COVID-19 cases “remain high,” “Mother killed” in ongoing violence in the city of Chicago, “Plover chicks” born to Monty and Rose receive bands and names: thus reports the Chicago Tribune, Section 1, page 3 for Monday, July 13.

One page, nothing else on it, covers three huge stories of concern to all of us: the worldwide pandemic and its deadly effects here in the US, the increasing violence in large urban areas in the US (and elsewhere in the world), and the environmental crises, as illustrated by the hope that the Piping Plover population will increase with these new fledgling chicks who look as though they may have a chance.

I was glad that I was interested enough to care about the three stories on page 3 of the paper, because I have had trouble with sorting out what most matters to me at this time. I seem lethargic, not interested, not energetic. I put off projects that are worthwhile, instead, “whiling” away my time on crossword and jigsaw puzzles. What I have seen in myself and in others is a growing “malaise.” Oh, I know the word is supposed to be related to some underlying disease that is just about to make itself known to a person, and I am fairly certain that most of us who are feeling this “malaise” are not coming down with a dreadful disease. But this general feeling of discomfort, this nagging suspicion that something is wrong, is attacking many of us, it seems.

Depression. That’s what I think this feeling probably is. Not the clinical kind of depression, just the ordinary “something is wrong today and I don’t have any energy to do anything about” variety. We are living in uncertain times. Some might scoff at me for saying something so obvious and something that could possibly describe every “time” that anyone has ever lived through. The very fact that we face an unknown future moment to moment defines “uncertain” for all of us. But, to use a highly overused word in the current era, we are living in an “unprecedented” time of pandemic, at least it is unprecedented for anyone living today—and that’s all any of us know. History of the Spanish Flu pandemic or of the Bubonic plague give us an idea, but history is, in many ways, dead.

What can we do to ease this condition?

Recognize it. Be kind to ourselves.

Praise our attempts to get anything accomplished, large or small. So I can accept the fact that I haven’t written a blog for about ten days, but I have weeded two areas of my flower gardens during that time. Will the weeds come back? Of course, but what a sense of vindication in getting rid of those pesky green things that just want to live, even while choking out my flowers. I have to choose for them: flowers over weeds!

Reconsider what is important or valuable to us. Who knows? Those silly crosswords and jigsaws just might be adding new cells to my brain. Baking multiple loaves of zucchini bread is valuable, too. I’m feeding my part of the world! Sitting on the patio, chatting with friends about really important things (white hair rules!) and really valuable things (taking care of our aging population in appropriate ways) is important if only because we are taking the time to be in each other’s presence and listen to each other voice our thoughts.

And, in the midst of my ordinary, commonplace depression, I realize once again just how much I have to be grateful for. I live in a relatively safe area where COVID is not raging. I’m retired, so I don’t have to be on the “frontlines” where I might encounter the virus and where I would be expending energy beyond what I had day to day. I actually have the time to sit on the patio and be with friends.  I am blessed with all kinds of people who ask how I’m doing and who really care about the answer—and some of those people I don’t really know well. They are some of those frontline workers who are probably tired to death, stretched to the limit, and yet who ask the question “How are you?” and who listen to whatever answer I give.

How many times will we have to remind ourselves that we are all in this together? Part of that being “in this together” is that caring, that understanding, that generosity of spirit, that listening ability, that patience, that ability to turn from our own depression to reach out to the other who may feel just like we do and who needs that kindness.

Oh, the plovers’ names? Hazel, for a noted Chicagoland environmentalist, Esperanza, for the importance of our Hispanic neighbors and for the word itself—hope, and Tish, for the Potawatomi tribe who settled the area I live in.

And about the word “unprecedented”: More unprecedented than the pandemic is the visit of a comet which has been coming towards our sun for over 3000 years, and, once it is gone, it won’t be seen for another 7000 years because of its orbit. Check out Comet Neowise, as it is being called.  https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2020/07/14/now-a-naked-eye-comet-by-night-nobody-saw-comet-neowise-coming-heres-how-you-can-see-it-going/#658621982762

June 16^: As this date is my birthday, the date is important to me. It catches my eye. For example, part of my attraction to James Joyce’s Ulysses is that it all takes place on June 16, which many literary scholars call Bloomsday, in honor of one of the book’s main character Leopold Bloom.

But the date caught my eye just yesterday when I read it while scanning the Chicago Tribune. Most days, the paper shares an extended obituary and feature article of someone who has died of COVID-19. The deceased featured yesterday had died on June 16.

While I was going about the work of that day, which happened to be grading AP essays, and then enjoying a patio restaurant dinner with Jim and our good friends Jan and George, this gentleman was dying. Very likely, he was so ill that he barely knew his own condition. He had not been able to see his family. His partner had tried to talk to him by video chat, but it had not very successful.

June 16: a birth date; a death date. I am not naïve: I know that I share my birth date with many others, and I know that many people have died on that date, too. Somehow, though, the symmetry of it bothers me—life balanced by death. Equal quantities: add a life, subtract a life. How neat.

