written; and it’s not fully written yet.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Washington Journal
The Torch Has Been Passed
President Barack Hussein Obama has now taken the oath of office, concluding with the words, “So help me God.” Chief Justice John G. Roberts, the first Roman Catholic chief justice, administered the oath. Forty-eight years have passed since John F. Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic president, concluded the oath of office prescribed by the Constitution, as have all presidents since Franklin Roosevelt and most before, with the words “So help me God.” President Kennedy began his remarks immediately thereafter with a specific reference to this oath, thereby reassuring Protestant America that he was no different from those who came before:
We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom-- symbolizing an end as well as a beginning--signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago.
Religion was on everyone’s mind during the election of 1960, but race was also a decisive factor. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. had intended to vote for Richard Nixon because, like many other Protestant clergymen of that day, he did not think that a Roman Catholic should be president. Then his son, Martin Jr., was arrested in Atlanta on October 26, 1960 at a lunch counter sit-in. After several days, the merchants involved dropped the charges and everyone, some 280 students plus Dr. King, were released.
Except that it was discovered that Dr. King had violated his parole from a previous arrest, for driving in Georgia with an Alabama license. So he was taken, in chains, to a state prison. Many feared for his life under such circumstances. This obviously came at a critical time in a close election. While Vice-President Nixon chose not to mention the matter, Senator Kennedy made a phone call to Mrs. King and brother Robert made some lawyerly inquiries of the authorities. King was released. Then Martin Senior spoke to the press:
“Because this man was willing to wipe the tears from my daughter-in-law’s eyes, I’ve got a suitcase of votes, and I’m going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap.”
Forty-eight years later, that suitcase has grown to immense proportions.
President Obama’s entire life, from conception and birth to the present, has taken place in those forty-eight years since John F. Kennedy brought the nation to its feet with his remarkable address on a similarly cold and sunny winter day. The Cold War was at its utmost intensity. Only one sentence of that remarkable address dealt with domestic policy. The rest focussed on our struggle with the Soviet Union, with Marxism, international communism, the specter that had been haunting Europe for over a century. Yet remarkable changes soon swept the country unleashed by the energetic and charismatic young president.
On that January 20, 1961, I was in the fourth grade at Sanford E. Merrill Elementary School in Park Ridge, Illinois. I walked home for lunch that winter day, as did all the kids in the school. We all lived within a mile of this red-brick school with a classical portico for a front door and a framed photograph of Sanford E. Merrill, who I believe was superintendent of schools in some distant decade, in the entryway. There were two classrooms for each grade, K through Six. Mom had the television on when I walked in the door and we, along with my brother, who was in the sixth grade, watched the inaugural parade as we ate lunch. I remember images of the President’s motorcade leaving the Capitol and PT-109 on a float parading down Pennsylvania Avenue accompanied by crew members and sailors in uniform.
A child of nine today is as far removed from that event as I was then from the inauguration of President Wilson in 1913. In the following forty-eight years, the United States went from being a potential world power to being a superpower that had twice landed expeditionary forces on the continent of Europe and welcomed them home victorious. The United States had put Europe back on its feet and was unquestionably the leader of the free world yet faced a powerful and belligerent coalition of opponents led by the Soviet Union, whose massive army had crushed Nazi Germany only fifteen years before.
From 1961 until today, we have seen our old adversary, the Soviet Union disappear and Red China join the practitioners of capitalism. A new adversary, terrorist Islam, has arisen. We also find ourselves in the midst of an almost unimaginable and barely explicable economic crisis. We have made extraordinary changes in our society and culture, probably greater than those made in the previous forty-eight years. Women are working in greater numbers and higher pay scales. African-Americans are accepted at levels of society and government. The sexual revolution took off in the 1960s, and proceeds apace.
Along with the giddying pace of social change, there is great concern for the survival of local customs and institutions in the age of the internet, much argument over the role of religious figures, institutions and ideas in public life, much concern about the ability of government and education to accommodate the unceasing and vertiginous waves of technological and cultural change. At the local level, people are as concerned as ever about schools, how to prepare children for the future while giving them a sense of the nation’s past, how to achieve the appropriate ethnic, cultural, racial, linguistic and economic mix, and at what price of transporting kids to and fro, and whose decision this is, what role the courts play in deciding who decides and what.
