More than I can handle--and I want more!

Every hour something new comes out about the inquiry of the House of Representatives into the President's possibly impeachable actions.

It's more than I can handle--and I want more!

The letter today from the Legal Counsel to the President had more wrong things in it than cogent thoughts.

The emails that are coming out, along with text messages, are damning to say the least.

And the President's attitude and behavior is beyond comprehension.

And I want more.

Polls--lots of them--show over 50% of Americans (in some 58%), like me, want more inquiry.

I'm not sure anymore I need an actual impeachment.

I just more of this stuff I can't handle.

Right up to November of 2020. A whole year of reveals.

Then let's vote.

And the nonsense about selling out our allies the Kurds to Turkey has caused a lot of Republicans to pause and think (for a change) about who this guy in the White House really is.

Stuff is shifting like the over-head storage on a bumpy flight.

Bumpier is what I want.

More shifting.

It's all more than I can handle.

And I want more......

Body and soul--one or seperable? I don't care.

I stayed up to 1 a.m. last night, watching the Yankees sweep the Twins and was so hyped up by their win I didn't get to sleep until after 2. So, I didn't get to my Tuesday morning group in time for Eucharist (and no one offered it to me, I noticed!). When they asked me why I was late, I told the story about the Yankees and we talked about baseball for 15 minutes or so. One of the group, who I love dearly, had no clue about the baseball playoffs, which shocked me beyond measure.

I once had a conversation about church politics with a guy who had served with me as a seminarian for two years. He was much more conservative than I'd imagined and asked him why he hadn't told me before.

"Jim, you are so sure everyone agrees with you," he said, "it would do no good to disagree."

I suppose that is true. Driving down Cornwall Avenue this morning I noticed that most of the signs for the local elections next month, were for Republicans. I was shocked! My neighbors MUST  be Democrats, right?

Apparently not.

Anyway, after talking about baseball, someone changed the subject to whether the soul is independent of the body or not.

Folks got very involved in the conversation and started throwing around Phoenicians and Pharisees vs. Sadducee's and Indo-European and Jung and Freud.

I said, "this is a long way from baseball", and everyone laughed and agreed.

What I should have said is this: "I don't care if you have a soul independent of your human life or not. I care about you and you and you and you--but not your soul. I leave stuff like that up to God. It simply doesn't interest me."

Which is the truth.

The whole truth and nothing but the truth.

I don't think about such things--I think about the people I am around.

Just that.

So be it.

Which excuse are we on?

The President has made at least 6 excuses for his call to Ukraine's president.

First it was a 'perfect' call.

Then it was a 'hoax'.

Then it was that the whistle blower had only second and third hand information.

Then it was whoever gave the whistle blower the information were 'traders'.

Then it was Adam Shift was a spy.

Then Nancy Pelosi should be impeached (never mind that there is no way to impeach a member of the House).

Then it was he had ever right to do it--and do it to China as well, as he did.

Then he was 'joking' about China.

Then it was all Rick Perry's fault.

That's more than six and there are several more I've left out.

Holy Cow!!!

Can you believe this guy?

Haven't written for a few days

The whole impeachment news is so compelling, I haven't caught up with my blog.

Amazing, what's going on,

Today's gospel from Luke (the usually compassionate gospel) tells 'believers' that they are like 'slaves'--what a horrible comparison, and shouldn't expect acknowledgement for what they do since what they do is what they're called to do--be loving, generous and open to the needs of others.

And that's the truth.

The idea that 'everyone gets a trophy' has created a generation of folks who think they are 'entitled', whether they have succeeded or not.

I had one person tell me how she used to run a Science Fair and give three ribbons until parents told her everyone should get a ribbon.

Another person told me how, in her office, folks show up 'expecting' to be promoted and treated with respect even if they didn't know how to do their jobs.

I am 'magna cum laude' and Phi Beta Kappa.

I earned that, just as I earned my four degrees.

And I didn't feel like I deserved any praise. It was just 'what I did'.

We all need to 'do' what we are called to do.

And expect no praise.

It is simply our calling.

Be loving, generous and open to the needs of others.