Our family has been aware of this awful symmetry for years. My grandson was born on April 15, which most of us would mark as “tax day.” But my stepdaughters forever will remember it as the date marking their mother’s death. Life/death: that seeming balance in this universe of ours. Almost like yin/yang or white/black or love/hate. Opposites that balance.

But everything within us screams “No!” These are not equally balanced events. We celebrate a birth, but we mourn a death. Birth is full potentiality; death is empty finality. Birth is the beginning; death is the end. And most of us do honor to the beginning of a life by finding life “sacred,” even before an embryo is viable. In the same way, most of us fight to keep people from exercising the freedom to end their lives when they choose, rather than when “their time has come.”

Here in our country, we are being confronted with the reality that we have not really been honoring all life or rejecting all death. At the very heart of the Black Lives Matter movement is the idea that White people, White people in power, have not found Black lives to be as valuable as White lives. Those Black lives have counted less in so many ways. They have not counted enough to live in good houses in safe neighborhoods. They have not counted enough to go to schools with enough resources to give them the same education that their White fellows across town get. They have not counted enough to face equal sentencing protocols when they appear in court. They have not counted enough to get equal pay for equal work. They have not counted enough to have a fair shot at higher level positions in many corporations, educational institutions, or governmental offices.

And lately we have also been seeing that those Brown and Black folks who are our neighbors count more on the side of death. Because of all kinds of social, educational, and environmental factors, they have been much more affected by COVID-19. Even before the pandemic, many of these people of color had a greater percentage of serious medical conditions that cause death at younger ages than that of many White people. Unfortunately, these folks have also been much more affected by poverty, crime, abuse, and mistreatment in our society than White people who have been privileged in such a way as to be immune to such conditions.

Of course, my statements are generalizations. There are, indeed, White people who suffer from all of these “death” problems, as well as there are people of color who have achieved high levels of success, experiencing the American dream in ways most of us, Black, Brown, Indigenous, or White, can only dream of. But, on the whole, my generalizations hold up to scrutiny. Data, statistics, even anecdotal stories of personal experiences prove the truth of the last two paragraphs.

No, life and death are never equal in our minds. All of us, regardless of our color, race, ethnicity, or other category, love life, value life, crave life. None of us wants to capitulate to the power of death. Unfortunately, some of us are more likely to have to yield to death much too soon and through circumstances that affect the Brown, the Black, and the Indigenous far more than the White.

Life and Death in the Balance: in our country, we would do well to balance the two–life and death–for all people in our country. We need to make sure that all of us have equal access to life. Death will take care of itself.

Note: Because most style books are now capitalizing Black when it refers to our African American brothers and sisters, I have capitalized all “color” words when referring to people for the sake of balance.

Recently I have finished reading two very different books, but gleaned a bit of the same truth from both of them. The first was the children’s classic The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. I had never read it, even though it was published in 1908 and, therefore, was surely available when I was a child. As I read the rollicking adventures of Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger, I was amazed that it is labeled a children’s book. The vocabulary is much too adult for younger children who love talking animals, and older children would probably prefer the antics to be performed by some children contemporary in age to themselves, instead of by animals rowing boats and driving motorcars and carrying on routs against weasels and stouts.

The second book, the Pulitzer prize-winning novel Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, published in 2004, weaves the story of an aging minister’s life, as he is writing his memories in the form of a rambling letter to be read by his son when he grows up. Because the father grew up in the same town, indeed the same house, as they continue to live in during the years of his ministry, the town earns the titular claim as the character to know. The old minister, in recounting his life, comes to grips with his own grudges, his own errors, his own sins. As he does so, we the readers vicariously find ourselves confronting our own issues that are so similar to his.

The bit of common truth I found in the two stories is how very long it takes us human beings to come to terms with our own failings and turn from them. Frog possesses an extremely high view of himself, considering himself the most accomplished of all creatures. He sees himself as well-liked by everyone and knows himself to be the best of company. When others come to his rescue not only to help him escape from jail but also to help him evade the police who would recapture him, he begins to tell himself—and others—that he was the mastermind who brought about the daring escapade. At the very end of the saga, when his friends Mole, Rat, and Badger have rescued him and restored him to his ancestral home, he is repentant of all the trouble he has caused because of his pride and his entitlement. He finally realizes that he needs to be a different frog, a humble frog, one who is worthy of his father’s name.

Rev. John Ames may not be the wild exaggerator of his own worth, but he has lived his life with a sense of rightness in himself. Being a faithful servant of Christ, when he fails to be loving, kind, honest, or understanding, he turns to prayer to bring about the change of attitude that he knows he should have towards his best friend’s son—and his namesake—even though the son has never been worthy of the good will of others. From his childhood to his early adult life, Jack, the friend’s son, has done nothing but bring trouble and disgrace upon the family name. After Jack returns home, Rev. Ames, for his friend’s sake, tries to bring some semblance of kindness to the younger man, but continues to harbor his inner dislike and distrust of him. When Rev. Ames finally comes to the point of forgiving Jack and accepting him, regardless of any reciprocation of the act, he gains a sense of inner peace and true love for Jack.

