Awards

   On the wall of what is affectionately known as ‘David’s Hole’ hangs an interesting collection of debris: mirrors (to keep the vampires in line), masks (offering various views into the souls of the artists), sculptures (from the crucified Christ to a commemorative bottle of bourbon (sadly empty), pictures of angels, a close up of a sculpture of a Madonna, an elderly woman walking past a grave yard, fishermen bringing boats onto the beach, waves breaking, the Giants winning the Super Bowl, a sea bird in flight, , Marilyn holding down her skirt,  the church where I grew up, the twin towers (lots a pictures).  Then there’s a shaggy doll of Gerry Garcia, a clay casting of an Assyrian battle plaque, a Chinese Dog, a Butterfly in a plastic case, a muskrat’s skull, an amethyst geode, a silver trophy given to my father for being first in his class in high school, crossed foils, my high School varsity letter, two bronze medals for college fencing, a nautical map of a section of the Maine coastline, Ethiopian spear heads, a fork made by my grandfather, a brass fire nozzle, homemade knives (not by me), a Goofy hat from Disney World, a Celtic cross covered with fish and sea monsters, a whale tooth, a dragon claw (novel in the works), a cork board, a hanging plant, and a ton of books (or at least half a ton).  There are other things I haven’t mentioned, awards given in honor of some things I did along the way. 

   Awards are nice.  They say nice things.  They bring back memories.  They remind us that somebody is watching and appreciating.  But in some ways all the ‘debris’ on the walls and shelves of my ‘hole’ are awards.  They commemorate days lived, adventures come home from, glimmers of beauty and glory that lit my life. On my desk is a picture of my birth family with my kids, gathered on a sand dune just after my mother’s funeral, yelling at the camera, and next to it is a close up of my wife.  Are they awards?  More like blessings living outside of time forming me as surely as everything I’ve been recognized for and managed to collect. 

   All our lives have awards.  We just have to claim them and treasure them.  They are invested with the power of the moments that brought them into our lives.  Don’t be afraid of such debris.  I knew a guy who collected rocks.  Each one had a name that reminded him from where it came and what had happened in his life there.  It was a hard collection to move around.  We don’t need monuments.  We just need to appreciate the miracle of life as it comes to us and open ourselves to our role in it.    

   As Bobby Burns said:

                        I burned the candle at both ends, it did not last the night

                        But oh my foes and ah my friends, it gave a wondrous light.

Being a Patriot

   As a college sophomore, I was a wise fool.  Such is the fate of the young to be filled with a confidence to forge ahead and assume they have enough wisdom and energy to deal with the problems of the world without making the same mistakes that have been made before.  Energy there may be.  Seething torrents of it.   But wisdom?  Well, they do have the wisdom of the young.  Wisdom to claim happy endings.  Wisdom to believe we could be doing better.  Wisdom to face walls as obstacles rather than necessary additions to the land scape. So you see the paradox.  There is great wisdom and power in these possibilities.  And there is glory.  Ah glory. 

   So, armed and shackled with this paradox, I went forth from the ivory tower to face the bastion of entrenched darkness, home.  So the foolishness shows its gory face.  I wasn’t horrific, but close to it.  My parents looked forward to having me come and breathed in relief to have me go.  My local congregation had arranged a ‘Folk Service’ led by the ‘Young People’ complete with a ‘Dialogue Sermon.’  Talk about foolish.  It was 1967/68.  They were desperately trying to be relevant.  They were trying to see the upheavals around them with some perspective other than fear.  The stench of their burning center city was still fresh in memory.  The war in South East Asia was becoming a wound.  The young were not staying on the tracks so lovingly laid for them.  And the cacophony of Rock and Roll was swamping The Rat Pack, Rosemary, Bing, and Big Band Music in pounding rhythms and feedback.  Slick and pretty had become shaggy and bra-less.  Scotch and soda had been traded for pot and LSD.  And worst of all, the kids were protesting everything from cutting down trees to supporting the boys-over-there.  They had stopped being American.  Perhaps these church leaders who planned the dialogue service were a bit sophomoric themselves.  Or they were trying to build bridges.  It was a deep chasm. 