How many children today walk home from school to eat a lunch prepared by their mothers? Is this good or bad?
At this time, along with much soul-searching, finger-pointing and trepidation over said economic crisis, and other crises, and after a seemingly interminable election campaign, the American people have entrusted their leadership to this tall, handsome man from Kansas, Hawaii, Indonesia, southern California, New York City, Cambridge and Chicago, a man as close to being the American Everyman as anyone could imagine. How will a child of nine today look back on this presidency in 2056?
I have not written much about this new president because I am still having trouble believing all that has happened since he announced his campaign some two years ago. Just witnessing the transition that began in November has been unbelievable enough. Suddenly, when his eight years were almost up, here was a gracious and communicative President Bush. Where had this man been all these years? I could not help wondering about a presidency that might have been. He promised to be a uniter, not a divider, way back when, remember?
Now, several weeks after the inauguration, the focus is on the presidency that is and will be. Barack Obama looks like a president, talks like a president and walks like a president. He seems supremely comfortable in his new role, as does his family. William Kristol, a sharp-tongued conservative commentator, has written admiringly of Obama’s political talent. I do not know the story behind his departure from the editorial page of the New York Times, but he seems to be signaling that he will find other things to do for a while and wishes this president well.
There will, of course, be plenty of opposition to his policies. There already is. One cannot be successful without creating some opposition and one cannot expect a president to change the attitude and behavior of the opposition party. But by sounding a consistent theme and maintaining a consistent public persona, a president can accomplish much. There is every reason to believe that Obama is embarking on a presidency of the scale of Eisenhower’s, Reagan’s or Clinton’s in terms of consistent personal popularity.
Comparisons to President Kennedy are inevitable at this point, with Obama’s youth, athleticism, oratory, Ivy-League education and Ivy-League retainers. Back in 1993, when another very smart Democrat took office, many commentators noted the Vietnam disaster that followed the Kennedy presidency, brought on by the best and brightest of the Kennedy brain trust, the very advisers who had so admirably managed the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet no major national disaster occurred on Clinton’s watch. He was a popular president and his economic policies worked so well that they helped him to weather the self-inflicted wounds of his personal life.
Sixteen years later similar concerns have been raised by that school of thought that presumes minimalism to be safer than bold attempts at sweeping change. It is worth noting then, that the Vietnam debacle really unfolded after Kennedy was dead and that his advisers and President Johnson were following the conventional wisdom of the day that Communism had to be met and defeated wherever it reared its ugly head. America’s entire foreign policy establishment initially supported sending combat troops to Vietnam, as did most newspaper editorials, Time magazine and many others.
As an adult now of fifty-seven, I would not trade those thousand wonderful, giddy days of the Kennedy presidency for any other time in my life, whatever came afterward. If the Obama presidency is only half as inspiring, it will be a success.
Now President Obama faces the most severe combination of foreign and domestic crises since Franklin Roosevelt. He has a faltering economy and two shooting wars on his hands and there is no consensus about how to proceed. His greatest challenges lie in countries that no one thought particularly important back in 1961. He will need all the help he can get.
Which brings me back to where I began.
Much has been made of the fact that a conservative white Christian clergyman and a liberal black Christian clergyman, both Protestants, offered invocation and benediction on January 20th, 2009. I thought they each spoke well, but could have said more by saying less. Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and Jews have been offering prayer and benediction at inaugurations since President Roosevelt instituted the practice in 1937. Perhaps he decided that the nation could use all the help it could get in the middle of the Depression. His choice for the first invocation: The Rev. ZeBarney Phillips, Chaplain of the Senate; for the benediction, Father John A. Ryan of Catholic University.
