Views from a John

Losing Your Faith

2007-12-17T10:56:00.000-06:00

On the television a few nights ago, I heard that an atheist in the state of Washington had filed a law suit against the city of Seattle because the identification patch the volunteer police chaplains wear includes a cross. This kind of nonsense has become so common that I asked myself, “What makes that news?”

As the report progressed, I learned what made the story newsworthy. It wasn’t the lawsuit but the man who wanted the cross removed from the chaplain’s uniform. He had been a Lutheran pastor for 30-years! A Christian minister lost his faith?

As I reeled from that news report, I remembered a dinner a few months ago where a minister informed me and two other Christians at the table that he believed in the Church but not God.

Now I have heard a lot of people say they believe in God but not the institutional church. I have some understanding, even sympathy, for that sentiment, but not to believe in God while affirming the church was not only unusual, but puzzling. So I asked for an explanation.

The seminary graduate proceeded to laud the virtues and values of the church. He said it is a place to hear inspiring messages and to adopt a code of conduct to live by. He continued talking about how the church was an influence for good in the community, promotes ideals worthy of human striving, and a provides a great training ground for children and youth. The he mentioned the hospitals, schools, orphanages, food pantries, half-way houses, and social programs that are planted and nourished by churches. At the end of his praise for the church, his voice softened and he said, “But God …well, maybe he is and maybe he isn’t.”

Last Sunday, I worshipped with John the Baptist. Similar kind of guy with a similar story.

John the Baptist recognized Jesus was the Messiah before either was born and again when Jesus came to be baptized. Later, when John was in prison, he sent his friends to ask Jesus if he was, indeed, the Messiah. The clear implication is that John had lost his faith, perhaps while sitting in a prison cell reviewing his life.

Two ministers and John the Baptist – are their experiences common or exceptional? How would you answer? Do you know anyone who has lost his or her faith?

Let me ask the question in another way. Do you know anyone who taught Sunday school for years but doesn’t bother to read her Bible any more? Have you ever attended a funeral for a church member who didn’t even show up for Christmas or Easter worship? Ever notice how faith is often applied in fox holes, hospital rooms, wedding plans, and at family gatherings for weddings, baptisms, and funerals but not obvious anywhere else? If such people didn’t lose faith, they clearly lost something. Oh how I wish losing weight were as easy as losing faith seems to be.

At worship this morning, I heard the pastor read the story about John the Baptist sending disciples to Jesus to either confirm or deny that Jesus was the One-to-Come. While he read the familiar story, my mind went back to my encounters with ex-ministers. As a result of that mental excursion, I stumbled on the reason I was in worship this morning in spite of the snow and cold that I considered hiding under to excuse my absence.

I had been asking myself some profound questions in recent days. How does it feel to lose one’s faith? Can others see faith slipping away or is it a private experience? Is my faith better or worse, stronger or weaker, than it was 10, 30, even 60 years ago? Am I a 21st Century John the Baptist who has new and troubling questions about the identity and purpose of Jesus?

The conclusion the preacher offered me in worship was that when times are difficult and when faith fades, what is needed is a word from Jesus. His word to John the Baptist was something like this: “So you have some doubts and you wonder if what you once believed is still true. Of course you are sitting in a prison cell, undoubtedly discouraged and maybe confused. What you need is a different set of eyes, eyes to see beyond the prison wall, eyes to penetrate the darkness, eyes to take in a bigger world.”

After the story from Scripture, the preacher’s sermon, and my own reflections had settled in my soul, I heard Jesus speak a similar word to me. "Get another set of eyes."

If your faith is not what it once was, maybe you also need a different pair of eyes.

So it seems to me.

A weekend without church

2007-11-11T20:53:00.000-06:00

It has been a good Armistice Day weekend.

Let me count the reasons …

The University of Illinois football team traveled to Columbus, Ohio on Saturday and returned to Champaign with smiles on their faces. Since Illinois now seems destined for some bowl game invitation, Coach Zook will receive a $200,000 bonus. I wonder what an English professor will get for making it possible for most of the players to read their names in the Gazette.

The U of I played their season opening basketball game Sunday afternoon and won. The team had a slow start, racking up only 20 points in the first 20 minute period. In the second half of the game, they scored twice as many points. That was enough. I wish I had been a fly on the wall to hear what Coach Weber said in the halftime break. The difference in the team’s performance hinted that his locker room talk was a barn burner.

But the real put-me-over-the-top part of the weekend experience was that I watched the game live from the second from the top row of seats in Assembly Hall with my son sitting next to me. Actually, ever better than being at the game with my first-born was the two hour drive each way from Springfield to Champaign with my son that was the best part of the experience. Not often do I get to spend six or seven hours alone with him, so the weekend has been exceptional in several ways.

Is was Armistice Day and at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month my son and I talked about our military service. I always take some sinful pride that my son and I share a common experience of uniformed service to our country. I know some fathers who wish they could tell and listen to war stories with an understanding son. In the company of such men, a joyful kind of guilt sometimes arises in me as I try to imagine what that lack might mean.

At the end of the day, in a moment of reflection about the day, I had to deal with the fact that I missed worship this morning. After making a false start on a guilt trip, I realized that even the Heavenly Father missed the Sabbath worship in the temple that Friday night that his son lay in a tomb. At least spending time with a son put me in good company.

And the second point of my sermonic reflection gave me this take-home message. Just as I treasure today’s father-son time to chat, remember, and enjoy each other’s company, wouldn’t my Heavenly Father enjoy a little. special time alone with me?

I wonder if the preacher’s sermon at church this morning was as good as the one I experienced with my son Scott.

Shakertown Day 2

2007-10-31T13:01:00.000-06:00

October 28, 2007

A huge transom with clouded glass above the door to our room provided a “night light” aura and an easy escape from the repeated toe-stumping foray into the bathroom that marks a typical night for me.

In the middle of the night I removed my CPAP mask for some reason. Consequently, Carrol had a long period of sleep deprivation during the night and until I put the mask back on. The night’s events seem clear to Carrol, but are vague to me. Sleep apnea – you beast.

I was going to write this journal and check e-mail and got everything unpacked and then discovered that the electrical outlets in the room did not accept three-prong plugs. I had no adapter. Murphy’s Law has not been repealed!

Then things got better. Our reservation for breakfast was at 7:15 and we were on time.

It was a buffet – scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage patties, grits, biscuits, sausage gravy, fruit, juice (I had V-8) and coffee. Not the best breakfast, but more than we routinely eat in Springfield.

After breakfast and after asking the front desk if they could provide an adapter, we drove 33 miles to Danville in search of a church. We found several, but the one that had the most compatible schedule with ours was Grace Presbyterian Church, a PCA congregation. We attended an adult Sunday school class and was impressed with the elder who taught the class, the obvious caring for each other, and their familiarity with the Bible. We stayed for worship but did not find it impressive. On the plus side, no loud drums demanded ear plugs and no screen tried to dissuade us from thinking this was a house of worship. Earning our low ratings, however, was the absence of hymnbooks (words without music were printed in the four page worship program). The prevailing praise music consisted of tunes unfamiliar to us but at least presented more than one phrase repeated several times. A perfunctory nod to tradition was the singing of first and last verses of the traditional hymn, Amazing Grace. On that note, the worship hour was closed. The sermon was long in time but short in substance and consisted of a chain of clichés strung together in a manner that left one exhausted by listening to too many words competing for attention by the preacher’s increased volume and the stress laid on every other word.

Oh yes, this old traditionalist and lover of Reformed worship missed seeing a baptismal font, Communion Table, and pulpit in the chancel area. But, I suppose worship can be experienced in the presence of a podium and stage. (Now, now, John.)

Apparently we are simply out of step with younger Christians because young families outnumbered the grey-headed set. And certainly the Sunday school class provided something we can’t find in Presbyterian Churches in Illinois.

In our drive around Danville, we found Centre College, the Presbyterian college in town. This afternoon, the college was hosting the two gubernatorial candidates for a debate. The hot-button issue in the county, we learned at church, is the proposal that restaurants be allowed to serve alcohol with meals.

I thought of W.H. Auden’s observation that the tobacco farmers in the south are mostly Southern Baptists. I suppose he could have added that the workers in the distilleries around Danville, Kentucky are dry and sober Presbyterians.

At the Wal-Mart Supercenter, I bought an adapter, actually two in a package, to solve the electrical problem in our room.

Both Scott in Springfield and Joni in Washington, DC called us on our mobile phones and satisfied our need that someone be interested in what we do and where we go. Joni “text messaged” us so we had to learn one more damned feature of that telephone leash.

When we returned to the room, the maintenance guy had used a long extension cord that converted the two-hole outlet to a three-hole. Nice touch and a positive contribution to our stay.

Our dinner reservation was for 1:45 so we had time to browse the craft shop where one could buy Shaker boxes in more than a dozen different sizes, books about the Shaker experience, Shaker furniture, and Shaker cooking, plus all kinds of ceramic, fabric, and wood craft products made by Kentuckian artisans. Since we don’t collect mementoes and souvenirs any more, we walked out empty-handed and still financially solvent.

The menu for dinner was the same as last night’s evening meal, but with a different soup, cream of cabbage rather than seafood chowder, a corn, rather than pineapple, casserole. Brussel sprouts and red-skinned potatoes were new choices of vegetables.

Because the breakfast and dinner menu’s were the same each day, we cancelled our reservation for the evening and tomorrow’s breakfast.

Back in the room, Carrol finished the book she was reading, I wrote this journal, and we watched 60 Minutes. Carrol lugged the big suitcase down the 20 steps to the first floor and then to the car since we plan to leave early in the morning and eat breakfast on the road. All we have to carry tomorrow is CPAP bag, computer, and two little bags of make-up and shaving gear.

We are both satisfied that the trip fulfilled our intentions, not perfectly, but pretty well considering that we live on the earthly side of heaven. Soon, with Willie Nelson on our mind, we will be “On the road again …”

Visit to Shakertown

2007-10-30T09:25:00.000-06:00

I keep a diary of trips we take for two reasons. I have trouble remembering and I want something of mine to read when I am taken to the "home." Pretend you're feeble, frail, and bored and join me in a little weekend trip.

Travel Journal

Destination: Shakertown, KY
Start date: October 27, 2007
Travelers: Carrol and John
Goal of trip: Weekend Getaway

Saturday, October 27, 2007
We put Alex in the Dal-Acres West Kennel and got out of town about 9:30 this morning, prepared for a 7+ hour drive.

Second stop was at McDonald’s for an “old people’s coffee.” Seventy-six cents.

A near emergency precipitated a stop at an antique mall on Route 4 between I-55 and Lebanon. John rushed into the business and announced that “this old man needs a restroom in the worst way.” The owner said, “We have the worst restroom in Illinois. Help yourself. First door on your right.”

He was right on both counts; location and condition. I had a little trouble finding the light switch on the wall because the switch was a string hanging from the ceiling. I knew the string on a light was just the beginning of a nostalgic trip.

