Clergy blogs

Up the Switchbacks

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 03:36:01 +0000

Myself, about 1972, rock-climbing in the Santa Cruz Mountains, CA New words for an old hymn! Words by Jim Burklo Tune: Beach Spring 8.7.8.7.D. -- Sacred Harp Hymnal “As We Gather at Your Table” - #332 New Century Hymnal UCC Hear the whisper of the pine trees as their needles catch the air Trace the outline of the mountain with its soaring snowy glare Feel your heartbeat pounding harder on the steep trail as you hike Feel your breath swell with your footsteps as you’re climbing up the height You are walking in your solitude but you’ll never walk alone The One walking right beside you can’t be seen but can be known You are led by inner Wisdom, you are seen through sacred eyes You are known by an inner Knower who is listening as you sigh Up the switchbacks on the mountain ever higher do you climb As you scramble past the boulders, leave the forest far behind On the narrow path you dangle o’er the wilderness below Earth meets heaven at the summit, as they meet within your soul

A Word for Young Men

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 23:47:47 +0000

Dear young male friends:I’m here to share some insights gained in my 71 years of being a white male heterosexual American, advice that is the product of lessons I’ve learned, in many cases, the hard way. I am good with being who I am. I’m here to offer suggestions that might help you be good with who you are, too, in ways that are good for you and for those around you. Because there’s a lot of toxic rhetoric floating around us these days, messages that uphold your sense of self by tearing down the sense of self of other people. There’s another way. A major reason I’m good with who I am is that I feel better when I let other people be good with who they are. I don’t need to belittle or demean them so that I can have pride in myself. Neither do you. Sure, there are folks who dis whiteness, maleness, and American-ness. So what? Their attitudes don’t change anything about me. I have no need to take their bait. I can silently acknowledge them, and then move on with a dignified demeanor. My response is to be a straight white male American who is humble and kind. Other people are just that: others. And I try hard to remember that. I don’t want others to assume that I am exactly like them. So why would I expect others to be just like I am? While we can get to know people really well, there are always mysteries about them. And that’s a pretty cool thing! People are full of surprises. So the less we judge others, the more we can discover and enjoy about them. When I was a young guy, I thought that gay people were weirdos, and that gay sex was gross and wrong. Then I discovered that one of my best friends was gay. When he told me, it took me about half an hour to process this revelation as I sat there with him. I felt like somebody had sawed open my skull and reached in to re-arrange my brain cells! I realized that if such a good person could be gay, then gay must be okay. I didn’t understand it fully. I could not relate to being attracted to a person of the same sexual orientation as myself. But just because it was mysterious to me, that didn’t mean I should oppose it. I’ve been a strong supporter of LGBTQI+ rights ever since. So if you’re gay, be gay, and if you’re trans, be trans – let’s let people be whoever they see themselves to be, and let’s live with the mystery of it all. Your identity doesn’t threaten mine! Because manhood is defining myself by what I am, and not by what I’m not. I’m good with being a religious person. I made the choice to follow Jesus when I was 16 years old, and I’ve never looked back, even as my understanding of my Christian faith has gone through changes over the years. I experience God as the unconditional love that Jesus practiced and preached. This love is bigger than my religion or any other. It makes room for other faiths to be as good for others as my faith is good for me. It makes room for my religion to be good despite the many imperfections in Christian dogma and history. Divine love moves me to be kind and forgiving and patient, and to do my part in working for justice and peace in the world. My religion prevents me from claiming that it is the only true path! I am a Christian who doesn’t think everybody else ought to be a Christian. But I do urge you to find a spiritual practice and a spiritually-centered community that will help you live a deeper, richer, more fulfilling life. I aim to be a man like Jesus: strong and brave, gentle and compassionate, spiritually awake. The power of Jesus was in his humility. He practiced and preached that the greatest person is the one who is the servant to all the rest. As a heterosexual male, I’ve learned a lot about what it means to respect women. Much of it was learned by experiencing the consequences of my failures to be respectful. I’ve learned that I’m responsible for my own sexual gratification. It’s not any woman’s job to provide me with sexual fulfillment. Getting this straight is the beginning of having a healthy relationship in which the couple seeks what is best for each other with genuine curiosity and patience and careful listening. A long conversation, with clothes on, is often the most delicious sexual foreplay. In the cultivation of healthy sexuality, fantasy is good so long as it does not get in the way of real relationships with real people who have real bodies with quirks and features that need to be cherished rather than negatively compared with unattainable images. Sex is wonderful so long as it is in the context of kindness and compassion and isn’t harmful, physically or emotionally, to the couple or those around them. Healthy, caring premarital sex can be a very good prelude to marital sex. Having trouble finding an intimate partner? Take a break from indulging in sexual fantasies and practice conversing with people with whom you have no sexual interest. Ask them questions. When they answer, ask yet more open-ended questions reflecting your genuine curiosity. When they answer those questions, ask more. When they ask you questions, answer them honestly without getting long-winded. Then ask them more questions. Get good at having deep and meaningful conversations with all sorts of people. At some point, it will become natural – and it will be deeply satisfying. Do this a lot and you’ll be amazed at how much easier it will be to make a connection with a person to whom you are attracted. And when that relationship gets going, keep up the habit of being genuinely curious about what the other person is feeling and thinking… for the rest of your life! In college I went to more beer bashes than I care to count, and I found these parties to be uniformly boring. “’Tsup? All good.” That was about as substantial as most encounters got. Then I tried something different, out of desperation. I would come up to people randomly and ask: “How is your soul?” And to my amazement, they would tell me! They would be so relieved to encounter someone who asked a deep, open-ended question and seemed genuinely interested in their answers. Immediately they gushed out their true thoughts and feelings. It was as if I had breached a dam holding them back. I have kept asking people that question ever since, and the profound encounters that have resulted have enriched my life immensely. May it be so for you! Being manly means having the strength to be emotionally and spiritually vulnerable. My wife feels particularly close to me when I share my sadness and failures and weaknesses. It might seem contradictory, but it is true: my vulnerability is attractive to her. Now that doesn’t mean I should fake being vulnerable – she would see right through it. It just means that manhood makes room for revealing our mistakes and our disappointments and our wounds. Manhood is enriched by a sense of humor. Not humor that comes at the expense of others, but rather a sense of humor that lifts up and celebrates the ironies in everyday life, that takes things lightly, that makes connections between things that we usually don’t think are related. Real men laugh a lot. Not at people, but with people. Manhood requires self-awareness. It requires mindfulness of our inner lives, consciousness of our thoughts and emotions. Because what is unconscious within us has a way of controlling us in ways that harm ourselves and others. To be mindful means practicing the discipline of watching our inner experience without judgment and with compassion, so that when we know we’re angry, we will know to take a walk and breathe before responding. So that when we’re sad, we’ll notice it and take compassion on ourselves and seek out someone who will listen and care for us. Men need friends in order to be fulfilled in their manhood. Not just buddies who share common interests, but real friends with whom they can share the truth of their hearts and give support to each other through thick and thin. Men need to take the time to cultivate such friendships, face to face, in person… not just on social media. Men need friendships with different kinds of people in order to see the world more richly and fully. Such friendship usually doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a long-term investment of time and a willingness to be vulnerable with each other. Join a community – a temple, a church, a community service group – where you can make good, solid friends. Real men keep track of what is going on in the world, and take seriously their responsibility to make it a better place as active and engaged citizens. They follow reputable sources of information that are produced and vetted by professional journalists – not just the blogs or podcasts of individuals. I read The Economist magazine and the Los Angeles Times and listen to NPR for news: I watch very little television. I read the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly magazines for excellent long-form stories about public affairs. I also sample disreputable media regularly just to know what others are seeing. I pay close attention to the difference between factual reporting and editorial opinions, and only follow news sources that make a clear distinction between the two. I strive to be skeptical of opinions – even of my own. The scientific community is organized skepticism that develops and self-corrects. But opinion based on isolated incidents is disorganized skepticism and generally goes nowhere. I go with science. I always vote, and I share with others how I’m voting, and I engage in respectful conversation about the candidates and issues. Politicians and parties are far from perfect. But I make the best choices I can, voting strategically for the most positive impact that is practically possible. I vote for a strong democracy and for the common good, understanding that free enterprise flourishes best when everyone has access to health care whether they can afford it or not, and when people are not at risk of hunger or homelessness. I’m a progressive patriot. I love America because here we engage together through our democracy to correct our country’s mistakes and solve its problems. Keep yourself clean. Keep a tidy home. Wear decent clothes. Cook and eat healthy, natural food. Stay away from hard drugs and limit your intake of alcohol and weed. Go to the doctor and the dentist regularly. Spend a lot more time in activities that nurture your body and soul than you spend in front of any kind of screen. Take responsibility for your own actions and also for the wider community and world in which you live. Have outrageous fun, but be righteous about how you do it. Be righteous in your deeds, but maintain a sense of humor. Most of all, be kind. And with that, I wish you a wonderfully rich, fulfilling, and satisfying manhood! Yours, Jim Burklo