President Eisenhower began his inaugural address in 1953 by asking everyone to bow their heads while he prayed aloud. He did this, astoundingly, when he was technically not a Christian. He was baptized several days later, on February 1, at National Presbyterian Church, then on Connecticut Avenue. President Kennedy’s inauguration featured no less than three invocations, led by Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston, followed by Iakovos, Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church of North and South America, followed by John Barclay, Pastor of Central Christian Church, Austin, Texas. A benediction by Rabbi Nelson Glueck, President of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, concluded the proceedings. Remember it was even colder that day.
Everything that happens on inauguration day (except for the taking of the oath, which must happen) is the prerogative of the President. The President is free to say “So help me God,” or not; place his hand on a Bible, or not; pray, or not; hold a parade, or not; patronize inaugural balls, or not. Should an atheist gain the highest office of the land, (s)he is free to affirm the oath and leave the rest out. If a strict Baptist is elected president, he does not have to dance.
This first African-American president has chosen to reassure the approximately 90% of Americans who profess a belief in God or identify with a religion that he shares their faith and respects their observance.
It’s a free country.
The Torch Has Been Passed
President Barack Hussein Obama has now taken the oath of office, concluding with the words, “So help me God.” Chief Justice John G. Roberts, the first Roman Catholic chief justice, administered the oath. Forty-eight years have passed since John F. Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic president, concluded the oath of office prescribed by the Constitution, as have all presidents since Franklin Roosevelt and most before, with the words “So help me God.” President Kennedy began his remarks immediately thereafter with a specific reference to this oath, thereby reassuring Protestant America that he was no different from those who came before:
We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom-- symbolizing an end as well as a beginning--signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago.
Religion was on everyone’s mind during the election of 1960, but race was also a decisive factor. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. had intended to vote for Richard Nixon because, like many other Protestant clergymen of that day, he did not think that a Roman Catholic should be president. Then his son, Martin Jr., was arrested in Atlanta on October 26, 1960 at a lunch counter sit-in. After several days, the merchants involved dropped the charges and everyone, some 280 students plus Dr. King, were released.
Except that it was discovered that Dr. King had violated his parole from a previous arrest, for driving in Georgia with an Alabama license. So he was taken, in chains, to a state prison. Many feared for his life under such circumstances. This obviously came at a critical time in a close election. While Vice-President Nixon chose not to mention the matter, Senator Kennedy made a phone call to Mrs. King and brother Robert made some lawyerly inquiries of the authorities. King was released. Then Martin Senior spoke to the press:
“Because this man was willing to wipe the tears from my daughter-in-law’s eyes, I’ve got a suitcase of votes, and I’m going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap.”
Forty-eight years later, that suitcase has grown to immense proportions.
President Obama’s entire life, from conception and birth to the present, has taken place in those forty-eight years since John F. Kennedy brought the nation to its feet with his remarkable address on a similarly cold and sunny winter day. The Cold War was at its utmost intensity. Only one sentence of that remarkable address dealt with domestic policy. The rest focussed on our struggle with the Soviet Union, with Marxism, international communism, the specter that had been haunting Europe for over a century. Yet remarkable changes soon swept the country unleashed by the energetic and charismatic young president.
On that January 20, 1961, I was in the fourth grade at Sanford E. Merrill Elementary School in Park Ridge, Illinois. I walked home for lunch that winter day, as did all the kids in the school. We all lived within a mile of this red-brick school with a classical portico for a front door and a framed photograph of Sanford E. Merrill, who I believe was superintendent of schools in some distant decade, in the entryway. There were two classrooms for each grade, K through Six. Mom had the television on when I walked in the door and we, along with my brother, who was in the sixth grade, watched the inaugural parade as we ate lunch. I remember images of the President’s motorcade leaving the Capitol and PT-109 on a float parading down Pennsylvania Avenue accompanied by crew members and sailors in uniform.
A child of nine today is as far removed from that event as I was then from the inauguration of President Wilson in 1913. In the following forty-eight years, the United States went from being a potential world power to being a superpower that had twice landed expeditionary forces on the continent of Europe and welcomed them home victorious. The United States had put Europe back on its feet and was unquestionably the leader of the free world yet faced a powerful and belligerent coalition of opponents led by the Soviet Union, whose massive army had crushed Nazi Germany only fifteen years before.
