Turns I Took On the Way To Becoming a Christian Liberal

John Kennedy and Richard Nixon battled for the Presidency in 1960, the year that I was in the tenth grade. I had tuned in to politics largely through the fact that my father had run for and been elected to local office two years before. The election took place during the height of the Cold War. Americans were jittery about the spread of communism throughout the world. Sputnik, launched in 1957, had triggered a frantic attempt on the part of American educators to stress science and mathematics, convinced that were my generation to fall even further behind the Soviets in technical capability, we would soon be hostages of superior Russian geopolitical power. At the same time, for the preceding six years, the South—at least a good percentage of Southern white people—were running scared in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education, which quite clearly threatened “the values” that most all white Southerners held dear, enshrined in the institution of racial segregation. Our Senator even in those days was Strom Thurmond, whose name was about as hallowed in South Carolina as Roosevelt’s had been during the Depression. We argued that the chief issue was “States Rights,” the same constitutional ground on which our forebears had based their defense of slavery. With the same rhetoric, we proceeded to talk about without talking about the real bugbear, racial integration.

My parents had come of age in the 1930’s. They were half-way through Conway High School when the economy tanked in 1929, and lived through the early years of the Great Depression as they were graduated from high school, married, and started a family. Both of them, Daddy in particular, revered Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He had been their hero. And since they were Southerners and therefore Democrats, they were pleased to have been able to vote for a Democrat who not only represented economic salvation for them but one who was allied with the only party whom most white people in the South would even think of supporting. The taste of Reconstruction had by no means left the mouths of my parents; and certainly it had not left those of my grandparents, three of whom were born within a decade of the end of Republican-run Reconstruction in 1876. All that and the fact that Daddy had served in the Navy for his President and Country during World War II made him intensely loyal to the Democratic Party and fiercely inimical to anything that bore the name “Republican.” Some things he did not doubt, among them that Herbert Hoover had been responsible for the Depression. Other things he probably doubted but would not talk about, such as the fact that the National Democratic Party had cast in its lot with the oncoming struggle for Civil Rights for the Negro, which of course is what had occasioned Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrat candidacy in 1948.

Somehow or other I came to see that it was the Republicans who truly were on the side of states’ rights, and who had the interests of the South at heart. I had already come to learn how despicable the word “liberal” was. Those of my teachers who talked politics quickly taught me that what one wanted to be in order to be respected and respectable was “conservative.” I put all this together in a fairly succinct creed. As a Southern white boy, I believed that the Republicans stood for states rights and against a dictatorial federal government that wanted to dismantle the structures of segregation; that the Republicans were the champions of limited government against the “creeping socialism” of the Democrats that would soon land us into the column of the communists; that the Republicans were on the side of right (after all, weren’t they called “the right wing” as opposed to the sinister, liberal left?); and that the Republicans were the only way to unlock South Carolina and the rest of the South from the grip of one-party government which even then seemed to me to be grossly unhealthy.

Daddy and I argued. I pushed his every button. The fact that I was for Nixon drove him crazy. And the fact that he would “argue” with me by putting me down only increased my distrust and anger at everything labeled “Democratic.” So there was something that got into the mix that had more to do with the perennial struggle of sons with fathers than it had to do with politics per se.

By the time I finished high school, Kennedy had been president for two years. There was a part of me that loved Kennedy, but it was a part that loved to imitate his Boston accent and make my peers roll in the floor laughing. He was never my hero. Rather, I chose as my mentor and idol a Republican: Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was the homespun humorist, deeply spiritual, intellectually astute, courageous misfit that I myself wanted to be. I would sit and look at photographs of him for what seemed like hours. And I read everything I could about Lincoln. I was to pursue that interest when I went to Randolph-Macon, writing a major paper my freshman year on Lincoln’s religious beliefs, which I presumptuously and pretentiously entitled, “Through a Glass Darkly.” Meanwhile, my political mentor became Barry Goldwater.

But something else was stirring in me. Let’s call it a religious sensibility. Ever the earnest kid, I devoured much of what I could get my hands on that The Methodist Church said and was doing. I found myself passionately excited about being a Methodist, yet troubled by what seemed to me to be the liberal positions that The Methodist Church was taking. I remember going to a great assembly one summer at Lake Junaluska, that gigantic Methodist watering hole in the Southeast. Sitting through a sermon in the great auditorium, I found myself enchanted by the preacher. Then, when he fully had my attention, he stung me with the revelation that what he was driving at was “this whole matter of race relations.” I had never heard such a thing from a preacher or a pulpit. I squirmed, puzzled and vexed.

Such incidents and the uncomfortable thoughts they churned up sent me scurrying to my pastor, Mr. Shumaker, to whom I confessed that I had problems reconciling my political views with some of the teachings of the Church. I don’t remember anything that he said, but somehow I left him about as troubled as I came. Something was shaking loose in me. I was beginning to be aware that folks who had thought much about issues sometimes came out with positions very different from mine. Then something else jarred me. I took a job at the Ocean Forest Hotel, then the only convention facility at Myrtle Beach. Though only about twenty miles away from home, it was in some sense my first experience out from under my parents’ roof. I lived all summer in a dormitory which housed most of the hotel employees, many of whom were college students. One resident there was the wife of the sous-chef. From Savannah, Anastasia de Guillou was a devout Roman Catholic and an equally committed Democrat. She loved Pope John XXIII and John F. Kennedy, perhaps the latter a bit more than the former, really. I spent hours with her listening to her explanations of the Rosary, the mass, devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary. “Darling,” she would say to me, “If you are planning to be a Methodist minister, you can’t afford to be narrow-minded.” She had me take her to the Roman Catholic church for Sunday mass, then still in Latin. And to demonstrate her broad-mindedness, she went with me to the Methodist church one Sunday. Suddenly, I was conversant with something that had lain outside my frame of reference. And I saw that someone of deep faith and intelligence could in fact be a Democrat.

In college I roomed with an ardent Democrat, a fervent Methodist, an adorer of John F. Kennedy. George Marshall and I would stay up all hours of the night talking about everything, including politics and religion. One day he told me that his espousal of liberal politics he traced to his dawning awareness of the dictates of the gospel. I blew up. I pulled out every curse, every epithet, every obscenity that I had ever heard and let fly at him with an unspeakable vitriol. Worse, I had little idea of where all my anger was coming from or even an inkling that my behavior was downright bizarre. I mocked his adulation of JFK. I lampooned his political philosophy as stupid and bigoted. And I carried on for days, bringing to my side and defense a person whose name you probably have heard: Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the conservative sometime Chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, still, as I understand it, under investigation for the misappropriation of federal funds. Ken was our dorm counselor, or residence advisor, and a convinced conservative, which he has remained to this day. I would get out of the way and let him rank on George, whom he would chide mercilessly in a Galax, Virginia, accent, all the while puffing on a cigar.

My sub-sophomoric tantrum at George was, as is transparently obvious, a classic case of projection. I had begun to see the cracks in my political philosophy. I had begun to be aware that the values promulgated in the Christian faith somehow did not square with racial segregation. That the love of Jesus had nothing to do with states’ rights more and more seemed frighteningly plausible. Meanwhile, I found myself continually pushed at Randolph-Macon to think, to test my suppositions, to investigate, to question. I could hardly wait to join the debate team, which I imagined would be all about public speaking, for which I had some aptitude. Instead, I found that collegiate debating was about investigating a proposition (my first year it was “Resolved that the federal government should guarantee the opportunity for higher education to all qualified high school graduates”) and debating both the affirmative and negative positions. More than any other single thing, inter-scholastic debating totally ruined my naïve belief that any one position could be valid beyond question.

Then a strange thing happened. Daddy was running for re-election to the magistrate’s office in the summer of 1964. I came home from college to find that the whole family was astir in the toughest battle he had ever faced. A critical precinct which he had always carried was “The Hill,” in Conway, practically 100% black. Totally outside the regular Democratic party stump speaking circuit, the leaders of the black community would invite the candidates for political office to come and address them. It was crucially important for Daddy to do so. On the night he would have gone, he had a conflict of some major proportions. He asked me if I would go and speak on his behalf. I enthusiastically agreed. I made a speech that invoked Abraham Lincoln, talked about freedom and liberation, and the importance of participating in the democratic process. I came down off the dais. A fellow congratulated me and introduced himself. “Sunday, June the 21st, is Father’s Day. At Salem African Methodist Episcopal Church in Bucksport, South Carolina, we’re having a service in the afternoon in honor of all fathers. We’d like for you to come and give us such a sermon as you gave here tonight.” Well, I’d be happy to come, and honored as well, I told him.

Word got around. Daddy’s political enemies somehow found out within days of my going to Bucksport that I had gone and preached in a “damn nigger church.” My family and I got threatening phone calls. I began to taste what it was like to be disparaged for even so mild a thing as associating with blacks. One of the most obstreperous voices was that of Harry Martin, a fellow member of First Methodist Church. He was later to get up and stride out of church when I was delivering a sermon on youth Sunday. Such happens, I discovered, when a southern white boy crosses the line drawn by southern white racists. To their credit, Mama and Daddy were supportive, affirming the value of sticking up for what I believed. That virtue—if it is a virtue—I now heard differently from what I had previous taken it mean (being committed to one’s opinions at all costs). Daddy won the election by two votes, a margin that after a fiercely contested recount rose to something like eight or ten.

I finished Randolph-Macon, by which time I had ceased thinking of myself as a Republican. Debating combined with a deepening understanding of biblical faith called into question my facile adolescent assumptions. I had begun to see that there was strong strand of social justice that ran through the Hebrew scriptures and a non-negotiable communal imperative in The New Testament. In my sophomore biblical literature class I had been stunned to learn that the theology of the Old Testament, adumbrated by the pre-exilic prophets as well as the Torah, made unmistakably clear that God championed the cause of the poor, the dispossessed, the marginalized, the stranger.

By the time 1968 rolled around I was 23 years old and ready to vote. My seminary roommate at Princeton was a conservative from California, as devout a Republican as George Marshall had been a Democrat. He admired Ronald Reagan. We argued theology. We argued politics. When he pressed me as to why I would vote “for the man with three first names—Hubert—Horatio—Humphrey” I told him that we absolutely had to care about the decaying hovels that people lived in in neighborhoods a few miles down the road in Trenton. When he asked what made me believe that, I replied that my understanding of the gospel led me to believe that it was a moral obligation to care about the poor. He laughed and voted for Nixon.

That was the year that the Republicans launched their “Southern Strategy,” somewhat undercut by George C. Wallace’s candidacy. Lyndon Johnson had presciently told Bill Moyers, his press secretary, that in signing the Civil Rights Act he had given the South to the Republican Party for the next hundred years. That is exactly why, I am convinced, the map of Dixie is to this day a stretch of red states. At bottom, the old arguments have changed little. People talk about small government and fiscal responsibility and strong national defense. But the issue that reddens the South still is race.