Pride, our own sense of rightness, our inability to see our own flaws even while we see others’ flaws so easily, our firm grip on our petty beliefs and understandings, however limited, one-sided, or wrong-headed they might be: these are the common lot of man, are they not? We see so easily others’ sins, even while failing to see “the sin that so easily besets us” (Hebrews 12:1). And in this world of ours today, all of us can see sin and injustice and wrong everywhere, regardless of what our belief systems are. Everyone of us can claim to be on the right side of whatever issue we cherish as right and true, even while considering those on the other side as villains.

We could all use a dose of Frog’s capitulation to humility, understanding the rightness of others’ attitudes. And like Rev. Ames, we could all learn to forgive and accept others, even if they fail to reciprocate the forgiveness and acceptance. After all, isn’t that what God, the creator and sustainer of the universe and the redeemer and sustainer of our souls, does for us? Forgives and accepts.

Note: This is another assignment given to my memoir class–if they so chose to do it. The idea comes from Leslie Leyland Fields’ book Your Story Matters (NavPress 2020)

“No, Mrs. Fleming, it wasn’t me. It was Donnie.”

“No, Mrs. Fleming, it wasn’t me.”

“Then who was it?”

“I don’t know,” shrugged Donnie. “I just know it wasn’t me.”

Wayne Township School, 1954. I was in second grade and scared to death of my teacher Mrs. Fleming. I had loved my first-grade teacher Miss Platt. She had a kind voice in which she would praise all of us for our reading and writing ability. Not Mrs. Fleming! She was big and loud and, to my little person, flamboyant in a way that just wasn’t acceptable.

In our small brick school, all we had done between first grade and second grade was to walk from the front corner of the building to the back corner of the building, and we had arrived at our new classroom, along with a new teacher—not just new to our class, but new to our school. I don’t know which was worse: my dislike of her or my fear of her. I just knew that I could not tell her the truth about who had thrown the paper wad.

My very first lie, told because of the fear of the consequences—a paddling for sure and perhaps a note to my parents. My school persona had already been formed: I was a good girl, a quiet girl, a smart girl, a girl to be trusted. How young we learn to save ourselves, even at the expense of others. Why couldn’t I have said, like Donnie did, that I didn’t do it and that I didn’t know who had done it. I don’t think I bore Donnie any ill will necessarily; it was just that he sat right behind me and, therefore, a logical assumption could be made that someone close to me threw the paper wad.

Why did I throw the paper wad to begin with? It wasn’t a spit wad, meant to cause a bit of pain for a classmate. That would have been totally off limits to me, a girl. Only boys did that kind of thing. No, it was just a simple paper wad, something that needed to go in the trashcan. Why didn’t I wait until a recess when I could get up and throw it in the trashcan that was halfway across the room? Where did I get the idea that I could even throw a paper wad that far? And how did I think I could evade detection?

The years have wiped all those reasons, silly as I’m sure they were, out of my mind. But I have never forgotten that lie nor its consequences. Donnie received the paddling and, more than likely, a note to his parents. Being a rather shy, quiet boy, he did not seem to know how to defend himself. Seated behind me, he surely knew that I had thrown the paper wad, but he did not reveal me as the culprit. Instead, he took the punishment. What graciousness in someone so young!

He and I went to school together for the next ten years, graduating together from the new town school where both of us, I presume, acquitted ourselves well. He played sports; I won academic awards. Our paths didn’t cross much; back in those days, schools tracked students, a practice that is illegal now. Of course, back then, officials didn’t say they were tracking: they were merely placing us in future career paths: mine was college prep; Donnie’s was not.

I never have told too many lies. I believe the second-grade lie was the first. I do remember another one from my childhood. I was playing nurse with my neighbor Linda. I was using a cactus spine for a needle to give her a shot. Obviously, the prick hurt, and Linda, crying, ran to my mother. Mother confronted me about what I had used. I did not tell the truth. Not only did I get a good scolding for whatever I had done, but the stern steely gray of my mother’s eyes pierced to my very soul. And I knew that that look was much more about lying than it was about the prick in Linda’s arm, which was quickly forgotten by all.

I remember quite well—in fact, too well—two very serious lies I have told in my adult years—one to save my skin and one to save another’s heart from breaking. Those lies deserve their own stories—if I’m ever ready to tell them. And I have at least one great story of a lie perpetrated upon me—a very serious lie about a very serious act, but one which has lost its pain as time passes.