From 1961 until today, we have seen our old adversary, the Soviet Union disappear and Red China join the practitioners of capitalism. A new adversary, terrorist Islam, has arisen. We also find ourselves in the midst of an almost unimaginable and barely explicable economic crisis. We have made extraordinary changes in our society and culture, probably greater than those made in the previous forty-eight years. Women are working in greater numbers and higher pay scales. African-Americans are accepted at levels of society and government. The sexual revolution took off in the 1960s, and proceeds apace.
Along with the giddying pace of social change, there is great concern for the survival of local customs and institutions in the age of the internet, much argument over the role of religious figures, institutions and ideas in public life, much concern about the ability of government and education to accommodate the unceasing and vertiginous waves of technological and cultural change. At the local level, people are as concerned as ever about schools, how to prepare children for the future while giving them a sense of the nation’s past, how to achieve the appropriate ethnic, cultural, racial, linguistic and economic mix, and at what price of transporting kids to and fro, and whose decision this is, what role the courts play in deciding who decides and what.
How many children today walk home from school to eat a lunch prepared by their mothers? Is this good or bad?
At this time, along with much soul-searching, finger-pointing and trepidation over said economic crisis, and other crises, and after a seemingly interminable election campaign, the American people have entrusted their leadership to this tall, handsome man from Kansas, Hawaii, Indonesia, southern California, New York City, Cambridge and Chicago, a man as close to being the American Everyman as anyone could imagine. How will a child of nine today look back on this presidency in 2056?
I have not written much about this new president because I am still having trouble believing all that has happened since he announced his campaign some two years ago. Just witnessing the transition that began in November has been unbelievable enough. Suddenly, when his eight years were almost up, here was a gracious and communicative President Bush. Where had this man been all these years? I could not help wondering about a presidency that might have been. He promised to be a uniter, not a divider, way back when, remember?
Now, several weeks after the inauguration, the focus is on the presidency that is and will be. Barack Obama looks like a president, talks like a president and walks like a president. He seems supremely comfortable in his new role, as does his family. William Kristol, a sharp-tongued conservative commentator, has written admiringly of Obama’s political talent. I do not know the story behind his departure from the editorial page of the New York Times, but he seems to be signaling that he will find other things to do for a while and wishes this president well.
There will, of course, be plenty of opposition to his policies. There already is. One cannot be successful without creating some opposition and one cannot expect a president to change the attitude and behavior of the opposition party. But by sounding a consistent theme and maintaining a consistent public persona, a president can accomplish much. There is every reason to believe that Obama is embarking on a presidency of the scale of Eisenhower’s, Reagan’s or Clinton’s in terms of consistent personal popularity.
Comparisons to President Kennedy are inevitable at this point, with Obama’s youth, athleticism, oratory, Ivy-League education and Ivy-League retainers. Back in 1993, when another very smart Democrat took office, many commentators noted the Vietnam disaster that followed the Kennedy presidency, brought on by the best and brightest of the Kennedy brain trust, the very advisers who had so admirably managed the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet no major national disaster occurred on Clinton’s watch. He was a popular president and his economic policies worked so well that they helped him to weather the self-inflicted wounds of his personal life.
Sixteen years later similar concerns have been raised by that school of thought that presumes minimalism to be safer than bold attempts at sweeping change. It is worth noting then, that the Vietnam debacle really unfolded after Kennedy was dead and that his advisers and President Johnson were following the conventional wisdom of the day that Communism had to be met and defeated wherever it reared its ugly head. America’s entire foreign policy establishment initially supported sending combat troops to Vietnam, as did most newspaper editorials, Time magazine and many others.
As an adult now of fifty-seven, I would not trade those thousand wonderful, giddy days of the Kennedy presidency for any other time in my life, whatever came afterward. If the Obama presidency is only half as inspiring, it will be a success.
Now President Obama faces the most severe combination of foreign and domestic crises since Franklin Roosevelt. He has a faltering economy and two shooting wars on his hands and there is no consensus about how to proceed. His greatest challenges lie in countries that no one thought particularly important back in 1961. He will need all the help he can get.