Thirty miles farther down the road at Lebanon, we stopped again to drain two bladders this time.

By the time we reached Mt. Vernon, it was lunchtime. Carrol had prepared a ham and Lorraine Swiss cheese on home-made bread so we thought we would pull into a McDonald’s parking lot, get something to drink, and eat our sandwich in the car. Unfortunately, a tour bus had dumped a load of hungry tourists at the counter. We postponed our planned drinking.

Before getting back on the road, we stopped at a gas station, picked up a 20-ounce bottle of Diet-Rite cola for me and a diet Dr. Pepper for Carrol, and switched seats. Carrol took us out of Illinois and well into Indiana on Interstate 64 before I woke up.

Somewhere between the Evansville exit and Louisville, we remembered how many times we had driven the crooked old US 460 through the hills of Southern Indiana between Laconia and Sparta and the Metro-East. I-64 has changed everything – traveling speed and ease, driving time, and scenery. Just like the changing leaves and life, travel changes too.

At the south side of the I-64 double-decked bridge across the Ohio, the milepost numbering started from zero. Watching for Exit 53, the rolling hills of Kentucky brought to mind the few years we called Kentucky, home. We have never driven through Kentucky that we didn’t both say something like, “I could live in Kentucky.”

Even after we left the Interstate at Exit 53, our new route, US 127 South,remained a four lane road until we reached Kentucky 68, 28 miles down the road. A curvy, hilly two lane road took us to Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, just as the Mapquest directions had said.

We checked into the Inn and were given directions to find the building where our room was. Neither of us remembered with certainty which building we stayed in the last time we were here. If not the same building, the area was clearly the same. Lugging bags up to the second floor we found our simply furnished room, Room 191.

Two single beds, two rocking chairs, a small writing table with chair, a nightstand, and a chest of drawers – that was the furniture. Oh yes, there was a small television perched atop a very un-Shaker-like bookshelf. Three electrified candles mounted on a Shaker candle sconces hanging from the pegs mounted on all four walls, a floor lamp, and a nightstand lamp provided an escape from darkness. The pine floor with one rag-rug, the Shaker pegs, and the bare walls made certain that guests understand the Shaker doctrine. “Odd or fanciful styles of architecture may not be used among believers. Beading, mouldings, and cornices which are merely for fancy may not be made by believers.”

The bathroom is small. So small, that the door will open only halfway because it hits the lavatory. The commode is smaller than normal, and to old people, too close to the floor.

Our dinner reservations were at 7:15 so we drove to the dining room and sat down to a candlelight dinner. Although the food was not noteworthy in taste, its uniqueness and ample servings will shape our memories of this weekend.

For starters, there was little cornbread sticks and a relish dish consisting of: pickled okra, olives, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, small carrots, cauliflower, picked baby corn, and grapes. Then an appetizer – Carrol had tomatoes and vinaigrette dressing and I had seafood chowder. The main course came with a pineapple casserole plus two other vegetables; Carrol had green beans and zucchini and I had rice pilaf and green beans. Carrol chose baked chicken and I opted for baked trout. Along with the main course, the server set pickled watermelon rinds and beets on the table. A basket of pumpkin muffins and cornbread offered a place to put the real butter. Of course, Carrol drank coffee and I had a Diet Coke.

Back in our room about 8:30, we rocked and read until bedtime. Chaim Potok and Thomas Hardy ended a good day for the Stahlmans. (The Clay and The Mayor of Casterbridge.)

That was Saturday. Tomorrow is "go to church" day. Come back tomorrow.

A Day Trip

2007-10-13T14:22:00.000-05:00

We left Springfield about 9:00 a. m. after eating our bowl of morning oatmeal at home. At the edge of town we stopped at McDonald’s to get an “old people’s” coffee for the road.

Avoiding Interstate 55, we drove south on Route 4, that between 1926 -1933, was part of historic Route 66. At Carlinville, we headed west on Route 108, then picked up Route 111, followed it through Brighton to Alton where we caught Route 3 that took us through Godfrey to Grafton.

Passing a sign on Route 3 advertising “Eckert’s Farm, 1 ½ miles,” we turned around and drove about a mile until we saw another sign with a picture of a big red apple on it. We turned at the sign and drove and drove and drove down a road that became narrower and narrower. At one point in a deep woods, a small sign at the side of the road read, “You’re not lost. Keep going. 1 mile.” Encouraged by the thoughtfulness of someone who understood human nature and confident that we were not the first ones to question our navigation skills, we kept forging forward. Finally, we arrived.

Not at Eckerts, but at a different orchard: Yates Farm. Not wanting to take advantage of the invitation to “pick your own,” we turned around and retraced our way back to Route 3 where we had seen the Eckert’s sign. Could we have misread the sign? Were we duped by our minds associating a picture of an apple with Eckert’s Farm? Is this an example of the confusion that afflicts old people?

No, we weren’t crazy and we hadn’t been hallucinating. The sign on the highway did, indeed, say “Eckert’s Farm, 1 ½ miles.”

We turned around again and set our minds on following the sign to Eckert’s. One mile in the right direction, where a few minutes earlier we had turned, some troll had in the last three minutes added beneath the painted red apple. “Yates Farm.”

“Huh?”

“I thought it read Eckert’s!”

“So did I.”

A look at the odometer I read 00.5, not 001.5. “We didn’t go far enough. Eckert’s is another mile ahead.”

Sure enough, a mile farther along the road, was a parking lot filled with school busses, vans, and cars –all bringing children, chaperones, and parents to find just the right pumpkin for Halloween, a bag of apples, or a jug of fresh apple cider. We had found Eckert’s just in time to save us from the attack on our self-confidence and the intensifying urge of Mother Nature. But we had been duped and confused by our own minds. Too many birthdays I guess.

John, with still dry pants, and Carrol, with somewhat restored confidence in a husband who doesn’t ask for directions or look at a map, returned to the road that took us to Grafton, a quaint little town on the banks of the Mississippi River. With several choices of places to eat lunch, we chose the Ruebel Hotel, a small, renovated, 22-room hotel with a dining room and saloon. We chose the saloon; Carrol because the dining room was closed and John because the waitresses in the saloon were blond.

After nourishing our bodies with a saucer-sized pork tenderloin, a platter full of fries, and a mom-sized dish of home-made cole-slaw, we drove around town, actually, up the town built on the face of several river bluffs. Phase II of a new condominium project sits on the bluff like a press room in the Nature’s stadium where residents can watch Old Man River push south to St. Louis. We didn’t buy one; too high.

Then we drove a few miles north on the Great River Road between the mighty Mississippi and a wide paved bicycle trail to Pere Marquette State Park. There we sat on the patio of the big stone lodge built by young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps between 1933 and 1939, watching the river go by, and soaking up a bit of bright sun that was trying to drive the autumn chill away.

Rested by the change of scenery, refreshed by each other’s company, and freed from cooking and repairing a mail box broken by vandals, we headed back to Springfield. In Godfrey, we stopped at Fritz’s for a fudge and malt concrete and a big vanilla malt. We agreed that was supper.

We pulled into the garage a few minutes before 5:00 o’clock.

Where was Jesus in the day’s experience? I don’t know. But I believe he was somewhere near, even though I didn’t see him.

on Library Fines

2007-09-23T16:14:00.000-05:00

I went to the public library this morning to return Gilead, a novel that had been on my “To Read List” for months. I intended to return the book earlier this week but procrastination and a one day closing of the library installed another brick in the road to Hades. So the book was overdue and I was in debt to one of the few worthy beneficiaries of my tax dollars.

The cost of my negligence was a mere thirty cents; a fine so small that not even this Heidelberg Scotsman could complain. For a quarter and a nickel, I earned a guilt-free conscience and was restored to the position of patron in “good standing” within seconds of my confession. Quite a bargain!

I also got something I didn’t bargain for – the return of a long buried memory.For a few moments at the circulation desk, I was dragged back to another time I had kept a book longer than I should have.

I think I was about ten-years-old. I must have been pretty bored to have walked all the way to the Sparta Public Library at the corner of Market and Jackson Streets. I don’t remember the book at all; not its subject, title, or author. But I do remember not returning the book when it was due.

The fine for returning a library book one day late was a penny in those days; five days late and the fine was a nickel. Although I don’t remember the number of days between the due date and the date of the actual return, I do remember the fine was more than a dollar.

Sixty years later, I still can’t think of any reasonable answer that might explain why I kept the book for so long. I could have renewed the loan repeatedly and avoided a fine. I could have returned it before the fine grew past the nickel level. But I put it off and lied to myself until I couldn’t pay the fine. By then, I had become too scared to ‘fess up and take the consequences. I know that my tardiness makes no sense.

I acknowledge that I failed to do the right thing. All I could say then, and even now, is that I have no excuse for such behavior. Like many people in difficult financial straits, I hoped that by doing nothing the problem would disappear or solve itself. Of course, that rarely works. How irrational can one be?

Theologians call such irresponsible behavior a manifestation of original sin; the human nature that comes with being born. Now we might say that we inherited a flaw in the DNA from our pre-historical, disobedient parents.

It is not a comfortable experience being unable to excuse or justify one’s bad behavior. It is even worse to behave irresponsibly, knowing that an escape from punishment is impossible.

Miss Bess Brown was the librarian who had the authority to wring every last penny from my resources. She could have insisted that I find 50-plus empty soda bottles and collected the two cents deposit for each. She could have collected from my parents. She could have kept me under the sword of Damocles. But she didn’t.

What Miss Brown did was more memorable than any of those possibilities. She forgave my debt. Not because I deserved such a gift. Not because I really wasn’t a bad boy. Not because I couldn’t help but procrastinate.

I never paid a penny of that library fine because it was Miss Bess Brown’s nature to forgive, to offer a new beginning, and to teach a young boy by loving rather than condemning. That experience with an overdue library book and Bess Brown now seems like a revelation.

A revelation worth passing on.

Changes are due

2007-09-05T10:39:00.000-05:00

My wife pulled up the last of the almost dead petunias yesterday. Too little rain, too much heat, and Father Time did them in. The three tomato plants that yielded more huge tomatoes than I could eat now have only two small green tomatoes waiting to ripen. The leaves on the flowering crab apple have begun falling. Fall, and then winter, is coming. My list of things to do before winter is growing like the weeds in my hosta plot.

When should I shut off the outside faucets? Drain the garden hose and take it to the garage? Clean up the outdoor grill? Check the anti-freeze in the car? Put away the short sleeve shirts and dig out my sweat suits that I call my nursing home clothes? Should I do those chores while the signs of summer still abound? Or should I wait until the very last moment?

Years ago, in the age when men wore hats, my grandfather traded his felt hat for a straw one every Memorial Day and reversed the exchange on Labor Day. He chose the dates for changing hats; nothing could override his decision, not even my grandmother and certainly not the weather. Not even a frost in June or a hot spell in September altered his choice of hats.