The end of the 1960’s heightened the fever of anti-war sentiment on campuses. Princeton was rife with sit-ins and takeovers. Students, their futures threatened by the draft and a war that increasingly sent bagged bodies home, took on “the establishment” in ways strange to their American elders. It all got mixed up with various liberation movements. Woodstock. Stonewall. Gloria Steinem. Angela Davis. Black Panthers. A generation of young people, certainly not without exception, came to accuse American society of harboring murderous intent. Reports on the evening news from places like Da Nang and Mi Lai corroborated their accusations. Seminary friends and university students often demonstrated at places like Fort Dix. Some were arrested. I sat it out. I could never bring myself to become an activist. The old debate still went on inside me. There were two sides to every question. One day I would answer a question affirmatively. The next I would debate on the negative side. But like many of my peers, I had a growing sense of the untenability of official United States policy. The war was clearly a moral catastrophe. Nixon, Agnew, and all its other rationalizers spouted stuff that was every bit as dubious as anything Lyndon Johnson ever said. Viet Nam did not make a radical student out of me. Viet Nam taught me that the society I lived in was capable of justifying anything it found expedient.

Why had I even gone to Princeton Theological Seminary? I graduated from college in June, 1967 and struck out for Colorado where a job awaited me with A Christian Ministry in the National Parks. In addition to offering services twice on Sunday at an amphitheatre in the park, I worked for the Mesa Verde Company, the park concessioners, running a recreation hall for the park company employees, a good majority of whom were Navajos, the first Native Americans I had ever known. Warren Ost, the director of the National Council of Churches' program, came through Mesa Verde on two separate occasions, met me on the first of those, and on the second trip took up and accelerated his argument that I ought to go to seminary. Vulnerable to my local draft board, with whom I had been haggling all summer in an effort to get a deferment to go to graduate school, I heard myself in response to one of Warren's insistent questions blurting out, "OK, dammit, I'll go!" When I spoke that, I felt a piece of me fall into place which had for some time lodged in a space of resistance and denial. Off to Princeton, Warren's seminary, I went, stunning my girl friend, my parents, and a handful of friends who thought that I had been on a trajectory of becoming a college professor.

I had no idea of ever being ordained. All I wanted to do was to avoid the draft long enough to plug a few holes in my academic résumé, so that with luck I could get into a classy graduate school after seminary. By then, I reasoned, the war would be over or at least the draft would not be breathing down my back. Consequently, my first year I opted not to do any field education in a local parish, there being nothing compelling me to do so. I spent Sundays jockeying around from church to church, or at least that was my plan. The second week I landed in the Episcopal church across the street from campus. That stopped my peregrination. Somewhat later it would launch me on another journey, one towards ordination. Meanwhile, I fell in love with Anglican liturgy and began to notice that there existed a strange compatibility between ancient Tudor language and social conscience. The sermons at Trinity Church made that much clear.

I could not avoid field education more than one year, however, if I wanted a degree. So I began to shop for possible placements at the end of my first year. The Reverend William H. Gray III, a masters degree student at the seminary, was barely older than I. He had recently assumed the pastorate of a black Baptist congregation in Montclair, New Jersey, where he would serve for several years before returning to his native Philadelphia to assume the leadership of the congregation his father and grandfather had pastored. For reasons best known to himself, Bill Gray hired me to be his seminarian, despite the fact that I was very white, very southern, and this was the fall of 1968, just a few months after Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed and all hell had broken loose in the black communities of the nation's cities. For an academic year, I trekked up to Montclair on Friday nights and returned to Princeton on Sunday nights. I spent weekends in the homes of parishioners. I learned a few things. I learned how very white the world was in the day before black faces turned up on cereal boxes or in magazines in the homes of people whose walls displayed photos of people conspicuously non-white. I learned how generous and open black people could be, inviting me into their lives not caring who I was or where I came from. I learned what it was like to be honored and loved, and above all, fed.

Hardly any of this surprised me. But one thing that clearly did stun me was experiencing what it felt like to be a minority. As I bonded more and more strongly with the kids in the youth group, with adults who welcomed and mentored me, with Bill Gray whose intellect and leadership I came to respect, I marveled at how little I had known in my native South about people who lived less than a mile from my front door. Shame rose in my throat when I thought of how I had underestimated the plight of Lunelle Hunt, the maid who had kept house and children for Mama while she worked. After I had been at Union Baptist Church for a couple of weeks, I was with Jimmy, one of the guys in the youth group, chatting one Friday night during an after-game party at the Soul Sanction, the dance hall housed in a storefront to which Bill Gray had assigned me to chaperone. "So what was the reaction in the youth group when Reverend Gray hired a white guy to work with you?" I asked.

"You're kidding." Jimmy's face furrowed. "When did he do that?"

"A couple of weeks ago," I responded, puzzled.

"Who?"

"Me."

His eyes widened. "You are white?"

"Well, yes, what did you think I was?"

"I thought you were just light skinned." He patted my frizzy hair. "Wait till I tell the kids about this."

I came back to campus unable to wait to tell this to Louis Favors, a fellow student who was black.

"You see, Frank," Louis said, shaking his head. "That's what I've been telling you. All this race stuff is a bunch of bullshit."

I left Union Baptist in the spring of that year, forever changed by the weekends I had spent there. I cherish memories of hanging out with the youth group at Lelia Fant's house on Sunday afternoons. The Sunday dinners which Bill Gray and I enjoyed at the invitation of cooks like Fannie Julius and Mrs. Rice, the wife of the Pastor Emeritus, are to this day my standards for elegant hospitality. I carry somewhere in my body the memory of a youth retreat when some kids I did not know very well took me to task for not understanding anything at all about them because I was white and therefore never could understand, or be trusted for that matter. I recall being comforted and affirmed by kids I did know well, gathering around to let me know that I was OK, and that my complexion mattered not a whit to them. I have never since Union Baptist stopped believing that the quintessential American political issue is and always has been the matter of race. Which was and is and ever shall be, in Calvin Louis Favors' words, bullshit.

By 1972 and the candidacy of George McGovern, we had lived through the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X. The country was badly divided, drawn and quartered down age and race lines. We woke up one day to find that something else had been the victim of an assassination attempt: the American political system, and with it the illusion that we actually operated according to rules of fairness and honesty. From that time on, with the possible exception of 1976, I have seen every single Presidential election sullied by the forces of dishonesty and deception. It is interesting to ponder what might have happened had the Watergate burglary not been discovered. But in fact it was. And everybody acted surprised. Before it was over with, the nation had the opportunity to see just what a paranoid gang ran the government. Riding to a clergy meeting with a number of colleagues during the Watergate crisis, someone made the comment that the trouble with Richard Nixon is that he had no doctrine of original sin. That set me back on my heels. I thought about it. What is "original sin" but a way of stating the truth about the corruptibility of human nature, even when its ostensible desires are noblest?

Nixon and his buddies, appealing to Americans who were mad at hippies, mad at communists, furious that Viet Nam had proven such a disaster, angry with their own children who defied them by growing long hair (in the case of boys), wearing granny gowns (in the case of girls), and living with their lovers outside of marriage (in the case of both) found the phrase that worked like a charm: "Silent Majority." The majority were neither silent nor a majority, in all probability. But at least at that point, conservatives took a giant leap forward. They invented a narrative that was to become highly successful and as stubbornly vibrant as kudzu. That was the notion that they were, even when a majority, nonetheless persecuted. Spiro Agnew nearly forty years ago quipped about the "liberal elite" that they were the "nattering nabobs of negativism." Conservatives, specifically Republicans, began to spin a tale that the media was a liberal hegemony, mocking the values and beliefs of Middle America. Women, blacks, and other minorities had somehow gained ascendancy at the expense of good, law-abiding white people, who took it lying down. In other words, the Silent Majority were the really oppressed ones.

A few years later, the evangelical movement having burgeoned into a political phalanx, Jerry Falwell spun "Silent Majority" into "Moral Majority." By that time, Anita Bryant and others had begun to single out homosexuals to bear a particularly virulent strain of contempt, and people in droves decided to join sides in what would soon become known as the "culture wars." Ronald Reagan rode the wave of increasing dissatisfaction with the attacks of left-wing radicals against the "Majority's" social structure. I saw taking place a marriage of conservative politics (which I had espoused in high school) and evangelical Christianity (with which I was certainly familiar). Suddenly to be "liberal" was not to be a true Christian. In religious matters, the old liberal establishment (which was not, by the way, a fantasy, but indeed a reality) was sidelined by upcoming conservatives.

One important strand in the cultural rope of the early '80's was a heightened awareness of the charismatic movement. To look backwards momentarily, I can recall a benchmark moment for me that dates the rise of the charismatics. I had become acquainted with the term and the movement in the summer of 1965 when working in Altavista, Virginia. When I returned to the Randolph-Macon campus the following fall, I mentioned the phenomenon of charismatic renewal to a Bible professor of mine who registered a complete blank. He knew nothing about it. In fewer than six years, TIME magazine carried a cover story about the charismatic movement, a branch of which was the "Jesus Movement," popular among youth. By the early eighties, charismatic Christianity had become a force to be reckoned with in all mainline churches.

The charismatic revival in the churches might have been incidental to American politics for the most part had not it stressed a new earnestness about the Bible. Those of us who had grown up in mainline Protestantism, and certainly we who had gone to mainline seminaries, had largely espoused a religious viewpoint strongly colored by modern biblical scholarship. Folks in the pews, such as my parents and their friends, were hardly conversant with the giants of twentieth century theology--Nieburh, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, Barth, Bultmann--but continued to read the Bible more or less under the tutelage of ministers who were. Charismatics stressed not only the necessity of taking the Bible quite seriously, but a particular interpretation of scripture emphasizing the activity of God in the present moment. That idea gave me no indigestion, since I had grown up believing in, indeed seeing, the activity of God in the workaday world. What drove me nuts was the fact that no questions I ever asked charismatics led to any kind of reflection and probing, only to answers that were doctrinaire. Charismatics always had something to teach me, and usually, it seemed, it was some deficiency I had. But what I learned eventually from my contacts with "born-again" Christians was that they, with few exceptions, experienced God as having a set of definite ideas about how the world ought to be run and furthermore would be quite irate if somehow human beings got it wrong. A bumper sticker summed it up: "Jesus is coming back, and boy is he pissed!" Biblical literalism, often confusingly conflated with "fundamentalism," came to be the default position of many people who through the various renewal movements in the Church came to a fresh appreciation of the Bible as a living book. If you talked with such people about plural interpretations of texts, or about the relative merits of context of passages? Nothing doing. There was a "plain sense" of the text, which they saw and understood even if you didn't, and that was that.

This way of understanding the Bible has driven and still drives the quarrels about cultural issues. The sexuality issues illustrate it well. Give the literalists the point: the Bible is "against homosexuality." Don't argue about the meaning of the word, just concede the point. But then ask, "So what?" What if the Bible prohibits all homosexual activity? Why should we, churches or society, be concerned about that? Then comes the answer: "The Bible is the Word of God. That is how we know God's will." Then ask, "So what happens if we misread the Bible, or otherwise mess up and get God's will wrong? What then?" I have yet to hear a biblical literalist say, "Well, if you mess up, God will forgive you." Instead, I hear about hell and how those who don't get it are going there. So why should society actually care about, say, the unrepentant homosexual who gets it wrong and goes to hell? The only answer I can detect from the literalists is that God would be equally irate with those who provided the homosexual with the opportunity to get it wrong and go to hell. In other words, everybody who colluded in making it possible for a person to sin and go to hell would be equally guilty.

Otherwise, it seems to me, the tremendous steam that literalist Christians emit over such issues is impossible to understand, short of some facile quip such as "homophobic." If you push the apparatus behind the phobia only a bit, you come to the point of seeing that it really is a terrible fear of what God is going to do to anyone who gets it wrong or who complies with a system that allows anybody else to get it wrong. I think that that fear is far more basic than, say, the fear of "the other" or the fear on the part of men that the might be perceived as feminine, or God forbid, an actual woman. Why are those things in our unconscious anyway? In large part, I think, it is because a religious system of inculcating those fears has been terribly effective. And it rests on a simplistic, uncritical way of reading sacred texts.