A Sunday School Lesson

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 23:32:40 +0000

(This is an excerpt from SHOUTING STONES: A Novel of Biblical Distortions - the novel I'm writing...) “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” 1 John 3: 1-2 “I don’t know what to say to these kids,” Marge Bessemer confessed to Pastor Todd. “They ask questions I just can’t answer. They’re polite, they’re respectful, but they are persistent.” “What questions are they asking?” asked Pastor Todd. “More like what questions aren’t they asking,” replied Marge. “When we look at any Bible story that involves a miracle, they want to know how the miracle happened. They want me to explain how God created the world out of nothing. They want to know where all the water went when the great Flood went away. They want to know how Jesus fed the five thousand with just a few loaves and fishes. When I tell them that God can make anything happen just by deciding to do it, then they ask why He lets wars happen and lets people get sick. It’s exhausting to teach this Sunday School class. Can I get switched out from junior high to preschoolers?” “How many of your kids are asking these questions?” asked Pastor Todd. “Well, it started with just two kids. Rhea Larsen and Ricky Morales. Obviously they are very smart, kinda nerdy. But once they started asking these questions, the other kids started asking even more.” “Tell you what, Marge,” said Pastor Todd. “Let’s give you a break, and let me send Al to teach your class for a while.” “Who is he?” she asked. “Al’s a new member here at Liberty Baptist. A retired guy. Amazing how well he knows the Bible. In our new members class, he could cite passages by chapter and verse on the spot.” “He might have memorized the whole Bible, but I don’t know if he’s going to be able to answer these questions any better than I could,” said Marge. “Well, let’s give him a chance!” declared Pastor Todd. After singing a few praise songs, with the words displayed on the huge screen in the former warehouse that served as the sanctuary, the children were dismissed from worship to go to their classes. The junior high kids filed into their room, where they were greeted by a balding guy in rumpled clothes with a day’s growth of grey stubble on his face. He greeted each kid by name as they came in the door, to their amazement. When they were all seated, he introduced himself. “Hi there. I’m Al Shaddai. You can call me Al. I’ll be teaching your class for a while. I’ve heard that you guys are curious about a lot of stuff in the Bible. I’m pretty familiar with it myself. So instead of doing today’s lesson, I think I’ll just throw it open for you to ask any question that’s on your mind.” Rhea Larsen wasted no time. “Okay, Mr. Shaddai – I mean, Al. I want to know whether there was anything before God created the world.” She opened up her floppy King James Version of the Bible. “The Bible says it was without form and void, but it also says “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” So was there nothing before the creation, or was there water, and if there was water, where was the water? On top of the earth, or was it water all the way down? And if the water had a face, then it must have been kinda flat, so what was above it? It had to be something, not nothing. What does it mean that the Spirit moved on the face of the water? Did God make the world out of water? How did he turn water into earth….” “Okay, okay, Rhea. I think I get your question.” Al Shaddai responded with a crooked grin. “Let me answer by asking you a question. Can you explain how you tied your shoes this morning before you came to church?” “What do you mean?” she asked, bewilderment knotting her dark red eyebrows above her freckled face. “I mean, can you tell me in words how you tie your shoelaces?” Rhea reached down, untied one of her shoelaces, and proceeded to tie it again, explaining the process a step at a time. “You take one end and lay it over the other end and pull it under, and then you make a loop with one end, and then you take the other end and put it around the loop…” “Very good description of what you do with the shoelace, Rhea,” said Al Shaddai. “But there’s more to it than what happens with the string. How does your brain get the message to your fingers to do all the stuff you need to do to tie your shoelace?” “What do you mean?” she asked with a tone of impatience. “Just that. What makes your fingers move to tie your shoelace? How do your fingers get the message about what to do? No way you can explain completely how you tie your shoes without knowing how your brain and your fingers work.” “I… I don’t know. Can you explain all that?” “Actually, I can. But it would take a very long time to explain it completely. I’d have to teach you a college-level course in human biology before we could even get started. Are you guys ready for that?” he asked with a laugh. The kids shook their heads. “Uhhh, no…” said Rhea. “So tying your shoes, something so simple, so obvious – something you do every day without even thinking about it – is hard to explain. So it is no wonder that it is hard to explain how I – er, he, God – created the whole universe, which is a much, much complicated thing.” “Could you explain it, if we had enough time?” asked Rhea. “And if you could stand to hear the extremely long and complicated answer?” responded Al with a flash of his irregular teeth. “Yes, I could.” “Really?” asked Ricky Morales. “You really can explain how God made the whole world? Okay then, tell me just one thing about it. The Bible says the world was without form, and void – void means empty, right? But then it says there was water before the world was created. So how could it be void but full of water? That doesn’t make any sense.” “Excellent question, Ricky. I admire you a lot for paying such close attention to the text. Here’s the thing. God is omniscient – that is, he knows everything. He is omnipotent – he can do anything. And he is omnipresent – which means he is everywhere at once. Now if he is everywhere at once, that means he can go backward and forward in time. Humans can only be in the present, not in the past or the future. Before and at the beginning of creation, there weren’t any people stuck in the present moment. There was just God, who was everywhere in time and space at the same time. So the beginning of the Bible is written from the point of view of God, and from his perspective, the future was as present as the past, so for him, water already existed, even though, from our human point of view, it didn’t exist before God created it.” The kids looked at each other, seeking signs that any of their peers understood what Al Shaddai was talking about. After a stretch of dead air, Rhea Larsen stood up and declared “I call BS! Because if God can mix up time like that at the beginning of the Bible, then the whole Bible would be all jumbled up and its books would be out of order!” The other kids were stunned by what she said, but then chimed in with utterances of agreement. “But the rest of the Bible is in order of human time. Because the rest of the Bible is told from a human point of view, and humans exist only in one direction of time, in the present toward the future,” said Al Shaddai, visibly flustered. Now Ricky stood up. “Human point of view? But Pastor Todd tells us that the whole Bible was inspired by God. Doesn’t that mean that the Bible is written from God’s point of view? Which means the Bible stories should have jumped from past to future to past, all over the place, right?” “Okay, okay. Now I get it why Mrs. Bessemer wanted somebody else to teach this class,” said Al with a tone of resignation. The kids looked at each other again and started laughing. “You kids are darned smart, to ask such tough questions. We could spend the rest of our lives right here in this room, dealing with them, and I doubt you’d ever be satisfied with the answers. So let me just cut to the chase and answer every one of your questions once and for all, but not with words. Are you guys ready?” “Yeah, we’re ready!” answered Ricky Morales loudly. “Yeah!” said the rest of the class. “Are you really ready? I mean, really? Because what I’m about to do is gonna be pretty intense.” The kids looked at each other again with apprehension. “Okay, we’re ready!” declared Rhea Larsen, whether the rest were ready or not. “Okay. Here goes,” said Al Shaddai, and he disappeared. The kids gasped, their eyes bugging out. A few seconds later a scrubby bush appeared in the spot where Al Shaddai had stood before. Suddenly it caught fire, with flames engulfing every branch. The kids screamed and huddled in the back of the classroom. Al Shaddai’s voice emanated from the burning bush. “Don’t worry! It’s okay! It’s just me, God!” The kids howled and cried and shook with fear. “Don’t be afraid! You’ll notice that it’s only me who is burning – do you feel any heat?” “N…n…no!” answered Rhea, who also noticed that there was no smoke, and that the ceiling of the classroom did not appear to be singed. “So don’t worry! It’s just me, God, taking the form of a burning bush, just like the story of Moses meeting the burning bush in the desert. So go back to your chairs, sit down, and let’s keep talking. I’m not going to hurt you.” Slowly the kids returned to their seats, their mouths agape, unable to speak. “Any more questions?” asked God from the burning bush. “Y…y…y…yeah….” sputtered Ricky Morales. “How did you do that? Is it a magic trick?” “Oh, Ricky, here we go again! The kids I knew in Bible times didn’t ask questions like this,” God sighed. “I miss those simpler times. But okay, I’ll explain how this works. First, calm down – breathe – relax. You’re safe. I know this is really weird for you. Really, really, really weird. But just relax and breathe. Pay attention to your breath. Pay attention to how you are feeling – in your mind and in your body. Just sit there and breathe and watch. I’ll keep burning, you close your eyes, and pay attention to what is going on inside of yourselves. Give it a few minutes.” The kids sat in silence, mouths still hanging open, eyes closed. Minutes passed. Time itself passed. Past, future, present, future, past, jumbled together and slipped away into the eternal now. “Now open your eyes and look at me. Just look. Let go of how weird this seems to you. Just look at the flames, at the bush that is on fire but not being burned up. Just look. For now, give up any judgements or opinions about what you are seeing. For now, give up any definitions of what you are seeing. Just look and let me be what I am, just as right now I am letting you be who and what you are, as you are. Pay attention to me, just as I am, and observe and appreciate me as much as you can. I’ll do the same for you. Let’s give it some time.” The kids stared at God in the burning bush. And stared. And stared. And stared. Suddenly Rhea Larsen disappeared, and in her place was a burning bush. The kids gasped and shuddered. “Go ahead, look at that burning bush,” said God. “She’s okay. She’s in there. She’ll come back. For now, just pay attention!” Then Ricky Morales disappeared, and a burning bush appeared in his place. Then another kid, and another, and another. It was long past time for Sunday School to be over. Pastor Todd noticed that the door to the junior high classroom was still closed. He knocked, but there was no answer. He opened the door. He looked inside at a room full of burning bushes. He passed out, tumbling onto the waxed linoleum floor of the hallway.

Spiritual Vacations

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 18:40:58 +0000

For about five years I served as the pastor of Sausalito Presbyterian Church up in Marin County, just over the Golden Gate from San Francisco. It was a gorgeous old wood-shake-sided church with a pointy steeple and a dark wood interior – a destination in itself, in a town that is a major tourist attraction. When the weather in Sausalito was particularly lovely, the town was overrun by tourists from all over the world. When I walked down the hill for lunch, I passed by hordes of people peering into the shops on the waterfront, looking for ... what? The tourists mostly came from the same place: a town called Where. It’s the generic community with its mall or downtown which has all the usual chain stores. We all know what’s at Where. Knowing what we all know, and bored with it, the people of Where became tourists looking for ... what? Looking for clothes in Sausalito? The town had much of the same clothes sold in all the Wheres of Ohio, Iowa, Omaha, and Oklahoma. Looking for ice cream? What Sausalito had to offer was essentially no different than what’s available in the Wheres of Nashville, Asheville, Louisville, or Jacksonville. In a way, it was not Sausalito they were visiting. Rather, they came to make a pilgrimage to a generic Elsewhere. At Elsewhere, you can expect to find salt-water taffy stores, tee-shirt stores, stores that sell wind-up toys, ice-cream, and fast-food. At Elsewhere, so you don’t feel totally homesick for Where, you’ll find several of the usual chain stores, and even a sweet little Presbyterian church to remind you of the one back home. But the tourist may get the desire to seek out someplace beyond Elsewhere. The tourist may realize that a certain amount of anxiety with the unfamiliar might be a healthy thing. At that point, the tourist ventures further, wandering off the waterfront and visiting with the grizzled guy who carves totem poles by the mudflats near the docks on the north end of town, and then visiting the studios of the local artists at Liberty Ship Way. The tourist then climbs up the public stairs to catch the amazing views, and from there, who knows? To the clubs where the local people hang out and listen to jazz? Instead of just snapping a picture of that pretty little church, the tourist goes inside, and after worship goes to coffee hour, and gets to know a bunch of people who might see the world differently than the way people see things back home. The soul is like a tourist who gets bored with Where and decides to go Elsewhere for a vacation. The soul prays or dreams to get to Elsewhere, and once there, finds that things are not too much different than they are in Where. But after praying or meditating the way to Elsewhere many times, the soul-tourist begins to realize that Elsewhere is just a prettier copy of Where, an idealized projection of his or her own everyday reality, and there must be more to experience than what is found Elsewhere. So the soul strays from the well-trod path and discovers that within the heart there is a realm that isn’t familiar, that doesn’t correspond to how he or she thinks things are or ought to be. The realm Beyond Elsewhere is both beautiful and terrifying. In this place, the soul doubts its assumptions about itself and about the nature of God. The soul confronts its prejudices, questions its neat theological constructs, challenges its habits and beliefs. It’s more work to go beyond Elsewhere, but it’s also exhilarating and energizing. And as the soul travels further in this place, it begins to gain faith in its ability to live and love despite, and even because of, the uncertainty and ambiguity around it. In Where, the soul barely pays attention to God at all. In Elsewhere, the soul worships the God it thinks it knows. Beyond Elsewhere, the soul worships the God it knows it does not know. All of us are tourists, trying to get a break from Where. May we all take a vacation from the main drag of Elsewhere, and seek out the less-beaten paths that take us beyond Elsewhere and into the mystery and majesty that is God. This summer, let’s vacate! Let’s vacate our smart phones, which keep us hooked on doomscrolling and on the algorithms designed to feed our preferences and our prejudices. Let’s vacate our grudges against people who have done us wrong. Let’s vacate the mental cable channels that keep our minds spinning in circles that go nowhere. Let’s vacate our assumptions about other people, and open ourselves to their points of view – not that we need to adopt them ourselves, but so that we can know people more fully. Let’s vacate our holy habits, our daily drills, our rigid routines, enough to open ourselves to new experiences, to the fullness of the sacred creation around us. Let’s vacate the human-made world long enough to occupy the natural world long enough to remember that it is our sacred source. Let’s integrate our physical vacations with spiritual vacations – and make them much more than just time off from work. Let our vacations become spiritual retreats in which we rise to a higher consciousness and savor it. The trouble with vacations, as we usually think of them, is that they end. And then it is time to get back to work and the daily drill. The trouble with vacations, in other words, is time itself – time as we define it. But a spiritual vacation is not just a vacation from the usual routines of work and life – a true spiritual vacation is a vacation from time itself! It is an embrace and a practice of timelessness, of eternity. Think of the last time when, for you, subjectively, time evaporated – when time stood still, because you were so enraptured with what you were experiencing that time didn’t matter, time didn’t register. I suggest that you intentionally set up your vacation so that such moments happen. What makes time stop for you? Do that, go there, and you’ll be on a vacation at a totally different level. It won’t matter that you have only two weeks or a month off – because you’ll taste eternity moment by moment, and it will stick with you when you go back to work and your day-to-day existence. Let’s go on vacation! Let’s leave Where and go to Elsewhere and from there forget about the salt-water taffy and the tourist traps, and go Beyond Elsewhere, to the kingdom of heaven within and without, to the realm of the eternal, to where God who is Love lives beyond space and time – and stay there!