If I do those outdoor chores that say, “I am ready for winter,” too soon, I make winter seem longer and summer shorter. But if I sacrifice certainty and allow the outdoor temperature to control when I get ready for the season’s change, my schedule, routine, and maybe even my life, will be out of control. Oh my!

The older I get, the clearer I see what I do not control. With age comes the reluctant acknowledgment that control of my life is rapidly shrinking. I didn’t choose my gender, my parents, not even the number of siblings. My fingerprints, eye color, and the size and shape of my ears were not of my choosing either. Who would ever choose ears like mine?

The wife I have is fifty years older than the one I chose in 1957. The babies she and I made together aren’t babies any longer; they are in their forties. Some of my choices in friends didn’t pan out. My choices in vocations never lasted for longer than a decade. I didn’t get to choose whether I would have a heart attack; and certainly not its date. Although I wanted to run, or at least walk, in the six kilometer Abe’s Amble at the close of the State Fair, my choice was trumped with an emphatic, “You can’t.”

A long time ago Jesus taught me that I could not even choose the number of hairs on my head. To help me understand that persistent lack of control applied to his best friends as well, he said he chose them, not the other way around. Even though I have long suspected the choices I make are a lot fewer than I imagined or hoped, I keep trying to control my life, my family, and my world.

Somewhere deep in my soul I hear a small voice whispering, “Let me be in control. Take your hands off the wheel. Trust me. I am wiser than you.”

I think I'll listen. No better than that, I’m going to give up my obsession with control before I wind up the garden hose this year. Maybe when I team up with Jesus and ask his father to help, maybe we will be prepared without sweat. What do you think?

Smile -- You're on heaven's camera!

2007-08-28T14:07:00.000-05:00

What brings a smile to your face? A tear to your eyes?

For me, it’s the little things in life the unanticipated events, the chance remark, the unbidden dream, and the little things that don’t matter much. Of course, big begets BIG. I cried buckets of tears when my parents died. Smiles dominated my face on our wedding day, when the children were born, and when the Illini beat Michigan and Ohio State in football both in the same year.

But those big things are too rare to depend on to maintain a persistent smiley disposition. Instead, it’s in the little things and the daily routine that we find reasons to smile. This week I’m smiling.

A couple of nights ago, I had a dream. Nothing unusual about that. I take some little pills to adjust the chemistry in my brain and one of the side effects of that medicine is that nighttime dreams come every night with uncommon intensity and a magnified vividness. These dreams are not just a nighttime extension of the day’s events, but often speak of recurring fears, doubts, and failures.

One of my recurring dreams has me scheduled to take a school examination. In the dream I am well prepared and confident, but when I get into the room where the exam will be taken I discover I have prepared for the wrong test. To think one is to take a history exam only to discover the test subject is calculus, is not a pleasant feeling. No smiles coexist with that kind of fear. But at least the dream gives my mind a safe way to experience the fear of failure.

Another recurring dream is about churches. The other night, I dreamt that I was a pastor again of a typical congregation. In the dream, a friend told me that a member of the congregation had included me in her will that she had changed just prior to her death. I knew the woman but not well. We had nothing more enduring than a routine pastor/parishioner acquaintance. Surprised and skeptical about her reasons to include me in her will, I showed up at the time appointed for its reading. I listened while her wealth and treasures were doled out to her relatives and then in the last line of the will, the attorney read, “To my pastor, I bequeath a brand new commode.”

Sure enough, there it was in the lawyer’s office, shiny and complete with its double lid. As I carried my new commode home, I wondered what the woman had been thinking. Putting aside the blasphemous and cynical thoughts, I concluded that she gave me a way to rid myself of all the S--- I had been given. I woke up laughing!

Days later, awake, I returned to that dream again and again and each time, I smiled. I think the dream tried to explain that in every congregation there is an unlikely someone who wants to give a commode to the pastor – to flush away you-know-what that comes with the territory. Oh, if only we all had someone to give us a commode to handle what we put up with. At that thought, I smiled again.

Won’t you smile when a similar commode, a way to flush the stink out of your life, comes your way?

On the first day of a Shakespeare class I am taking at the University of Illinois – Springfield, the professor came dressed in a shirt, tie, trousers, coat, shoes, and no socks. I smiled! After all, Shakespeare isn’t about black wing-tips and over the calf socks. I smiled again.

Yesterday, in the same class, I overheard a young woman, no more twenty years-old, say to her classmates, “In all my years of study of the English language, even Middle English, I have never seen words that Thomas Hardy uses in Tess.”

In all her years – I hope not. I, a near 70-year-old student who assumes she has some years yet to live, smiled at her mismatch of words and meaning. At age seventy, I grin at the concept that I might have learned enough about anything. And I suspect octogenarians smile at this 70 year-old’s premature conclusions.

Go – search for a smile. Begin looking in the life of someone 20 years your junior. Don’t quit looking until you find a smile in an unpleasant memory.

John

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Breakfast time

2007-08-24T09:36:00.000-05:00

If you are like me, one who often finds truth complex and confusing, maybe the idea of finding a simple truth improving life taunts you, as it has me. Is something more than taunting possible? When is the last time you had some simple truth make a significant impact on your routine life?

If it has been awhile or if you don’t have an immediate answer, you might be interested how a simple truth has recently impacted my life.

My story really begins at night on a hillside near Pleiku, Vietnam in 1966. The heavens were cloudless and starry, undisturbed by the loud booms of howitzers in the distance. The majesty of the scene high above me demanded that I think about the Creator. So I did. The opening lines of Psalm 8, a psalm I had recently memorized, bridged the expanse between heaven and my feelings. “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth.” Yes sir, the size, power, and greatness of the One who put the heavens together were unmistakably obvious that night.

As I silently recited the remainder of the psalm, I heard an ancient Hebrew ask the same question I was asking. “What is man that thou art mindful of him and the son of man that thou dost care for him?”

I grabbed hold of an important truth that night that I have never forgotten. For the rest of my life I have known how mighty God is and how puny I am. Neither side of that truth, God’s majesty nor my insignificance, has ever been an area of doubt for me.

But the years and logic that followed left me wondering; wondering if I could have a close relationship with God on the far side of a space-wide chasm. Could the creator of the universe, high in the heavens, touch me where I craved to be touched and love me as I wanted to be loved?

As the calendar pages kept flipping past, I worked hard to find convincing evidence that Almighty God chose to love little old me. In seminary, my mind was satisfied that God loved me. As a pastor of souls, I was bombarded with signs that God cared enough about others to use me to bring some hope and consolation to weary pilgrims. Surely God was displaying his confidence in me to give me such noble opportunities to serve.

By now, in the autumn of my life, I have compiled a rather long list of blessings in my account. A supportive wife who has loved me for more than 50 years, children who honor their parents, a faulty life expectancy table, money in the bank, a Buick in the garage, and a comfortable home where I sleep and eat in peace – all are blessings I recognize. I understand them as signs that God chose to love me, a guy who could mess up a two car funeral and who makes Murphy seem like an optimist.

Again and again, I have been persuaded by hard, unimpeachable evidence that a transcendant God chooses to love me. Well … almost persuaded. The mirror where I shave, however, has kept me from being absolutely persuaded. In that mirror, I see a man I often don’t like, the man living under that thin layer of opaque skin. How could a self-centered guy who doesn’t always love himself be loved by a personal God?

Then it happened! At the breakfast table a few days ago, my wife and I were discussing a short passage from the Bible. The Scripture boldly stated that God chose us even before he laid out the universe. God’s choosing of us turned into talk about the ways that God has blessed us. After listening to my wife’s litany of blessings, in the smooth words of a Reverend, I said, “Yes, God must really love us.”

Before I put the period on that sentence, God interrupted my thinking and added a different ending to my thought. “Yeah, but I didn’t have to.”

That thought, God “didn’t have to” wouldn’t go away. All day long and for several days afterwards, I kept hearing those words, “Yeah, but I didn’t have to.” Slowly at first, and then at a faster clip, I threw out the many lies I had accepted through several decades; lies that can be summed up this way. “God can’t help it that he loves me; that’s the kind of God he is.”

That God didn’t have to choose me, love me, or bless me added a refreshing perspective to what I already believed. And my life is different again. Different and better. Thank God!

In the same way, if God didn’t have to choose you, love you, or bless you, but did anyway, you have yet another reason to be glad – a gladness that soaks into your whole life.

John

Lying lips

2007-08-06T10:53:00.000-05:00

"Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord . . ." Proverbs 12.22

Know any liars? A dishonest tree trimmer pushed me into a frame of mind that asks about liars.

Think of the people I know who are liars, I appreciate anew the gift of forgetfulness. Not to remember all the times I have heard is one of the less obvious blessings of my life. Today, as I try to think of liars I have known, one stands out in my memory.

Of course I am ignoring several categories of liars. Ones who tell little white lies, those harmless falsehoods like the 60-pound watermelons and 12-pound blue gill fish your brother-in-law boasts about, don't count.

Writers who change the name of characters "to protect the innocent" don't count as liars in my book either. Children caught prevaricating about the absence of cookies in grandma's cookie jar are also exempt. Politicians and prison inmates may be liars, but because their lies surprise no one they can be ignored for the same reasons I do not name the mosquitoes that inhabit my back yard. I even grant a stay-out-of-jail card to those souls who lie so often, they don't know when they are lying.

No, when I speak of liars, I mean those diabolical people who intentionally and deceitfully misrepresent the truth for some benefit to themselves.

I remember the first time I encountered a honest-to-goodness, in the flesh liar. It was during my teen years.

That tells you what kind of sheltered childhood I had. I doubt any teenager today can boast of such naivety or innocence. But that is another essay for another time.

I was 15-years-old and had an assignment to drive my mother, my grandmother, and my great aunt to St. Louis so they could shop in the city. For them, the day was special; shopping in a huge department store without a husband who kept asking, "Do we really need that?" For me too, the day was special because I got to drive more than a hundred miles and amidst city traffic. Even though my passengers were not on my list of people I most wanted to accompany me to the city of crowds and stop lights, driving my parent's 1951 Plymouth was a duty I understood as a treat.

About 35 miles into our northbound trip, a huge tractor trailer truck carrying coal in the southbound lane pulled out to pass a car in his lane. Before he noticed us the truck was about three feet on my side of the center line. Even though I was hugging the right edge of the highway, the mammoth truck clipped our little Plymouth's rear fender.

A State trooper arrived and began taking statements from the truck driver and me for his report. He spoke first to the truck driver. "Tell me what happened."

With a straight face, the truck driver said, "I was driving in my lane when I saw this car coming toward me real fast. Just as that car got even with my truck, I guess the driver lost control and the car swerved across the center line and fish-tailed into my truck."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. As soon as it was my turn to tell what happened, I asked the trooper a question. "Sir, I am 15-years-old. My mother, my grandma, and my aunt were in the car. Do you really think I would be driving over the speed limit with them in the car when one word from them to my dad would mean I would never get the keys again? I was driving 45 mile-per-hour when the truck started to pass a car in his lane. He crossed the center line and hit our rear fender."