Which brings me back to where I began.
Much has been made of the fact that a conservative white Christian clergyman and a liberal black Christian clergyman, both Protestants, offered invocation and benediction on January 20th, 2009. I thought they each spoke well, but could have said more by saying less. Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and Jews have been offering prayer and benediction at inaugurations since President Roosevelt instituted the practice in 1937. Perhaps he decided that the nation could use all the help it could get in the middle of the Depression. His choice for the first invocation: The Rev. ZeBarney Phillips, Chaplain of the Senate; for the benediction, Father John A. Ryan of Catholic University.
President Eisenhower began his inaugural address in 1953 by asking everyone to bow their heads while he prayed aloud. He did this, astoundingly, when he was technically not a Christian. He was baptized several days later, on February 1, at National Presbyterian Church, then on Connecticut Avenue. President Kennedy’s inauguration featured no less than three invocations, led by Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston, followed by Iakovos, Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church of North and South America, followed by John Barclay, Pastor of Central Christian Church, Austin, Texas. A benediction by Rabbi Nelson Glueck, President of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, concluded the proceedings. Remember it was even colder that day.
Everything that happens on inauguration day (except for the taking of the oath, which must happen) is the prerogative of the President. The President is free to say “So help me God,” or not; place his hand on a Bible, or not; pray, or not; hold a parade, or not; patronize inaugural balls, or not. Should an atheist gain the highest office of the land, (s)he is free to affirm the oath and leave the rest out. If a strict Baptist is elected president, he does not have to dance.
This first African-American president has chosen to reassure the approximately 90% of Americans who profess a belief in God or identify with a religion that he shares their faith and respects their observance.
It’s a free country.
Friday, January 2, 2009
In Search of a Sense of Place
Washington Journal
I flew to the Midwest in October for the burial and memorial service for my mother’s last surviving sister. Aunt Virginia died at 93 and had been quite active until recently. She bought a new car just four years ago, using it to drive to the Central Christian Church and to the grocery store in Seymour, a town in southern Indiana spawned by the crossing of the Baltimore and Ohio and the Pennsylvania Railroads in the mid-19th Century. I remember a thriving downtown from family visits when Eisenhower was president, but Seymour is now flanked by Interstate 65 and shopping centers and the downtown looks deserted. Nonetheless, the rest of this small city seems healthy enough with a new high school and rows of wood frame houses with front porches shaded by towering archways of trees. For me, my brother and my two cousins, it is a town full of good memories.
Virginia Green Otto was born in 1915, the second of three daughters to David Green and Nellie Humes Green. My mother was the first, born in 1911 and my Aunt LaDonna was born in 1917. David and Nellie died in the flu epidemic in 1919 or shortly thereafter. None of the girls could remember exactly. What they all remembered was their grandmother, Carrie Berkeley Humes, taking them into her house just down the road on East Third Street in Seymour and various aunts and uncles, of which there were seven, plus a great uncle or two, sending money periodically to keep the girls out of the orphanage.
Virginia married Donald Otto, also of Seymour, in the early 1930s. They had no children because Donald, whom everyone called Beanie, did not want any, or so Mom said. So my brother Steven and LaDonna’s two children, Dick and Donna, were the closest kinfolk who gathered with spouses and a couple of now grown children for the brief burial service at the cemetery, which we had all visited many times. It was a gorgeous afternoon, sunny and warm, not just sort of warm but eighty-plus degrees warm, Indian summer with the leaves turning and the fields a golden yellow.
There is something about a burial, as opposed to the increasingly popular cremation that imparts the unmistakable sense of a life’s trajectory. For Virginia, as for her sisters, life began at a small house on East Third Street. She went away to Franklin College and for a few years to Cincinnati, but for most of her adult years she lived at 215 Johnson Street. She played golf and tennis when younger and remained active in her church throughout her life. She and Beanie loved to go to the horse races. Whenever they visited us in the Chicago area, they would go to Arlington Park. By one of life’s happier coincidences, I walked in the door of her new duplex at the Lutheran Home several years ago a few minutes before the start of the Kentucky Derby. We each had a beer and watched on her little television in the kitchen.