Money and God

Thu, 29 May 2025 17:27:09 +0000

What is money? Cryptocurrencies push the question up in our faces. The “crypto” in cryptocurrency means “hidden” – obscured. But in a way, all money is cryptocurrency. What is a dollar, really? Ultimately a dollar is worth what people believe it is worth – it has little intrinsic value in itself. Now that we have a president who is spectacularly inept at managing the economy with his wild turnarounds on tariff policy, and now that Congress is about to add trillion dollars to the government budget deficit, which is funded by selling dollar bonds to governments and investors all over the world, amounting to the government "printing" more money - people around the planet are beginning to question the stability of our currency. The value of a dollar is a figment of the collective imagination of humans. It is a habit of mind that can change. The dollar is getting more “crypto” by the day. When you get down to the root of it all, money is the quantification of trust, of faith. There’s something religious about it, eh? You put a twenty dollar bill in your wallet and you trust that it will be worth something when you go to the store. You trust your employer to tells its bank to send a number to your bank, and you send numbers from your bank to the banks of the companies that provide you with the stuff you want to pay for. Our cash is printed with the words “In God we trust”, promoting the fiction that there is supernatural backing for its value. A backing that most assuredly isn’t there, whether or not you believe in God! If we were honest, we’d have these words printed on our money: “Just trust that this piece of paper is worth something”. Money isn’t divine. But there is something divine about maintaining trust and faith in each other. Children trusting their parents to take care of them – that is a sacred trust. Neighbors trusting neighbors to pitch in and help in times of crisis – that’s a sacred kind of trust. The trust we put in each other in our churches is holy. And the institutions we create to enable our economy to run smoothly and predictably – that too necessitates a sacred trust. The global financial system, precarious as it is, backed up by little but habits of mind, inspires both awe and suspicion - especially now, as we are getting a look behind the curtain to see the very flawed humans turning the cranks and pushing the levers that generate its illusions. The weirdness of cryptocurrency, and the peculiar characters behind it, practically beg us to do what Dorothy did in exposing the Wizard of Oz for who he really was. How do we change the money system so that it serves humanity more equitably and humanely, without tearing away the delicate filaments of trust that hold it all together? At its root it is a religious question, a spiritual question. How we make and spend money – that’s a matter of morality. How we structure the way money is created and how money flows – that’s a matter of a morality founded on spirituality. How does love move us to gain and distribute money – both as individuals and as a collective? Money itself is not sacred, nor are the banks and financial institutions through which it moves, but the trust that gives money value has a sacred quality which we must hold precious even as we demand reforms to the financial system to achieve greater economic justice. We’re going backwards on this front today, but soon enough we’ll have the chance to elect politicians who can move us forward on economic justice. In the gospel story about him, people hated Zacchaeus because of his ill-gotten gains. Tax collectors in the Roman empire effectively were robbers. They were given an amount they had to deliver to the Romans and they were set loose to gather it up by hook or crook, backed up at sword-point, and keep whatever extra they collected in the process. We can be sure that he set neighbors against neighbors, getting them to rat each other out about who had more money than who, so he could extort as much as possible from all of them. Zacchaeus was a cog in a machine that tore apart the filaments of trust between people. So folks were boggled when Jesus invited himself to dinner with this social pariah. Jesus inspired him to pay back what he had extorted from people. Jesus’ mission was to restore trust among people, to inspire people to forge communal relationships that would enable them to thrive. His encounter with Zacchaeus was a microcosmic reform of the money system of the day, moving its needle in the direction of economic justice. Let’s do our parts toward the same end today!

Mending the World

Mon, 12 May 2025 02:32:05 +0000

(A cartoon from Iran, after a terrible earthquake there....) Every hole and tear and sign of wear in a beloved piece of clothing tells a story. As do the dings and scars and wrinkles and divots on our bodies. They make us who we are, they recite our sagas for us without words. I know a lot of folks who have tattoos, and my theory is that they haven’t had enough damage done to their bodies, haven’t experienced enough wear and tear to have any visual stories to tell, so they feel compelled to tat their skin in order to tattle their tales! In Britain during the Second World War, Coventry Cathedral, dating back to the 14th century, was blasted mostly to bits by the German Luftwaffe. What took many decades to build, and seconds to destroy, took decades more to mend. Just like what’s happening today – in just 100 days, whole swathes of essential government services were wiped out, and when this disastrous administration finally ends, it is going to take years to mend what’s been ripped and torn asunder. Coventry Cathedral today is a striking modern edifice that beautifully incorporates the remains of the medieval structure. The mending restored the cathedral to its function, while letting its long and rich story remain visible. I pray that when our current political debacle is over, the mending process will memorialize what has happened, so that our people will remember the damage done and the price paid. Arty, cool-looking patches on old clothing satisfy our eyes but also touch our souls, resonate with our hearts, because they are powerful metaphors for our human experience of striving and suffering and redemption and renewal. Seeing patches on holes in the knees of Levi’s remind us of the strain and sweat we exerted while we were wearing them – gardening, building, fixing, cleaning, working. The patches are badges of honor for our labors that resulted in the holes and tears. The sacred myth of the Christian gospel tells us that after Jesus resurrected, he walked and talked like he did before his crucifixion – but he wasn’t quite the same. The wounds that killed him were still visible on his hands and feet and side, though they’d apparently mended enough that he wasn’t bleeding any more. You could say that Jesus was tatted out! And those tats told his tale. So let us wear our visible signs of wear and tear with deep respect for what we’ve been through, for all we had to deal with to get where we are today. Those divots and dings give us character, and let us revel in it. Of course, some of the most significant dings and divots and wears and tears are those we suffer within – ones that aren’t immediately visible. But one way or another, these invisible marks will become visible. And often the best patches for inner invisible tears are visible tears. I remember plenty of times when my tears have mended my heart. And when I’ve been a witness to the same in others. When we mend what has been torn, there’s usually no use using the same kind of cloth as the item needing repair. The idea isn’t to make it look the same as it did before it wore out. Often that’s a hopeless enterprise. Might as well make it obvious that you’ve mended it – but be creative about how you do it. Japanese culture has much to teach us about artful mending. There’s the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which a broken bowl is made whole with lacquer dusted with gold holding the pieces together, highlighting and beautifying the cracks. A kintsugi is worth more than the bowl before it was broken! And sashiko mending is a Japanese art form, embodying the principle of wabi-sabi – perfect imperfection. Let us artfully, creatively mend the world of its rends and tears – not pretending we can make it like it was before. That just makes things worse. We’ve got people running our national government now who want to “take America back”…. But back to what? They want to “restore” our country to their hallucinated image of its former greatness, but are wrecking it in the process. What we need to do is to mend it and build it better than ever before, creatively employing elements both old and new...

A Vax for the Musk Mind Virus

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 16:03:31 +0000

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself…” Philippians 2: 5-8 This same mind is the one in which Pope Francis lived and died. And this same mind is the vaccine for the Musk Mind Virus. I am a sort of Forrest Gump. Through no conscious intentions of my own, and certainly not because I’m anybody special, I have repeatedly stumbled into front-row seats in the theaters of history. It all began when I started my career as a pastor in Palo Alto just as Apple took off, and I got to know some of the key players in the advent of personal computing and the internet. I wrote articles for Whole Earth Review, the magazine started by the futurist Stewart Brand. His Whole Earth Catalogue, a fat, regularly-updated compendium of creativity in tech, practical hacks, and alternative lifestyles, was the nearest thing to the internet at the time, and a lot of Silicon Valley techies were profoundly influenced by it. Referencing the tech revolution, he famously declared: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Some folks in Silicon Valley ran farther with Brand's dictum than he ever intended. One was a friend of mine - a brilliant scientist who ran one of the most important and prestigious Silicon Valley institutions. He was a nice guy who suffered from what I would now call the Musk Mind Virus. He had been told that he was preternaturally intelligent from his early childhood, and over time came to believe that his mind was so extraordinary that it was capable of paranormal powers. It took me a while to realize that he truly believed that he was going to be the savior of humanity. He drifted into the study of New Age literature and practices. He confided in me that he was frustrated. He was certain he was close to unleashing his extraordinary power but just couldn’t quite break through with it. We’d take hikes in the redwoods above Palo Alto and talk. As gently as I could, I urged him to reconsider the nature of spirituality. “It’s not about superpowers,” I told him. “It’s really simple and basic. It’s about paying attention and being kind.” But he just couldn’t hear it. He believed that his god-like nature was a thing to be grasped. Sadly, his hubris ended up wrecking his life. Our government is now being trashed by a grown man who sincerely believes he is a superhero. Elon Musk read a lot of science fiction when he was a kid. He identified with the protagonists so completely that he convinced himself he was one of them. He believes he is “as a god”, and that it is a thing to be grasped. The Musk Mind Virus has become an existential problem for the United States. Recently, in the course of my work as a pastor, I met with an undocumented woman who has lived and worked hard in the US for twenty years and has two young kids who are US citizens. She is now petrified by the prospect of being deported. “My kids don’t even speak Spanish! If I am sent back to my home country, what will I do?” she lamented. I counseled her as best I could to stay brave, know her rights, and know that our church people and many others will stand with her in solidarity through this frightful time. On our nation’s current trajectory, she’ll be but a bug-speck on the window of Elon Musk’s Starliner. In his addled mind, the little people - the immigrants, the poor, the vulnerable, and the sick - are expendable distractions from the pursuit of a grand and glorious future super-human civilization colonizing space. Musk is focused on his imagined humanity of the future, not on the welfare of real people today. His is the mind behind Adolf Hitler’s last words, adjuring his followers to make way “Für den Mann der kommt nach mir”… For the coming man. The uber-mensch master-race of the future - not actual humans here and now. Musk said to Joe Rogan recently: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Another vector of the Musk Mind Virus is Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who mentored JD Vance. Thiel is a libertarian who has declared that freedom and democracy are incompatible. He has advocated for “sea-states” created by billionaires that would exist apart from the sovereignty of any nation. He is one among a cabal of billionaires, lost in their hubristic fantasies, certain they know what is best for everyone else. Let Pope Francis’ rejoinder to JD Vance, on the topic of how immigrants and refugees should be treated, continue to vibrate within us as a vaccine for the Musk Mind Virus: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.” Folks like that immigrant woman, whose tears flowed before me as she poured out her heart in fear of deportation, should be front-and-center in our consciousness. We must empty ourselves of arrogance and take on the form of humble servants to each other. The survival of democracy and human decency depends on it.

“Why do your people have so much hunger to kill?”

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 03:09:53 +0000

There’s a point in American Primeval when a bounty hunter makes a deal with two men for them to help him find a woman who has killed her husband, and, once they have the information _they_ need to find her, they kill the bounty hunter so that they can get the full reward. That’s sociopathy, and there really are people like this – people who will kill for profit, and hurt without qualms – but they’re very rare. Much rarer in real life than on TV or in movies, because, after all, villains make for drama.

There’s a point in American Primeval when Brigham Young says, I don’t remember the exact quote, but something along the lines of “They are trying to eliminate us, and I will not let that happen.” And Brigham Young is _not_ any kind of sociopath, _not_ an evil character, and, importantly to how you view him in the context of American Primeval, not responsible for the Mountain Meadows massacre, and unaware, during the course of the series, that a group of Mormons perpetrated it. (He and his people will, in the series, be attacked in part for an action of which most of them were innocent and ignorant.)

But the words are chilling when Young says them, because you realize that, at this point in the series, _every_ one of the factions headed for war have that same fear – someone else is trying to eliminate them, and they won’t let it happen. The Mormons have this fear, because of course they do – you see in flashbacks the killing of Joseph Smith. And now the army has arrived in the place to which the Mormons have fled. The Indians have this fear, because of course they do – they have every reason to fear white settlers because they have been, and will be, attacked by them. And the US army has this fear – the series begins with the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and the army spends much of the series knowing that _someone_ slaughtered unarmed women and children, and trying to figure out whether those who did the deed are Indians or Mormons.