A scarier example of the way all this works is the conservative Christian view of foreign policy in the Middle East. Reading--I would say seriously misreading--Old Testament prophecies and the Book of Revelation, conservative Christians avidly support Israel, not because they care a fig for the Jews, even arguing that no Jew is "going to heaven" because only believing in the Lord Jesus Christ can possibly land you there. But to them Israel is a key fulfillment of a biblical prophecy that is absolutely integral to their apocalyptic view of the end time. Thus, when during the run-up to the Iraq war I contacted a number of people encouraging them to sign a petition to the government to back off, to give the inspections (for weapons of mass destruction) a chance to work, a conservative Christian friend of mine wrote back and said that he was not the least bit interested in doing anything to forestall war, since the sooner the Middle East became embroiled in war, the sooner the chances that Armaggeddon would come about, an event necessary for the Second Coming of Christ. People like that are not only advocating in our departments of State and Defense; in some cases they are in power. That fact does not bother the right wing. Far from it! It is just other evidence that muddle-headed liberals who stick up for peace and forbearance are ignorantly getting in the way of God's will.

The more energy that the Reagan-led conservative movement generated, the harder set the cement bonding conservative ideology and religious--specifically Christian--more specifically right-wing Christian--views. In people like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, Republicans found operatives who would do and justify the meanest and dirtiest of political tricks. The people that raved on about personal conscience had no pangs of conscience whatever when it came to smearing a Michael Dukakis or a Max Cleland. No, the end (keeping the Republicans in power) justified the means (lying, smearing, distorting, and above all fear-mongering). I am not naively suggesting that Democrats have not done some, many, or all of those same things. But there has been at least one principle difference. And that is, to my knowledge, there has been no wedding of Democratic Party political philosophy and religious ideology that has even once justified political chicanery on theological grounds. The reverse has been true of Republicans. Smearing John Kerry by the infamous "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" was justified, as was mocking his war record by handing out purple heart band aids at the Republican National Convention in 2004, because a vote for Bush (and against Kerry) was a vote for God.

If the Civil Rights Act redrew the political map for years to come, surely the redrawn map solidified with the decision of the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. When religious groups, notably the Roman Catholic Church, threw their weight on the side of opposing abortion rights, enormous numbers of people signed on to the conservative cause. Or, to put it another way, espousing the "pro-life" position made the Republicans the party for great numbers of people who opposed abortion rights. In the 1970's, The Episcopal Church passed a resolution in General Convention which said, among other things, that abortion was not an acceptable form of birth control. It also held that there were situations when abortion was an acceptable choice. Nothing, the resolution held, should be a reason to abridge the right of a woman to choose, under the pastoral guidance of the Church. This position accorded with my own belief. But conservatives would not even recognize this position as valid, let alone as a defensible Christian one, so convinced are they that there is only one biblically congruent position on "pro-life" matters. As dubious as I am about the wisdom of abortions generally--certainly as a form of post facto birth control, I find deeply troubling the notion that the Bible is a two-dimensional book that provides clear-cut, self-authenticating answers and solutions to a range of questions.

Anyone who has studied the Bible even superficially will notice that it is full of contradictions, which, more often than not, reflect the multiple traditions, texts, and theologies of its authors. The Bible itself is full of revisionism. The Book of Job, for example, debates the prevailing theology of the Deuteronomist. No better example of revisionism exists than Jesus. One can make an argument that the reason he was condemned and crucified was precisely that he was perceived as a dangerous revisionist, teaching a hermeneutic and an ethic that ran afoul of the governing interpretations of his day. Plucking grain and healing on the sabbath are acts far more radical than the modern conservative Christian would be able to stomach. By the same token, his call to a stricter morality in the case of divorce (which also departed from current orthodoxy) denotes Jesus' seriousness of ethical purpose that undercuts any attempt to make him the darling of permissiveness.

Well before I had reached the age of 30, I was on the same trajectory that I still follow. I have changed my mind about many things over the years. At one point, for example, I argued vehemently against the proposal to ordain women. A short year or so later, I was solidly in the camp of those who saw women's ordination as being just and right. In the early 1980's, I argued on the basis of scripture, tradition, and reason that there was no ground for sanctioning homosexual behavior. Two decades later I struggled to articulate what had been clear from my adolescence: that I was myself a gay man who had chosen to tackle my own sexuality by doing all the things, including marriage, confession, and remaining closeted, that any right-winger would have prescribed, only to see my life kneaded into a more and more unpalatable loaf of neurosis. What remains constant for me is the measure of all things by what I perceive the Truth to be. I find that Truth best approached by two things. One is my commitment to a philosophy of dispassionate inquiry which holds unabashedly to the awareness that I could be wrong and often am. The other is a religious tradition which holds lightly the non-essentials of its faith while pursuing firmly the core of that faith, namely the belief that the entire project of salvation is a matter of reconciling humans with other humans, humans with all creation, and all creation with the Creator. To that end my whole life has been moving, and if I have to bet on it, that is the way it will keep moving till the end.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2008

Suppose There Were a Financial Meltdown and Nobody Cared

Practicing Stewardship:
Suppose There Were a Financial Meltdown
and Nobody Cared

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, Sunday, October 12, 2008

Leo Bebb is his name, and he is a character. A guy by the name of Frederick Buechner invented him and gave him not one but four novels in which to star. The third one of them is called Love Feast. Bebb is a southern, overweight white preacher whom we come to know because another character, much more like you and me, by the name of Antonio Parr, decides one day in New York City to follow Bebb in order to expose him as the charlatan that he had to be. Parr goes after him to Florida, to Connecticut, and then to Princeton, New Jersey. It is the 1970’s, just about the time that I myself was living in Princeton. The university is chock-a-block with hippies. It is to them that Bebb offers his message of salvation. He persuades the rather stodgy Princeton University to let him hold love feasts in Alexander Hall in the middle of campus. The students by and large love attending Bebb’s services, not the least reason for which is that he serves tropicanas, a tasty orange drink which he has imported from Florida.

By the time he reaches Princeton in the wake of Bebb, Antonio has discovered that Bebb is anything but a phony. His brand of Christianity, while unpolished and blunt, captivates Antonio with its courage and imagination. Bebb manages to attract a well-heeled supporter whose name is Gertrude Conover. Gertrude lives in a big house on Library Place in Princeton, which is truly the high rent district. His faithful patron, she offers to give a Thanksgiving dinner, expecting a crowd of university students stranded on campus during the holiday weekend. Her grand house, Revenoc, is immaculate, ready for the occasion. Wreaths decorate the big lions at the end of the driveway, whose gravel is carefully raked. Caterers deliver the makings of the feast to the house, all decked with chrysanthemums throughout. And when nobody comes, Bebb gives a little homily about how much there is to eat and how few there are to enjoy it, just as it was in Jesus’ story. So Antonio gets into a friend’s rusty Chevy. They go hunting through the nearly deserted streets of Princeton, rounding up unsuspecting people to come for Thanksgiving. Gertrude gets on the phone and calls some of her pearls-and-blue rinse friends. A miscellany of people, like “ants and anteaters, cats and dogs, lambs and lions…were stabled together there in uproarious harmony while outside the chilly sky darkened.” And there followed an amazing love feast where differences melted faster than the stock market last week.

Matthew’s story is not quite as nice as Buechner’s, let’s admit. Matthew got his story from Q, another author, and rang some changes on it to make some of Matthew’s own favorite points. Luke had a version that was closer to Bebb’s and Buechner’s, and the Gospel of Thomas told one, too. But Matthew wanted to let folks know that this was not just anyone behaving like Gertrude Conover with her slip showing innocently, but the God and father of Our Lord Jesus Christ who had given a banquet for his Messianic Son. Prophets of old, like servants of a king, had given out the invitations. They had been shabbily treated to say the least. So God, fed up with the combination of ungrateful guests and murderous villains, fell into a rage and up and burned the place down, presumably his own town, while dinner had to wait. Not a pretty sight! Then he gave the order to go into the main streets and invite everyone they could find to the wedding banquet. And just as at Revenoc, the wedding hall filled with guests. But Matthew wants us to know that the real messianic banquet, much more serious than even the parable would have it, was not a come-as-you-are affair. It involved complete conversion, symbolized by a new suit of clothes. All of that is the way that Matthew read history and understood it as a narrative of a gracious and just God who extended a generous invitation but was definitely not to be trifled with.

Ah, there is so much here if we want to mine this parable for some cues as to how to practice our Christian faith! There is a message about carelessness and one about carefulness. There is a message about generosity and one about profligacy. There is a lesson about welcoming, balanced by another about presuming on the graces of the host. Where to dig in?

If it is all right for Matthew to take a story and use it to convey an urgent message about getting ready for the coming Reign of God, then might we not take the bones of the story and flesh them out with a slightly different point, one that serves the cause of the same Reign of God, but addresses the particular concerns of this week in this place?

This week I opened several statements that have come at the end of the third quarter to find what many of you have likely discovered. What I have socked away for my future has rapidly dwindled. I don’t even want to ask how bad it is. It is that bad. And while I received a reassuring letter from the Church Pension Fund, my first instinct is to be angry, which is the mask my fear usually wears. When threatened, we frequently resort to the default position, which is to hold on tighter rather than to let go, to grasp rather than to trust. It is precisely at this point that I am learning the Christian practice of stewardship. Sometimes that is described as “holding something in trust,” as stewards typically do. But I am beginning to think of it as “letting go of something in trust,” which is counter-intuitive.

I read something a few months ago by a person who encouraged living more generously than necessary. Tip generously, he said. Never let it be less than 20% unless the service is just abysmal, and let it be more if the service is really good. Frankly, I had always been a 15% man, even though I remember quite well the days of my own life as a waiter. Now I am hearing another voice when it comes time to pay the bill. That is the way one gets ever closer to giving a great banquet, like the one in the gospel or the one in Princeton. You give a little here and a little there, not counting the cost and soon you find that the universe is humming in harmony with you, or you with it. The occasions multiply. The amounts grow. And the worries lessen.

Suppose there were a financial meltdown and nobody cared. Suppose we were all as drunk on the joy of giving as the proverbial “Wall Street gang” is reputed to have been during the sub-prime mortgage spree. Suppose we honestly didn’t care because we knew that if God clothes the birds of the air and the lilies of the field how much more will he clothe us? I don’t know that I can do that. But I don’t know that I will in fact have much choice. Might as well make the most of it. Hoarding has never been known to do much besides harden a heart, like that of Moliere’s Misanthrope counting out the contents of his pathetic strong box.

Suppose there were a financial meltdown and nobody feared. What might happen if we said, in effect, as long as I have resources and others have fewer; as long as I have food, and there is someone who is hungry; as long as I have a hand to give, I’ll give? The funny thing is that it has never been prudent to wait until you have abundance, let alone security, before you give anything, because in all probability you’ll never cross that line. Abundance only comes after you have learned to give it away. Those who have not yet learned that have not yet learned one of the open secrets of the universe.