The trooper must have believed me because I never got a ticket or heard anything more about the accident. But I never recovered from the shock of hearing a grown man tell a policeman a bold-faced lie for no purpose other than his benefit. In my short life, I had never heard a man lie.

A few weeks ago, a tree trimmer overcharged me $150. He agreed with my idea of a fair price and said he would return the money to my home a few days later. I waited and he never came, so I called him to learn if I had misunderstood. Again he said he would settle the matter with me by sending a check for $150 in the mail. A few days later, with no sign of the money, I left a message for him at his business suggesting that maybe the postal authorities should be contacted since the money never arrived.

So I have been educated about human nature by many, many people plus two liars. The tuition for the learning the exception was $150.

Did I get a bargain or what?

Family Therapy

2007-07-31T10:32:00.000-05:00

Dear Lou,
One of the things I do to avoid the cuckoo’s nest is to pound the PC keyboard. So consider reading this as your part in keeping me balanced.

Saturday, we went to Waterloo to attend Carrol’s Cahokia High School class reunion. Although she graduated from Sparta, she went to school at Cahokia for her freshman through junior years so most of her longtime friends are from Cahokia, not Sparta. We ate dinner with six widowed or divorced women at the table, each of them auditioning for a part in The Golden Girls

Sunday morning, we drove to Eckerts to pick up some Southern Illinois peaches. We got West Virginia peaches instead because the Eckert family decided to keep both the peaches from their trees. You may remember that we had enough warm weather early last spring to bring fruit trees into bloom early. After the peach buds had formed, we had several days of heavy frost that eliminated the peach crop. As one orchard owner said, “Apples pay the bills, but peaches are the profit.” Guess that is why there are no more orchards of just one kind of fruit like the Stahlman pear orchard was.

While we were at Eckerts, I enjoyed looking around at all the old style meat and produce they sell. How many places do you know that sell fresh, home-grown kohlrabi? Or still offer honest-to-goodness liver sausage? If you lived closer I would have bought some and brought it to you on the condition that I didn’t have to eat any of it. Carrol bought a muskmelon for Scott that came from Posey County, Indiana.

Back in Springfield Sunday afternoon, (God forgive me for shopping on the Sabbath.) I visited a couple of farmers who drive into town and our neighborhood to sell fresh vegetables from the back of an old Ford pick-up. I may not be able to convince you that their corn is as good as you can find anywhere, but I guarantee that you can’t find any fresher produce unless you have your own garden.

As one of the two farmers was sacking up my corn, I asked him how many tomato plants he had this year. “Oh I only put out 46 this year. These are my neighbor’s tomatoes.” (Forty six doesn’t provide enough to sell I guess.) So I asked if he knew how many plants his neighbor had. He said, “A couple a hundred.” And as if that demanded an explanation, he added, “He’s 95 and goes to bed at 7:00 o’clock every day. My partner and I sell his tomatoes for him.”

While I was out and about Carrol suggested we could have bacon and tomato sandwiches for dinner, IF I would pick up a loaf of bread. She knows how to motivate me! While at the store I found dark cherries for the less than three dollars a pound, so picked up a small bag of cherries. When I got home, and looked at the register tape, I realized I had paid almost ten dollars for a bag of cherries grown in Montana. The bag was larger than I thought.

Had a great dinner. I vaguely recall reading that the combination of fresh corn on the cob, tomatoes, cucumbers, and sweet cherries override the drawbacks of thick sliced bacon. I am sure I read that somewhere!

Monday, Carrol spent most of the day in the kitchen making peach coffee cakes. I joined her for a mid-afternoon break and forced myself to eat some warm peach coffee cake with her. By the time the last of nine coffee cakes were out of the oven, only seven could be accounted for. For a brief moment on that summer afternoon, I was sitting in Grandma Stahlman’s house. It was a Saturday morning and I was waiting for that old kerosene stove to spit out coffee cakes. As I remember, the first grandchild to show up got to choose which peach coffee cake he could take home. Last one to show up got the one that was a “little well-done.” I also recall that Grandma, however, didn’t allow Butch to come early because he liked to eat the unbaked dough before she could get it in the oven.

The weekend turned out to be a pretty good one – even though attending a spouse’s high school class reunion.

Too bad I couldn’t share any of my nutritional pleasures with you. But I did think of you.

Love you.

Your brother

Meet Professor Tomato

2007-07-20T11:52:00.000-05:00

Shortly after Jack Frost left central Illinois, my dog, Alex, and I were walking the neighborhood. The fellow across the street, Bud, was out walking Scooter. We met a couple of blocks from home and stopped to chat while Alex and Scooter did the doggy version of shaking hands. Bud asked me, “Do you remember those tomatoes I gave you last summer?”

Even at my age, I rarely forget a gift of fresh tomatoes, so I said, “Yeah. And I hope you are going to continue that tradition this year.”

He smiled and said, “I can do better than that.” Then I smiled.

He continued, “My grandson gave me the tomato plants last year. This year, he brought me three more than I want. They’re the same kind he gave me last year. If you want those three plants, I’ll give them to you. Just come over and get them when you want them. They’re sitting by the back door.”

A few days later I pulled some flowers I now disliked out of the border along the back side of our privacy fence. In there place I planted Bud’s three tomato plants. Our daughter Joni didn’t plant any tomatoes this year so she offered to loan a couple of conical, wire supports designed to support tomato plants. For the third plant’s support, I set a plain, three-foot wooden stake next to its trunk.

From those three tomato plants in my backyard, I have learned two lessons. Actually, at my age, learning is mostly re-learning. Nevertheless, the re-learning was a bargain for the effort I invested.

The first truth worth keeping grabbed my attention several weeks after the initial planting. Because I procrastinated, the plant without the wire supports never did get attached to its wooden stake. But it grew anyway. Unlike the two other plants, this plant didn’t have anything to lean on as it grew. So of course, as it stretched out from the earth, it soon collapsed and sprawled out on the ground. Even though it wanted to reach for the sun, it had no support for its effort. Lying on the ground with its small blooms just above the soil, I knew that some of the fruit of that plant would lie on the ground; vulnerable to the forces that would introduce rotting and scarring .

As it is with tomato plants, so it is with children. With a little help, with a little encouragement, the child will reach levels unattainable on its own. My supported tomato plants grew and are now ready to bear fruit. But make no mistake --the sturdy aid of a wire cage didn’t cause the growth; growth came from within the plant. With or without an anchor of support, a tomato plant will grow and produce fruit.

My unsupported plant grew as well, but it will not be all it could have been because it lacked support and direction.

During a recent visit to a church I left nine years ago, I wanted to see what changes time had wrought. I noted lots of new faces, air-conditioning, revitalized choir, and the new organ, But guess what impressed me most. Eric is still there.

Eric has grown up since I saw him last. That is in itself quite an accomplishment. Not the brightest kid on the block, Eric was one of those children the world thinks needs a “special education.” Without a family functioning as enthusiastic cheerleaders and lacking a strong bulwark against tormentors, Eric’s future was not bright when I first met him.

But God is a better gardener than I. He surrounded Eric with a congregation that stood with him and supported him by accepting him in a youth group, paying his expenses to attend a life changing youth conference, and engaging him in patient conversations that began as dialogue and ended as soliloquy. With the strength and stability of a Presbyterian congregation near him, Eric’s destiny now more closely matches his Creator’s design.

In a similar way, every time I witness a baptism of a child, my flickering little candle of hope is rekindled because I look at the child and the congregation and imagine that another tomato plant has been staked so it can grow and bear good fruit.

The second truth reconfirmed by my tomato plant is this: A young plant is more pliable and more easily trained than an old plant with thickened trunks and stems. When I try to train the plant already set in its ways or make it conform and adapt like a young plant, sometimes the mature plant breaks … and dies with green fruit still on its vine.

So I have learned.

What truth do my tomato plants reveal to you?

for one more day

2007-07-09T15:39:00.000-05:00

Looking for a "quick" read? Mitch Albom's for one more day fills the bill.

Have you ever wondered what kind of life the dead live. Do they play harps all day long and float endlessly among puffy clouds or at the other place, do the condemned do anything but shovel coal into hungry, insatiable, and fiery furnaces for the pleasure of cruel, little devils with pitchforks?

Albom suggests another possibility. Spirits of the dead might just spend their days visiting people on the living side of the grave. Not all people. Just to those folks who, on the eve of their own deaths, are thinking about some relationship they had with an already departed soul.

In Albom's story, a man is at the point of dying in an accident. Before he crosses the line separating life from death, he spends one more day with his mother who died a few years earlier. For one more ordinary day, the dying son and his mother are together.

What do you suppose he learns in the one more day he has with his now-dead mother?
I won't -- can't -- tell you. You have to read the book and answer that question for yourself.

But I can give you a clue. If you are a motherless child, his answer is a probably a lot like the answer you would get if you had the opportunity to spend one more day with your mother. And who wouldn't like that opportunity?

If I had my own copy of for one more day– I have more confidence in my daughter's choice of books than in my own – there were a couple of short paragraphs I would have underlined, thinking I could benefit from a periodic repeat reading. Here they are.

It's funny. I met a man once who did a lot of mountain climbing. I asked him which was harder, ascending or descending? He said without a doubt descending, because ascending you were so focused on reaching the top, you avoided mistakes.

"The backside of a mountain is a fight against human nature," he said. "You have to care as much about yourself on the way down as did on the way up."

Life isn't just about growing up; it's also about getting old. Life isn't just the ascent to the mountain peak of life's best years, but includes the descent back to being hairless, toothless, dependent, weak, and trusting as a little child.

Mitch Albom helped this reader to enjoy the journey whether ascending or descending and encouraged me to set my eyes on the horizon where heaven and earth meet.

There's something extraordinary about an ordinary day spent with one's parent while looking for the horizon.

Word Abuse

2007-07-04T08:55:00.000-05:00

Apparently there is a crisis looming on the horizon. Actually there may be several, but the latest one that grabbed a piece of my attention for a few minutes happened on my way to the Farmer's Market to buy some fresh corn, tomatoes, and a couple of cucumbers. (Besides thinking about what's for lunch, what does a retired guy do on a Saturday morning?)

When I turned on the car radio, National Public Radio was broadcasting an interview with an entomologist who was bemoaning the diminishing numbers of pollinators. Without pollinators, he said many plants would not produce the fruit that assures the continuation of the species. At the end of this certain extinction of some plant species, he predicated the human race would soon go hungry.

Wow! All of a sudden, I was interested in the sex-life of plants. With that interest piqued, my memory yanked me back to a sex education class in the seventh grade.