There are some characters in the series that I can only view as sociopaths, but the bulk of the killing, the killing done by ordinary people, has another source.

“Why do your people have so much hunger to kill?”

“Fear”

Let the Mountains Be My Home

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 19:11:09 +0000

(I was listening to the "Perro Sessions", a jam with Jerry Garcia, David Crosby, Grace Slick, Paul Kantner, and others - and got the inspiration to turn their rendition of "Mountain Song" into a call and response chant. The tune from Perro Sessions is HERE - I sing it, badly, HERE, just so you get the gist of it - the lines in italics are chanted in a lower key - play with it! And if you come up with your own rendition of it, record it and send it to me and I'll share it!) Let the Mountains Be My Home Gonna let the mountains be my home And there I’ll let my people roam Gonna let the mountains be my home Where Moses met me through the cloud Gonna let the mountains be my home And Elijah cried to me aloud Gonna let the mountains be my home Where Jesus sat for forty nights Gonna let the mountains be my home And kept me ever in his sight Gonna let the mountains be my home Up my switchbacks may you climb Gonna let the mountains be my home What you’re seeking may you find Gonna let the mountains be my home Up my canyons steep and long Gonna let the mountains be my home I hear the echo of your song Gonna let the mountains be my home I hear the stepping of your feet Gonna let the mountains be my home To the summit where we’ll meet Gonna let the mountains be my home And there I’ll let my people roam Gonna let the mountains be my home Gonna let the mountains be my home Gonna let the mountains be my home

Post-Mortem 2024

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 17:51:38 +0000

One of my high school classmates, after the election, grumbled that people were complaining about election post-mortems, but, if you’ve fallen short, isn’t a post-mortem the normal thing to do? As someone who tends to wince at the sight of “here’s why we lost the election” articles and op-eds, and as someone who also respects my friend, I’ve been thinking about this, in the nearly two months since the election. I divide post-election thinking into three buckets.

The first (which I don’t think my friend had in mind) is the bucket for which I have no use, because I think it’s in fact useless. These are the post-mortems that take one of the following forms:

We lost because the candidate ran too far to the left or too far to the right. It’s not that we might not have, in any given election, including this one, lost either because the candidate ran too far to the left or to the right. It’s that, in every election that the Democrats lose, the people making these arguments have their pre-packaged reasons for the loss, that always amount to, “in order to win, Democrats need to be popular, and that means, agree with me.” Matt Yglesias talks a lot about “popularism,” but in practice, arguing “popularism” about any internal party position means skipping the hard work of getting people within your party to agree with you that your position is good, and instead expecting them to cave because you say it’s popular.
The candidate was horrible because by rights Trump should have lost in a landslide, and anyone who can’t win in a landslide against Trump must therefore be gravely flawed. Yes, if we’re going by how crappy a President he was, and how crappy a President he promises to be, Trump should have lost in a landslide. But taking as your starting point “Trump is so awful that it has to be the fault of the Democrats if he wins” is a prime example of Murc’s Law where only Democrats have agency – it ignores his strengths as a candidate (however awful he is as a President), ignores the real political background (incumbents losing around the world), and treats Trump voters as children with no agency for their choices. Screw that.
Some people, in their results to losing elections, are way too tuned to “fawn” in their fight/flight/freeze/fawn response – if Democrats lose, that means they need to yield in all kinds of core values, but if Republicans lose, the candidate isn’t even obliged, ever, at all, to acknowledge that he lost a free and fair election. Screw that.

The second (which may be what my friend had in mind), is the kind of post-mortem that I think is useful, and should be done by somebody, but I’m not the someone to do it. Look, as campaigns go, I think Kamala Harris ran about as good a campaign as she could, given the starting point she was handed. I think that Tim Walz was a great VP choice, and talks a hell of a lot more like a normal person than either Trump or Vance. But – I also think that people who are likely to run campaigns in the future should do a post-mortem of any failed campaign and look for ways to improve next time, just as I, in IT, would do a post-mortem of a failed deployment. And as long as these post-mortems aren’t skewed toward “fawn” and don’t skip the hard work of persuading others in a diverse coalition that your policies are actually good ones – I’m all in favor of someone doing the post-mortem. I just don’t think I’m the person to do it. I’m a foot soldier in any campaign, evaluating campaign strategy and tactics is far from my best skill, and, though I’ll turn out to vote every election and spend at least some time trying to get others to vote, I’m not spending my time between elections working on how Democrats can do better at messaging come election time. But if you want to spend your time on that – I won’t fault you. It’s a useful thing to do.

The third kind of post-mortem reflection is the kind that draws me – how do we built and maintain an opposition – an opposition that can carry us through the next couple of years until we can hope to prevail again. That’s what I’ve been looking for, and these are the thoughts that have caught my eye:

Jamelle Bouie on how Democrats can become a real opposition party

Dr. Joanne Freeman and Heather Cox Richardson respond to Jamelle Bouie’s op-ed with a YouTube video about Thinking Like An Opposition Party

Marc Elias at Democracy Docket on Building the Opposition

Marc Elias at Democracy Docket on We Are On Our Own (and what to do about that)

Indivisible has a new guide of practical strategies for dealing with Trump 2.0

Take a look at the ACLU’s roadmap for responding to the incoming administration – maybe you want to volunteer?

2023 Hugo Awards scandal round up

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 01:33:24 +0000

File770: The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion

John Scalzi: The 2023 Hugo Fraud and Where We Go From Here

Books+Publishing: Glasgow Worldcon chair promises transparency following Hugo censorship

Arinn Dembo on past Hugo Award controversies, the genius of SF writer N.K Jemisin, and why We Need to Fix the Hugo Awards. Not Eliminate Them.

Abigail Nussbaum: The 2023 Hugo Awards: Somehow, It Got Worse

Remembering Andre Braugher

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 05:04:05 +0000

At Synergy house at Stanford, you can find a series of notebooks (called “the Synergy journal” at least when I lived there) going back decades, each with things written by students who lived in Synergy at the time. If you were to search through the notebooks till you found the one for the academic year 1981-1982, and flip through the pages, you would find:

“To me, the whole world is a stage. – Andre Braugher”

This note was not written by Andre Braugher, though he lived in Synergy at the time. I know it wasn’t written by him because the notes that were written by him, in handwriting that doesn’t match the handwriting of this note, are signed “proteinman,” the pen name that he reserved for the Synergy journal. He must, though, have said the words sometime that year, so that someone, struck by the phrase, recorded it.

It came true, of course. For him, the whole world was a stage.

Here’s where I tell you that, for all that my friend Joseph Haletky will tell you about how he burned up the stage at Stanford as The Emperor Jones, Andre Braugher was not, at the time, of all the theater people I knew, the one I was surest would succeed in making a career of his passion. That person was Matthew Arkin. The reason wasn’t doubt of Andre’s talent, any more than, when I give you the reason I had greater confidence of Matthew’s success, I mean to cast doubt on the work he still must have had to put in to make a career in acting. It more came down to how I thought the world worked if you had to make a living in a creative field – that it’s hard, and that Matthew Arkin was the only person I had ever known who maybe already had a map of how to do it (of course he had some idea of what an acting career took – his father was Alan Arkin). Andre Braugher, at 19, had brains, and charisma, and a passion for acting, and a scholarship to Stanford after the scholarship that had gotten him into prep school. A Stanford degree guarantees that someone will be willing to look at you for some job (parents, don’t worry that your child at a name brand school will be unemployable if he or she gets a degree in Drama), but it doesn’t guarantee that job will be theater.

“It’s a pipe dream,” my practical immigrant father would have said, if he’d known Dre (but Dad was 3000 miles away and so never met him). Dad always encouraged me to sing, but for career preparation – “Lynn, learn about computers.” Which was not a bad suggestion, especially given that it turned out that I liked computers. I’m sure Dad would have been delighted, though, if he’d known him, to see him go on to Juilliard and then to prove that, for him, acting wasn’t a pipe dream.

I always knew he might soar, and I admired him for taking the risk. I also feared he might fail, because how could you be sure of a career in theater? But though Andre Braugher had a father as constrained by practicality as mine, he dared to try, to venture out without a net, because he fell in love with theater and would have nothing else.

There’s a running argument that Steven Barnes makes to aspiring writers – it’s not about talent, he says, but about putting in the work. I’m not sure I ever had the talent for acting that any amount of work could have made me Andre Braugher, or even the equal of his less famous but still accomplished wife. Even as a singer – which is my own greatest talent in performing arts, I am not that accomplished (maybe enough that I could have found some way to make a living singing, if I’d put everything into it, but not enough that I’d have been featured, when I died, in the New York Times and the Guardian). But I am sure that, whatever his starting talent, no one I knew worked harder at his craft, even at 19.

I also remember him as having one thing that I’m convinced you have to have, if you’re going to make a go of it in a creative career: the ability to come back from doubt and rejection. If you see him on the screen, the actor of whom everyone uses the word “gravitas,” you see him as if he had always had it in hand. I remember a magnetic young man with a smile that lit up the world and a voice that drew you to him, but I also remember a 19-year-old eager to be a man and not always sure he had what it took. I remember his moments of self-doubt. But he had what it took to come back from those moments of self-doubt and keep trying. I had lost touch by the time he had gone on to Juilliard but, from what I know of the world, I can’t imagine, even with Stanford and Juilliard behind him, that he could get where he got without sometimes getting rejected. And rejected again. Rejection is part of the process.

There’s a touch of acting in singing, and I remember trying to put every bit of expression I could, when singing to him, to get his attention. Carly Simon: “The couples cling and claw, and drown in love’s debris” – and I tried to make my voice expressive of all that song’s sad cynicism.

Whenever I have been up on stage, in my amateur way, I have imagined Andre Braugher in the audience – look, see what I can do! This year I took a role in the Diwali festivities at work – one part in the introductory dance, leading the men on stage and singing a line. Then a duet with Vishal. Then part of an group – not the lead, but one of a set of five dancers each time – for two dances, Kala Chashma and Jai Ho. This took weeks of daily, sometimes twice daily practice, and coaching and help for each piece, and a rehearsal where we got our blocking instructions, and then the day came when I got to play my part.

I said the same thing to myself that I always say, imagining Andre Braugher in the audience: “I’ll never be you. You’ll always be a better performer than me. But look at me! I’m singing a duet in Hindi! I’m dancing, and hey, I’m not the best, but I’m not bad for 62! If you could see me now, I hope you’d be proud.”

And then I got up on stage and gave it my best.

I had no idea, then, that he wouldn’t be around, when Diwali arrived next year, or even for this Christmas this year. I’m left with memories: Andre Braugher lifting weights. Talking with him about Jane Austen. How Cynthia used to call him “our man of action.” The way he would volunteer for all kinds of tasks in the coop, from fixing something to being bouncer in case of trouble at the Halloween party. But also, always, how passionate he was about acting.

It paid off.

May his memory be a blessing.

“No man can step into the same river twice”

Sat, 28 Oct 2023 16:23:53 +0000

“It’s 9/11 all over again,” I have seen a chorus of voices saying, on BlueSky, about October 7. Mostly they are people distraught about Israel’s response to Hamas’ assault on October 7, people who see the same rush to war in their own government’s support of Israel.

And in some ways it is like 9/11 again – a horrifying terrorism attack on civilians, killing a large number, and a response from Israel reminiscent of the famous post-9/11 Onion headline, We Must Retaliate With Blind Rage vs. We Must Retaliate With Measured, Focused Rage

But in many other ways it isn’t:

There are hostages this time.