Oh, but that first lie—never to be forgotten. I have never forgotten it or the circumstances or my wrongdoing. I never apologized to Donnie for the lie. In fact, while creating this small essay, I finally decided enough time had passed (66 years!) while the truth has gnawed at my insides and my guilt has not abated. I searched for Donnie’s name and location. My intention is to write a formal apology. He may not have any recollection of the event. If he doesn’t, I hope that he can take this silly little truth in stride, forgiving a very silly little girl who was too afraid to tell the truth.

Three professors, six students, and six R-rated films. What was the common thread between all of them? A famous–and infamous—chapel talk at a conservative Christian university. The leader of this chapel “talk,” which consisted of all nine people acting as panelists, was the dramatic arts professor. He had recruited a religion prof and me, a literature prof, to speak about the worth of at least some R-rated movies in a culture that thought R-rated movies, by their very identification as such, were sinful. I was game; I was exhausted with hearing my students praise PR-13 films that were little better than window-dressed NC-17 or X-rated films while bashing some really good films that, of course, they had not seen because they were R-rated.

My two student-assistants and I had chosen to talk about American Beauty (Dir. Sam Mendes) and Magnolia (Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson), both 1999 releases. Both films deserve their R-ratings for sex, violence, drug use, etc. But both films, beautifully executed, show the universality of the human condition in all its brokenness and tragedy, and, ultimately, all its resilience and hope of redemption. How could a conservatively religious student body not love to hear that phrase—hope of redemption?

I am always a sucker for any film or book or short story that even appears to have a hope of redemption at its end. I was caught by the beauty of the main character’s realization of the worth of his life at the end of American Beauty. And I knew that every individual in the strange inter-locking stories of Magnolia, would not struggle in failure forever, but would find purpose and peace in life. At the end of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I felt hope, along with the dad, that the son would be able to pass the fire on to other human beings. There would be a future for him and others. When I read the final words of J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, I had no doubt that the narrator, who wasn’t sure the road he was on was leading anywhere, would encounter a good destination, simply because he had the hope to continue.

This inborn “hope of redemption” that I look for (and, therefore, find) in so many postmodern books and films that others eschew, must come, I believe, from my own hope for redemption. When others mourn the loss of the absolute truth associated with Modernity, I am content that the relative truths of Post-Modernity contain a hope of redemption, too. Out of relativity has come our ability to embrace the other, to find a truth in the other that echoes the truth we find in ourselves—that as lonely and lost and unlovable as we may be in our human condition, we find hope in redemption, a hope beyond ourselves, a hope that transcends the restrictions of the human condition and that can unite all of us as brothers and sisters who share the same blood, the same DNA, and the same hope for the future.

At the time I participated in the scandalous chapel panel on R-rated movies, I presume all nine of us, regardless of the range of our ages from 18 to 53, were naïve to think that our well-conceived arguments and examples would be broadly well-received. None of us expected, however, the rapidity with which the vitriol of the religious establishment would rain down upon us. The dramatic arts professor, of course, took the brunt of the attack, having been the creator of the topic for the panel, but all of us felt the wrath, not just of the board of trustees and the administrative heads, but also of many regular students who really did not want to be awakened to good films that were R-rated.

Within two years, all six students were gone from the school, as well as the other two profs. I alone was left to witness the transformation of the university’s policy against R-rated movies. It came because the Department of Religion wanted to use clips from R-rated movies to illustrate certain points within their curriculum. Granted, the policy was not a total rejection of the former one: now some films could be shown with objectionable parts removed; other films could pass the ”vision” test because the R-rating was given for something other than sex and language. Arbitrary? Probably. Progress? Definitely. I sometimes wish that both the decision makers and the general student population had been on the timeline with the nine of us instead of on one that was three to five years later.

But the experience did not deter me from seeking—and finding that hope of redemption in all kinds of places. I am still finding it. Now I am finding it in all of the protests that have recently occurred here in the U.S.—and in all of the protestors—with their glorious diversity: white, black, brown; old, young, and every age in between; male, female, trans; religious and not so religious. Finally, or, perhaps, better stated, again, we have hope for a different future, a better future, a future without nonsensical divisions, a future that will bring a kind of redemption to all of us.

We may not recognize it as the redemption that we thought we hoped for, but it will be the redemption we need. In “Little Gidding,” T. S. Eliot writes about arriving at a place which you might find, regardless of the way you head towards it, and, having found it, realizing that “what you thought you came for is only a shell, a husk of meaning. . . [and] the purpose is beyond the end you figured and is altered in fulfillment” (ll. 30-35).  We must be open to such a place, to such a meaning, to such a purpose. Eliot goes on to say that in our coming to this place, which for him, in his job of fire-watcher during World War II, was the village of Little Gidding, with its restored Anglican chapel. To this place, he says to the reader, “you come, not. . . to verify, instruct yourself, or inform curiosity or carry report. You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid” (ll. 43-46). We could do worse than find our own place, where we watch for “fire,” to be a place where prayer is valid. We pray for the coming of the hope of redemption, here and everywhere.

Works Cited

American Beauty. Dir. Sam Mendes ; distributed by DreamWorks Pictures, 1999.