Mr. Frazier, a public school coach, seventh grade teacher, and Presbyterian Sunday School teacher was the one who first introduced me to the science of reproduction. Of course, his pedagogy was not of the "show and tell" type. He used no anatomically correct dolls, no pictures like you get from magazines at Barnes and Noble, and no television soap opera illustrations. In fact, Mr. Frazier never even mentioned sex in the same paragraph with any word about human life. He stuck to biology when he talked about the "birds and bees."

His lesson was not really about birds and bees, but plants; stamens, pistals, pollen, anthers and a dozen other words I can't remember. But I do remember learning that bees had a role in getting the pollen from the stamens to the pistils. And that's all I got out of my introduction to the subject euphemistically called "the birds and bees."

I was confused. Mr. Frazier hadn't talked about birds at all, only about flowers. Why didn't he just say he was going to teach us something about bees and flowers? Even though I learned nothing, I was afraid and ashamed that I didn't catch the apparent meaning of the birds and bees stuff. To avoid the shame, I wasn't about to talk to Mom or Dad. Fear of ridicule and the threat of being thought "slow" kept me from asking anyone questions.

Not until I overcame the fear of my mother catching me in Riley Cox's Pool Room did I learn that there was a different language available to learn about the birds and bees. The pool-shooting, poker-playing crowd in Cox's Pool Room didn't use botanical language like Mr. Frazier. They didn't seem to know or care much about stamens and pistils. Instead, they talked about people; people like Mike and Ike; people you could laugh at. Mr. Frazier didn't laugh much. Pool room regulars had a way of speaking that seemed to be easier to understand. Or maybe I was just older and wiser at 14 than at 12.

I digress.

Back to the entomologist on the radio. As he ended the interview with a plea for more accurate use of language, I thought maybe he was going to chastise teachers like Mr. Frazier for using words in the way politicians do, to conceal rather reveal truth.

I was wrong. Instead, he begged, "Please, do not call plants weeds and never refer to insects as bugs. Weeds are still flowering plants even though they grow where you don't want them." He continued his rant about insects deserving better treatment than being associated with negative ideas as in "Stop bugging me."

A comparison of Mr. Frazier's dance around words and a contemporary entomologist's longing for a taboo against certain words with the dialect of the pool room, I think I understand Jesus' preference for the straight forward language of the underclass and Luther's passion for getting the Bible into the language of ordinary people.

Bond County

2007-06-22T12:30:00.000-05:00

Bond County, Illinois.

How do we know the toothbrush was invented in Bond County?
Because if it had been invented anywhere else it would have been called a teethbrush.

For years, that is all I knew about Bond County. Then last weekend, a new picture took over the task of reminding me of Bond County’s uniqueness.

Driving through the county seat where the courthouse sits in the center of the town square, there were tents, canvas booths, and a petting zoo on the courthouse lawn. On the street north of the courthouse, there was a large trailer, as in tractor-trailer, to be used as a stage. Folding chairs sat in rows in front of the stage and anticipated a small crowd wanting to be entertained later in the day. Something festive was going on!

I assumed the festivities were either a celebration of some civic event or local holiday or marketing ploy sponsored by the courthouse square businesses to attract weekend shoppers. Regardless of its origin or sponsorship, a community event was drawing a crowd from throughout the county.

For a moment, I was not just driving through a small town in Bond County, but every rural town and county south of the B & O in Southern Illinois. I was emotionally back in my childhood, living in another small, rural community, my hometown, in the bottom third of the state of Illinois.

Instead of sitting in a 2004 Buick, I was bouncing along in a 1950, International ¾ ton pick-up truck, affectionately known as the “Flying Blue Goose.” (Yes, it was blue; if goosed, it could hit 80 mph on a flat stretch; but it never could fly unless you count the two-wheels-up when ‘flying over’ the humpback railroad crossing on East Main Street.)

The people milling around the booths and tents could have been my grandparents or the grandparents of my schoolmates, neighbors from Church Street, or all the people that helped my parents keep their mischievous son in check back in the 1940s and ’50s.

One sight that day stands out above all the rest. Right there on the courthouse lawn, a Holstein cow waited for a line of small children to pull up a stool and learn how to milk a cow one at a time. The teacher was a man in bib overalls and a straw hat. An older man, perhaps the teacher’s father, stood by with a smile on his face that displayed his fond approval.

Where else but a small town would the grownups think knowing how to milk a cow is worthwhile knowledge? Where else but in rural America, would the youngest generation learn that milk doesn’t begin its journey to the breakfast table in a plastic jug? Where else but in a county like Bond, would a child learn by seeing and touching that the present owes a debt to the past? In what city or urban sprawl in this technological world and information age offer a child access to a vanishing world of self-reliance and close connection with nature?

WIth the courthouse in the rearview mirror, at the edge of town, I began reciting to Carrol the benefits I had gained from a childhood spent in a small, rural community. Not until I was a teenager did I ever learn an adult would lie to a state trooper to escape responsibility. I thought about how I had to go away to college to learn that for some, cheating on an exam was as natural to them as driving to the coal mine to buy a load of coal was for me.

The picture of a kid learning to milk a cow and my reflections on my own growing up made me realize that I created a hole in my life when I walked away from my hometown more than 50 years ago. I now see that that hole is about the size of a small town and shaped a lot like Southern Illinois.

So, I’ve come to realize that only two places make me homesick: the heaven I have never seen and the small town I can’t forget.

Introducing people I met -- including me

2007-06-10T12:00:00.000-05:00

A congregation of Presbyterians in my town annually accepts the task of delivering meals for a week to people who need, or at least want, them. So Carrol and I signed up to deliver meals on Route 9 for three days this week.

Route 9 weaves its path through a trailer park, a housing project, and a neighborhood created more than sixty years ago. It goes through no gated communities, no suburbs with manicured lawns, and the only huge homes on the route have long since been converted to apartments.

The people on Route 9, at least the ones we delivered meals to, aren’t much different than the houses they live in. One resident is blind and lives in a house that isn’t much to look at. Even though blind, she brightens one’s day by her friendliness.

One man lives far back from the street, keeps the blinds and curtains shut, and wants his meal left outside the door. If he were a motel guest, he would probably hang one of those little “do not disturb” signs on the doorknob as soon as he checked in.

The lady with the yapping dog that pants incessantly is leashed to an oxygen tank and comes to the door while stepping carefully around the dog and over the long plastic hose attached to her nose.

The widow around the corner is a living reminder of my wife’s mother after she became a widow; quiet, modest, undemanding, and no trouble to her neighbors. The big difference is that this woman doesn’t have nine daughters and four sons checking on her.

At the last house, the one with the two dilapidated mailboxes, a frail young man is waiting at the door for his meal and the one for the man in the other apartment. He says, “Thank you,” in the same way I say it at MacDonald’s.

Who are these people on Route 9? Who am I?

Each of them lives alone and eats alone. I still eat most of my meals with my wife of fifty years.

Most of the Route Niners have the red, white, and blue Medicare card and pull it out of their purse or billfold regularly because they have medical issues. The most treasured card in my billfold grants me permission to drive. Different cards for different folks.

I suspect a ringing telephone is a welcome sound in their homes. For me, uninvited contact with the world is an interruption and inconvenience.

I eat home cooked meals prepared by someone who loves me. They eat institutional food prepared by a job-holding stranger.

I can see; drive; get out and around; go where I want when I want; eat only the food I like; and have opportunity to do good. The folks on Route 9 qualify for Meals on Wheels.

My ancestor Abraham was blessed so he could be a blessing – and so am I. Other people, a select few really, are put in my life, not for the purpose of comparison, judgment, pity, or example; but for me to bless. For three days, the people on Route 9 made it possible – easy – for me to be the person I am meant to be.

Memorial Day

2007-05-29T07:57:00.000-05:00

Memorial Day, 2007, Decoration Day to the over-70 crowd, has passed. The grills have cooled, the flags have been brought in, buglers have put their horns away, Indy cars are back in their garages, and the lump in the throat has shrunk.

So why am I sad? Another Monday is over and my routine is back to normal. A new month is at hand. I have money in my pocket and the motel reservations for a summertime trip are confirmed. Birds are singing and my dog sleeps at my feet while I win another game of Free Cell.

For no reason clear to me, I hang on to two troubling blips on the screen of my memory. Those blips are like the dark spots that are always moving before my eyes but never disappear from my vision. Whether I focus on them or try to ignore them, they persist.

One of the little dark spots on my Memorial Day experience first appeared during the Sunday morning worship hour. The sermon was helpful, the choir sang beautifully, the towering gothic arches and beautiful stained glass windows hinted at a paradise not yet known. There was nothing in anything I heard, saw, touched, or smelled that marred the worship of God. But it was an absence, a lack of something that spilled a drop of black ink on my mental Renoir scene.

As one of the ministers prayed for and with the congregation, she thanked God for ministers, apostles, and rulers of the church and placed the sick, homeless, poor, and troubled in the healing, comforting presence of Jesus. But not a word about my gratitude for veterans, no mention of uniformed men and women living under constant threats of death, no petition for the relief of anxiety and anguish endured by parents and spouses of soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen. No mention of the “ …heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life!”

How could the public worship of God be authentic or relevant without gratitude and intercession encouraged by a sacred, national holiday?

The second dark spot on the holiday appeared on Monday’s front page of my hometown daily newspaper. In a caption under the picture of a US Marine sergeant, I read “Marine Sgt. Robert Ballance was given the Bronze Star Medal during the last of his three tours in Iraq.”

“Given?” Like a birthday gift? Because he was lucky?

Sgt. Ballance wasn’t given the Bronze Star, he earned it! He earned it by exposing himself to enemy fire on multiple occasions . . . he personally directed the fires of the squad by moving from position to position . . . His quick thinking and decisiveness in the face of heavy enemy fire assisted the patrol in overwhelming the enemy force and ensured all casualties were treated and safely evacuated.

If there were any “giving” that day, Sgt. Ballance was the giver. He gave courage and encouragement; strength and determination; loyalty and competence.

Sergeant Ballance accepted a Bronze Star Medal from a grateful country and his fellow Marines. They recognized the gift they had been given.

And so should we.

Those men and women who gave their lives or portions of them have earned the respect and admiration of every American who has enjoyed freedom from the horrors of war. Even ministers and journalists.

Old dogs; old truths

2007-05-26T17:14:00.000-05:00

One of the men who greatly influenced my life, Elton Trueblood, said on his 70th birthday, "Education is too wonderful and valuable to limit it to the young." I was not quite 33.

Decades later I still remember his words. Maybe not the exact words, but certainly the idea. The idea that advancement in years ought not to bring an end to learning is more and more at the core of things I really believe.

Not to believe this truth is, frankly, impossible. In my case, even though I may be too old to negotiate schoolhouse stairs and too old to run the halls with youngsters, learning is routinely forced on me. My learning is as persistent as my sinning. An old woman who willingly confessed being guilty of the sin of gossiping, said, "I know I don't have to sin; but I just can't help it." That was more than forty years ago and I still remember her words.

Friends, you don't have to keep learning in your approach to the golden years; you just can't help it.

