Half Mast

Shrewsbury is a small town, used to be a farming town, now it’s a bedroom community for high end folks who work elsewhere and live here to have a safe and quiet place to raise the future shakers and movers. But some of the old fashioned stuff still pops up its head once in a while.

Memorial Day is one of those once in a while’s. The girl scouts march with the flags. The school band plays a medley of patriotic songs, fourth graders sliding trombones always makes me proud. It’s a long story. I stand with the firemen, the Rev and the boys. We stand behind the cops, next to the ambulance folks. One of the firemen who happens to be a woman sings the national anthem. She’s pretty good. Then a sixth, a seventh, and an eighth grader each reads an essay that speaks to What Memorial Day means to me. Then they read a list of the one’s we’ve lost, starting in the Revolutionary War and working all the way past Vietnam. Then they raise the stars and stripes and lower it again to half mast, while the pipes play “The flowers of the field ha’ all wiede away, followed by Amazing Grace” Then I say the benediction.

I always appreciate the whole thing. There’s something so real about it. But this year while they read the list, I started to tear up. The pipes put me over the top. Why? Each name seemed to be a personal loss, a tragedy. The terrible price of war stood up and spoke those names. And then it was my turn to talk, to send them out.

I climbed up next to the flag pole and looked over the crowd. They were waiting for something. People do that. They know something is about to happen, something that fits into the normality and might actually mean something. They wait for it.

“Tecumseh Sherman, hero of the Civil War, savior of the nation was asked to speak at the graduation of West Point the year after the war ended. They expected a two hour speech. He came to the podium and looked over the eager cadets and said three words. ‘War is Hell.’ He sat and looked at his shoes.

“Sherman knew. Every one of the people whose names we read died in Hell. They suffered and paid a terrible price so that we can live in peace. Now claim what they have paid for. Live in peace, each day, every day, live in peace. It has been bought with a terrible price. Amen.”

I don’t know if that was normal enough for everybody, but about twenty people told me that it made sense. Maybe that’s all we can hope for.

Sherman hung out with the guy who used to own my house. They drank bourbon in my dining room with another guy who’d been to Hell, Grant. I hope it was good stuff, they deserved it.

I Met a Prophet

When I was told I needed surgery, I got out my calendar and set it up, surgery Thursday, back to work Tuesday. Made sense to me. The doctor told me it would take a month, but I figured I could get by, what the heck. I don’t expect whether forecasters to be accurate. Why should I expect doctors to know what they’re talking about?

In our Tuesday morning Bible study, we’re talking about prophets. These scary people who are the mouth pieces of God, standing with one foot firmly planted in the world of here and now and the other in the clarity of the eternal now of the One who knows and sees all that was, is, and shall be. “Thus says the Lord,” has rarely been greeted with gladness or eagerness. We don’t like to be told that most of what we’re doing is wrong and will get us into a lot of trouble. We don’t want to hear that we shouldn’t smoke, or eat half a bag of Doritos, or judge people because they’re different. We don’t want to be any more generous, forgive our enemies, or reduce our carbon foot print. We’ve worked hard on our excuses. We’ve even find ‘good’ reasons to tune out all these weirdoes. Why should we listen to somebody that doesn’t agree with us, let alone believe what they say?

I’ve found inspiration in the prophets. Though nobody listens to them, they keep at it because their relationship with God drags them toward the clarity from which their inspiration comes. So, when I get slapped around or worse, ignored, I remember them and keep at it.

I doubt my surgeon considers himself a prophet. But I doubt he has any easier time convincing stubborn patients like me to believe the probabilities that are coming at them like an eighteen wheeler. Last week Chris told me it was nice to see the brightness coming back in my eyes. I looked at the calendar. Yup, a month. I have to tell my doctor about the prophets. And, I have to stop being such an idiot. I’m sure
that's going to happen, real soon.

Clean Desks

I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs personality preference profile a few times. Some of the insights it reveals about my personality are no brainers. I’m an extrovert out the whazoo. And then there’s the way I keep order. I don’t. I have a tendency to not worry too much about how my desk looks at any time of day, week, month, or year. True, I’m infamous for loosing things. But then there’s always the epiphanous moment when I rediscover them.

I was at a continuing education event once where we were sorted by personality type. We’d all taken the test and sent them in before we got there. So I was in a group of six other extroverted, disorganized ministers. Fifteen minutes into the exercise we were laughing at our shared normality. One guy put a trash can at the end of his desk every six months and emptied whatever was piled on it into the gaping maw of oblivion. I asked him, “Did you ever miss anything?” His simple answer was “Not unless you count all the anxiety I dump with the trash on my desk.” In another fifteen minutes we were trying to figure out where to go for beer after the class and I noticed the other groups. One of them had found and easel and markers. They were making a list. Another group was sitting quietly. I bet they all had clean desks.

I used to worry about the creation story that most people are familiar with. There’s an awful lot of ordering and separating and judging going on there. I worried that God was the ultimate bean counter. This god liked things neat. And the chaos that was conquered by all the ordering and separating and judging was more similar to my fly by the seat of the pants reality. So did that make me on the outside of God’s orderliness?

You might scoff, but I’ve been told point blank and almost diplomatically over the years that my lack of order was paramount to a failure in my moral system and a good reason why my spiritual leadership was questionable. The budget types wield powerful influence over the hearts and minds and pocket books of the church. And they are faithful workers in the vineyard.