Years ago when I was a young pastor in Charlotte, I learned the lesson from someone who modeled for me what it means to live like a king throwing a wedding banquet. His name was Holt, and his titled was Elder. I think he was the pastor of an off—shoot of the AME Zion Church, maybe. Elder Holt called one day and wanted to come see me. He sat and told me about his project. He drove from Charlotte to Morganton each week to visit the patients at the large state mental hospital there. He had no agenda but to build relationships with the patients, many of whom had been abandoned by family and what friends they might have ever had. Elder Holt would invest in trinkets, candy, little favors, plastic flowers, maybe, anything that he could use to strike up a conversation or to meet some small need. I had a paltry discretionary fund, but I gave him what I could. One time I bought a putter from him when he was selling some golf clubs that someone had given him. Over several years I got to know him. One day he came asking if I could help him get his car fixed. “Elder,” I asked, “what will you ever do if you get out of debt, when you are free and clear, when your wife no longer fusses at you because you spend all this money on mental patients?”

He looked at me without hesitation and said, “I’d go right back in.” Elder Holt is one of that company that includes Saint Xenia of St. Petersburg and St. Francis of Assisi that are known as “fools for Christ.” Most of them are anything but fools, except by the world’s standards. They simply have learned how to give without counting the cost, until it becomes first a joy and then an all-consuming passion. None of them would be the least bit bothered by a financial meltdown. They have a gold not of this world, which strangely enough knows precisely what to do with the gold of this world, and that is to keep it moving, giving it away.

Everything follows that. Hospitality follows, because it is simply another form that generosity takes. Openness, too, grows, because money is incidental to the more basic work of the soul, which is its own opening to embrace the other. Forgiveness, patience, thanksgiving: they all grow from a common seed as fruit sharing a stalk.

Every virtue, like generosity, has its counterweight in the form of a vice. It would be easy enough to say, quite reasonably, that the vice opposing generosity is profligacy. And that might well be. But I think there is another vice more dangerous than being a spendthrift. And that is ingratitude. Grace is the essence of generosity, and charity is the essence of grace. Grace finds its expression in a sustained attitude of thanksgiving. And so its opposite is ingratitude, pictured like the wedding guests who made light of the king’s invitation, oblivious, no doubt, to the hurt that rode on the arrowshaft of bad manners.

Suppose there were a financial meltdown and nobody stopped giving. Sharing simply increased. People laughed instead of wringing their hands. And got into theirs and their friends’ beat-up old cars and pick-up trucks, and combed the city streets and alleyways looking for people to invite to dinner, where “ants and anteaters, cats and dogs, lambs and lions, were all stabled together in uproarious harmony, while outside the chilly sky darkened.”

© Frank G. Dunn, 2008

The New Yorker Endorses Obama

October 13, 2008

Keywords

2008 Election;

Obama, Barack (Sen.);

McCain, John (Sen.);

Elections;

Endorsements (Political);

Bush, George W. (Pres.) (43rd);

Iraq War

Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one fast approaching—that’s the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—undermined the country and its ideals?

The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages. The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist, asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.

The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to help rescue the financial system from Wall Street’s long-running pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year’s federal budget is projected to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial infrastructure.

At the same time, a hundred and fifty thousand American troops are in Iraq and thirty-three thousand are in Afghanistan. There is still disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific regime, but there is no longer the slightest doubt that the Bush Administration manipulated, bullied, and lied the American public into this war and then mismanaged its prosecution in nearly every aspect. The direct costs, besides an expenditure of more than six hundred billion dollars, have included the loss of more than four thousand Americans, the wounding of thirty thousand, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, and the displacement of four and a half million men, women, and children. Only now, after American forces have been fighting for a year longer than they did in the Second World War, is there a glimmer of hope that the conflict in Iraq has entered a stage of fragile stability.

The indirect costs, both of the war in particular and of the Administration’s unilateralist approach to foreign policy in general, have also been immense. The torture of prisoners, authorized at the highest level, has been an ethical and a public-diplomacy catastrophe. At a moment when the global environment, the global economy, and global stability all demand a transition to new sources of energy, the United States has been a global retrograde, wasteful in its consumption and heedless in its policy. Strategically and morally, the Bush Administration has squandered the American capacity to counter the example and the swagger of its rivals. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other illiberal states have concluded, each in its own way, that democratic principles and human rights need not be components of a stable, prosperous future. At recent meetings of the United Nations, emboldened despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran came to town sneering at our predicament and hailing the “end of the American era.”

The election of 2008 is the first in more than half a century in which no incumbent President or Vice-President is on the ballot. There is, however, an incumbent party, and that party has been lucky enough to find itself, apparently against the wishes of its “base,” with a nominee who evidently disliked George W. Bush before it became fashionable to do so. In South Carolina in 2000, Bush crushed John McCain with a sub-rosa primary campaign of such viciousness that McCain lashed out memorably against Bush’s Christian-right allies. So profound was McCain’s anger that in 2004 he flirted with the possibility of joining the Democratic ticket under John Kerry. Bush, who took office as a “compassionate conservative,” governed immediately as a rightist ideologue. During that first term, McCain bolstered his reputation, sometimes deserved, as a “maverick” willing to work with Democrats on such issues as normalizing relations with Vietnam, campaign-finance reform, and immigration reform. He co-sponsored, with John Edwards and Edward Kennedy, a patients’ bill of rights. In 2001 and 2003, he voted against the Bush tax cuts. With John Kerry, he co-sponsored a bill raising auto-fuel efficiency standards and, with Joseph Lieberman, a cap-and-trade regime on carbon emissions. He was one of a minority of Republicans opposed to unlimited drilling for oil and gas off America’s shores.

Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved remorselessly rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned immigration reform, eventually coming out against his own bill. Most shocking, McCain, who had repeatedly denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February against a ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that he himself once endured in Vietnam—as long as the torturers were civilians employed by the C.I.A.

On almost every issue, McCain and the Democratic Party’s nominee, Barack Obama, speak the generalized language of “reform,” but only Obama has provided a convincing, rational, and fully developed vision. McCain has abandoned his opposition to the Bush-era tax cuts and has taken up the demagogic call—in the midst of recession and Wall Street calamity, with looming crises in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—for more tax cuts. Bush’s expire in 2011. If McCain, as he has proposed, cuts taxes for corporations and estates, the benefits once more would go disproportionately to the wealthy.

In Washington, the craze for pure market triumphalism is over. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson arrived in town (via Goldman Sachs) a Republican, but it seems that he will leave a Democrat. In other words, he has come to see that the abuses that led to the current financial crisis––not least, excessive speculation on borrowed capital––can be fixed only with government regulation and oversight. McCain, who has never evinced much interest in, or knowledge of, economic questions, has had little of substance to say about the crisis. His most notable gesture of concern—a melodramatic call last month to suspend his campaign and postpone the first Presidential debate until the government bailout plan was ready—soon revealed itself as an empty diversionary tactic.

By contrast, Obama has made a serious study of the mechanics and the history of this economic disaster and of the possibilities of stimulating a recovery. Last March, in New York, in a speech notable for its depth, balance, and foresight, he said, “A complete disdain for pay-as-you-go budgeting, coupled with a generally scornful attitude towards oversight and enforcement, allowed far too many to put short-term gain ahead of long-term consequences.” Obama is committed to reforms that value not only the restoration of stability but also the protection of the vast majority of the population, which did not partake of the fruits of the binge years. He has called for greater and more programmatic regulation of the financial system; the creation of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would help reverse the decay of our roads, bridges, and mass-transit systems, and create millions of jobs; and a major investment in the green-energy sector.

On energy and global warming, Obama offers a set of forceful proposals. He supports a cap-and-trade program to reduce America’s carbon emissions by eighty per cent by 2050—an enormously ambitious goal, but one that many climate scientists say must be met if atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be kept below disastrous levels. Large emitters, like utilities, would acquire carbon allowances, and those which emit less carbon dioxide than their allotment could sell the resulting credits to those which emit more; over time, the available allowances would decline. Significantly, Obama wants to auction off the allowances; this would provide fifteen billion dollars a year for developing alternative-energy sources and creating job-training programs in green technologies. He also wants to raise federal fuel-economy standards and to require that ten per cent of America’s electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2012. Taken together, his proposals represent the most coherent and far-sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential candidate for reducing the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.

There was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would have a sensible debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the first Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon dioxide, and he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-and-trade program as evidence of his independence from the White House. But, as polls showed Americans growing jittery about gasoline prices, McCain apparently found it expedient in this area, too, to shift course. He took a dubious idea—lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling—and placed it at the very center of his campaign. Opening up America’s coastal waters to drilling would have no impact on gasoline prices in the short term, and, even over the long term, the effect, according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy, would be “insignificant.” Such inconvenient facts, however, are waved away by a campaign that finally found its voice with the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!”

The contrast between the candidates is even sharper with respect to the third branch of government. A tense equipoise currently prevails among the Justices of the Supreme Court, where four hard-core conservatives face off against four moderate liberals. Anthony M. Kennedy is the swing vote, determining the outcome of case after case.

McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two reliable conservatives, as models for his own prospective appointments. If he means what he says, and if he replaces even one moderate on the current Supreme Court, then Roe v. Wade will be reversed, and states will again be allowed to impose absolute bans on abortion. McCain’s views have hardened on this issue. In 1999, he said he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006, he was saying that its demise “wouldn’t bother me any”; by 2008, he no longer supported adding rape and incest as exceptions to his party’s platform opposing abortion.

But scrapping Roe—which, after all, would leave states as free to permit abortion as to criminalize it—would be just the beginning. Given the ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has pursued, it’s safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds would likely be outlawed by a McCain Court. Efforts to expand executive power, which, in recent years, certain Justices have nobly tried to resist, would likely increase. Barriers between church and state would fall; executions would soar; legal checks on corporate power would wither—all with just one new conservative nominee on the Court. And the next President is likely to make three appointments.

Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, voted against confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several unqualified lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won the support of prosecutors and police organizations for new protections against convicting the innocent in capital cases. While McCain voted to continue to deny habeas-corpus rights to detainees, perpetuating the Bush Administration’s regime of state-sponsored extra-legal detention, Obama took the opposite side, pushing to restore the right of all U.S.-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial future would be safe in his care.

In the shorthand of political commentary, the Iraq war seems to leave McCain and Obama roughly even. Opposing it before the invasion, Obama had the prescience to warn of a costly and indefinite occupation and rising anti-American radicalism around the world; supporting it, McCain foresaw none of this. More recently, in early 2007 McCain risked his Presidential prospects on the proposition that five additional combat brigades could salvage a war that by then appeared hopeless. Obama, along with most of the country, had decided that it was time to cut American losses. Neither candidate’s calculations on Iraq have been as cheaply political as McCain’s repeated assertion that Obama values his career over his country; both men based their positions, right or wrong, on judgment and principle.

President Bush’s successor will inherit two wars and the realities of limited resources, flagging popular will, and the dwindling possibilities of what can be achieved by American power. McCain’s views on these subjects range from the simplistic to the unknown. In Iraq, he seeks “victory”—a word that General David Petraeus refuses to use, and one that fundamentally misrepresents the messy, open-ended nature of the conflict. As for Afghanistan, on the rare occasions when McCain mentions it he implies that the surge can be transferred directly from Iraq, which suggests that his grasp of counterinsurgency is not as firm as he insisted it was during the first Presidential debate. McCain always displays more faith in force than interest in its strategic consequences. Unlike Obama, McCain has no political strategy for either war, only the dubious hope that greater security will allow things to work out. Obama has long warned of deterioration along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and has a considered grasp of its vital importance. His strategy for both Afghanistan and Iraq shows an understanding of the role that internal politics, economics, corruption, and regional diplomacy play in wars where there is no battlefield victory.