Different consequences for political alignments, for Israel and the US: Israel recalls diplomats from Turkey, to rethink ties to Ankara

No Bush-like “rally around the flag” bounce for Netanyahu

(Perhaps no rallying around the flag for either Hamas or Netanyahu, but I’m not sure we know yet how opinion toward Hamas will be influenced in Gaza by these events – it’s only safe to say that Gazans don’t like Israel any better than they did before October 7.)

Both Islamophobic and antisemitic incidents rising with the war (the link talks about incidents in the US but we’re also hearing similar reports from Europe). (After 9/11 there was a rise in Islamophobia without a corresponding rise in antisemitism, and even Islamophobia, in the immediate aftermath of the attack, was more held in check than it is now.)

There’s more, here in the US, about how the crisis hits existing political fault lines, which have changed since 9/11, but I’m not sure how to explain that part briefly.

I just know that we are in some sense encountering the same river, and I don’t have a lot of confidence any of us will weather this river well, but it’s not exactly the same river, and neither the US nor Israel is exactly the same country as the US was right after 9/11.

The Civilian Side

Sun, 15 Oct 2023 04:38:39 +0000

There’s a moment in the movie “Eleni” where the judge who sentenced Gage’s mother to death asks Gage what side his mother was on.

“The civilian side,” says Gage.

Some wars are morally messy, both sides wrong. Others have one side much more wrong.

But the civilian side always deserves protection.

Being Real

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 14:01:09 +0000

Being Real Acts 22:3-16 by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones First Central Congregational Church 3 September 2023 “Being a person is hard work; it is anxiety inducing and stressful.” So writes religion professor Chris Stedman in his book IRL: Finding Our Real Selves in a Digital World. The book grapples with how the digital world shapes our identities, particularly how we struggle with being real online and how our online selves match up with our analog selves. One of his key points is that we are still in the early years of living with these technologies, still figuring them...

“Default Setting Brave”

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 05:29:21 +0000

“Default setting brave” is how my coworker who’s friends with Glenn Sprowl’s brother describes Glenn Sprowl.

Three people died last week at Cook’s Corner: Tonya Clark, there to celebrate her birthday, and dining at the same table with Marie, the ex-wife of the shooter. John Leehey, 67, the urban planner and landscape architect whose last words, on being shot outside Cook’s Corner, were, “I think I am dead.” And Glenn Sprowl, the one who is said to have told his companions to lock the door and get behind the bar, that he was going to take care of the situation. And then set out for the parking lot to confront the shooter.

Yesterday, as it was one of my WFH days for the week and Cook’s Corner is minutes to walk to from my home, I went down the hill at my lunch break to see the “soft” (no live music yet) reopening. The motorcycles were back in force in the parking lot, and a crowd was there to show support, both indoors and at the outdoor tables. Reporters were there from several outlets, including Telemundo. The memorial out front had been enhanced, since my last visit, with large photos of the three who died.

Of the three, it’s Glenn Sprowl who has been on the mind, because he’s the one whose choice raises the question, would I try to fight a mass shooter? It’s not a moral question. I’m a Quaker; I don’t have a gun, and therefore can’t kill a mass shooter even if I wanted to. Unarmed people can, under the right circumstances, subdue a mass shooter, and I can’t possibly hold an opposition to the use of force so severe as to object to nonlethal force to stop someone from killing. At the same time, I can’t imagine I’d have any moral obligation to try to fight a mass shooter when most of the time running or hiding is a more effective way to survive. In a review of 433 mass shootings, people without guns subdued the mass shooter about 10% of the time.

It’s not a moral question. It’s more a question of, under what circumstances would my survival instinct and fight/flight response swing me toward fighting, and under what circumstances would it swing me toward fleeing. I don’t know. I’m not “default setting brave.” I’m not “default setting cowardly.” It’s all about what looks possible in the moment. Am I near an exit? Near an entrance to a room that can be locked? Near something that looks like a good impromptu weapon, and the shooter isn’t looking at me, so I can take him by surprise? That’s why it’s so easy to swing these hypotheticals to the answer you want, whether it’s the answer you want to give about yourself, or the answer you want to prod someone else to give.

Run/Hide/Fight, says the FBI, in that order, and that makes sense to me. But also, we shouldn’t live in circumstances where active shooter training is a normal thing. It wasn’t always so. And now each mass shooting is pushed out of the news within days by the next mass shooting.

Mid-Forties: The Momentous Years

Sat, 02 Sep 2023 19:15:48 +0000

This is the third post in a series reflecting on my forties. The first is here and the second here. This writing is prompted by my half-birthday last week and entering the final six months of my forties. That day I posted on Facebook "Today I am six months from turning fifty, and the most surprising realization, as I head into the final six months of my forties, is how young and sexy this age actually feels. Never would have convinced me of that in my thirties, but a joy to discover." So these posts should be taken with this...

Late Forties: New Life

Sat, 02 Sep 2023 15:25:48 +0000

This is the fourth, and last, post in a series reflecting on my forties, as I near their end. 2021/47--A Transition Year Vaccination! Much thanks to Darryl Brown for informing me that clergy were being inoculated along with social workers, therapist, chaplains, and others at the tail end of medical worker inoculations in January 2021. What a blessed day that was, full of possibility and newness. I went walking on the Field Club Trail afterwards and was almost dancing. And by my birthday, at the end of February, I was fully inoculated. By the end of February, Michael had moved...

My Forties: Two Contrasting Years

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 12:52:22 +0000

43 and 44 offer two contrasting years. 2017 was the least eventful year of the decade, by which I mean lacking in major turning points and with few highlights. While 2018 was chock full of them. But both years were heavy with emotions, particularly grief, stress, and anxiety. 2017/43--A Grieving Year I remember that winter as being one where I struggled to sleep, experiencing chronic insomnia. One reason was the Trump administration, which of course weighed heavily, bringing some ruin and devastation to pretty much every day. Professionally we clergy were wrestling with how to do our jobs well in...

My Early Forties

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 20:26:10 +0000

I've been thinking this week of the highlights and turning points of each year of my forties (as I'm in my final six months of the decade). So I decided to write about them. In this post My Early Forties which include some of the most significant years of my life. 2014/40--A Fresh Start My forties began on the Big Island of Hawaii, where we had traveled to celebrate the big occasion. A wonderful trip that included hiking over the caldera of a volcano, exploring lava fields at night, kayaking in the ocean, swimming on beautiful beaches, and a stargazing...

Becoming Human

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 19:11:49 +0000

Becoming Human Jonah 3:9-4:11 by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones First Central Congregational Church 27 August 2023 On the Day of Atonement every year, Jews read the entire Book of Jonah at their worship service. The reason is explained by Baruch Levine, “The story of Jonah epitomizes the power of repentance, and serves to reassure the worshipers that God’s arm is extended to receive them.” Two weeks ago when I preached about the far more familiar story of Jonah and the whale, one of the themes we drew out of the book was God’s “lavish love.” That God pursues...

Jonah's Journeys

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 18:06:10 +0000

Jonah's Journeys by Barbara Green OP My rating: 3 of 5 stars While it contains fun and interesting interpretations of the Book of Jonah, the text is really an examination of how we make meaning from reading scripture. Would be great to use in a classroom setting. View all my reviews

A Forever Kingdom

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 15:37:49 +0000

A Forever Kingdom Daniel 7 by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones First Central Congregational Church 30 July 2023 We’ve finished with the legends that compose the first half of the Book of Daniel and today will look at one of the apocalyptic visions recorded in the second part of the book. Get ready for terrifying monsters and strange encounters. Hear now the Word of the Lord: In the first year of King Belshazzar of Babylon, Daniel had a dream and visions of his head as he lay in bed. Then he wrote down the dream: I, Daniel, saw in...

Substack links: A new COVID dashboard and a rabbi’s reflections on textual activism

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 14:03:45 +0000

COVID information has become harder to follow since the end of the public health emergency, but some may still have reasons to follow it. And, you can still assemble it from public health websites, but Dr. Jeremy Faust, Inside Medicine substacker, makes it easier with his Inside Medicine COVID-19 metrics dashboard.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on the origin and Jewish interpretation of the “eye for an eye” passage in Leviticus: eye for an eye? or: let’s hear it for textual activism

The Lion's Den

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 17:19:17 +0000

The Lion’s Den Daniel 6 by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones First Central Congregational Church 23 July 2023 The Rev. Dr. Yvonne Delk is one of the mothers of the United Church of Christ. She has spent many decades in leadership in our denomination. In the opening of her most recent book, of which I’ll have more to say in a moment, she writes, To “remember” is to define who we are in ways that we are not free to walk away from. Remembering is a sacred liturgy that grounds and equips us with an identity, meaning, and purpose....

A Mad King

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 13:49:51 +0000

A Mad King Daniel 4:28-37 by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones First Central Congregational Church 9 July 2023 Before Joffrey Baratheon and Aerys Targaryen. Before MacBeth and King Lear. Even before Caligula and Nero. There was King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, the Mad King. According to the History Channel’s website, of the ten most famous Mad Kings and Queens in actual history, Nebuchadnezzar ranks number one. Of him they write, “The granddaddy of all mad kings is King Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian ruler whose first-person account of a seven-year descent into animal-like insanity is one of the most fascinating sections of...

On Justice O’Connor and Affirmative Action

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 15:07:03 +0000

Was Justice O’Connor Right? Race and Highly Selective College Admissions in 25 Years

In 2003, in her opinion on Grutter v. Bollinger, Sandra Day O’Connor famously wrote:

“We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in student body diversity] approved today.”

O’Connor, at that time the swing vote on a Supreme Court that split 5 to 4 in favor of leaning right, believed that affirmative action was necessary, but was also a temporary measure. Temporary for how long? She thought that probably in 25 years (that would be 2028) it would no longer be needed.

It has been 20 years, now, since O’Connor wrote that opinion. It’s hard to remember exactly one’s beliefs and reactions from 20 years ago. I think I read the opinion, or at least extracts from it, the day after it was written. I think I agreed with O’Connor both that we needed affirmative action to achieve equal opportunity and that the time would and should come when we would need it no more. I think that I thought she was optimistic that the time would come in 25 years, and that it would take longer than that to overcome the effects, both on the minds of white people and on the circumstances of Black people, of centuries of enslavement and a century of Jim Crow (and I think I wasn’t aware yet of some of the practices that legally enforced inequality even in the North, such as redlining, though I’m confident I did already know about restrictive covenants, having learned about those in high school).

A commenter on my blog once said that if affirmative action were to have an end date, it made sense that it last as long as the wrong it was designed to remedy – centuries.

We’re now 20 years out from when Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that opinion. I think it’s fair to say her prediction was optimistic – Black people are still at a clear disadvantage. But affirmative action in higher education is dead; I can only hope that some form of race neutral consideration of socioeconomic factors can work in its place, both providing some way of addressing racial inequality (that naturally adjusts over time if such gaps narrow) while also addressing class based inequality.

Now, a century ago, “white ethnics” like me faced discrimination – in what proved a far more manageable problem, as there’s a real difference between an immigrant wave encountering discrimination for decades before being assimilated and either the enslavement and Jim Crow that Blacks went through or the dispossession and slaughter that Native Americans went through. I want to be clear about this difference, and say that any analogy I can make about the discrimination that Greek-Americans faced and what Blacks have gone through has to be highly qualified.

But I bring it up to make two points. First, the whole “how Italians became white” story doesn’t mean that Southern Europeans became completely “white” for everyone. Even now, you can find people who don’t consider Southern Europeans quite as “white” as Northern Europeans. Richard Lynn, whose sketchy book about IQ provides the “average IQ” citations used by so many “scientific” racists, is on the record as believing that people in some European regions are genetically predisposed to be smarter than people in other regions – smarter the further north you go in Spain or Italy. But this kind of prejudice hasn’t made a whit of difference in my life and opportunities – by the time I was born, prejudice against Southern Europeans, in the US, was a small enough thing to be no systemic obstacle, just an individual failing. I can imagine getting to that point, in terms of systemic racism – but we’re not remotely close to being there now.