Come along with me as I follow the road to truths newly recognized.

When I wrote a newspaper column, I knew the limits of my audience. No one in Illinois read my musings that appeared in Jackson, Michigan's newspaper. No one I knew in Michigan subscribed to the Nashville (Illinois) News. This limited circle of readers tempted me with subject possibilities. Since my in-laws in Illinois never read Jackson Michigan's Citizen-Patriot, I could tell Michigan readers about the silly ways of my in-laws without fear of retribution from anyone but my wife. In a similar way, I could tell newspaper readers in Illinois about some of the foibles of parishioners in Michigan without eating those words. Laughing at the antics of people one will never meet is not only permissible, but can be good for one's mental health. Shaking one's head in disgust at wrongs in a distant community can scratch the itch of self-righteousness without exposing one's own hubris.

Blogging, on the other hand, doesn't tolerate limited readership. Folks in Michigan can read the same stuff and at the same time as folks in Illinois or Freeport, Maine for that matter. I am learning how to be more discreet and more timid, two traits that have been neglected in my life.

Although the lesson has not yet been forcefully made, I have learned there might be unintended and uncomfortable consequences if I ignore the need for discretion and tact as I "blog.".

More importantly, I am learning whom I have been.

As I search for a topic to write about that will be received kindly by every potential reader, whatever their location, relationship, political philosophy, prejudices, and level of tolerance for the irrelevant and irreverent, the list of topics is quite small.

I am learning that the best escape from this nagging lack of subject matter is to adopt a policy of authenticity. To the degree that I write with integrity and in a voice that is authentic, responses and reactions to my words and ideas shrink in importance. Shakespeare, using the mouth of a less than admirable character in Hamlet, recognizes some level of wisdom in the advice "… to thine own self be true."

That idea brought me another learning experience.

For most of my life, I have not been very proficient in originality. Every good idea, every Church doctrine, every article of faith, every position on every issue, and even every imagination I have espoused or called my own have not actually been mine. Rather, those beliefs, doctrines, understandings, teaching points, and opinions have been someone else's. I have been a master at taking another person's position, chewing it as a cow does her cud, and then passing it along as my own. I have discovered that knowing one has never been original is not original.

Although I am not ashamed of being the echo of another's wisdom and originality, I think I should at least make a diligent effort to be creative, original, and authentic. I suspect that those traits are especially respected in heaven.

How do you learn whom you have been? Or want to be?

What I Have Been Reading

2007-05-16T11:45:00.000-05:00

I have been on a reading binge the last couple of weeks. I think it may have started when I received The Last Town on Earth as a birthday gift from my son. That novel is a gripping, suspenseful tale set in a small timber mill town in the Pacific Northwest during the great influenza epidemic of the last century. The residents of the town, in an effort to save themselves from the rampant and deadly epidemic, decided to allow no outsider to enter their town until the epidemic had spent itself.

As I read the novel, I watched people try to save themselves by sacrificing contact with other communities while fighting against the push of individual desires and the pull of the common good. The conflicts between good and evil, courage and fear, reason and emotion, and opposing loyalties had me sighing and saying to myself, “Yes, that’s the way it is.” Like good fiction generally does, this book held a mirror before me and asked me how far would I go to protect me and mine. A great read! I recommend it.

The life all around me by Ellen Foster, is a another book by popular author, Kaye Gibbons. I had read an earlier Ellen Foster book so thought a sequel might be as entertaining as the first. Wrong! I finally quit reading at the half-way mark. The writing style is too confusing and requires more concentration than I can muster.

Next, my daughter gave me Larry Crabb’s Shattered Dreams to read. The title was real and alive to me because I have been with a lot of people when their dreams had been shattered. Thinking I knew something about shattered dreams ‑ not so much my own, but of others ‑ what new perspective might I gain from this book?

Like the author, I have watched and waited for God to make an appearance in human suffering, especially the kind of suffering that comes with shattered dreams.

A bright young man had a promise-filled future until he slipped into the chasm of mental illness. A high school graduate, headed for college collided with a drunk driver and immediately became a human vegetable. The seven-year-itch redefined “family” for two small children. Hearing the doctor say, “It’s cancer.” Getting a pink-slip at age 50. Infertility. Bankruptcy. Each of these circumstances authored a story of shattered dreams.

“Why didn’t God do something in those situations to rescue the sufferers? He could have done something, but he didn’t.” These two questions asked by the author hooked me and pulled me deeper into his book. Thinking I might find a new version of the old bromide, “Some things are not meant to be understood,” I was pleasantly – no, profoundly – surprised by what I read.

Closing the book after reading the last chapter, I realized that I had just read a book that earned a spot on my List of Books That Influenced My Thinking and Life. As an old Quaker once said, “It spoke to my condition.” So it did.

Right now I am reading a biography, The Most Famous Man in America. A man of the Civil War Era, but not a political or military figure. Of all things, a preacher – Henry Ward Beecher. Brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and son of the Rev. Lyman Beecher, a key figure in the Second Great Awakening that was marked by revival meetings that sought renewal of salvation experiences and gave birth to the social movements of abolition, temperance, and women’s rights.

Henry was a prankster as a child, not very good in school, and eventually a rebel against his father’s hyper-Calvinism. A model worthy of imitation? I haven’t finished the book yet, but maybe.

More likely, a help to me as I write some stories about a fictional Rev. McMasters.

A sanctuary for immigrants

2007-05-09T13:16:00.000-05:00

The Associated Press put the provocative headline, Churches to provide immigrants sanctuary, on my computer screen 24 minutes ago. I wanted to assume that the news story would tell a story like the Swedish immigrants to Chicago told in an earlier century. That story went something like this.

Immigrants from Sweden after arriving in America wanted to share their blessings with Swedes immigrating after them. Those first Swedish-Americans brought a Church with them and that Swedish Church built or bought apartment buildings to house later arrivals from Sweden. While staying at one of these church-owned apartments, the recently arrived immigrants were helped to learn English, find a job, and enroll their children in school as they began making the necessary adjustments needed for their new lives in the United States.

After a short immersion into the American society and culture, those families would move out of the Church-owned apartments and another Swedish immigrant family would move in. They, the earliest Swedish immigrants, supported the Evangelical Free Church that in turn gave aid, a safe place, and encouragement to new arrivals.

Who could be against the kind of "sanctuary" ministry to immigrants? Not me.

But the AP story was not about churches following the model of immigrant Swedes. Instead, it reports that one congregation of different denominations offers safe haven to one immigrant who broke the nation's laws to get here. The purpose of this new "sanctuary" ministry is not to teach English; not to assist the immigrant in finding employment; not to help transition into a new culture and society; not to explain the laws of the land, but to avoid arrest.

Should a congregation protect a law-breaker? Should a congregation itself break the law?

The Bible says both yes and no to questions about lawbreaking and lawbreakers. Romans, chapter 13, says to obey the governing authorities and Revelation, chapter 13, says a governing authority can be evil and those who obey an evil authority will be at war with God.

A few decades ago, churches and generous Americans "adopted" hundreds and thousands of Southeastern Asian families, made their path to assimilation navigable, and affirmed again that America is a land of opportunity and freedom.

We sometimes have to learn from our mistakes, but couldn't we also learn from our successes?

My Cronies and I Talk

2007-05-06T21:06:00.000-05:00

I have lunch every Thursday with a couple of men I affectionately call, “my cronies.” We meet at Olive Garden and order the same thing every week. Salad with lots of cheese; soup, two pasta e fagioli and one minestrone, each with cheese; two diet Cokes and a water with lemon; and a handful of individually wrapped chocolate mints.

We aren’t that rigid in choosing subjects for our conversation although we generally like to imagine what God would say on whatever subject we lay on the table.

We have talked about our children, our grandchildren, and everybody younger than 60. We occasionally talk about politicians but most of the time we steer away from subjects that might raise our blood pressure. Neither do we waste our breath reviewing the lives of Oprah, Imus, or Brittney but leave those discussions to those who have an interest in or care about celebrities. What we do talk about is ourselves. A lot!

You see, we are guys who haven’t got life and our place in it all figured out yet. Life expectancy tables urge us to think more deeply about issues we once skirted and postponed. Some of those ignored issues have now become issues that can be categorized as “end of life issues.” We have compared notes about how we have dealt with our slide into “not as good as it was” physical health. We find it amusing that a few brief words from one of us about a prostate exam, colonoscopy, or his bladder capacity enhances our privacy by eliminating deliberate eavesdropping.

But committed eavesdroppers don’t give up so easily. One day they might hear us confess of dumb things we did long ago when we knew everything. On another day, our discussions might be about relationships we have nurtured or destroyed. Although divorce, indiscretions, and infidelities are deeply personal issues, they are not prohibited in our noontime fellowship. Without fail, reflecting on those unpleasant subjects leads my cronies and me to conclude that we have been blessed by mercy, especially from those who love us most.

Besides physical health and lifestyle issues, our conversation often wanders into spiritual realms. The unspoken motive that begins most of these spiritual discussions is rooted in a search for an honest answer to the question, “Am I making any progress in my walk with Jesus?”

I recently told my cronies about my desire to make a strong finish in my race to heaven. Influenced by an old preacher who prayed, “Lord, don’t let me drown close to shore,” I have used his imagery in more than one circumstance to guide me. I have always understood the old preacher’s desire not to drown in shallow water after a long and tiring swim because he could have stopped swimming and just walked to shore.

My cronies and I talked about the tasks that were finished before we recognized the struggle was over. I sometimes keep working as though more effort is needed even though it’s not. The time is at hand when I should stop swimming because I’m in shallow water and could walk out of the water if I only stopped swimming.

There comes a time when parents have to quit protecting and providing for their children. The parenting job is finished and parents need to stop the life-saving rescue.

There are times when a retiree is merely wasting energy to continue striving to make a better widget, improve working conditions, or earn more money.

Church members are sometimes made weary by the effort to maintain successful, but old programs, instead of letting those who just fell out of the boat do the swimming in new waters.

As I float on my back, headed toward shore, its nice to see and talk with friends who are as wrinkled as I am because we have been in the water too long.

Are you swimming or walking?

Competitive Lawn Care

2007-04-30T11:22:00.000-05:00

I might as well be crocheting potholders as writing this blog. The similarities are strong. I have experience crocheting and writing. As a Cub Scout, the widowed mother of a friend of mine didn’t know what else to do with a bunch of rowdy boys, so she taught us how to make potholders instead of the art of catching frogs.

As a bored, sometimes frustrated, newspaper sales manager needing relief and adventure, I wrote hundreds of 700-word articles published in a chain of newspapers. Later, as an under worked pastor, I extended the church’s pulpit by writing a religious column for a local newspaper.

In both endeavors, the practical value of my effort was minimal. The potholder quickly unraveled in my mother’s hand and the newspaper clippings are now brittle and yellow. So much for creating enduring values.