Unimaginably painful personal experience taught McCain that war is above all a test of honor: maintain the will to fight on, be prepared to risk everything, and you will prevail. Asked during the first debate to outline “the lessons of Iraq,” McCain said, “I think the lessons of Iraq are very clear: that you cannot have a failed strategy that will then cause you to nearly lose a conflict.” A soldier’s answer––but a statesman must have a broader view of war and peace. The years ahead will demand not only determination but also diplomacy, flexibility, patience, judiciousness, and intellectual engagement. These are no more McCain’s strong suit than the current President’s. Obama, for his part, seems to know that more will be required than willpower and force to extract some advantage from the wreckage of the Bush years.

Obama is also better suited for the task of renewing the bedrock foundations of American influence. An American restoration in foreign affairs will require a commitment not only to international coöperation but also to international institutions that can address global warming, the dislocations of what will likely be a deepening global economic crisis, disease epidemics, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and other, more traditional security challenges. Many of the Cold War-era vehicles for engagement and negotiation—the United Nations, the World Bank, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—are moribund, tattered, or outdated. Obama has the generational outlook that will be required to revive or reinvent these compacts. He would be the first postwar American President unencumbered by the legacies of either Munich or Vietnam.

The next President must also restore American moral credibility. Closing Guantánamo, banning all torture, and ending the Iraq war as responsibly as possible will provide a start, but only that. The modern Presidency is as much a vehicle for communication as for decision-making, and the relevant audiences are global. Obama has inspired many Americans in part because he holds up a mirror to their own idealism. His election would do no less—and likely more—overseas.

What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” The view that this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity, and accountability. Even so, there’s some truth in what Davis said––but it hardly points to the conclusion that he intended.

Echoing Obama, McCain has made “change” one of his campaign mantras. But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has entered his talk on the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that, in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South Carolina.

Perhaps nothing revealed McCain’s cynicism more than his choice of Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been governor of that state for twenty-one months, as the Republican nominee for Vice-President. In the interviews she has given since her nomination, she has had difficulty uttering coherent unscripted responses about the most basic issues of the day. We are watching a candidate for Vice-President cram for her ongoing exam in elementary domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina Fey routine on “Saturday Night Live,” but as a vision of the political future it’s deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the backup to a President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility. Obama’s choice, Joe Biden, is not without imperfections. His tongue sometimes runs in advance of his mind, providing his own fodder for late-night comedians, but there is no comparison with Palin. His deep experience in foreign affairs, the judiciary, and social policy makes him an assuring and complementary partner for Obama.

The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic, and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to his usefulness as a “maverick” senator. But in a President they would be a menace.

By contrast, Obama’s transformative message is accompanied by a sense of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him, his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama’s temperament—and not McCain’s—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower’s stolidity for denseness or Lincoln’s humor for lack of seriousness.

Nowadays, almost every politician who thinks about running for President arranges to become an author. Obama’s books are different: he wrote them. “The Audacity of Hope” (2006) is a set of policy disquisitions loosely structured around an account of his freshman year in the United States Senate. Though a campaign manifesto of sorts, it is superior to that genre’s usual blowsy pastiche of ghostwritten speeches. But it is Obama’s first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” (1995), that offers an unprecedented glimpse into the mind and heart of a potential President. Obama began writing it in his early thirties, before he was a candidate for anything. Not since Theodore Roosevelt has an American politician this close to the pinnacle of power produced such a sustained, highly personal work of literary merit before being definitively swept up by the tides of political ambition.

A Presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize: we elect a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But Obama’s first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his fundamental attitudes of mind and spirit. “Dreams from My Father” is an illuminating memoir not only in the substance of Obama’s own peculiarly American story but also in the qualities he brings to the telling: a formidable intelligence, emotional empathy, self-reflection, balance, and a remarkable ability to see life and the world through the eyes of people very different from himself. In common with nearly all other senators and governors of his generation, Obama does not count military service as part of his biography. But his life has been full of tests—personal, spiritual, racial, political—that bear on his preparation for great responsibility.

It is perfectly legitimate to call attention, as McCain has done, to Obama’s lack of conventional national and international policymaking experience. We, too, wish he had more of it. But office-holding is not the only kind of experience relevant to the task of leading a wildly variegated nation. Obama’s immersion in diverse human environments (Hawaii’s racial rainbow, Chicago’s racial cauldron, countercultural New York, middle-class Kansas, predominantly Muslim Indonesia), his years of organizing among the poor, his taste of corporate law and his grounding in public-interest and constitutional law—these, too, are experiences. And his books show that he has wrung from them every drop of insight and breadth of perspective they contained.

The exhaustingly, sometimes infuriatingly long campaign of 2008 (and 2007) has had at least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama’s intelligence and steady temperament are not just figments of the writer’s craft. He has made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to accept McCain’s imaginative proposal for a series of unmediated joint appearances was among them.) But, on the whole, his campaign has been marked by patience, planning, discipline, organization, technological proficiency, and strategic astuteness. Obama has often looked two or three moves ahead, relatively impervious to the permanent hysteria of the hourly news cycle and the cable-news shouters. And when crisis has struck, as it did when the divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened to bring down his campaign, he has proved equal to the moment, rescuing himself with a speech that not only drew the poison but also demonstrated a profound respect for the electorate. Although his opponents have tried to attack him as a man of “mere” words, Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

—The Editors

A Pile of Sin, and What to Do About It

Practicing Repentance:
A Pile of Sin, and What to Do About It

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, September 28, 2008

Sometime shortly after the assassination attempt on President Reagan’s life in 1981, Earl Brill, an Episcopal priest then on the staff of the College of Preachers, noted that he had gone the following Sunday to the National Cathedral and was stunned by the fact that not a word was said about the assassination incident. “Ronald our President” was dutifully prayed for in the Prayers of the People. That was that. Brill was horrified that the Church was so out of touch with what was going on in the nation.

A decade and a half later, I was on vacation during the week of the bombing of the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. When I returned, I opened a very thoughtful note from an upset parishioner who wondered how on earth such a thing could happen and merit not even a word of prayer in the liturgy the following Sunday. She was horrified that the Church was so insensitive to what was going on in the nation.

The chatter about billions and bailout, economists and politicians, Treasury and the Fed, Wall Street and Main Street this week has me dizzy and bewildered. I was almost at the point of dodging saying anything at all about what by all accounts is the most serious economic challenge since the Great Depression. Then I heard the voices of Brill and my erstwhile parishioner. Does the Church have nothing to say about all that is happening in the nation?

And if we do have something to say, what? Shall we just be somebody else, flailing about, blaming the fat cats on Wall Street, calling for the resignation of first one and then another official? Shall we speak in platitudes about “the market” and “corruption”? Or do we join the chorus of economists, editorialists, and columnists who apparently know what ought to be done?

The Christian faith does have something to say about all this, different from any of those alternatives. And it might surprise you that it has to do with a theme imbedded in today’s gospel lesson. Jesus’ parable about the two sons, both of whom say one thing and do another, is about the simplest and easiest to understand of all his parables. On one level, of course, it is about the religious establishment who politely say that they will go and do what God bids them, but do nothing of the kind. In contrast, those who at first refuse but later accede to God’s will are the outcasts and sinners. They catch on to the message, change their minds, and change their behavior too.

When we open up the parable we find that what distinguishes the faithful son from the faithless son is not what each one believes but how each one acts. And the distinguishing activity of the second son is that he changes his mind. To put it another way, he repents. I don’t normally like sermons that do word studies, but this one I can’t pass up. The New Testament term for repentance is μετανοια, which means a change of mind. Matthew does not use that word here, but one that makes the same connection between repenting and changing one’s mind. So his story sets up a model that is key to understanding an urgently important dimension of the Reign of God, or what I like to call the Realm of Truth. That model is repentance: changing one’s mind and thus one’s whole program, issuing in radically new behavior.

Thus we come to discuss another practice in the Christian life in a series of sermons that focus on basic Christian practices. You would think, wouldn’t you, that the connection between the practice of repentance and the near catastrophe in the economy would lead very quickly into an easy, superficial moralism that wags a bony finger in the face of greedy financiers and says, “Naughty, naughty. You should have been less greedy and more generous.” What would happen, however, if we were to suspend blaming and shaming long enough to take a good look at what repentance involves? Might we come to see that what has happened on Wall Street is not an isolated case of something gone wrong on a massive scale? And we might come to see that it surely won’t be fixed by draconian measures to make private debts public.

In my opinion, it is impossible to talk about repentance without first coming to terms with the fact that there is such a thing as Justice in the universe. There is a thing called Equality and its twin called Fairness. If you go down to the Justice Department Building you will see the ancient symbol of Justice: a blindfolded woman holding scales. The very image of impartial weighing suggests that there is something about Justice that brings things into balance. Justice in the moral realm is like gravity in the physical realm. It just is. And ultimately the nature of the universe, through and through, is that what is out of balance will be brought back into balance. Nature ultimately rights itself, which, by the way, is one reason why climate change is so horrendously disturbing. Nature will not remain out of balance forever. Justice is the name we give to the same principle applied to human behavior. We cannot get away with imbalance and inequality forever.

Lincoln in his Second Inaugural dealt with the ultimacy of Justice when he said,
Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-men’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’

In other words, Justice is not just a good idea. It is something that is built into the fabric of the universe, an inescapable reality in the world of human behavior. Like Lincoln quoting the Hebrew scriptures, I understand Justice to be divine business. Justice is what God uses to bring balance to a severely unbalanced world.

And the thing that we humans most need to understand about Justice is that we participate in it by acting justly. One of many ways, but certainly not the only one, that we can act unjustly (and therefore be out of balance) is to be grasping, seizing for private use what belongs to another or what belongs equally to all. As one of our hymns puts it, “…we hoard as private treasure all that [God] so freely gives.” When we begin doing that, whether we live on Park Road or Newton Street or Wall Street, we are skating on ice that will assuredly break.

And so repentance, a change of mind, becomes essential and even urgent. We need to move back into a right relationship with God the Source and Creator of all things, and we need to move back into a state of balance—equality—with our neighbors. Now if you have noticed I have gone this far and have yet to mention the s- word: sin. Maybe now we can talk about sin without getting hung up on the the fallacy of relating it to a cosmic-sized list of no-no’s. Sin, before it is an act, is a condition. And the fundamental condition is being estranged from God, out of proper balance with creation, with our neighbors, with ourselves.

In order to become more and more just, we have to be able to recognize our sin. As our baptismal covenant puts is, “Will you persevere in resisting evil and, whenever you fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord?” The only way we can do that is by being able to recognize when we are in fact out of moral whack. The next step is to confess it. And the next is to accept the forgiveness that is freely offered us. Then we are in a position to change our minds, which means really to change our entire direction, and thus our behavior.

What we have just done is open up the gospel story of the two sons, view it all in slow motion, and see what happens when the first son moves from a willful stubbornness that disregards his father’s will to a changed behavior that begins to be in line with the truth, which includes his own wellbeing. And we can begin to connect the dots and see how all this applies to the economic mess we are in at the moment.