When Uncle Don died over twenty years ago, she stayed in that little white clapboard house on Johnson Street until recently, when she moved into a duplex at the Lutheran Home on the other side of town. On family occasions she still had so much stamina that we took to referring to her as the “energizer bunny.” Immediately upon my arrival on another occasion, we set out for a brisk walk around the neighborhood. It was close to 90 degrees and humid.
She died there on October 4, and now lies here, next to her husband in Riverside Cemetery. Not scattered somewhere, but here, on this piece of land, under this stone, next to her husband, among her ancestors, where the leaves now turn and birds and insects sing. Here.
The cousins went to dinner afterward at the Story Inn, some twenty miles north and east of Seymour in Brown County. The Inn advertises itself as being “in one inconvenient location since 1851.” It appears that the inn and restaurant actually opened for business in the old general store some thirty years ago, but who can quibble with great advertising? The restaurant consisted of two large rooms set with white table cloths and fine crystal amidst assorted junk still on the shelves from the old general store. Three college kids performed classical music inside on the flute, violin and keyboard, while outside a bar served up beer in bottles to a couple dozen bikers. Thus all generations and social classes come to the Story Inn.
After everyone else had left I sat in the foyer for at least an hour listening to the music and taking in the atmosphere. The place intensely reminded me of Vermont and New Hampshire, where I lived for about a decade. After a while I found some paper and took note of the following:
A hornet’s nest next to the door (no hornets)
Working Coke machine that delivered Coke in the old hour-glass bottles
A huge glass jar full of corks
Blackboard with dessert menu
Antique baby buggy suspended from the ceiling, below which sat two kids playing checkers with bottle caps
Working dial pay phone with slots for nickels, dimes and quarters
Cast iron letter box
Magazines in old wooden ammunition boxes
Photograph of the children of the one room Storey school, ca 1910
Old Standard Oil pumps out front, with illuminated glass crowns on top, meter reading 40.9¢ per gallon
Shelves full of old bottles, brown beer and cough syrup bottles, blue Vicks Vapo-Rub jars with faded wrappers, various indistinct green bottles; cigar boxes, more ammunition boxes; various tools and implements, more jars, gadgets, gewgaws, krimkrams, whatsits, flooglemeisers, whatchacallits, thingamajigs . . .
In addition to grief for the passing of Virginia and for the knowledge of life’s fragility and brevity, I was swept by a powerful sense of peace and gratitude for the beauty of this land, for my family, for their stories, for us the living standing under the trees, where the sunshine felt warm on dark slacks and coats, amidst rows of stones marked with family names: Green, Humes, Burkley, Schneck, Martin, Otto.
I flew back to California the next day, taking the bus from San Francisco Airport up to the Napa Valley, which became my home in the spring. I picked up the battered old Toyota pickup – 300,000 miles on it, a beaut -- I had been driving all summer and stopped at Peet’s Coffee, where a deep, dark, creamy, complex triple espresso brought me back to life, then drove up Highway 29 to Saint Helena, stopping at the health spa where I work for a swim and a hot soak. There is not a lot to do in the Napa Valley besides eat and drink, hike and bike, and drop into one of numerous of spas and health clubs that dot the valley floor along with wineries and restaurants. But one does all of these things extremely well and I have grown to love the place.
I spent much of last winter in Washington working on applications for various fellowships, networking, getting around town to attend the literally dozens of panels, lectures and presentations that take place in the nation’s capital. When it became clear in May that none of these applications was likely to yield anything soon, I departed for Napa and settled in for a good six months. It was summer when I arrived in May and still essentially summer in November when the anticipation of a new administration pulled me back to Washington for another try.
(That’s right. Those columns I wrote this summer “from Washington” were written in California. Heh-heh-heh.)
I got to know the local restaurants and some of the bartenders, who were often happy to offer a taste of whatever wine was open, and grew accustomed to a glass of red wine after work. I met a lot of people through my landlord, who became a good friend, the sort of guy whom people spontaneously call “Dude!” The dude even lent me his truck, above. I also met a lot of people through the spa, the Rotary Club, and two churches in town, where I was invited to preach a couple of times.