And, since “Italians became white” without any need for affirmative action to reach equality, in a matter of decades, it’s probably fair to say that sometimes, if prejudice and barriers are small enough, equality can be reached without any sort of formal affirmative action. And I still don’t think we’re there, in terms of racial equality – there will be a cost to the end of affirmative action. But I can at least understand how someone might believe that we’re, say, at a similar point in terms of equality between Black and white people to where we were in terms of equality between recent immigrants through Ellis Island and WASPs, a century ago. And that maybe, just as the other gap from a century ago closed without affirmative action, this one can as well, that maybe, to some critics of affirmative action who realize that the playing field isn’t level (for instance, the minority of Black people – like Thomas Sowell – who oppose affirmative action), the side effects of affirmative action look worse than its advantages.

But so often, that isn’t even the argument that gets made. So often, affirmative action – designed to address inequality – is argued to be exactly as wrong as Jim Crow. So often, people talk as if equality was achieved the minute the Civil Rights Act came down – and we’re not even talking about subtle “implicit bias” here, as many people were actively resisting the Civil Rights Act every way they could. So often, I see white people arguing as if the real disadvantaged people, here and now in the US, are white people.

And plainly that isn’t true.

Religious Liberty

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 15:02:55 +0000

Religious Liberty Daniel 3:1-30 by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones First Central Congregational Church 2 July 2023 Let’s note a few things about this story. For one, it’s a little over-the-top, isn’t it? Especially how often the author repeats those long lists of the officials present and the musical instruments played. We get the sense of heightened spectacle. Another is how over-the-top the king is. Leaders often get an inflated sense of self, but King Nebuchadnezzar takes the cake. In his commentary on the Book of Daniel, Princeton professor C. L. Seow points out that the problem here isn’t...

Affirmative Action and Disparate Impact

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 00:37:30 +0000

I’ve been expecting today’s Supreme Court ruling for some time. Even pre-Trump, I’ve thought that affirmative action’s days were numbered, given the combination of Republicans getting more Supreme Court picks and “we’ve elected a black president” making it hard for most white folks to see why we’d need affirmative action.

I just want to point out why, back in the day, we got Griggs v. Duke Power Co. I want to point out that Duke Power Co. had openly discriminated against black people until the Civil Rights Act went into effect in 1965, and that the day the Civil Rights Act went into effect, they put in place new employment tests that had a disparate impact on Black people because Black people had inferior education opportunities, and that Black people in the employment pool at that time not only had inferior education opportunities but had inferior education opportunities because it was practically five minutes, historically speaking, since school segregation had been enforced by law (particularly when you consider the trouble getting compliance with Brown v Board of Education, once the decision went down).

Raising Them

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 14:15:34 +0000

Raising Them: Our Adventure in Gender Creative Parenting by Kyl Myers My rating: 4 of 5 stars A memoir of one family's effort to raise a child without assigning them a gender at birth based upon their genitalia, allowing the child to form their own identity and gender expression. For all parents trying to be more open and less binary in the way they raise their kids, this should be helpful. View all my reviews

Compassion & Power

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 14:22:40 +0000

Compassion & Power 2 Kings 4:8-37 by the Rev. Dr. E. Scott Jones First Central Congregational Church 11 June 2023 This summer we are reading stories of prophets and rulers under the lens of the theme “Good Trouble.” Last week we heard a story about the prophet Elijah confronting King Ahab for the evil he and Queen Jezebel had committed against Naboth—having him killed so that they might have his vineyard. Today we hear a story not about a ruler, but a regular citizen of Israel. And our prophet has changed. Now it is Elisha, who succeeded Elijah as God’s...

"Too Political"

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 00:24:16 +0000

Every preacher, at least if they are doing their job, has heard at least once that someone thinks a sermon they preached is "too political." Even though this has been said plenty of times before, even by me, let me say it again clearly--a sermon cannot be "too political." For every sermon is political. Always and inherently. All worship is political. Worship is forming the habits, and thus the character, of a people. Preaching shapes a community of people--the very definition of a polis. The church is a polis. Our houses of worship are even historically based on the architecture...

Sermoning

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 15:19:18 +0000

Recently, I saw a FB posting that said, “My house is never so clean as when I’m working on a sermon.” I relate. Most of the time when I am working on a sermon it doesn’t LOOK like I’m working on a sermon. It may look like a walk, scrubbing the kitchen sink or painting a cat picture. It makes me wonder what writing a sermon is supposed to look like. I think of Seymour Cray, father of the supercomputer. ‘"I work when I'm at home," he recently told a visiting scientist. "I work for three hours, and then I get stumped, and I'm not making progress. So I quit, and I go and work in the tunnel. It takes me an hour or so to dig four inches and put in the 4-by-4s. Now, as you can see, I'm up in the Wisconsin woods, and there are elves in the woods. So when they see me leave, they come into my office and solve all the problems I'm having. Then I go back up and work some more."’(Time Magazine, March 28, 1988, Wayback Machine) His board chairman John ‘Rollwagen knows that Cray is only half kidding and that some of the designer's greatest inspirations come when he is digging. Says the chairman: "The real work happens when Seymour is in the tunnel."’ (Time Magazine, March 28, 1988, Wayback Machine) I don’t ascribe my sermon to elves, but to the Holy Spirit. However it seems to work in the same manner. I read the text, I read the commentaries, I sit with it in prayer and then I go and do something: walk, clean, paint, make, sew – whatever. And when I get back to it, another part of the sermon is done. I think it’s an additive vs. subtractive process. When I sit down at my desk to work on the sermon, I’m continually adding more and more. If I only did this, each sermon could be a couple of hours long. Not optimal. When I go off and do something with my hands, my brain is still working on the sermon somehow, but it’s like when you reduce a sauce on the stove and let the water boil off. Eventually the essence of what needs to be said remains. Diana Kwon on April 7, 2021 in “Scientific American” wrote about the research around this topic (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-brain-typically-overlooks-this-brilliant-problem-solving-strategy/). So my method seems to work – and my laundry gets done. And I’m not going to judge my peers when then clean their house OR they sit at their desk to get sermons done. It’s what works for you. Peace y’all.

Youth Voices to be heard--from CitySquare!!!

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 20:42:33 +0000

Our big chance. . . .today!

Wed, 03 Nov 2021 03:30:00 +0000

Any way you cut it, as a nation, we now face a huge opportunity to strengthen our country, to include more neighbors, to prepare our grandchildren for what lies ahead. President Biden's plan presents a very practical response to national issues. His vision seeks to make America better and more prepared for competition in our shrinking world.

The first half of the current opportunity has to do with physical infrastructure improvement and literal rebuilding--bridges, highways, lead-lined water pipes, climate change curtailment, railways, internet accessibility, etc.

To build our national, social infrastructure by really investing in our people, consider these real, tangible, very doable strategies to share the opportunity of America to a wider segment of our people:

Lower child care costs to no more than 7% of a household's income
Expand parental leave benefits
Two years of post high school community college costs
Fully fund early childhood education
Increase maximum allowed for Pell Grants
Lower prescription costs by allowing Medicare to negotiate costs with big pharma
Add vouchers for Medicare participants that cover vision, hearing and dental costs
Expand Medicaid for the extremly impoverished
Use tax credits and government financing to bolster affordable and resilient housing, supporting the construction or rehabilitation of more than two million homes
Extend the Child Tax Credit expansion in the American Rescue Plan, providing 39 million households and nearly 90 percent of American children a major tax cut and cutting child poverty nearly in half
Increase the Earned-Income Tax Credit from $543 to $1,502. This will benefit roughly 17 million low-wage workers, including cashiers, cooks, delivery drivers, food preparation workers, and child care providers
Aggressive jobs training program, including green jobs and education careers
Invest in nutrition improvement by expanding SNAP benefits
Pay for it all with equitable tax reform that asks the very rich and U. S. corporations pay their fair share.

An often overlooked fact of public investment in our people is that every dollar spent on our people moves quickly and completely back into the economy. Nothing is lost, nor wasted as relates to economic stimulation and continuing growth.

If adopted, this plan will assure the promise of America for generations. It will cut poverty significantly. This plan will unite us as the benefits become obvious. We can do better. We can change for the better.

Since 1970, I've been working on a daily basis with men, women and children caught up in the cruel reality of poverty and economic disadvantage. Poor folks have been my very best teachers.

One conclusion seems undeniable: progress in our work to overcome the cruel, negative impact of poverty on our neighbors will depend on a comprehensive, public, community strategy that bundles numerous assets and transfers them to the people closest to the problem, "the poor."

It is time to act and act boldly.

Together We Rise!

Tue, 26 Oct 2021 21:38:14 +0000

Spoken word, crafted on the spot at our annual retreat by Michael Guinn, from CitySquare staff's single word descriptions of the CitySquare experience over the past 18 months! "Amazing" was my word. Look for it below!

Together We Rise by Michael Guinn

Its been 1 year, 5 months, 20 days since we’ve had to pivot.

But there is no stopwatch that can clock the hours of unwavering dedication to our neighbors and to each other.

During this time. We’ve been the epitome of social philanthropy. Proud curators of collaboration through chaos. Undaunted and fearless warriors on the front lines whose endurance and determination has provided an indestructible display of teamwork.

Together we have risen, relentlessly reliable and persistently resilient. Brilliant in our chase to provide supportive services so that our families gratefully receive intense case management and resources no matter the circumstance.

We didn’t let stress get the best of us. Instead in one another we learned to share and trust.

We became tenacious in the face of this pandemic via powerful partnerships and a diligent delivery of services that even covid couldn’t mask.

So here’s to you CitySquarians. Because of you.. hope becomes the music of the moment for our homeless who hunger less. Because of your strength and creativity in serving the community, we’ve been able to push forward this narrative of normalcy no matter how tired we be. See its been exhausting. And You’ve had to socially self-care, privately self-love while selflessly going beyond and above.

But because of your flexibility and humility, and your heartfelt steadfast impressive one of a kind abilities. Our neighbors continue to see equity in their proximity.

Because of you, Poverty’s notoriety in our society gives way to a social sobriety that drives us to a new high.. ya see..

You are amazing. We Salute you. Its been 1 year, 5 months, 20 days since we’ve had to pivot. But your hearts are the reason why… Together We Rise…

Practical, Healthy Outcomes for Our Neighbors. . .

Fri, 08 Oct 2021 17:30:29 +0000

The following post comes from one of our Case Managers at the Cottages (CitySquare's "tiny homes" community):

There is a neighbor at The Cottages who for the last several months, if not years, has been struggling with medication and mental health management. One day, I was trying to brainstorm ways to assist her with taking her medications so that she could get back to baseline, when I noticed that the majority of her psych medications had instructions on the bottle to “take at night.”

Because there are no staff on property at night, it made it difficult to help this neighbor with taking her medications at night.

During one of this neighbor’s phone visits with her psychiatrist, I asked her permission to sit on the phone call and speak with her doctor. She granted me permission and I asked the psychiatrist if this neighbor absolutely had to take certain medications at night or if there was a possibility she could take them in the morning. As it turns out, she can actually take all but one of the medications in the morning.

After this conversation, I was connected with the neighbor’s Metrocare case manager who was able to provide me with a med minder. With the neighbor’s permission, we can assist her with organizing and managing her medications and can bring her the medications in the morning. And, if we are not able to, her home health aide can assist her in reminding her to take her medications.

After a month and a half of this, the neighbor has now ceased to sporadically cry; she has less and less episodes of anger and she is able to have a competent conversation about her own wellbeing.