The whole thing got out of whack. Greed, avarice, unbridled competition, unregulated risks, all fueled what everyone knew and could have predicted would eventually happen. There would be hell to pay. You can say it in one of many ways. “Nothing is free,” is one. “Justice will finally exact her wages,” is another. “God’s will can be denied at one’s own peril,” is a third. It all boils down to a scenario that develops when humans start behaving in a grasping, overweening, unaccountable manner. And I would emphasize that the lesson to be learned here is not one that applies only to bankers and investors, but to everyone.

The thing that we as individuals and we as the Christian community need to be on the lookout for at this stage is the danger of piling on sin upon sin by extending the inequity by letting the rich and powerful avoid Justice by skating over the faces of the poor. People don't like to come to Justice, especially if they are going to have to pay. We can reasonably predict that a result of the economic calamity will be drastic reductions in government budgets on all levels. And who will pay? The most vulnerable, who are dependent on government services: the poor. That would be a grave injustice.

There is some Good News in all this. We do not have to remain stuck in willful disdain of Justice or the God of Justice. We can change. One son in Jesus’ story did. Might that son have been you?

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2008.

The Shadow Side of Politics

Obama and The Palin Effect

From: Deepak Chopra | Posted: Friday, September 5th, 2008

Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis this week. On the surface, she outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice, given her negligent parochial expertise in the complex affairs of governing. Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which reduces the job ofgovernor to the scale of running one-tenth of New York City. By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering international figure. Palin's pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.

She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses. In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of "the other." For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don't want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind. (Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.)

I recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to understand Palin's message. In her acceptance speech Gov. Palin sent a rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to
change and a higher vision.

Look at what she stands for:

--Small town values -- a denial of America's global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism.

--Ignorance of world affairs -- a repudiation of the need to repair America's image abroad.

--Family values -- a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don't need to be heeded.

--Rigid stands on guns and abortion -- a scornful repudiation that these issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.

--Patriotism -- the usual fallback in a failed war.

--"Reform" -- an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who doesn't
fit your ideology.

Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants, being different from "us" pure American types,can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism isa foreign threat. The radical right marches under the banners of "I'm allright, Jack," and "Why change? Everything's OK as it is." The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the same time.

She can add mom to apple pie on her resume, while blithely reversing forty years of feminist progress. The irony is superficial; there are millions of women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they are voting against their own good. The Republicans have won multiple national elections by raising shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness.

Obama's call for higher ideals in politics can't be seen in a vacuum. The shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just conservatives possess a shadow -- we all do. So what comes next is a contest between the two forces of progress and inertia. Will the shadow win again, or has its furtive appeal become exhausted? No one can predict. The best thing about Gov. Palin is that she brought this conflict to light, which makes the upcoming debate honest. It would be a shame to elect another Reagan, whose smiling persona was a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to the demoralized state we are in. We deserve to see what we are getting, without disguise.

Would Someone Please Explain to Me How It Is?

How is it that John Kerry deserved to be mocked by the Republicans passing out purple heart band aids at their convention in 2004, and yet John McCain deserves to be Commander-in-Chief because he was a POW?

How is it that God is somehow pleased with trashing the environment, tax cuts for the wealthy, uninsured millions, torture, and character assassination in exchange for a constitutional amendment forbidding gay marriage?

How is it that it is good business to deal with the world's largest communist country, China, but un-American to open up dialogue and trade with Cuba?

How is it that liberals are responsible for premarital sex and unwanted pregnancies, yet when they happen in the family of the Governor of Alaska, families have a right to privacy and deserve to be left alone, except of course, when they are useful in television advertising during political conventions?

How is it that Hillary Clinton is a bitch because she is a strong woman seeking public office and Sarah Palin is hip because she loves to fire a gun, hunt, and cuss with the boys?

How is it that wearing the flag (against custom and tradition that the flag not to be used for personal decoration) becomes the token of someone's patriotism?

How is it that "the surge worked" gets to be the test of someone's acumen at appraising a war when (a) lots of factors besides the surge were in play and (b) the surge came four years and thousands of deaths late?

How is it that when Clinton lied about Monica Lewinsky he was "sleazy," yet when George Bush lied in his State of the Union about nuclear materials being acquired by Iraq, he is either ignored, assumed to be telling a truth against all evidence, or is given a pass?

How is it that dozens of Republican congressmen and senators have offices run by or filled with gay staffers, yet vote against protecting the civil rights of those same gay staffers?

For that matter, how it is that a gay person can look at himself or herself in the mirror while working for an anti-gay Republican legislator?

How is it that experience is the key factor in a presidential election until one of the candidates chooses a running mate that is totally inexperienced to the point of not knowing what a Vice President's duties are, at which point "change" becomes the main issue of the campaign?

How is it that Michelle Obama is suspect because she said at last she was really proud of her country, but Todd Palin, a member of the secessionist Alaska Independence Party, is an all-American husband although he publicly disdained the Union?

How is it that Tim Kaine, Governor of Virginia, had too little experience to be Vice Presidential material because he had only been mayor of a small city (Richmond) and governor of a “small” state, while Sarah Palin is qualified to be Vice President because she has been mayor of Wasilla (population in 2007: 9780) and governor of the least densely populated state in the naton?

How is it that in three of the last three Republican administrations we have had recessions or serious economic downturns (Reagan, 1981; George H. W. Bush, 1991; George W. Bush, 2007-8) and yet people with money feel more enthusiastic about Republican economic policy?

How is it that a young person choosing to give several years of his or her life to community organizing, working to improve human lives and living conditions, draws scorn?

How is it that, as mayor, trying to get a librarian fired for not purging the library of books that you disagree with, is not enough to make you suspect for not understanding one of the basic tenets of a free society?

How is it that the longest periods of sustained prosperity since World War II happened during Democratic administrations (Kennedy/Johnson, Clinton) and Republicans declare that Democrats bankrupt the country and only raise taxes?

How is that Reagan racked up the hugest deficits in history (until Bush), and the debt under George W. Bush has zoomed to trillions, and yet Democrats are accused of being the big spenders?

How is it that the media are liberal and not to be trusted to tell the truth, but when they convey trash about the Democratic candidate, no matter how fabricated, they are immediately believed?

How is it that when John McCain uses his “lipstick on a pig” metaphor to accuse Hillary Clinton of warming over her old health care plan, he is “talking straight” but when Obama uses the same metaphor not even talking about Sarah Palin he is accused of being sexist, with Republican women in the House demanding that he apologize for something he has not even said?

How is it that Sarah Palin can make sexist and racist slurs and she is excused “because that is the way Alaskans talk” while Obama is accused of racism on the basis of what his pastor said in a sermon that he never even heard?

How is it that a President who dodged the draft by going into the Texas Air National Guard with his father’s political pull, and a Vice President who had “better things to do” than go to Viet Nam are presumed to have what it takes to lead a nation’s military and foreign policy, and in the next election one must have been a POW to have credibility to become Commander-in-Chief?

How is it that after eight years of disastrous wars, failed foreign policy, a shrinking economy, environmental disasters, inept government (Brownie, Gonzales, Miers) rising unemployment, soaring health care costs, people expect change from two people committed to the same failed policies?

How is it that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson can be “agents of intolerance” in 2000 but John Hagee’s endorsement can be coveted in 2008 (until pressure mounts to renounce him) and you can still maintain the line that you are a straight talker?

How is it that “maverick” became a label that anyone thought qualified one to be President?

How is it that John McCain can change his mind on immigration, taxes, the environment, and any number of other issues, and still be a straight shooter, whereas John Kerry is mocked for changing his mind by a host of people chanting, “Flip-flop, flip-flop”?

How is that a party can continue to fabricate, lie, smear, trash, slash, and burn its way through election after election and still maintain that it is doing it all in the name of heaven and argue that it is the party to bring about real change?

How is it that the Constitution is a sacred document not to be tampered with and strictly to be adhered to, to the point of denying the vote to an entire area of the country called the District of Columbia, but can be mocked by a Vice Presidential Candidate who falsely accuses her opponent of worrying about reading accused persons their constitutional rights?

How is it that an electorate could possibly keep voting against its own interests because it continues to believe that they will be better off if homosexuals are worse off?

How is it that, after six years, some people, including the Vice President, continue to argue that Saddam Hussein’s finger was on the 9/11 attacks and that whether they were found at all, he had weapons of mass destruction?

How is it that 2/3 of the country could believe one month that the nation is on the wrong track, moving in the wrong direction, and the next month seriously consider voting to keep it moving in the same direction?

How is it that when courts interpret the law in ways that differ from conservatives the judges are “activists” and when they make sweeping changes that accord with conservatives, they are simply interpreting the Constitution?

How is it that when Barack Obama draws thousands in this country and abroad he is dismissed as a phony (or dangerous) celebrity, and when hundreds flock to cheer Sarah Palin she is lauded as being poised for having been a beauty queen?

How is it that you can wade through these questions and not be just a little sick at hypocrisy and falsehood?

Is the World Ready for What the Church Can Give It?

Practicing Shaping Community:
Is the World Ready for the Gift the Church Can Give It?

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, September 7, 2008

“And just why is it that the church is so important?” asked a visitor of Dr. Samuel Johnson, eighteenth century England’s prototypical scholar. The visitor went on to make a case that was to become standard fare for many people in American society two centuries later. I can worship on my own. My relationship with God is my own business. Religion is personal. Organized religion gets in the way of being spiritual. Dr. Johnson said not a word, but reached his tongs into the coal fire in front of him and his visitor and plucked a burning coal and set it on the hearth, alone. The conversation went on to other subjects. In a few minutes, Johnson remarked to the guest, “You observe what has happened to the coal, Sir. It no longer burns. That is what happens to a Christian who tries to practice faith apart from the community of faith.”

Christians practice faith in community. Someone has put it this way: that the perennial strategy of Christianity is to gather the folks, break the bread, tell the stories. The amazing photography of Jim Stipe that hangs behind me this morning well illustrates that. On the left you see the bowl in the baptismal font. Baptism is the original act of bringing someone into the assembly. It is indeed the way we create community. You remember your baptism every time you pass through the door into this place, reach your hands into the font, and sign yourself with the cross you first received on your baptismal day. Today we’re bringing Anna into the Body of Christ. From today onward, she is as much a Christian as she will ever be, just as the oak seedling is as truly oak as is the five hundred year old oak in Rock Creek Park. We bring Anna into this community of faith precisely so that she can grow into the fullness of all her potential, spiritual as well as physical and mental.

In the photograph on the right, you see the Eucharistic feeding. When we celebrate the Holy Communion today, as every Sunday, we proclaim that through his gifts of bread and wine Jesus is, as he promises in today’s gospel, present with his community. More than any other thing at St. Stephen’s, the way we celebrate communion, gathered in a circle around the Table where everyone has a place, illustrates what we understand community to be. It is a gathering of all God’s people, where Anna, the newest member, has as definite a place as Edith or Vivian or Bill or Doris or Daphne who have been here for decades.

So between the time we gather the baptized and the time we break the bread we tell the stories. And in the middle photograph, you see hands holding the Bible. How do you think of the Bible? As an almanac predicting events? As answer book to life’s questions and problems? I suspect that most of us think of it the way we first learned it: as a storybook. We are spending an entire year, beginning today, focusing on the theme of “story.” Most, though not all, of our formative stories can be found between the covers of the Bible. The themes of the Bible, especially its major theme, “I will be their God and they shall be my people,” inform the other stories, large and small, that we tell and retell to define who we are.