   The place was packed.  We played our songs, even had a sing along without incident.  But the dialogue sermon was loaded with tension.  The kids actually got honest about the war and a pervasive judgment on their life styles.  Finally one of the ‘older guys’ stood up and almost cried, “Why don’t you love your country anymore?”

   The room went silent.  The question was loaded.  He wasn’t only raising a question about our patriotism but about our identity, about our value systems, and most about our relationships with these people who were struggling to have a clue about who we had become.

   Everybody looked at me.  I had the longest hair, I played the guitar, I was a minister’s kid, and I had said I wanted to be a minister.  So obviously I was the one to field this land mine.  Hey, I was a sophomore.  The motto of my college is “Why Not?”  So I forged ahead toward… 

   “I do love my country.  I consider myself a patriot.”  I let that one sink in for effect.  “We are the best educated generation in the history of this nation, because of the schools you have built.  We’ve studied more history and American history than any generation before us.  Thomas Jefferson is one of my heroes.  So is Ben Franklin and George Washington.  These guys were revolutionaries.  Their vision of what this nation could be is revolutionary.  It’s nuts.  It makes room for everybody.  The Bill of Rights is off the wall.  It offers an equal footing to anybody.  They were crazy enough to believe it was possible, not probable, but possible.  It still is nuts.  Jefferson thought we were going to need a good revolution every 20 years or so, just to keep the dream from getting bogged down in the power plays that have defined history since it began.  So, Jefferson was right.  We’re having a revolution.  No guns.  Just Jimi Hendrix.  We’re fighting for your country too, for its soul.  You taught us to do that.  We don’t expect you to approve.  Why should you?  Just listen, listen with your hearts and believe that we’re not totally nuts.  And love us.  We need that.  We’ll grow up.  Then you can retire and let us fight with our kids.”

   Pretty good speech, huh?  Somebody recorded it with one of the old reel to reel machines.  My mother cried.  My father was preaching at another church and asked for prayers for the congregation where the dialogue service was happening.  God listened.  The last line got a laugh.  To this day I have no explanation for the content, except for the Holy Spirit.  It’s what I’ve come to believe, but then?  Gimme a break.  I was a sophomore.  But I guess I was a patriot, even then.  Peace bro’.

   Happy Fourth of July.      

Foundation Stones

   This is Derek Jeter’s last year as a professional baseball player.  This is either of no interest to you or something you were already aware of.  He has played short stop (don’t worry about what that means) for the New York Yankees, won awards for his defensive play, set records for offense, been captain of the team, and in the process set an unusual example of what we would like a sportsman to be.

   Once in a while they show highlights from his career.  There’s one scene of him sprinting after a foul ball across the third base line.  He caught it, but had no chance to slow down.  He ended up diving head first into the stands, fans doing their best to catch him, coming up with a bloody nose and a shiner.  He got a standing ovation. 

   These guys are the elite.  They get paid big bucks to play a game.  They are entertainers, right?  Well, yes and no.  Their games are about working as a team, facing opponents together, backing up each other, putting themselves on the line, their talents, their energy, their commitment to the game, to their team to win together.  In baseball one of the strategies is even called a sacrifice fly.  So, cynical pronouncements aside, the games represent something about us, ideals that we use as foundations for our society. 

   Games are a lot more than amusements.  The games we play and how we play them say an awful lot about who we are and who we aspire to become.  And the people who are icons for us say an awful lot about what we celebrate.  Winning is important in whatever context it happens.  It speaks of excellence and power.  But when a winner also plays ‘the game,’ whatever that game happens to be with a sense of personal humility and integrity, they become more than entertainers.  Mariano Rivera, a pitcher for the same team just retired, a star in his own right said recently in an interview that he wanted everything he did to point to God, whether he won or lost, he wanted everything he did to demonstrate his faith.  Sounds like more than an entertainer to me, more like a stone for a foundation.

   Go team.

Wow!

 Believe it or not, I was actually successful.  I navigated through the Colorado rapids of Blog reality.  Hubris assumes that success is the norm.  Hubris is not part of this scenario.  I  realized recently that success is as possible as a lack there of.  How’s that for a realization?  Fifty-fifty odds aren’t bad are they?