Eliot, T. S. “Little Gidding.”  Four Quartets: An Accurate Online Text. http://www.davidgorman.com/4quartets/4-gidding.htm

Magnolia. Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson; released by New Line Cinema, 1999.

Ordinary Time: June 9, 2020

46: 46 minutes; 46 hours; 46 days; 46 years. Depending on what you are counting, 46 can represent a paltry amount of time—not even an hour’s worth of minutes or very little of a week or, for that matter, only a little more than a month. Even 46 years isn’t that much to a person who has lived twice that long. My mother and her two sisters all died at the age of 92. To them, 46 was still young—two of them were raising children at age 46. As busy as they were, running households, taking care of husbands, raising children, they had little time to contemplate the stages of their lives—their middle-aged-ness.

46: the measure of a whole lifetime. That is what George Floyd was given for his lifetime. Someone snatched his future from him. How long would he have lived? Would he have seen his daughter graduate from high school in 12 years? He would only then be 58, still a middle-aged man, not old enough to die. And yet he died. I doubt he was contemplating death before he ended up on the pavement with a police officer’s knee choking the breath out of him. He might have been thinking about possible jobs. He might have been thinking abut his daughter. He might have been thinking about the members of his family whom he had joined in the Minneapolis area. But I doubt that he was thinking of his imminent death—until he was in the middle of that eight minutes and 46 seconds. There is that number again: 46—46 seconds—but that is just the end of the eight minutes. Subtracting the 46 short seconds would not have saved his life.

When I was 46, I had just started taking doctoral classes. On a whim, fueled by envy for what some of my high school teaching colleagues were gaining from their classes at Middle Tennessee State University, I walked into the field house, looked over the graduate class options in English literature, chose 17^th century poetry and prose, pulled out a credit card, and left with a schedule to enter the class. It was a year later before I found out that I actually needed to gain admission to the program. 46 years old, acting on a whim, not thinking logically or reasonably, I started a graduate program without permission and finished it seven years later, all the while working fulltime and being a single mother of three. That program gave me the opportunity at a whole new career at age 50, a career so satisfying that I did not want to give it up, even at the age of 71.

What if my life had ended at 46? What if I had never had that opportunity to teach at a university for 23 years? The whole second half of my life has been shaped by that moment when I was 46. Who knows what the arc of George Floyd’s life would have been if he had been allowed to live beyond his first (and only) 46 years? Every day we are given to live on this earth gives us new opportunities, new horizons, new possibilities—if they are not snatched from us.

Of course, lives end in different ways—disease, debilitating depression and mental illness, accidents of various kinds. All those things may take lives too soon. The coronavirus has taken 46-year-olds just as cruelly as the policeman took George Floyd’s life. But the virus is mindless, senseless; even though the death seems “cruel” to us, it was not a death that could be prevented by the mind of a person. George Floyd’s death, however, was preventable—by the officer with his knee on his neck or by any one of the three other officers who did nothing to stop the slow, torturous squeezing of air passages.

46 years. A lifetime. A short lifetime, but already a lifetime that will make a difference in our country. This one short life has shined a light into the dark places of officialdom. Now it is our turn to do something with our years—whether they be fewer than 46 or more than 46. We must do our part to help bring abut reform to prevent lives from being stopped at 46.

Ordinary Time, Day 6: Saturday, June 6, 2020

“Come to me, all whose work is hard, whose load is heavy; and I will give you relief. Bend your necks to my yoke, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble-hearted; and your souls will find relief. For my yoke is good to bear, my load is light” (Matthew 11: 28-30, NEB).

I had never noticed the context of those very familiar verses before. They are set at the very end of chapter 11, a chapter that begins with Jesus sending out his disciples to enter the towns round about them, even while he himself went to other towns to teach. Then the narrative turns to the imprisoned John the Baptist who wants to know if Jesus is the “one who is to come,” and Jesus’ answer to tell John of all of the works he has been doing—healings, cleansings, raisings from the dead, and attendings to the poor. The rest of the chapter is devoted to Jesus’ talking to the crowd, first about John the Baptist, then about the Kingdom of Heaven being done violence, then about the generation to which he was speaking and their hard-heartedness. Then he prays, thanking his Father, that the truths he has been saying have been revealed to the “simple’ of the earth (KJV uses the term “babes”) before making a cryptic statement about those who know the Son and the Father are those “to whom the Son may choose to reveal [the Father].” Finally, we come to the familiar invitation to “come.”

And to whom, then, is Jesus speaking? It must be those to whom the Son has chosen to reveal the Father, but those, then, must also be the ones that are the simple ones, the babes, to whom God has revealed truths. The invitation is one of accepting Jesus’ way—taking the yoke, bearing the burden—and, in so doing, find  “relief” or “rest” as we learn from the “gentle,” “humble-hearted” one.