These things are our sacred symbols. Water, bread, wine, story form the core of who we are. But the core is not all there is to the apple. Shaping community takes practice. I began several weeks ago leading us through a series of sermons that focus on Christian practices, some of the habitual things that we do to live out our faith. So far we have looked at two of these, discernment and proclamation. Shaping community is a third practice. Much of The New Testament is about this practice. We see the fledgling church organizing itself in the Book of Acts, and thanks to those who preserved many of Paul’s letters, we see some of the challenges that these new communities faced.

One such challenge lies behind today’s gospel lesson. Every community has to deal with the forces inside it that threaten to unravel its very fabric. And maybe the most common of those is evident when a member does another member wrong. Matthew’s gospel painstakingly sets forward a procedure of what the Christian community is to do when that happens. Shaping community, however, goes on in many ways beyond handling disagreements. The interesting thing is that Matthew’s community employs, or at least is enjoined to use, a principle in adjudicating disputes that has a much wider application. It is what I would call “speaking the truth in love” one to another. We cannot be sure that Matthew’s community, any more than Paul’s communities, always practiced that principle. Maybe they were at each other’s throats (read the Letters to the Corinthians, for example). But the principle is one that consistently reflects one of the chief values of Christian community: the virtue of honesty. In order for there to be a viable community, the members of it have to be able to be honest with each other.

What happens when we speak the truth, sometimes difficult and hard, to one another in love? Do people cringe and fall silent? Get into arguments? Withdraw? Zoom in to St. Stephen’s. What do you imagine to be the most seriously divisive issues that do or could come about among us? At this point in our life together, it seems to me that there are a couple of things that we are going to have to deal with before Anna reaches high school age. One of these is that our diversity will become harder and harder to preserve, given the changes that are happening in our neighborhood. As that develops, my guess is that we will have the choice of becoming defensive and reactive, or becoming creative in figuring out ways that such an important value to us can maintain its centrality. Another issue that will continue to require our speaking the truth in love will have to do with inevitable conflicts that arise when resources are scarce and when many needs compete against each other. Neither of these things is new. Both of them will continue to require us to make a priority of facing the tough issues with each other with candor, respect, and forthrightness.

Sometimes when we stand and renew our baptismal covenant, which we shall do in a few moments, I wonder what would happen if the Christian community were to realize that one of the greatest gifts we have to give the world (which might, in fact, be just what the world needs to be saved, quite literally) is the model of what a community can be. If our political process, for example, were to catch just a little bit of the notion of truth telling with respect (notice how I am re-casting the idea of “speaking the truth in love” for a broader audience!) how might our fractious, polarized country come together in common endeavor? The Church, as Archbishop William Temple once said, “is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.” By practicing shaping a community in which we can safely speak the truth in love to one another, honestly and faithfully, Christians can show the rest of the world the possibility of living respectfully with neighbors who are different from us. We can demonstrate that it is possible to accord even our enemies basic respect. We can perhaps even cause people to stop and wonder at how a Christian assembly can hold up a little girl named Anna, like the wise old Baboon Rafiki holds up Simba, the infant Lion King in the story by that name, as if Anna were the incarnation which all creation has been awaiting and to whom the whole Circle of Life bows the knee. By shaping such a community we might actually give to the rest of our brothers and sisters in the world a model of how, with a little water, bread, wine, and a set of life-giving stories, we can fashion a common life in which people are treated as if they were in fact holy, and in which justice and peace are realities sitting on the bench beside you.

© Frank G. Dunn, 2008

Reasons why I might vote for Obama

George W. Bush
Dick Cheney
Karl Rove
Mission Accomplished
Weapons of Mass Destruction
Abu Graib
Privatizing Social Security
Guantanamo
Alberto Gonzales
Harriet Miers
Tom DeLay
Fox News
Kenny Boy Lay
Seven Houses
Cindy McCain’s $300,000 dress
Family Values
Donald Rumsfeld
Waterboarding
Katrina
John Ashcroft
Valerie Plame
Scooter Libby
No New Taxes
Global Warming
Kathleen Harris
Dead or Alive
Ann Coulter
One Man One Woman
$9 Trillion National Debt
John Bolton
$4 per gallon
Slam Dunk
Swiftboat Veterans for Truth
Terrorist Alert Today: Orange
Rush Limbaugh
Heckuva Job, Brownie
Bring ‘em on
Condaleezza Rice
Flag pins
Walter Reed
George Tenet
Body Armor
Cakewalk
Ted Stevens
Jack Abramoff
Larry Craig
Old Europe
Nigeria
Axis of Evil
Rick Santorum
Ted Haggard
Yellow Cake
Halliburton
Bridge to Nowhere
Anti-ballistic missile treaty (Bush pulled out)
Duke Cunningham
Blackwater
Ralph Reed
Intelligent Design
Spokane Mayor Jim West
Bush v. Gore
Bill O’Reilly
Trent Lott
James Inhofe
Mark Foley
Veto of the SCHIP act
Surge
100 Years in Iraq, I don’t care
Maverick
United Nations Population Fund
Bob Ney
Patriot Act
Terry Schiavo
Flight Suit
James Dobson
Texas Air National Guard
Paul Crouch
John McCain: “I really don’t understand the economy”
Kyoto Accords
Stem Cell Research
Samuel Alito and John Roberts
Or, for that matter, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas
Paul Wolfowitz
Richard Perle
The N. R. A.

We Have a Story to Tell, and it Won't Wait

Practicing Proclamation:
We Have a Story to Tell, and it Won’t Wait

A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, August 10, 2008


Raymond Thigpen, my piano teacher, let it be known that he would not waste his time trying to teach youngsters who would not practice. I had been taking lessons from him for over a year, enough time for me to begin to push the envelope a little bit. Or maybe a lot. I came in for a lesson one Wednesday, sat down at the piano, and played the highly unpracticed Bach Two-Part Invention Number Four. I slogged my way through it and finally arrived at the end.

“Frank,” he said with a pain in his face and voice, “Frank, that is the absolute worst I have ever heard you play. And the worst I have ever heard anybody play that Invention.”

There ensued a talk about my practice habits. All I remember is that I went home and worked overtime to learn what I had so colossally blown that week. The next week I played the piece better, much better, if not well. “That’s more like it,” Raymond said.

This is the second sermon in a series I began week before last on Christian Practices. I want to interest you in what the Christian life actually looks like, how it is lived, and how we act differently because we are living it from how we might otherwise act.

You have just heard a rather astonishing and mind-stretching story. Of all the metaphors that come from The New Testament suggesting something downright unbelievable, surely “walking on water” is near the top of the list. The very phrase has come to mean a kind of absurd review of people who think more of themselves than they ought to think, or the ridiculous adulation that some folks engender when others start thinking they can “walk on water,” or do the impossible.

Verna Dozier, a Washington educator, who after her retirement taught The Episcopal Church much about how to read the Bible, used to say that, after we have asked what a Bible text says, we then have to ask why it was preserved. If this particular story was preserved to inspire courage in the infant Church, it is likely that the Church had begun to discover that the only way it was going to become courageous was to act courageously. Not Jesus but Aristotle had taught that “moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.” I want to suggest that this whole story is told for the Church, the community of faith, at a time when they were huddled in a very small barque on a very stormy sea, without any palpable benefit of the Presence of Jesus to keep them non-anxious. It is a story fundamentally about fortitude, the courage required to believe in the possibility of the presence of Jesus even when Jesus is absent. It is a narrative about the faith that Jesus will in fact show up in the darkest part of the night, appear to his community, quell the storm, and show himself to his worshipers to be true God. And, guess what? The only way courage is going to become real for the church is for the church to act courageously again and again and again.

That is what a practice is. It is a set of actions continuously and systematically done over time, with a purpose in mind. In a word, that purpose is to bring us to excellence. But the essential ingredient in a practice is virtue. Think about it. If you just keep doing something over and over again you might get really good at it. But the question remains, is it good for you? When I sit in a Starbucks or ride the Metro, for example, I frequently watch hosts of young people fiddling with their cell phones sending text messages. Some of them can do it, or play computer games, at the speed of light. Human beings are that way. Do a thing over and over again and again and we get to be lightening fast at it. We become experts. We become excellent. But is the practice at hand (text messaging) a good thing? Maybe. Depends on whom we are texting and the messages we are sending. Suppose we become adept at something that is destructive. You see where this is leading, don’t you? A practice is a good practice when a virtue is involved. A virtue is one of those things that human beings need in order to be truly whole and good.

Now we have three things in play. First we have a story, the mysterious Presence of the divine Christ in an hour of crisis. Second we have established that the story is told for a purpose, namely to inspire fortitude , that strength which encounters danger with coolness and courage, to bear up against danger or to endure trouble. And third, this virtue of fortitude is what we want to acquire by practicing courageous acts.

Let’s now move in closer to this business of practicing courage and endurance. Ultimately, the reason we want to be courageous is so that we can become who we are meant to be. And our model of that is Jesus Christ. As Carl Jung put it, “Christ is a symbol of the Self.” Jesus manifests the wholeness, the balance, and all the virtues that you and I need in order to become who we are. In Bible scholar Walter Wink’s terms, Jesus is “The Human Being,” the model of the free and authentic person. Or as one of our hymns has it, “He is our… pattern.” So becoming Christlike is the long-term goal of the Christian life. Keep in mind that becoming Christlike means becoming more truly yourself, not an imitation of some willowy Jesus in a Victorian stained glass window.

So what gets in the way? Storms threaten to throw disciples off track. They get scared. They despair. The only reason they need fortitude is precisely that they won’t survive as disciples if they don’t have it. And the only way they can become brave, if you will, is by acting brave. Eleanor Roosevelt put it this way: “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.”


In a way, you could look at this image of disciples huddled in a boat on a stormy sea and think: the Church has come a long way! No longer are we defenseless, scared creatures. We have enormous power and influence. But interestingly, this narrative of the Church doing battle against the prevailing winds of society has become central to the Church’s self-understanding. And that is true no matter what your stripe or denomination, regardless of your politics. At the Lambeth Conference , the worldwide gathering of bishops in the Anglican Communion, recently ended, I am quite sure that conservative African bishops, for example, see themselves buffeted by the immense winds coming from the West, which seem to threaten everything that the Gospel is about. But I was one who paid money to Integrity, an organization of Gay and Lesbian Episcopalians and our allies, so that we could have a presence at Lambeth precisely because it feels as if we are the ones who are in a pretty vulnerable boat blown about by the winds of social resistance that always sees some value, like unity, as paramount to justice and equal treatment for all.

So, if the narrative of the disciples in the boat about to go under tends to be a formative vision of the Church, no matter its situation or politics in this century, why do we need courage is pretty obvious. We need to tell our stories and speak our truth. For Matthew’s church at the end of the first century, that truth was of a resurrected Jesus who called people into a New Community opposed on the one hand by the old religious order and on the other hand by the prevailing imperial secularism. For us, it is really no different. We are called not just to tell, but to proclaim—that is to tell clearly and forcefully—the Good News of God in Christ. We say so in our baptism. We are faced with it every day.

The debate in the Church is not about whether we need courage, but about the Story we need to be telling. I think it is highly unlikely that we will ever reach the point where there is no conflict around that issue. Certainly if the history of the Church proves anything, it proves that if it is not one conflict that divides us, it will be another. This then is the “storm” which has been and will continue to rage all around us. But in the middle of it, we have a proclamation to make. It was in the middle of the storm called the Civil War when Lincoln decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves. Why not wait until the conflict is over, and then carefully assess the pros and cons of issuing a big Proclamation? Because sometimes the proclamation won’t wait. The Gospel has to be proclaimed. The story has to be told.