We really are better together. We cannot do things alone. When we work together, we elevate the situations of our neighbors and even ourselves sometimes. Together, we rise!

Troubled by. . .

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 22:21:00 +0000

1. Gun deregulation to the extreme places more weapons on the streets of cities and in the hands of extremists. People die.

2. Evictions allowed in Texas ahead of national/federal guidelines. People move into homelessness.

3. Politicizing vaccines and their delivery. People get sick and paranoid.

4. Needlessly, and dishonestly disputed,national election results. People lose trust in democracy.

5. The "Big Lie" that Joe Biden "stole" the eleection. People doubt our system.

6. Vote recounts ad nausem. Wasted funds. More doubt and division.

7. Voter suppression legislation passes in many states. People ask why worry?

8. Texas Legislature does NOTHING to promote, discuss or consider racial equity strategies. People feel abandoned.

9. Bizarroo conspiraccy theories disseminated by the so-called "Q anon" crowd. People are duped.

10. The more than 100 U. S. House members who voted against election results and refused to seat their electors. . . .on January 6! Faith in our union lost.

11. January 6, 2021. New precident for rebellion.

12. Violence rooted in racism perpitrated against people of color. Fear spreads.

Troubled by all of these things and more for my own sake and that of my family, not to mention the vulnerable impoverished.

Strange times, right? Possibly not. Thus, I remain troubled.

Offended by Jesus?

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 18:02:18 +0000

The notion of being "offended" by Jesus interests me. Jesus' words in Luke 7:23 pull me up short: "And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” The word here is related to the idea of scandal or being scandalized. It means to "stumble."

This incident arises because John finds himself rotting in Herod's prison. He wonders if he's on the right track or not. Glad to pay the price of disruptive, civil disobedience, so long as the cause is right and the leader for real.

Here's how Luke records it:

Luke 7:18b So John summoned two of his disciples 19 and sent them to the Lord to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” 20 When the men had come to him, they said, “John the Baptist has sent us to you to ask, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’” 21 Jesus had just then cured many people of diseases, plagues, and evil spirits, and had given sight to many who were blind. 22 And he answered them, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them."

Reading this story makes clear the major focus of Jesus' mission. He intervenes to interrupt human suffering.

He cares about sick people and their suffering.

He cares about behavioral health and mental illness.

He cares about people who can't see.

He cares about those who can't walk.

He cares about the incurable and the stigmatized.

He cares about those who can't hear.

He cares about bringing the dead back to life.

And on that long list of radical interventions into very difficult life situations he ends by reminding these investigators that "the poor have good news brought to them."

Given who Jesus claimed to be, his lifestyle often offended people, often religious people who were in power and often addicted to power.

We find the same dynamic at work today.

I'm not sure exactly when the current fragmentation of the faith began. ActualIy, it has been with us since the earliest days of the Church. I remember how in the early 1970s, the so-called Christian Right known then as "the Moral Majority" stepped forward to articulate an extremely mean-spiritied theology of exclusion and judgment. Before that the Civil Rights Movement, grounded in the teachings of Jesus, faced stiff opposition from, of all groups, Southern, church-going Christians. Before that transformative era, lynchings were justified by Christian racists.

No doubt, these groups, and many others, found Jesus extremely offensive. Surprisingly, they found ways to step away from this offensive Jeusus while remaining people of religion and ritual. Some chose to remake Jesus in their own image, much like Bruce Barton did aboout a century ago in The Man Nobody Knows.1925. Barton made him into the ultimate businessman or salesman and avoided the offensive, socially engaged version of Jesus.

If you keep your eyes on the Jesus of scripture, at some point you'll want to know if it is true that he really put the pain and suffering of others above the rules of religion and the socially accepted
staus quo of the day. Given the limits of our compassion and our continuing refusal to fully embrace the commitment to justice our leader modeled, being offended makes a lot of sense.

Some of what he did and said trips me up in the worst way. But, I know he is right. God help me to follow no matter how offensive he may seem.

Purpose in the Maze-like Homestretch

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 22:01:32 +0000

So, I've faced it: I've been working on this job for a long time! And, it's time to shift gears and think carefully about the time and space I have left.

Thanks to CitySquare's leadership (Executive team and board), I now have the great privildge to serve in a new space. My new business cards will declare me "CEO Emeritus."

What does that mean?

I can see that my new role could easily jettison real meaning and legitimate purpose and leave me vulnerable to being tossed in the rat maze searching for meaning.

So, I've been fairly deliberate about my next steps.

Here's my assignment.

Function as Ambassador for CitySquare. In other words, I'll represent our efforts and our interests across the city, much like I have done for over 25 years.

Be an Adviser to the CitySquare team. I'm eager to work with our executive team and other team members to process new ideas, provide access to available counsel on a wife variety of issues and opportunities. I'll continue to be working with Dr. John Siburt as a supporter and colaborator.

Stand as an Advocate for justice and equity issues in our city. This has been my life passion for over 50 years in Arkansas, Memphis, Shreveport, New Orleans, Richardson and Dallas. The issues will arise as always in the course of our work but now I'll have time to work on them. And, I think I have at least one more book in my soul somewhere!

It helps me to document this. Written words indicate reality, commitment and prospects for purpose. We'll see how it goes.

A Rotary Speech

Tue, 20 Apr 2021 18:40:05 +0000

Notes for speech to Dallas Rotary Club

February 3, 2021

· Thank you for having me today. It’s an honor to be with you!

· I’m a former member of this club from back in the mid-90s

· For over 40 years, I’ve been working on the issues associated with poverty here in Dallas; before that we worked in Shreveport and then, New Orleans.

· I’ve concluded based on my experience that we won’t defeat poverty by charity alone—it plays its role, but it is not up to the task of systemic impact, nor is it scalable.

The Hard Data/Truth: We have a major poverty problem in the USA

You likely know the data well enough without my needing to repeat it all. Everyone has witnessed the growing divide between a shrinking minority at the top and a growing underclass at the bottom. Even during this pandemic, the rich have grown wealthier at the expense of the poor, who are disproportionately people of color.

Here’s a sad truth: your longevity is linked directly to your ZIP Code! Go on line to find how your zip code area compares to others in Dallas—up to as much as 16 years difference in life expectancy! Economist, Raj Chetty developed the Opportunity Atlas to plot these differences—for example, residents of a Preston Hollow neighborhood can expect to live 15 years longer than a person living in 75215.

Consider the scale of problem in Dallas and in our area: In DISD all students receive free and reduced lunches; in Dallas County ISDs it’s between 70-75% qualify to receive these meals.

During the year, 25-30% of our children experience hunger; thousands are homeless.

As of 2020, black families have a median household income of just over $41,000, whereas white families have a median household income of more than $70,000. Blacks earn less than whites for same job.

Racism and implicit bias remain as huge problems.

So, how do we begin to mount a “Marshall Plan”-type response?

We are the people who rebuilt Europe and Japan after WWII!

We are the people who, via the GI Bill, educated an entire nation! (though too white)

We are the people who through the FHA created housing stock for an exploding middle class! (again, too white)

We are the people who dealt with a marginal tax rate of 91% the year I was born to invest in a new nation!

I’ve been thinking about the weapons at our disposal today to engage in the fight against poverty.

What can we do just for starters?

· Raise the national minimum wage to $17 an hour (need to earn $16.81 an hour to rent a one-bedroom apt in Dallas!)

· Expand the EITC program and bury in IRS filing process automatically in the tax reporting process by employers where possible

· Expand WIC, SNAP and the federal child care tax credit—make recertification on line possible and easy

· Criminal justice reform—get serious

· Fully fund public education, including early childhood education

· Support comprehensive immigration reform that is sane and allows hard working people to come out of the shadows and move into citizenship—this used to be a bi-partisan point of agreement!

· Housing incentives to developers and buyers that reverse consequences of generations of redlining

· Expand LIHTC tax credit program

· Reward mixed incomehousing development and developers

· Track impact of public investments on private profits to remind ourselves that this partnership will be key to much progress

· Make public transportation more useful to mobilize the poor in our workforce

· &nb

Days of Our Present Horror

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 20:31:25 +0000

It has become so commonplace that we awake to the same news virtually every day.

We expect it.

Black people have good reason to be afraid.

My God! Last week a baby lost his life at the hands of police. He was 13-years-old.

An officer in the U. S. Army filed a law suite against the state of Virginia. He brought video. The policeman who stopped him back in December sounded and appeared out of control. The soldier had the good sense to stay in his car with hands visible.

How does this go on hapening again and a again?

A significant part of any answer must recognize that something baked into law enforcement today acts as a delivery system of horror The fear arises every time a traffic stop occurs or a young black kid walks out in public after dark wearing a hoodie. The atmosphere is super charged by blackness and a standard set of false assumptions that have become all but universally and automatically applied by the police to black people.

Whlle a member of a predominately Black church here in Dallas, we offered a Sunday School class series that taught our youth how to interact with police when encounters occurred. We regarded the class as life saving necessity.

That's sick.

It is as if we inhale racism as a nation. Our current situaiton goes beyond systemic to metastatic even for those of us who fancy that we've made progress, that we've moved beyond. But, then the horror returns. Can it be that we need racism to persist?

The late James H. Cone argued in his classic book, God of the Oppressed that "Jesus is black." Think about that for a while. Allow the implications to settle in. Finding God today seems a real challenge. Cone's road map contains possibilities that few of us have considered. The theological construct woven in this comparision contians the therapy we need, especially in faith communities. The faith we so eagerly share must contian fierce commitment to anti-racist lives, organizations and actions. Leaders need to present a radical message to congregants that equip them for encounters that lead far too often back to the horror we dread but find completely unsurprising.

At one level it is not that complicated.

Stop killing black people!

What I know for sure. . .

Wed, 04 Nov 2020 21:52:35 +0000

Certainty turns out to be largely elusive in these times.

But, not completely. Values--bedrock, non-negotiable, pre-selected--values offer us reasonable certainty on how life ought to be lived.

So, here is what I know for sure near the conclusion of our recent political convulsions:

People must be honored, loved, valued--all people.
Children must be cared for, loved and supported in families.
Parents must be supported in their responsibilities to their little ones.
Children must never be separated from their parents.
A nation as wealthy as this one must take seriously its responsibilities to its citizens and those who seek to be citizens.
A nation without fair, just, clear policies regarding immigrants and their desire to become a part of the nation lacks integrity, and is not living up to the values that created and sustain this nation of immigrants.
Black lives matter.
Due process trumps police brutality.
Protest provokes progress.
Prolife is a much broader life philosophy than pro-birth.
No one should know hunger.
Food scarcity and food deserts should be banned outright.
Economic opportunity should never be denied or segregated..
Health care is a human right. This nation should see that every man, woman and child receives such care.
Public health is more than an idea, it is a practice.
Pandemic infections call for public leadership, honesty and sacrifice.
Adequate, decent, affordable housing is a basic human right.
Work is sacred. Everyone who works should be paid a living wage. No one who works full-time should fall into poverty because of inadequate pay.
Education is a human right and should be afforded to everyone at public scale.
The earth is our home. We should care for it, preserve it and engage it.
Climate change is real.
As a value proposition, progressive tax policy is a plus.
Charity is good. Equitable investment better still.
Religion is not the point. Most divisive policies find root in it. Radical love, generosity of spirit and soul is everything.

Mural on community chalkboard at The Forest. . .much more than a theater!

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 20:12:47 +0000

Community Pandemic, What's Ahead

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 17:34:04 +0000

This just in from our friends at the DFW Hospital Council:

The Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council wants to remind you of public health considerations as we approach the fall and have three viruses ( COVID-19, West Nile and Influenza ) in North Texas.

Please pass this information to your friends, family and business associates, especially on social media. These three diseases display many of the same symptoms, so prevention is key in reducing the spread.