Most days it was more than fun to practice massage in Saint Helena. It was warm enough to be outside in an enclosed garden. The setting is not as spectacular as at Esalen, where one works on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean, but it was very peaceful and allowed for deep and meditative work. Sometimes I describe this work as making the world a better place one body at a time, or use the Biblical concept of “tikkun olam,” – repairing the world.
Here in Washington it has been unusually cold, but the severe storms all passed to the north of us, as usual. The latest one is just giving us a dusting of snow and some freezing rain. My favorite liturgical experience of the Christmas season remains the service of lessons and carols broadcast live from King’s College, Cambridge. This year I was particularly struck by one of the prayers:
Lastly let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom, in this Lord Jesus, we for evermore are one.
I flew to the Midwest in October for the burial and memorial service for my mother’s last surviving sister. Aunt Virginia died at 93 and had been quite active until recently. She bought a new car just four years ago, using it to drive to the Central Christian Church and to the grocery store in Seymour, a town in southern Indiana spawned by the crossing of the Baltimore and Ohio and the Pennsylvania Railroads in the mid-19th Century. I remember a thriving downtown from family visits when Eisenhower was president, but Seymour is now flanked by Interstate 65 and shopping centers and the downtown looks deserted. Nonetheless, the rest of this small city seems healthy enough with a new high school and rows of wood frame houses with front porches shaded by towering archways of trees. For me, my brother and my two cousins, it is a town full of good memories.
Virginia Green Otto was born in 1915, the second of three daughters to David Green and Nellie Humes Green. My mother was the first, born in 1911 and my Aunt LaDonna was born in 1917. David and Nellie died in the flu epidemic in 1919 or shortly thereafter. None of the girls could remember exactly. What they all remembered was their grandmother, Carrie Berkeley Humes, taking them into her house just down the road on East Third Street in Seymour and various aunts and uncles, of which there were seven, plus a great uncle or two, sending money periodically to keep the girls out of the orphanage.
Virginia married Donald Otto, also of Seymour, in the early 1930s. They had no children because Donald, whom everyone called Beanie, did not want any, or so Mom said. So my brother Steven and LaDonna’s two children, Dick and Donna, were the closest kinfolk who gathered with spouses and a couple of now grown children for the brief burial service at the cemetery, which we had all visited many times. It was a gorgeous afternoon, sunny and warm, not just sort of warm but eighty-plus degrees warm, Indian summer with the leaves turning and the fields a golden yellow.
There is something about a burial, as opposed to the increasingly popular cremation that imparts the unmistakable sense of a life’s trajectory. For Virginia, as for her sisters, life began at a small house on East Third Street. She went away to Franklin College and for a few years to Cincinnati, but for most of her adult years she lived at 215 Johnson Street. She played golf and tennis when younger and remained active in her church throughout her life. She and Beanie loved to go to the horse races. Whenever they visited us in the Chicago area, they would go to Arlington Park. By one of life’s happier coincidences, I walked in the door of her new duplex at the Lutheran Home several years ago a few minutes before the start of the Kentucky Derby. We each had a beer and watched on her little television in the kitchen.
When Uncle Don died over twenty years ago, she stayed in that little white clapboard house on Johnson Street until recently, when she moved into a duplex at the Lutheran Home on the other side of town. On family occasions she still had so much stamina that we took to referring to her as the “energizer bunny.” Immediately upon my arrival on another occasion, we set out for a brisk walk around the neighborhood. It was close to 90 degrees and humid.
She died there on October 4, and now lies here, next to her husband in Riverside Cemetery. Not scattered somewhere, but here, on this piece of land, under this stone, next to her husband, among her ancestors, where the leaves now turn and birds and insects sing. Here.
The cousins went to dinner afterward at the Story Inn, some twenty miles north and east of Seymour in Brown County. The Inn advertises itself as being “in one inconvenient location since 1851.” It appears that the inn and restaurant actually opened for business in the old general store some thirty years ago, but who can quibble with great advertising? The restaurant consisted of two large rooms set with white table cloths and fine crystal amidst assorted junk still on the shelves from the old general store. Three college kids performed classical music inside on the flute, violin and keyboard, while outside a bar served up beer in bottles to a couple dozen bikers. Thus all generations and social classes come to the Story Inn.