What is the proclamation that won’t wait today? I want to say that it is my own notion of the Good News. But I think it is deeper than that. I think the Proclamation, the story, that aches to be told all over the place is the story of how human beings can change our way of being human. Bishop John Shelby Spong gave the title to one of his more recent books, Why Christianity must Change or Die. But it is not just Christianity that must change or die, it is the whole human species and its behavior that must change or die. We cannot continue to heat up the planet and survive. We cannot continue to use war as a response to settling differences, and still survive. And nothing requires courage quite so much as massive and uncomfortable change. To call people to do the hard work of adapting to a new way of behaving, and to proclaim that change is possible is nearly as hard as walking on water. And it is clearly as hard as believing that Jesus will in fact show up when there are no signs that he will.

That we can behave differently is the proclamation of the Good News, not just that we have to. In Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen Prejean cuts across all kinds of social, political, and psychological barriers to proclaim the Good News to a man awaiting execution. But even more she exercises courage by calling into question society’s love affair with violence and revenge. She calls us to do the hard work of change and she does so courageously. The same can be said of Al Gore in his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. It is precisely because the truth is inconvenient that makes the practice of proclamation of it depend on fortitude, courage, to keep calling for massive, global change. It is true, too, of Jeffrey Sachs’ efforts and calls to get us to believe that we can end worldwide poverty. Sachs knows that we will never get there unless we believe that we can change.

So we’re not so different from the disciples in that little boat on a stormy sea after all, are we? We have a proclamation to make which requires a whole lot of fortitude, because people never ever want to do the hard work of adapting, of changing. The only way we’ll ever get good at proclaiming the Good News is by doing it over and over and over again. Whether we’re more like Frank who hasn’t practiced the piano, or like the kids on the Metro with their fingers flying at text messaging will depend on how dedicated we are to keeping at it.

Want to give up? As Marion Wright Edelman once said, “Who ever told you you had the right to give up?” Still you want to?

That is the point at which to remember the one who comes in the middle of the night, while it is still a long way from dawn and the shore, saying both words of encouragement to us and in a way summing up the proclamation itself: “Take heart. It is I. Don’t be scared.”

© Frank G. Dunn, August 11, 2008

The Truth of the Matter

Madeleine L’Engle, one of my favorite authors, once said that there were only a handful of stories in the world. We go on recycling them, telling them over and over.

One of those stories goes like this.

Once upon a time there was a little boy in distress. He had an impossible job to do. Just as he was about to believe that he could not accomplish his task, magically a goddess appears, inviting him to ask for anything. Sensibly he asks not for instant rewards or pleasures, but for the ingenuity to complete his task. Because he is so sensible, the goddess grants his request, and on top of it tells him that he will get all sorts of fringe benefits as well.

Sometimes the name of the story is Jack and the Beanstalk. Sometimes the person in trouble is Cinderella. In one story it is a pharaoh. Sometimes the gift-giver is an enchantress or a witch. By now you might be thinking that you’ve heard such a story recently. Very recently. Like about ten minutes ago in the lesson from 1 Kings. It is the story of Solomon’s request. It actually is the story of a dream of Solomon. Solomon dreams that God comes to him and says, “Ask what I should give you.”

Stop. That’s right where we need to be to get into the story.

Imagine for a moment that the dream is one you are having. God, or one of God’s surrogates—prophet, wish-granter, whatever—asks what you want. What might that be? Let me guess. Health? Financial security? One relationship that will give your life meaning and joy? Work that is fulfilling and meaningful? Security and blessing for your family and loved ones?

As you are dreaming and sorting out the possibilities in your dream, let me throw in another possibility.

Discernment.

Discernment?

That is what Solomon prays for. Or more precisely, in his dream he prays for “an understanding mind…able to discern between good and evil…” He says he wants it in order to be able to govern. One would hope that others in his situation might pray for the same gift.
Since, after all, we are dreaming—we might be tempted to say “just” dreaming—what might happen if we moved whatever was on that list of things we were considering a moment ago and made a space for discernment? What might that be like?

You might be asking yourself, “Why on earth would I pray for discernment when I don’t have the foggiest notion of what it is or what I would do with it?” Fair enough.
Discernment is, generically speaking, the ability to tell the good from the bad (like Jesus’ scribe in today’s gospel lesson), the faculty by which we decide what is valuable and what is worthless or what is somewhere in between. Just a little reflection quickly brings us to the point of acknowledging, maybe, that without discernment, we really can’t get very far. Voices natter at us all the time telling us what is important, or what we should want, or what we should do. Parents direct. Spouses and lovers cajole. Some voices even bribe. Commercials entice. The internet creates its own self-authenticating narratives about good and evil and whom we ought to vote for and why. Billboards and flyers, even the church bulletin, suggest things we ought to consider or do or commit to or buy. How do you know what to do when you are not sure about the sales rep?

Our faith tradition keeps making the point that among all these voices that yap and chatter away is the voice of God. Discernment is the effort to hear God’s voice and to distinguish that voice from all the other voices that we hear.

Now I don’t know about you, but I have a problem with that language.
When I worked years ago in a mental hospital, I learned that it just didn’t do to talk too persuasively about hearing voices, let alone hearing the voice of God. My audience would take me all too seriously. That was a valuable lesson. I suggest that “hearing the voice of God” is a very powerful metaphor, but still a metaphor—a symbolic way of talking—about getting at the Truth of the matter.

Let me give you an idea of what I mean. Not long ago I had to change dentists. I found a dentist, recommended by a friend who confessed that this dentist was so nice and thorough that he found himself looking forward to going to his semi-annual appointments. Well, that seemed a little over the top, but on the strength of his recommendation, I went. On my first visit, the dentist asked how I brushed and how often I flossed, etc., etc. I drew a breath and answered him with perhaps a somewhat inflated report of flossing. He proceeded to coach me, after all these six decades, in how to brush my teeth. He told me that the trick was to focus on the place where teeth and gums come together, because that is what needs attention. I have to confess that I had never paid much attention to my gums, let alone to that place where they meet teeth. I had always concentrated on the obvious: my teeth.

Discernment is a bit like brushing one’s teeth in the way I am now doing: practicing every day a basic life skill by concentrating on what is so obvious that, except I pay attention to it, I would miss it.

After I had been practicing my brushing for a week or two, religiously—to coin a phrase—it occurred to me that the practice of discernment is even more like looking at a printed page. Whenever I read a printed page, I never look at the page. I go straight for the words. And I don’t look at the way the words are composed, of lines and dots and curves called letters. I immediately jump to soaking up the meaning that those words are conveying to me. But the truth of the matter (remember that is what we are looking for),
the truth of the matter is that nothing on the page would or could make any sense were it not for the white space around the words and in between the letters.

Is it possible that God is like the white space on the page? The great space that supports and sustains all that is on the page, silently present, allowing letters to do their work and words to pop out of the background with voices all their own, conveying meaning to the eye beholding them and the ear imagining them? Discernment is paying attention to the spaces that surround the sights and sounds and movements of life.
Discernment is getting behind and beyond the words. Discernment requires no special instruments or directions, just the willingness to pay attention to what is there, silently waiting to be noticed.

Once we begin paying attention, we might find ourselves feeling a bit odd at first. Any new behavior, any new practice, is a bit strange. Someone has said that no new behavior is a part of you until you have done it for thirty successive days. So until we pass that threshold, or some similar one, we are apt to find ourselves feeling something like the pinch of new shoes.

The very next story in the biblical text after this dream of Solomon tells us the famous story about how Solomon adjudicated a case involving accusation and counter-accusation of two women. Solomon begins practicing his gift of “an understanding mind, capable of discerning good and evil.”

This is the first sermon of a series I will be preaching between now and Advent. Others of my colleagues might wish to join me. But I will be looking with you at some of the practices—the behaviors, the actions—that form the Christian life, where “the rubber hits the road.” For me, discernment is the key practice. And why? Because the central task for any of us is to fashion our lives according to the Truth so that we might live as authentically as possibly in line with the Truth. Or, to put it in more conventional Christian language, I want to discern the Will of God so that I can live in accordance with it.

How do you and I practice discernment?

We can take some specific actions. I want to mention three.

If you have been listening to me preach and teach for four years, you have surely by now heard the message that if you are going to find God anywhere, you will find God in the stuff of your life. Where your challenges, your griefs, your hopes, your shame, your joys are: there is God, like the space surrounding the words on the page. Pay attention to what is going on in your life. Pay attention to your dreams, like Solomon. They are what John Sanford, a priest and psychoanalyist, called “God’s Forgotten Language.”

Or take up a practice of journaling. Or perhaps letter writing, which I find easier to do than journaling. Any of these are actions you might take that will help you slow down, pay attention to your life, and listen to what the voice of God is saying to you, pointing you to the truth of the matters in your own life. You might discover yourself, as you practice these things, as many do, discerning dimly at first, and then little by little more clearly, that there are truths you must confront, statements you can make, changes you can initiate, tasks you can do. Soon you might become incrementally more open to consider, and ultimately more sure some of those things are right for you. You might discover that you are on your way to becoming like that scribe in Jesus’s parable, who is more and more able to pull out of her treasure at appropriate times what is new or what is old and know why she is doing it.

To give your process of discernment a center and a touchstone, add to it an ongoing dialogue with scripture. These stories, like Solomon’s dream and Jesus’ parable, are among the many that you can walk into and begin living. You might find that your own story is one of the few that make a world of meaning and sense of the world.

And a third action you can take is something you have already done this morning. Stay connected to the community of faith. Get up, come among us, be in dialogue. Question. Listen. Speak. Test. Argue. Dream. The truth of the matter is sometimes a lot easier to get at when several, or even a number, of us are searching for it together.

Solomon, Solomon! Time to wake up! What you have asked for, you already have!

A sermon preached in St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, Sunday, July 27, 2008

Trail

Trail

August 29, 2007

Harmonies swim through me adjusting
Blood, flesh, breath, and the spaces in between,
Setting this whole organism to a new station
As old as protoplasm. For a moment I think
I have died and then awakened to a fresh dream
Of stalwart ants threading a black line across
Southern sand, carrying giant crumbs, leaving
Traces of a strange intelligence for future use.

I see. It is my story. It is the old story
Of landing on the maker’s knee, fluttering
A bit, wriggling nervously, waiting to hear the
Invitation. I yearn to enter the journey, marked
by ages upon ages of those who have waited for this Now.

Yawning cave and layered rock
Beckon me and still the moonrise
In a distant sky keeps the strains coming
That promise no end save in the
Beginning.

August 29, 2007

Gathering

Gathering

Parched is the land, the desert high, and cool
Breezes sweep around sage and chaparral where
Storytellers flock weaving ancient patterns
To replace worn-out idols too late enchanting
Reluctant little minds running the planet.

We come.

Late summer in this hemisphere presages
Harvest. Seeds sown centuries since took root
In hard dusty earth, burnt over by revivals, thirsty
For mist, what birds did not carry away for their own
Suppers.

Story grew.

Words proliferate and sometimes overpopulate
This small island. Betimes the scythe is crucial
For making a clearing in the field
Of story. Such nutrients as can live for years
In dry envelopes stuck in the back of drawers
Of seed catalogue companies we drop into
Hard soil, planting themes that yet may salve and save
Our fragile home.

Water them.




August 26, 2007