On the other hand, both the crocheting and writing occupied my hands and mind for hours I might have spent in doing mischief. Who can imagine how many people I could have disappointed, enraged, and frustrated if I hadn’t crocheted chains and written paragraphs?

When a crotchetier finishes one project, she starts planning the next one. When a writer puts the last period in the last paragraph, he begins wondering what he will write about next. And the next step in crocheting and writing gets harder as one gets older.

Arthritis, rheumatism, and failing eyesight have a cooling effect on one’s zeal for yet another potholder, doily, or scarf. In a similar way, writing by an old man separated from the marketplace and with a shrinking circle of friends, writing about the day’s activities of an old man doesn’t inspire an avid readership.

However, maturity does have one valuable benefit. It doesn’t matter if the teacher doesn’t like the way you learn crocheting. And when the writer and editor are the same person, grammar, syntax, and clarity are non-issues.

So – like Seinfeld, this blog is about nothing. One of the nothings I did recently was mow the lawn.

Mowing the lawn in my neighborhood is a competitive sport. Although the rules have never been published, I think I have most of them figured out. The rules about equipment are few. There are no restrictions on size or brand of motors. That no one uses electric or old-fashioned, hand-powered machines may be simply a matter of choice rather than a prohibition. Because the game focuses on the finished product, the mown lawn, issues of noise and air pollution are ignored. Size and horsepower seem to not matter and the quantity of polluting contaminants is certainly ignored.

Although the number of “pusher” mowers out number the “riders” in my neighborhood,
I have chosen a 15-horsepower John Deere lawn tractor with cruise control as my machine. I like that it cuts a wide swath even though it gives me little advantage in the game of lawn mowing since mowing time neither adds or subtracts points. Because winners are chosen on Sundays, actual mowing time is irrelevant as long as mowers are resting in the garage by sundown Saturday evening. .

To learn what it takes to win the game, I have paid close attention to the perennial winners. Recognizing that there might be hidden secrets that explain their consistency in winning, I have made a list of obvious components that can make me a contender.

My lawn should be seeded with Kentucky Bluegrass and trimmed to a height between 2.5- and three-inches.
Have no dandelions, chickweed, or crabgrass – nothing but Kentucky Bluegrass.
Neatly trimmed borders and edges.
A uniformly green lawn.
A landscape plan that has drive-by appeal.

With those goals before me, I have begun to accumulate the needed equipment:

A 15-horsepower John Deere riding mower with cruise control.
An electric edger with a steel blade that is difficult to find and install.
A string trimmer that has a spool that routinely jams.
A sprayer to poison unsightly grass in the sidewalk and driveway.
No less than 100 feet of garden hose and an attractive storage place.
Sprinklers for lawn watering.
Hand held pruning shears.
A leaf blower to rid the sidewalk, driveway, and mower of cut grass and dust.
A rake.
A set of small garden tools for planting flowers and digging up weeds.

If I only knew what the prize is for winning, I might get excited about competing. Or, maybe not.

Loneliness

2007-04-18T17:07:00.000-05:00

Carrol and I spent the weekend with some of my high school friends from the Class of ’55. At our table for Friday’s dinner were two widower’s, one recent and one for more than five years. Also at the table were a Vietnam vet living on borrowed time because of agent orange and his wife. Of the four marriages, ours was the only one that had enjoyed a fiftieth anniversary.

Four months ago, Bob’s wife of 47 years died. The first four months, he said, were easy compared to the present. He told us they had known how she would die years earlier and planned accordingly. But when eventuality became reality, when dreaded expectations turned into dark certainty, when the horizon of the future crept close and became the present, Ruthie was dead and Bob was awash in an uncomfortable, embarrassing state of relief.

Since then, relief has lost its temporary value. In its place, a heavy loneliness has settled in. Aware that there is no realistic alternative, Bob knows his grief is now a meaner enemy. He and his wife had no children, his sister lives in West Virginia, and of course his parents are gone. At one time he had eleven dogs, but all but one have gone to doggie heaven. He says, “I can’t imagine marrying again.” With that possibility ruled out, Bob’s future lacks the marks of an eagerly anticipated vacation or holiday. As Bob rambled from subject to subject, a question formed in my head. Is Bob now saddled with perpetual loneliness or is there some relief possible?

The other widower, Albert, told us he lost his wife, “5 years, 5 months, and 18 days ago.” After a slight pause, Albert continued, “The first seven months were hardest.” More silence. It was clear that Al didn’t want to wade through the swamp of his grief again. All he wanted to say was that loneliness was his worst enemy.

At dinner the next evening, we sat with six different classmates, including Lynn who had buried her husband a year ago. As the rest of us inquired about her health and adjustment, she repeated what we had heard the night before. Apparently, time brings some peace and acceptance, but mostly it brings the demon of loneliness.

For years I have listened to widows and widowers tell me about grief, the lonely nights, the claustrophobia of a big house, the sadness of an empty chair at the breakfast table, the feeling of being a fifth-wheel among married couples. In those days, listening was part of my job description.

This past weekend, it was not my job; it was unavoidable. Today, four days after the weekend I am remembering a long-ago Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby and its message “Ah, look at all the lonely people … where do they all come from?”

One place lonely people come from is marriage or more precisely, the end of a marriage. My wife and I, by a joint effort, have avoided divorce that would have left me lonely. Yet, there is an end of marriage that we cannot avoid – the death of one of us.

When a spouse dies, the wedding vow “’til death do us part” is fulfilled. Completed. Finished. Gone. In my marriage, like Bob’s, Al’s, and Lynn’s, one will be left. That one, the one left, will certainly be lonely.

In such a harsh light, the message comes clear. Two questions must be asked. Two actions are demanded. What kind of defense am I building now, while I have a spouse, to keep the demon of loneliness at bay if I am the one left? If I am the one left, what kind of plan have I made to eliminate the poisonous seeds of loneliness in the soil of my soul?

Regardless of the plan, I always have to return to reality. I know neither my nor I can avoid or escape loneliness that comes with death of the other. Even though death brings one kind of loneliness, death also brings another reality – the assurance of Jesus. “I am with you always, until the end of the age.” That promise protects us from the kind of loneliness that yearns for an understanding and compassionate God.

Why do they do it?

2007-04-12T21:04:00.000-05:00

Why in the world does anyone spend time helping the others, especially the helpless, the lazy, bums, drunks, addicts, convicts, ex-cons, the dirty, the homeless, i.e., the bottom rung of society’s ladder? Why do grown-ups volunteer to serve children and youth? Why do seniors receive so much attention from their juniors?

I know a couple who exchanged a secure job with the government to be present with street people, serve them coffee, give them second-hand clothes, and offer a model of parenthood to kids who have multiple distorted views of parenting in their lives.

I wonder why they do that? Is it for money?

I know a guy who works the night shift and then drives 50 miles to teach and counsel prisoners. He works this other “job” two, sometimes three days a week and spends no less than two hours plus the two-hour driving time each day.

Why? Is it because he is bored and needs something to fill empty hours? Does he do it for the small deduction for charitable travel on his tax return?

I know a couple who show up every week at a city mission to pour coffee for folks who have never tasted Starbucks coffee. The couple would be comfortable in a stylish shop in the suburbs that offer Wi-Fi, but choose to serve coffee to people who are as unfamiliar with Wi-Fi as they are with a hundred-dollar bill. (Wireless-Fidelity enables laptop computer users to get on the Internet in coffee shops, bookstores, etc..)

Why? Are they doing some kind of penance for a sin God has already forgotten?

I know others who prepare and serve a meal to anyone who comes to St. John’s Breadline and they do this cooking and serving regularly.

Why? Are they learning how to cook and need someone to eat their nouveau cuisine?

After school tutors, Sunday school teachers, blood donors, people who serve as “big brothers” or “big sisters,” and the people who deliver meals to shut-ins all volunteer their services and spend their time doing something good for others.

Why? Why do all these volunteers do what they do?

When asked, some of these good people can’t answer the question about their motives. Most of them know a few reasons that do not motivate them. Money is the most often rejected explanation. Others say they only know in part what motivates them to volunteer. Among those partial answers are:

“I think I ought to pass along the blessings I have received.”

“There was a need and I could meet it.”

“I guess it is more or less a habit.”

“I like kids (or whoever benefits from their efforts).”

“In a way, although it seems selfish, I volunteer because I always get more than I give.”

Only a few mention any divinely inspired motivation. Are they embarrassed to talk about God or do they mostly look inside themselves to find the answer to the “Why?” questions.

After some listening, observing, and thinking I have come to the conclusion that self-referred answers bring some sadness to the good deeds when acknowledged. Wouldn’t service be more satisfying; more compelling; and more effective if the services of volunteers arose from a belief that God was the motivator? If God were so busy ruling the universe that he assigned certain jobs to ordinary John and Jane Does, wouldn’t the Does see their volunteering with more understanding and appreciative eyes?

To say, “God trusts me with a part of his responsibility for this child …” or “God thinks I am just the right person to do this …” or “Out of all the people in the world, God chose to motivate me to …” would undoubtedly make the value of a volunteer’s efforts more significant and meaningful.

So it seems to me. How does it seem to you?

Do you know what motivates you to serve? Or not to serve?

Whew! What a Holy Week

2007-04-07T13:20:00.000-05:00

I almost missed the Maundy Thursday service. Leaving the comfort of home and returning after dark doesn’t have much appeal anymore. Attending the Good Friday service was even less attractive since the cold front that has jeopardized the spring flowers is not blowing through, but making itself at home on the prairie. Even though the temptation was real, we overcame and, as usual, we were glad we went. Habit is a powerful force – keeps some people from worship and draws others.

I have learned to expect at least one “take home” truth from every worship experience. I never know where the jewel I seek will be found because it is sometimes in the music, the words of a song, some action or thing that captures my eye, but most often the “take home” benefit comes from the preacher’s mouth.

That was the case on Maundy Thursday. The preacher’s thesis was that, unlike every other Christian worship service, Maundy Thursday is for insiders only.

She helped us remember the events on another Thursday that gave us the Last Supper. On that evening Jesus was having a meal with his closest friends whom he had trained to carry on the tasks he had been assigned. No one else was invited, no disinterested onlookers, no adversaries, no one needing healing, no one who wanted to argue.

The invitation to supper read “Insiders Only.” Insiders, even though the group included a betrayer and friends who were so fickle they would desert Jesus when he could have used a little support and encouragement. Like members of other insider groups, the disciples often expected special advantages and choice seats. They sometimes became jealous when outsiders received the attention they wanted and complained when more understanding and courage were expected of insiders. Yet, Jesus wanted to eat his last meal with his insiders. At the most intimate moment of his life, he wanted to spend it with insiders.

I took home from the Maundy Thursday worship a renewed acknowledgement that I am an insider. But when I ask, "What kind of insider am I?" I have to admit some changes are called for and some adjustments are necessary to improve my relationships, both horizontal and vertical.