After everyone else had left I sat in the foyer for at least an hour listening to the music and taking in the atmosphere. The place intensely reminded me of Vermont and New Hampshire, where I lived for about a decade. After a while I found some paper and took note of the following:
A hornet’s nest next to the door (no hornets)
Working Coke machine that delivered Coke in the old hour-glass bottles
A huge glass jar full of corks
Blackboard with dessert menu
Antique baby buggy suspended from the ceiling, below which sat two kids playing checkers with bottle caps
Working dial pay phone with slots for nickels, dimes and quarters
Cast iron letter box
Magazines in old wooden ammunition boxes
Photograph of the children of the one room Storey school, ca 1910
Old Standard Oil pumps out front, with illuminated glass crowns on top, meter reading 40.9¢ per gallon
Shelves full of old bottles, brown beer and cough syrup bottles, blue Vicks Vapo-Rub jars with faded wrappers, various indistinct green bottles; cigar boxes, more ammunition boxes; various tools and implements, more jars, gadgets, gewgaws, krimkrams, whatsits, flooglemeisers, whatchacallits, thingamajigs . . .
In addition to grief for the passing of Virginia and for the knowledge of life’s fragility and brevity, I was swept by a powerful sense of peace and gratitude for the beauty of this land, for my family, for their stories, for us the living standing under the trees, where the sunshine felt warm on dark slacks and coats, amidst rows of stones marked with family names: Green, Humes, Burkley, Schneck, Martin, Otto.
I flew back to California the next day, taking the bus from San Francisco Airport up to the Napa Valley, which became my home in the spring. I picked up the battered old Toyota pickup – 300,000 miles on it, a beaut -- I had been driving all summer and stopped at Peet’s Coffee, where a deep, dark, creamy, complex triple espresso brought me back to life, then drove up Highway 29 to Saint Helena, stopping at the health spa where I work for a swim and a hot soak. There is not a lot to do in the Napa Valley besides eat and drink, hike and bike, and drop into one of numerous of spas and health clubs that dot the valley floor along with wineries and restaurants. But one does all of these things extremely well and I have grown to love the place.
I spent much of last winter in Washington working on applications for various fellowships, networking, getting around town to attend the literally dozens of panels, lectures and presentations that take place in the nation’s capital. When it became clear in May that none of these applications was likely to yield anything soon, I departed for Napa and settled in for a good six months. It was summer when I arrived in May and still essentially summer in November when the anticipation of a new administration pulled me back to Washington for another try.
(That’s right. Those columns I wrote this summer “from Washington” were written in California. Heh-heh-heh.)
I got to know the local restaurants and some of the bartenders, who were often happy to offer a taste of whatever wine was open, and grew accustomed to a glass of red wine after work. I met a lot of people through my landlord, who became a good friend, the sort of guy whom people spontaneously call “Dude!” The dude even lent me his truck, above. I also met a lot of people through the spa, the Rotary Club, and two churches in town, where I was invited to preach a couple of times.
Most days it was more than fun to practice massage in Saint Helena. It was warm enough to be outside in an enclosed garden. The setting is not as spectacular as at Esalen, where one works on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean, but it was very peaceful and allowed for deep and meditative work. Sometimes I describe this work as making the world a better place one body at a time, or use the Biblical concept of “tikkun olam,” – repairing the world.
Here in Washington it has been unusually cold, but the severe storms all passed to the north of us, as usual. The latest one is just giving us a dusting of snow and some freezing rain. My favorite liturgical experience of the Christmas season remains the service of lessons and carols broadcast live from King’s College, Cambridge. This year I was particularly struck by one of the prayers:
Lastly let us remember before God all those who rejoice with us, but upon another shore and in a greater light, that multitude which no man can number, whose hope was in the Word made flesh, and with whom, in this Lord Jesus, we for evermore are one.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