Our world has such a need for this kind of learning, for this kind of spirit. And we surely have a need for the “relief” that Jesus promises. But do we have any idea at all what he means by taking his “good” yoke and bearing his “light” load? I think all of us would attest to the “hard work” and “heavy load” that we all seem to be bearing right now. And so much of the “hard” and “heavy” life is of our own making. It is we in our world who are taking the hard ways, the divisive ways, the unjust ways. And how we fear to give up our ways that to us seem right and just. How much we fear each other who are all brothers and sisters on this earth. So fearful are we who are privileged and who have more than enough. How we grasp at our wealth and our power as if it is ours. Our lives are brief and, when they come to an end, we retain no wealth and no power. Exchanging our hardness and heaviness for Jesus’ goodness and lightness is the only way to bring us the relief.

If we take Jesus’ yoke and burden, however, then it follows that we must learn to be gentle and humble-hearted. How difficult might it be to learn these actions of gentleness and humility? Some of the protesters on the streets of the US seem to have learned these actions—they stand or sit or kneel in silence, letting their very presence speak of the necessity of change in our country. Some of our police officers and military leaders have learned these actions, too. They have marched in solidarity with those who oppose force; they have spoken words of condemnation about the use of force and military might to stop peaceful protests.

To learn to be gentle and to learn to be humble, we must give up our fears, give up our defensive postures, and become vulnerable. “Vulnerable”: such a frightful word! To be willing to be wounded. To lay down any type of weapon, to give up any type of defensive tactic, to surrender any rights we may have, in order to change whatever needs to be changed, to love whoever needs to be loved, to forgive all who may have wronged us, to ask forgiveness for all the wrong we may have done—consciously or unconsciously. Let us learn the actions of humility and gentleness by becoming vulnerable and submitting to that which will bring about the “greater good.” Then, and only then, will the relief come. Then we will know rest. Then we will have peace.

Ordinary Time: Day 3, Wednesday, June 3, 2020

Though God has never been seen by any man, God himself dwells in us if we love one another; his love is brought to perfection within us. Here is the proof that we dwell in him and he dwells in us: he has imparted his Spirit to us. . . . God is love; he who dwells in love is dwelling in God, and God in him. This is for us the perfection of love. . . . But if a man says, “I love God,” while hating his brother, he is a liar. If he does not love the brother whom he has seen, it cannot be that he loves God whom he has not seen. And indeed this command comes to us from Christ himself: that he who loves God must also love his brother. (I John 4: 12-13, 16b-17a, 19-21 NEB)

I should have known that I wasn’t done yet with the topic of Pentecost. After all, the New Testament was written following the Day of Pentecost, the day when the Holy Spirit manifested itself within the followers of Christ after his ascension. The essence of the Holy Spirit—Love—therefore permeates the entire testament.

This New English Bible translation that I’ve quoted above makes clear the relationships between Spirit, perfection, and love. Verse 12 proclaims that God’s love is brought to perfection, brought to fullness, brought to completion, within us. That’s a fairly “heady” concept, and not one that I am sure I live up to. And the first part of the verse tells us why we might not be those within whom God’s love is brought to perfection: we must love one another.

Easy words to mouth, but not easy to live out. And, of course, in our country right now, we have seen all kinds of behavior which does not seem to be motivated by love. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that those participating in that behavior don’t consider themselves to be Christians. The tricky part, right? What does it mean to be “Christian” in 21^st century America? We are now, perhaps, only nominally a Christian country. Fewer than half our population darken church doors at all; some show up at church for the great family events of Christmas and Easter, some who pride themselves on attending church regularly still couldn’t pass the test of seeing God’s love brought to perfection within their lives.

Can any of us pass that test? Is passing the test the point of the verse? What has the Apostle John given to us in these verses? The impossibility of living up to the Gospel? I can’t imagine that that would have been his point. That was the point of the Pharisees and other Jewish leaders of Jesus’ day—they wanted everyone to follow all the law perfectly—and everyone failed to do so. Jesus’ very behavior and teachings set his followers free from such an impossible obligation. Instead they were to dwell in him as he did in God—we would all be of one thought, one mind, one body in the church as we dwell in him. The perfection then is not of our volition, but of God’s loving work within us.

Consequently, that perfection, that fullness of love, is replicated in our dealings with our brothers (and sisters). The scripture makes plain to us the fact that we cannot love God if we don’t also love our brothers and sisters; therefore, our stance during this time of social unrest can be nothing less than one of loving everyone. Somehow, we have to love protesters and looters and rioters and politicians who make bad decisions and medial commentators that we don’t agree with. But, as I was reminded by a friend today, loving a person does not have to include loving all their actions or all their thoughts or all their beliefs. It does mean that I must respect that person as a fellow creation of God, a person, therefore, loved by God. We must love and still follow our consciences to do what we think is best, after thoughtful consideration, attention to the Holy Spirit’s speaking through the scripture, and prayer.