Going Tangential

 

   I love school.  I guess that’s one of the reasons I enjoy teaching.  I end up learning as much or more than the students and I get to be engaged in the dialogue of the intellect.  It’s a form of exploration. Indiana Jones never found a golden artifact more precious that a student’s dawning realization, a discovery of new terrain, landscapes of life never considered.

   So I went to school-for-a-day last week, a writer’s symposium at the local community college.  A workshop in the morning and one in the afternoon, one from column A, two from … you get the idea.  I took ‘Blogging’ in the morning and ‘Writing from the Dark’ in the afternoon.  The later one spoke to my creative side.  But more about that later.

   The Blogging seminar opened a lot of doors about this endeavor I embarked upon with you all a while ago.  The class led me to look at what I’d been doing with a new eye.  It led me to ask questions of myself in concrete terms ranging from what I call this collection of musings, to what script I use to write.  The interesting thing is that many of the questions it led me to ask were not part of the discussion.  But the discussion going on in the room was only tangential to the discussion going on inside my head.  And my conclusions shared the same vectors.

   So, I’m going to make some changes in the Blog.  If I can actually pull that off without causing a blackout in the northeast corridor, it will be a personal record.  I hope you don’t mind the changes.  Actually, I hope you actually enjoy them.  But probably more to the point, I realized that I need to be going tangential more.  It’s the way I learn best.  And as Joni Mitchell says, “Life is for learning…” 

 

Making a List and Checking It Twice…

 

   It’s the 21^st of December, the solstice, the anniversary of my father’s death, and more to the point, four days until Christmas.  There are very few events or celestial movements that take precedence above the list of purchases to make, dry cleaning to drop off, packages to wrap, parties to attend, bills to pay, sermons to write, pastoral calls to make, items to return to their point of purchase, gifts to procure from a spectrum of sources, devious and straightforward, cards to write, address, stamp, and mail.  The only way to keep track of this chaos is ‘the list.’   

   My wife is a blessing in many ways.  Her ability to bring some sort of order to a chaotic universe is one of them.  In her infinite wisdom, she knows better than to attempt to push and shove all these discordant entities and vectors toward an order that she has determined.  Her experience as a single parent has taught her that this is a waste of energy.  Rather, she composes, magically, bringing it to being from the bits and pieces of sensed and known dynamics, capabilities and possibilities, arcs and planes, the answer to all our worry and lack of understanding.  It seems to be just a piece of discarded envelope with numbers and words, paper-clipped to coupons and receipts, but we all know that this is what all magic is made of, common elements, herbs and minerals gathered together in to proper way, bits and pieces seeming so common until they are joined with words and motions, each exactly right.  Words like, ‘Well, we’ll be over there, it makes sense to drop by their house.  We’ll only stay a minute.  Then we’ll go to the mall.  We can get Starbuck’s while we’re there.  That will hold us up until lunch.’  See what I mean?  You’d never know that magic was brewing.  Magic that holds the world together.  Magic that allows all the insanity of this crazy season to become Christmas.

What's In Your Textbook?

I heard the other day that text books mentioning evolution were banned from Texas schools.  There is little doubt or discussion that this has to do with people’s unwillingness to allow any competition to the creation story in Genesis.  I could do some ranting about a terrible lack of understanding about the Bible’s intent.  An explanation of ‘How’ was not its purpose.  The identification of ‘Who’ was.  Nuff said.

 

But an even more basic discussion is about evolution.  Most consider uniformity the rule.  What is happening now will continue with small changes toward some evident result.  But such has as little to do with evolution as a six day agenda has to do with the Bible’s story of creation.  Evolution has to do with moments of change, sudden jumps and starts, unforeseen lightning strikes pulling forward  unappreciated strengths, altering species’ destinies.  Such a mechanism more closely resembles miracles than it does some ‘natural’ law.  It demands that we pay attention to the meek, the ones who are not dominant, who are not powerful according to the world’s definitions.  Gee, I’ve heard someone else talk like that.  Some guy who was giving a sermon on a hill in a back woods place called Galilee.  Taking all of that into account, I’m more comfortable with evolution than uniformity’s stolid unwillingness to confront God’s and nature’s obvious preferences.  Texas, put that in your pipe and smoke it.