It was pretty easy for me to get the idea that God’s image that we were made in didn’t include a nose. Creativity and separating and seeing that stuff was good were more in line with a family resemblance each of us receives, noses and such. But there’s more to our resemblance to God than some such specificity. Sure God ordered things. But the order included pretty intricate things like snowflakes and down right messy stuff like birth. And just because something’s messy doesn’t mean it’s wrong. And when the One decides it time to step outside the nice neat order of things and make something happen, we don’t call that wrong, we call that a miracle.

So in this convoluted manner, using whatever kinky form of logic my messy brain would allow, I decided that even if the writer of Genesis would disapprove of my lack of a coherent filing system, the Holy Spirit allowed for all kinds of loop holes. Even for people with messy desks.

Whew, what a relief. Now where did I put that sermon I was working on?

Peanut Butter Road

It’s been a while since I sat down to write.  Been sitting a lot, but there’s little drive to write.  Being sick is weird.  It’s not only a collection of symptoms that illicit ooo’s and oh my’s from observers, it’s a fatigue that makes the normal routine a journey through peanut butter.  Thank God the world is blooming.  Just walking around the back yard is like taking vitamins.  If the azaleas can explode after putting up with winter, there’s hope.

Transformation

I was walking down a hallway at school between classes. It was late in the week, I was pooped. The only thing I was thinking about was getting home, shucking my shoes and slipping into a novel as a prelude to dreams. Few students were around. Most were in classrooms, trying to pay attention.

Coming toward me was a girl, long dark hair framing her face. She was looking down, carrying some weight of sadness or fatigue or worry. She looked like I felt. She looked like a large percentage of our culture felt. ‘The world is too much with us, late and soon.’ Some instinct, perhaps empathy, perhaps lowly duty pushed me to smile at her as we came closer through the dimness. Glancing up she, noticed me coming, smiling. She responded her face breaking into a shy grin, showing her teeth, responding to the bit of brightness walking toward her.

It was an amazing thing to see. She became beautiful, transformed. It lit her. A window opened on some bright place in her and let an internal light shine through. As she passed me her head tilted up as she looked ahead down the hall.

It occurred to me that I carried the same weight she did, or a similar one. It also occurred to me that though I could never be as beautiful as she, I could do a lot toward improving the scenery. I’ve heard, when we smile, we literally improve our mood. It releases pheromones. We become happier from the evidence of happiness we display. Talk about acting our way into feeling!

Too often we’d rather display our misery, wearing the burdens we carry like badges of honor. Do we want others to share our pain? Or are we simply proud of it? Or is it simply a habit, like a slouch? Standing up straight is better for our back, more attractive, lets us breathe better, allows us more energy, and still we slouch. Maybe frowning’s simply lazy.

But perhaps there’s a darker basis for this. Imbedded in the choices we make everyday are the options of energy and entropy. Alfred North Whitehead posited that when we make such a choice toward energy we allow the nature of God to become more real. And when we choose the other… Perhaps that is the true nature of Evil, allowing our potential to slide into chaotic entropy.

So, our mothers were right, “Stand up straight!” “Smile, frowny-pants!” The rule is, listen to your mother.

How to Write a Eulogy III

When you’re speaking at a funeral, it’s not important to make any sort of list of the accomplishments of the person who has died. Such lists are part of the articles recorded in the newspaper. Other than being redundant, any such list is almost useless in allowing the person’s person to live in the memories of the people there. People remember small bits and pieces of a person, not what they’ve accomplished. Rather than the job, we remember how they worked. Rather than their leadership, we remember their smile, their forgiveness, their faithfulness, the way they played the piano with their eyes closed.

If I knew the person well, I try to remember something specific about them, the way they laughed, the way they loved to dig in the garden, they way they loved to go to flea markets. I call that a hook. I describe that specificity let it live in the midst of the people and let them remember the person digging in the dirt or bringing home an old chair, and I speak about how that was part of their persona. They loved to nurture things, to help things grow. They loved to see in things that were discarded, the possibility of treasure. Each person’s life is a story. Our job in that moment is to remind people of a moment in that story so the person’s tears and laughter can be heard and shared.

I try to not repeat what others are going to bring up, or at least if it is the Yankees or the beach, I try to take in toward another tangent. I try to get folks who are planning to speak to talk to each other before they do so. Editing can go a long way toward helping the occasion to work.

If I didn’t know the person, I talk to the family ahead of time. I ask them what was the person’s favorite season and why. What was their favorite room in the house? What kind of music did they like? Did they like to travel and where? I ask them to name one moment that comes to mind when they think of them. By that time they are usually crying or laughing or both. They are talking to each other about their lost loved one. It’s a good place to begin building a eulogy.

One Day

It’s April. It’s cold. Easter was early this year. It’s supposed to be warm after Easter. But the tilt of the planet has something else to say about the chill in the air.

Yesterday we drove to a concert in western Jersey. On the way out there the woods were winter gray. While we heard young talented students play Bach, Chopin, Beethoven, Ravel, and List the sun shone, the temperature lifted and stuck around sixty blessed degrees. As we drove home, the woods had a deep red cast. Buds had pushed out, invited by the sun its warmth. There was no longer a tracery of stark grey lines, there was lace. After we got home, we went over to see my mother in law. And there stood a crab tree, exploding with a color somewhere between lavender and pink. One day, one single day of warmth had created a new environment. There is no going back now.

There are moments in all our lives, no matter how deep our winters, no matter how long we’ve waited for some sort of thaw, moments when warmth from far beyond our efforts offers possibilities of growth and bloom. Too often our frustration and fear demand that we remain bundled in the winters that have defined our exhausting days and sleepless nights. Too often the inertia of our dark normality freezes us in spite of glowing moments that offer another possibility.

We were not meant to survive, we were meant to live. I guess that’s what Easter’s about.