And just as we grow into more fullness of God’s love, we have to trust that those around us, who say they love God, will also be growing into more fullness of God’s love. When we do this, we will surely find rest, peace, and justice for all.

Day 50: Monday, June 1, 2020

Note: I am aware that my timing is off–it cannot be Day 50, and Pentecost was yesterday; still, the subject is, indeed, the day of Pentecost

Yesterday, May 31, was Pentecost Sunday and now the Easter season is officially over as we enter “ordinary time” until the time of Advent in the church calendar year. Having become a member of the Church of the Nazarene at age 12, I have long been steeped in the importance of Pentecost, when the church celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the early church as they waited in Jerusalem for the promised gift.

If you are not familiar with the Church of the Nazarene’s statement of faith, then you might not know why the day of Pentecost is so important to us. We are a church of Wesleyan background with a strong dose of holiness evangelism added in. If you would ask one of the old-timers in the church what the central doctrine of the church is, you mostly likely would hear the words “entire sanctification,” which has been defined as a second work of grace subsequent to regeneration (or initial salvation] in which the Holy Spirit enters (and takes control of) the believer’s life. To tell the truth, the doctrine has come under attack many times because the explanations of the church leaders cannot be made simple to most people. At its worst, the doctrine has seemed to separate Christians into “first-“ and “second-class” citizens of the heavenly realm. Those who are entirely sanctified have more of the Holy Spirit than others? Is salvation not what Jesus came to provide? Some have objected to the part of the definition that speaks of an “instantaneous” work in the believer, leading some to surmise that the entirely sanctified believer is, thus, made perfect, free from sin for all time. Since experience has not borne this out, at least not in the best definitions of both “perfect” and “sin,” the doctrine has been much maligned.

And yet, it is not possible to dismiss an experience that many people attest to. Much better is the approach of listening to the believers’ testimonies of what entire sanctification is to them. Many people in the church concentrate on the idea that they are entirely consecrating their lives to God. My mother described her revelation of holiness to be “a closer walk with the Lord.” When I struggled mightily with the idea when I was a teenager, my pastor’s wife told me to just imagine that all of my future was an “unknown bundle” that I could lay on the altar, giving my life to God to direct. That was when the doctrine made sense to me. Even though Wesley’s experience of his heart being “strangely warmed” was his assurance of salvation, I could relate the same kind of experience in being assured that I had consecrated my life completely to God and that the Holy Spirit would always guide me.

I have heard that the Greek word “paraclete,” which is used by Jesus to describe the “one” that he is going to send to his followers after his ascension into heaven, cannot be defined by one word; it means “one who comes alongside of.” This Holy Spirit, then, this Spirit of Truth, this Spirit of God, will be one who abides with us, abides in us, to guide us into all truth. One word that was used in the old days, and perhaps still is, to some extent, is the word “comforter,” a person alongside us who comforts us, who brings peace and calm to us, perhaps. I’ve always liked this term for the Holy Spirt, although sometimes in my young mind, I thought the Holy Spirit was as much a nice warm blanket as anything else.

I’m sure part of the warmth of the word “comforter” also came from a gospel song that we sang often in the church when I was growing up. Written in 1890, by Frank Bottoms, “The Comforter Has Come” was a song that spoke directly to all of us who had invested so much in the idea of entire sanctification through the coming of the Holy Spirit in our lives. It is a triumphal song of the captive’s liberation from the dark night of sin to the glorious morning of freedom and salvation through the coming of the Holy Spirit. The refrain contains these words: “The Comforter has come! . . .  The Holy Ghost from Heav’n, the Father’s promise giv’n; Oh, spread the tidings ’round, wherever man is found—The Comforter has come!”

Actually the words of the song are not words about a doctrine, but about the “boundless love divine” that brings salvation and that stays with us in the form of a “comforter.” One verse contains the words, “How shall this tongue of mine to wond’ring mortals tell the matchless grace divine—That I, a child of hell, should in His image shine!” And that, indeed, is the message of salvation—we are transformed by an everlasting love that God has for us—or, at least, that is what should happen. Sometimes, we need to be reminded of what this transformation of life is all about.

That is exactly what I received when listening to my pastor Dr. Mark Quanstrom yesterday as he preached his sermon for Pentecost Sunday. He reminded us that Jesus sends the Holy Spirit to us to enable us to live our lives in the same way that God sent him to the world to save us. Pastor Mark reminded us that the heart of the gospel are the words of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” But then Pastor Mark reminded us that we cannot read that verse without reading the following one: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

And that last part became the heart of Pastor Mark’s Pentecost message. Jesus did not come to condemn, but to save. If Jesus sent us the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, so that we can be like him, so that we can be his messengers in this world, then we are not to condemn. Pastor Mark said that just as God sent Jesus into the world to save, not condemn, Jesus sends us into the world, not to condemn, but to “intervene” so that the world can be saved through him. We have an integral part to play as Christ’s messengers, we are to intervene, to make a difference, to love others so that they will have salvation through Christ.