A prayer I often say before a Eucharist is this: "God, open our hearts to your love, our minds to the Truth and our lives to those in need."

Our calling.

No acknowledgement or praise needed.

The Tuning (part one)

I promised you The Tuning a while ago. So here's the first quarter. I'll add as I go along and maybe this will make me hurry up....

THE TUNING

(April 10, 2000)

          When Spitzer arrived at my door, instead of Dobbs, I almost gave him money and sent him away. It was Monday and Dobbs had promised to some on Tuesday. “Sometime in the afternoon,” he’d said on the phone, “so I might walk around back if you don’t come to the bell. You might be doing yard work.” I almost said, “small chance of that”, but remembering my daughter Dora’s stern warning, “don’t inflict your moroseness on others”—which is a direct quote and no way for a daughter to talk to her aging father—I held my tongue.

          “This is my rush season,” Dobbs went on, “Easter season is a busy time.” He spoke as if I were lucky to have him come at all, as if he hadn’t tuned our piano three times a year for two decades, spending more time in our living room than most of my law partners. It was as if were imposing on him! Dora tells me I’ve become increasingly short tempered and impatient with people. She simply doesn’t realize that her mother always dealt with troublesome, irritating things like piano tuners. I’ve always been short-tempered and impatient. It just shows more, now that Sarah’s dead.

          “See you Tuesday.” Dobbs’ affected, half-British accent was beginning to annoy me considerably. “THIS Tuesday,” he said again, “in the afternoon.” His needless repetition seemingly implied I’d grown absent-minded in my widower head. So I replied, ending the conversation, “I won’t forget, Dobbs. I lost my wife, not my mind.”

          I’m glad Dora didn’t hear me, though I imagine Dobbs telling one of my neighbors, while tightening whatever piano tuners tighten with their little tool, “old George Martin is getting testy since his wife died. Just the other day on the phone….” Then that neighbor might run into Dora on the street during the time she and Kelly were visiting and say—with the best of intentions, I don’t doubt—“I don’t mean to interfere. dear, but I think you should know what Mr. Dobbs, the piano tuner, told me about ‘poor George’….”

          Sarah had been dead for only 149 days on that bright and clear April day when Spitzer had shown up and already I was ‘poor George’ in the mind of almost everyone—my daughter and granddaughter most especially. “Morose”, “irritable”, “short-tempered”, “forgetful”, “rambling around alone in that big house”—oh, I could imagine what they were saying, mostly because Dora said it directly to me. When she and Kelly had come at Christmas, she told me I needed to start ‘getting our’ and ‘doing things’. She said, ridiculously, “when spring comes you can work in the yard”, knowing better than anyone that I’ve never been the one to work outside. That had been Sarah’s domain.

          “I’m a lawyer,” I said to her, “not a gardener.” But she just chucked and shook her head, replying, “an a ill-tempered one at that.”

          Another time, on the phone line between Columbus and New Haven (fiber optics at work that I cannot comprehend) Dora said, “you should have some friends over.”

          “I have no friends,” I told her, meaning every word.

          “Of course, you do,” she told me, after a long pause, “that’s just not true. You and mother had lots of people over all the time. You lost your best friend, Daddy, but not your only one. For God’s sake, offer someone a scotch. It’ll come back to you, I promise.”

          I was on the verge of telling her that ‘those people’ were really Sarah’s friends, not mine, but luckily realized that she probably had a list of things pointing to my clinical depression and that might just cause her to call one of the psychiatrists who lived on my block. She even mentioned two of them as she rattled off people I could ‘have over’, if only I would. Meddlesome adult children, I believe, are God’s punishment for the lust of your youth.

          When I opened to door to Spitzer and said, “May I help you?”, he handed me a tan card with the deaf alphabet on the front—drawings of 26 hands in the letter positions. Even though the card said it was printed by the American School for the Deaf in West Hartford and was not for sale, I reached for my wallet. So, the real reason I almost sent Spitzer away wasn’t that he wasn’t Dobbs and it wasn’t Tuesday and it wasn’t afternoon: it was because he was deaf.

          Spitzer started shaking his head and making little sounds unlike any I’d heard since Dora had guinea pigs—squeaks, whistles and grunts—which indicated I had misunderstood.