Wear a mask

Wash your hands

Watch Your distance

Get your flu shot early

Remove standing water on your property

Wear long sleeve shirts

Utilize insect repellent

We need to be prepared for the triple threat and we can help tap down the community spread of these viruses if we all work together to protect each other.

Thanks for your cooperation and support.

W. Stephen Love

President/CEO

Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council

300 Decker Drive, Suite 300

Fairway Centre Building

Irving, Texas 75062

Telephone ( 972 ) 719 4900

www.dfwhc.org

Post Office

Sun, 16 Aug 2020 22:17:50 +0000

Reliable postal service in urban neighborhoods anchors vital communications, business enterprise and community organizing. Of course, the same remains true for suburban and rural settings. The local post office serves as an essential gathering place, a crossroads of sorts for residents and business owners and operators.

Economically and historically, the postal service has opened a pathway into the middle class for millions of workers of color. The postal service must not be regarded as just another business. In fact, it is much, much more. The ongoing subsidy required to keep the mail moving is a vital investment in the nation's life and well-being.

But now we notice a marked change in postal service quality. At least we do here in inner-city East Dallas.

Our experience with the postal service over the past 3 years or so presents a marked change in quality, reliability and scheduling. Our bills must be mailed much earlier to assure they make the payment deadline in many cases, both for local delivery and for out of city and state obligations.

We've noted that much more often than ever before days with no mail delivered to our home.

It reached the point for us that we asked one of our letter carriers what was up. She described exactly what recent news reports indicate. The Trump administration's management combines the removal of automated sorting machines with a new policy of no overtime pay for postal workers. Our carrier reported to us that, thanks to this policy, mail backing up for several days is not uncommon.

Frankly, this erosion of service and reliability aggravates me. It is downright annoying.

It also concerns me more and at a deeper level as we consider the potential impact of this new policy on mail in ballots for the coming general election in November 2020.

It may be past time to get on the phone, fire off an email or, yes, write letters. If you decide on a letter, just factor in a couple of weeks for delayed delivery!

"I just want to live like you!"

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 20:54:28 +0000

So simple. Yet, so obvious.

Problem is, I seldom think correctly about the urban "poor."

I don't see clearly.

I rush to "help," to "fix," to "solve."

I don't hear clearly.

I've known for years that I'm not always the sharpest knife in the drawer. However, I've also noticed over the last 50 years that when I get to know a person, really know them behind authentic effort, and hard work on my part, I begin to get the picture--often a very different picture.

Usually, growth in understanding follows time spent together. In the connection of simple, but genuine friendship, I come to realize important lessons.

Recently, a friend who is homeless, brought me to parade rest with this comment:

"Larry, I just want to live like you. You know, a house, a job, options, family, friends, good health, safety. I don't want to be out here asking people for money every day. I just want my life to be like yours."

Of course.

It's not rocket science.

Everyone wants a life like mine and most of my friends.

He doesn't want my service.

He wants my understanding. He'd like to help me re-channel my power for gains on normalcy in his daily life.

His understanding, and willingness to tell me, ought to cause me to think very differently about extreme poverty in my community.

Nostalgia

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 23:46:38 +0000

It is said that there are two different kinds of nostalgia -- reflective nostalgia and restorative nostalgia. Reflective nostalgia allows you to dwell in the emotion and yet realize that time has moved on and things are different than they were. Restorative nostalgiaI is the deep seated longing to want to go home where things have always been the same. Looking at it this blog I feel nostalgic.

People

Tue, 20 Aug 2019 17:54:48 +0000

Incidents over the last week. . .

Walking out of a downtown building, I noticed an elderly woman seated on a comfortable bench waiting for her ride to pick her up. "Good morning, mam," I said to her. "Have a nice day!" Her eyes twinkled, as she replied , "Oh, angel, you're just too kind! You have a good day too."
Got into a conversation with an employee about his weekend. "Have a good weekend," I asked him in passing. "I did, but about all I did was work," he explained. "Right now I have three jobs--this one and two more!" "You better watch that burning the candle at both ends," I quipped."Yeah, I know, but I have two kids in college," he explained. "Someday, they will rise up and call you blessed," I offered.
A wisp of a man whom I've known for a long time, looked at the impossibly long line of people come to get food, and remarked simply, "I'm starving. Don't you see, I'm starving. I can't stand in that line."
A volunteer, a young man, approached me as I double parked on an extremely busy day in our food center. "You dropping off something, sir?" he asked. "No, I'm trying park. I work here," I tried to explain, a bit defensively, thinking, "This this guy doesn't know me from Adam All-Fox!. "Well, we don't let people park here," he kindly informed me. As I was thinking what to say by way of explanation--as in "I need to get inside, I work here!" He appeared again and told me, "Park over here," as he pointed toward a cone-bordered space he had "made" for me. Before I could thank him, he told me, "I didn't want your car to get hit." What's to say but thanks?

Sermon for St Andrew’s, RVA, July 21, 2019 Luke 10:38-42 “Consider The Bees”

Sun, 21 Jul 2019 23:00:16 +0000

For the past few years, my husband and I have served as foster parents to a hive of bees. It’s a strange story. When we needed to have some dead trees cut down, the workers discovered a huge hive inside the gaping trunk of the tree.

We weren’t entirely surprised by that. We had three neighbors who were hobbyist beekeepers, and two had experienced swarm events in prior years, losing whole hives full of bees. Now we knew where they had taken up residence.

Tree workers have a dread of bees, and ours carried a case of insect killing spray - the aptly named CRC Bee Blast - with them, so when it became obvious that there were bees that were threatening them, they sprayed the heck out of that old tree before starting to saw it down. Cans were strewn all over the yard that night. The next day, they removed the tree sections and picked up the cans. We thought nothing further of it until the next afternoon, when we looked out into the yard and saw what looked to be a black t-shirt hanging down from the crape myrtle. Perhaps one of the tree guys had taken off his shirt in the heat and had forgotten it.

On closer inspection, though, we realized it wasn’t a t-shirt at all. It was a swarm of bees. So much for the inundation with Bee Blast!

We called our beekeeper neighbors, and they brought over a smoke can – smoke settles the bees – and a hive box, and they dropped the black, buzzing clump into the box. The box was put on a stand in our yard, because bees like to stay put. If they had moved the newly boxed bees back to Ed’s or Roland’s house, the bees would just come back to us.

Our local experts didn’t hold out much hope for the survival of the bees. It was unclear there was a queen among them, and without a queen, the hive would die off fairly quickly. But somehow the plan worked. There must have been a queen, because those bees not only survived, they thrived. The beekeepers had to add extra frames, and at the end of the season, some fourteen big jars of honey were collected! This has gone on for a few years now, and it has been fascinating to watch the bees in action. When the weather has been suitable, we have seen the honeybees out and about, enjoying collecting nectar from our flowers, taking little “bee-baths” on the edge of our pond. There’s been a steady stream of to and fro from the hive box during daylight hours, particularly when it’s a hot sunny day. We’ve learned to stay out of their flight path – they’re bees on a mission! And have never been stung. And oh, the honey! Delicious, delightful, wonderful.

They’ve truly been industrious. There’s a reason why that phrase “busy as a bee” is such a common one: bees do appear to be out and about all the time. They’re headed to the flowers to take in their nectar, and they zip back to the hive to store it as honey. Their mission is to support the hive. The queen lays eggs, drones are male bees whose role is to mate with the queen, and workers go get nectar and pollen as food for the brood of bees.

They understand their purpose. It’s deeply wired into them. They don’t have to think about it, they just do it.

But we humans, our wiring for purpose may be much more tangled and elusive. We wonder why we were put on earth. Are we simply around to perpetuate the species, like the bees, which contribute to a larger ecosystem but at least in their little bee minds, are simply about the continuation of their family of bees?

This notion of purpose is at the heart of what Jesus is addressing in today’s gospel.

Now as a Martha-type person myself, I always chafe a bit at this gospel. Having hosted my share of dinner parties where I’m doing all the heavy lifting and others sit back and chat on the sun-porch, I get why Martha is annoyed.

The question is, why is Jesus lauding Mary, who’s sitting on the sun-porch? Isn’t Jesus himself always doing something – his times of relaxation are so few that they are always mentioned in the Gospels, as if to say he’s worn himself to a frazzle and needs a break, but by the way, he works harder than you ever will, so don’t say a word!

Martha is following the social conventions of the Middle East in the first century: you always provide hospitality. It’s expected, and as the senior woman in the household, she does what is expected.

But there’s a sense as we hear the story that Martha is doing something wrong, even though it’s the sort of behavior that was important, even to Jesus. Earlier in Luke 10, Jesus sent out 70 disciples and told them to expect and accept hospitality from others. Isn’t Martha precisely the sort of host that Jesus had promised? Later in the Gospel, when those closest to him begin to argue about which one of them is the greatest, Jesus will define “great” discipleship and even his own ministry in terms of serving others (Luke 22:24-26), using the same vocabulary that here describes Martha.

I hate it when the gospel seems to be inconsistent. And yet it’s not…

Medieval biblical scholars would refer to the way that Martha lived her life as vita activa, the active life, in contrast with Mary, who represents the vita contemplativa, or contemplative life. Action versus contemplation, and we all have days and seasons when we live more in one than the other.

Here’s the thing: both manners of being are necessary in this world. Jesus knows that. Even he, fully human but also fully divine, has moments of action and moments of contemplation.

Both the active life and the contemplative life are needed; to choose one over the other can create a false dichotomy. Saint Ambrose observed: “Virtue does not have a single form. In the example of Martha and Mary, there is added the busy devotion of the one and the pious attention of the other to the Word of God.”⁵

Martha is not sinful – she is, as someone participating in the vita activa – living in a space of discipleship, just as Jesus talked about elsewhere in the Gospels.

But perhaps what Jesus is pointing to in his gentle words to Martha has to do with bees…

..bees?

Consider the bees. Their purpose is clear to them. Keep the world of the hive and the perpetuation of the brood going. The queen lays the eggs after being fertilized by a drone and the workers provide sustenance for all the bees and they also clean the hive. Those worker bees sound rather Martha-like, don’t they?

But what if the possibilities of what your purpose might be were much broader and richer? What if you didn’t know your purpose and were hoping to discover it?

As someone who had several other careers before becoming a priest, I can tell you that there’s a nagging feeling of “is this it?” when you are not following your God-given purpose.

We humans are given so many possibilities as the beloved children of God. One person’s purpose may be wildly different from another’s. And we are encouraged by Creator God to seek our purpose.

But that requires something more than flitting from flower to flower to gather pollen and nectar. It requires more than busily trying a bunch of different things to see which one feels right…

It requires contemplation. The Vita Contemplativa. It may well be that Jesus was suggesting to Martha that while Martha had a clear picture of her purpose, Mary might not. For Mary, spending some time in that place of sitting and learning and praying and wondering was a necessary part of her growth. Or it could be equally possible that Martha was so focused on the social conventions of her world that she never even considered if this was her true purpose, and Jesus was inviting her to stop and breathe and wonder what purpose God had created her for.

Frustratingly, Jesus doesn’t give us a clear picture of which of those two possibilities he’s pointing Martha to. It’s like that with Jesus – part of his vita activa is inviting us to do the work of considering possibilities – but I know this: he continued to interact with Martha and she with him after this encounter. She didn’t stomp off in a huff and refuse to speak with him again.

I imagine her in her kitchen many years later, still busy as a bee, yet understanding the importance of her work in a way that she hadn’t before that conversation. Understanding her purpose. Another way of saying that she understood her purpose is much simpler: she discovered who she was. And the work she did flowed naturally from who she was.

The vita contemplativa yielded the vita activa.

May it be so for each of us. Contemplate, then go and do what flows naturally, as God made you to do.

Amen.