Pentecost—the coming of the Holy Spirit—the call to love and to intervene in our world.

Work Cited

Bottoms, Frank. “The Comforter Has Come.” https://library.timelesstruths.org/music/The_Comforter_Has_Come/

Day 37: Friday, May 29, 2020

“Lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven ring, ring with the harmonies of Liberty. Let our rejoicing rise high as the listening skies. let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us. Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, let us march on till victory is won.”

These words, the first verse of the song known informally as the Negro National Hymn, written by James Weldon Johnson and his brother J. Rosamond Johnson in 1900 for a commemoration of Lincoln’s birthday, are, to me, majestic and transformative. I first heard them sung at a convocation at Roosevelt High School in Dayton, Ohio, where I was a first-year teacher in 1969. I was one of a handful of white teachers who had been hired to help integrate the faculty at the school. The school district’s plan was to successfully integrate the faculty before attempting to integrate the student body. That meant that every hour of the day, I walked into a room full of African American students.

Challenging? As a first-year teacher, I would have considered any classroom full of any kind of students challenging. Also, as a first-year teacher, I was young, idealistic, ready to face anything. And, I found I loved every aspect of my job just about every minute of the day. I was learning much more than I was teaching. I was teaching the regular language arts curriculum, but I was learning all about a rich, thriving culture that had survived the worst possible injuries in its history. The words of the hymn demonstrate how strong and fine this African American culture is—indeed, they had lived a “dark past,” but they had a hope, even though the victory had not yet been won. It hadn’t been won after the Civil War; it hadn’t been won when the hymn was written in 1900, just five years after the Plessy-Ferguson decision established separate but equal as the law of the land; it hadn’t been won in the 1964 Civil Rights Act; and it still hasn’t been won in 2020.

The dark past is now the dark present—as dark as it has ever been in this country. The death of George Floyd on a street in Minneapolis at the hands of four policemen earlier this week is not the first time our society has seen this kind of death, but this time should be the last. How is it that anyone can do what the policeman did and not be immediately taken into custody for the deed of withholding breath from the victim? Nothing that had occurred before that knee came down on that neck could justify such an action. In the days and weeks to come, the investigation will play out and the court case will be mounted, but nothing will change the video that shows the slow killing of George Floyd. Surely, this should be the last time that such an act is ever perpetrated upon one human being by another—not without outrage from all of us who have seen or heard of the deed.

Already, however, commentators and analysts are talking about how we are becoming so inured to this kind of atrocity that we no longer react. Too, we are becoming inured to the violent protests, as we are also becoming inured to the slow reaction of our law enforcement and governmental officials. Surely, all of us can and should wake up to the horrific problem we have; we can no longer afford to be hardened to the problems of institutional racism in our country.

Some would counter my words by pointing out that the protesters have turned violent, that they have destroyed private property of innocent people, that they have looted stores which serve the very communities of those protesting. All of those statements are true. And unanswerable. No reasons can be given for the violence that has spread across the country, no reason except that the death of George Floyd has been the tool that has scraped fresh scabs off the wounds of injustices against African Americans in just the last year or two. No wonder there are protests across the country—each location has its own history of an innocent, usually unarmed, black person being injured or killed by authority figures.

But the violent reaction to the death of George Floyd seems egregious, wrong, punishable. Yes, it is. But the death of George Floyd was egregious, wrong, punishable. One fact does not balance out the other; one does not explain the other, but, perhaps, one predicts the other—at least in tis time and place. Oh, that we could find another Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his crew, both black and white, that would lock arms, sing “We Shall Overcome,” and peacefully stand or sit in place in a non-violent protest. Yet even Dr. King said, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.” Today, in response to this current tragedy, Sen. Cory Booker misquoted the line, perhaps on purpose, to say “the absence of violence”; either way, the statement points to the way forward. We might think that we just want the violence to be over; in truth, the violence will not end until justice rules in this country—then we will have peace.

The second verse of the Negro National Hymn contains these words: “We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, we have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.” Unfortunately. today, not in the “gloomy past,” there are protesters, both black and white, walking a way of tears and blood. How will it end? Where in the world is the “bright star”? When will justice come? One answer is in the hymn. The last verse turns to prayer: “God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way; Thou who hast by Thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray.” Let us all join in prayer, whether we are black, white, brown, red, yellow, pink, beige, or any other hue that describes our beautiful, diverse humanity. Let us pray that we will all be avenues to bring about justice in our country—justice for all, not just for some; justice for all, not just the privileged; justice for all, not just the majority; justice for all, not just the whites; justice for all—because that is what Jesus, our great Savior, taught us when he said, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”

Work Cited

Johnson, James Weldon and J. Rosamond Johnson. “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Retrieved from Poetry Foundation.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46549/lift-every-voice-and-sing

King, Martin Luther, Jr. quotation; retrieved from GoodReads. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/202045-true-peace-is-not-merely-the-absence-of-tension-it