Then Good Friday came and I went back to church to worship in a most unlikely context. Early in the service, the preacher read a meditation noting that Good Friday is the one holiday that Hallmark ignores. Who wants to be reminded of injustice, suffering, punishment, shame, and hatred? What is the “take home” message in the hearing of Jesus suffering and death?

Although the non-commercialization of a holiday is refreshing, Good Friday 2007 yanks me out of the fantasy world I want; a world where people are nice, love is the only motivator, and the good guys always win. Who can find a way to make a buck reminding customers that they killed the only perfect man who ever lived? Who would dare celebrate?

So for me, the truth of Good Friday is like a baseball thrown at a guy sitting on a seat above a tank of water in a carnival booth. The man sits there, waiting for some kid with a good arm to hit the trigger that dumps him in the cold water.

Good Friday is that kind of shock – sudden, surprising yet certain, and as real as the cold water.

Life is not what it ought to be or could be or what we want to be. Life has a dark side. In the greatest story ever told, the good suffer; the innocent are oppressed, the powerful acquiesce to wrongdoing, the righteous are neglected, and trusted servants enrich themselves from the common purse. Good Friday spotlights unpleasant truths and begs for a redemptive act. .

Insiders know from whence our redemption comes and they look forward!

Sometimes I Need a Cathedral Experience

2007-04-05T13:36:00.000-05:00

The Christian church calendar, a calendar that reminds us of the significant events in the history of the faith. By setting aside a particular day and season, we lift up truths that are true all the time. Although we understand everyday that God visited his creation as a human being, the church calendar sets aside a Christmas season to drive the point home.

In the same way, forty days not counting Sundays are designated as Lent so we can prepare for the events leading up to Christ’s crucifixion and be ready for his triumphal and life extending resurrection.

I am glad we have Christmas and Easter on the calendar. On those days I am reminded that because of the events they commemorate these Holy days are not just like all the other days. They are special. They awaken convictions that have cooled. They force a new look at truths taken for granted. They give root to what has become a cut-flower existence. They reset me in starting blocks so I can run the race again, better motivated, stronger, and more determined to finish the race.

I need holidays!

In a similar way, I need a cathedral experience in my life.

When worship becomes routine, predictable, and ordinary, it isn’t worship. It isn’t helpful. It doesn’t bring any kind of meaningful praise to the Almighty. And, I think it doesn’t please God.

The little brown church in the vale may be good enough for Mother’s Day but ….

One’s home church may be quite suitable for the funeral of a longtime pew sitter but ….

Weddings are appropriately celebrated in the church building where the bride attended Sunday School but ….

Almost any kind of church structure can make a great place to have a pot-luck dinner but ….

New churches with their worship centers, stages, enlarged seating capacities, and state-of-the-art sound systems may appeal more effectively to the generations born after 1960 but …

But sometimes we need a cathedral.

A place unlike any other. A place with tall spires straining to reach heaven. A place with cast iron bells, Gothic arches, and thick walls. A place with a ceiling high enough to make you want to look up. A place with stained glass windows that illustrate some Bible story. A nave with a long center aisle, a pipe organ good enough not to embarrass J. S. Bach, and little plaques recalling the generosity of people no one remembers. A place that welcomes silence and demands reverence. A place that sets the standard for words like awesome, breath-taking, grand, stunning, sacred, and holy.

Of course, even cathedrals can become ordinary ‑ familiar, routine, taken-for-granted. Stained glass windows block sunlight, high ceilings run up the heating bill, pipe organs are more expensive to maintain and replace than guitars, and silence stifles fellowship.

But that is only if you are being literal. When one gets beneath the literal and physical perspective, he might find a spiritual lesson applicable to life. I have.

Visiting a Mercedes dealer’s showroom can be inspiring to a Chevy owner. A live concert or basketball game adds a dimension unavailable to television watchers. Reading one good book beats reading a thousand billboards. A few hours fishing sustains us more than a day spent at the grocery.

Yes, I am going to take another look at my life and see where I need a cathedral experience.

Free coffee and its price

2007-03-30T15:22:00.000-06:00

I like to think I am wiser than I used to be, mostly because I am older. Old people seem to have the enviable trait of ridding themselves of foolishness they once thought was cool. A wise move. Or maybe it is because they finally have the time to learn the stuff that qualifies as wisdom. Most gray-heads wasted too much of their youth chasing waterless clouds in their quest for a refreshing sip of water. No matter what the explanation, I like thinking I am finally wise. And just when I am pleased with myself, I discover that some younger persons have been longtime custodians of what I now call wisdom.

A few days ago, Butch and I visited the Washington Street Mission. Between 9:00 and 11:00 each weekday morning, the mission invites the citizens of the state capital to come in and have a free cup of hot coffee and a left over doughnut that no one was willing to pay for yesterday. Thinking if the doughnuts can’t be fresh they at least ought to be warm, the staff nukes the doughnuts and serves them to anyone who comes in off the street.

Some days 100 people enter the smoke-free, alcohol-free building for a cup of coffee in a real cup or mug. Many of them are street people. That’s a nice way to describe citizens who have no home, no job, and not much of anything else unless it fits in a black, plastic garbage bag. Many of the regular clients of the downtown mission sit at the bottom of society’s ladder, often because of drugs, alcohol, or mental illness.

Even at the bottom of the ladder, folks gather wisdom like interest on inherited money. Just as everyone has firm opinions about the adequacy of an inheritance, so most of us have strong feelings about the wisdom we have accumulated. I saw that truth in Mike as we drank the mission’s coffee.

Mike and Phil were discussing their living situations and my partner and I kept our mouths shut. What would a homeowner have to offer in a debate about the merits of public housing versus a motel room?

Phil was encouraging Mike to move out of his little motel room and into one of the apartments in a city-owned high-rise. Mike wanted nothing to do with that kind of living arrangement. As Phil pressed his pitch, Mike became agitated, and with something akin to a glare in his eyes, said, “I like living alone. I don’t want to be around people. No way!”

Phil got up and went outside to smoke a cigarette. We were left alone with Mike and were a little skittish about the direction the conversation had gone. So we tried to change the direction a bit.

“So, you like being alone?” I asked.

“Right. For me it’s better. That’s all there is to it.”

For a guy who thrives on the attention of others, I just had to speculate, “I bet you have some friends.”

“Nope.”

“Not even one? You don’t have a best friend?

“Not anymore. My best friend died last year.”

Feeling like I had found the drop-off point in a big lake, I started swimming for shore. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “How did he die?”

“He shot himself. He shot himself, but the police are the ones who killed him.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, hoping he would tell me more, maybe to help him resolve some of his grief or just to entertain me with an interesting story.

“Joe was driving when the police stopped him. He didn’t have a driver’s license and he was drunk, but the police didn’t arrest him and take him to jail. Instead, they took him home and he shot himself in the head.”

After a pause, when no one said a word, he continued.

“I know Joe is the one who pulled the trigger, but the police are the ones who killed him. If they had taken him to jail, like they should have, he would still be alive. He had several DUI’s and that is why he didn’t have a driver’s license. The police should have taken him to jail!”

After Mike had told the story a couple more times, the conversation drifted to other subjects and then my friend and I left. Michael counted it wisdom to live life alone. His wisdom was formed by his experiences and perhaps nurtured by his mental illness. Were my friend and I wise enough to learn something from Michael?

Now, two days later, I have been mulling over some questions. I must be a long way from wisdom.

Since every friend eventually will disappoint us, severely or mildly, how much energy is a new friend worth? For Michael? For me?

What are the consequences of losing a friend?

A friend cures or treats or intensifies what kind of ills? Michael’s mental illness? My approaching frailty?

Vacation to the Present Past

2007-03-28T15:27:00.000-06:00

We met James Armstrong, 83, in Birmingham. Although later in the week, we would visit Mobile, New Orleans, and Little Rock, a chance meeting of Armstrong is the part of the trip I will relive again and again. The beautiful azaleas of Bellingrath Gardens, the devastation of New Orleans, the optimism of its residents, and the story told by the Clinton Presidential Center did not penetrate my mind and soul as much as Mister Armstrong.

He volunteers every Sunday afternoon at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute located across the street from the historic Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Of course you remember the significance of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church - the church that was bombed on a Sunday morning in 1963 killing four little black girls, Sunday School classmates of the now radical Angela Davis.

Across the street now, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute tells the story of the injustices African-Americans lived and suffered under during those days when the meanness of white people ordained black heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr. Among the displays in the Institute is the jail cell door behind which Dr. King wrote his public Letter from a Birmingham Jail to the clergy of Alabama; pictures of water cannons and dogs being used against citizens who merely wanted a cup of coffee at a lunch counter, access to public schools, to vote in a democracy, and to enjoy the blessings of freedom.

Armstrong pointed to a picture with a father holding the hands of two sons as they tried unsuccessfully to enroll at an all-white school in their neighborhood. Without any prompting, he said, "That's me and my two sons." My wife and I were spellbound by his recounting of that day and by his present lack of bitterness. I asked myself how a man, a father, go through the difficult times when his children were rejected and belittled without bitterness. His answer to that silent question was, "That was a long time ago. People change."

A few days later, we visited Little Rock Central High School where the governor in 1957 ordered the Arkansas National Guard to stop black students from entering the school building. As the newspaper clippings and photos in the National Historic Site across the street showed the ugliness of white students and parents screaming at black children, I tried to remember what I was doing in September 1957.

While thinking of my life in those turbulent times, I thanked God I wasn't one of those bigots who bombed churches and killed little girls or called young people derogatory names because they wanted what every child in America deserves. I was glad my picture wasn't displayed as one of the opponents to fairness, equality, and decency.

I thought about Governor Faubus using the National Guard, not to guard but to harass citizens, I wondered about his life after the 101st Airborne Division allowed the doors of Little Rock Central High School to open for nine black children. I asked the Park Service Guide about his funeral and how big it was. The guide didn't know the number of people who expressed their respect by attending his funeral, so I let my imagination suggest an answer.

I imagine Gov. Faubus and "Bull" Connor of Birmingham were church members, and held a high position in the minds of most of their constituents. And I guess their funerals were attended by lots of people, some of them who had attended lynchings earlier in their lives.

More questions popped into my mind. Did anyone have a change of heart and later regret their convictions in 1957 or 1963?

This time, the Park Service Guide could answer my question. She said, "The screaming woman in the picture apologized to the black girl she had harassed and I think the press made a big deal of her public apology."

"When was that?" I asked.

"1997."

"It only took forty years, huh?"

As I turned to look at an African American standing near me, I sarcastically said it again, "Only forty years." The black skinned man said nothing, but just turned his head and looked at the floor.

I gained a lot from my short trek through the South. Knowledge, sympathy, regret, and respect and admiration for those who suffered indignities and real hurt because of the meanness of my race.

I also lost something. I now repent of my conviction that morality and goodness cannot be legislated. No longer am I committed to the false idea that a change of heart is necessarily followed by changed behavior. Sometimes legislated morality precedes the change of heart.

So it seems to me.

How does it seem to you?