          “What then…?” I began. He twisted his hand as if miming how to turn a door knob. I’ve never been a man who dealt well with confusion and was about to say, impatiently, “I don’t understand sign”, when Spitzer pointed to the card and I realized he meant for me to turn it over. On the back, in penciled block letters, as if those who cannot hear can barely write, it said: I AM SPITZER, DOBBS SENT ME TO TUNE YOU PIANO.

          “Ah,” I said, turning away from him to open the door wider, “why didn’t you say so?” Then I turned quickly to face him, my neck burning, and said, with slow, exaggerated diction, “COME…ON…IN….”

          Spitzer nodded and squeaked, showing what I imagined to be gratitude. He was inside the door and the door was being shut behind us when I belatedly realized I’d forgotten, in the confusion, that Dobbs had said Tuesday afternoon and was Monday, late morning. Besides which, the very idea of a deaf piano tuner finally registered in my brain as absurd and that this man might be a burglar. I was glad, for once, Sarah wasn’t there to be in danger or to know I’d might have let a thief in by the front door. I tried to decide whether to bolt out the door and go for help or try to overpower him. I’m nearly 66, but I haven’t smoked in twenty years, drink only one scotch before dinner and beat men half my age in racquetball. Besides which, Spitzer wasn’t much bigger than the 12 year old Vietnamese paperboy. All that was running through my mind—LOCAL BARRISTER TWARTS THIEF-TUNER—the headline would have read—when Spitzer rummaged through a pocket and handed me another deaf alphabet card. It was curled, dirty, much handled. The same black script said: BEETOVERN WAS DEAF, BUT HE KNEW ABOUT PIANOS.

          “You must need this a lot,” I said, mindlessly.

          Spitzer nodded, snorting a laugh. He looked a  little like Al Pacino—swarthy and Italian—but his eyes were blue, round as poker chips, and his dirty-blond hair curled in loose knots from beneath a Red Sox baseball hat. His clothes were the work uniform—brown shirt and slacks—of Sears repairmen and he wore a carpenter’s apron packed full of the kind of intricate and medieval tools Dobbs carried in a little box Sarah once told Dobbs looked like Father Allison’s communion kit. “I’m the high priest of pianos,” Dobbs replied (or so she told me, giggling like a school girl) “the Cardinal of the keyboard.” Sarah liked Dobbs immensely, even when he said such inane things as that.

          I was staring at Spitzer, about to tell him he reminded me of a cross between Al Pacino and someone I couldn’t quite place, when he handed me another card that said: A LITTLE LIKE HARPO MARX, BUT PART OF THAT IS MY BEING MUTE.

          Before I finished reading the card, Spitzer had found the piano, moving to it without me noticing him go, and had leaned his head just above the keyboard, playing scales with his left hand. He turned toward me grinning, then grimaced and shivered. I must admit that the piano sounded off to me and both Sarah and Dora consider me the most tone-deaf individual they had ever encountered. In Sarah’s case, he being dead, I will eternally hold that dubious honor. Dora, I can still hope, will someday meet someone less musical than me.

         

Wait until he gets home

Sauli Niinstio (should be an umlaut over the final 'o' but I can't do it on my keyboard) is the President of Finland, one of the most polite and sophisticated countries in the world.

I can't imagine what he'll say to his folks back home after sitting through an oval office meeting and press conference with the President of the US where He Who Will Not Be Named railed and cursed about Democrats and the impeachment inquiry.

He even said that "Shifty Shiff" (the Congressman from California who is head of the Intelligence Committee) couldn't carry Secretary of State, Mike Pampeo's "jock-strap", though he left out the word 'jock' but asked twice if the reporters understood what he meant.

Such kind of language probably wouldn't be in public in Finland.

Our President is melting down under the pressure of the Ukraine investigation. He is making no sense in many of his statements and outright lying in others.

It is a scary time in our history.

Be Lions, not Mountain Goats.

Please.

The Finnish will have a good laugh over this over some good wine.

Alas for us.

We are lion cubs raised by goats

A story I know goes like this:

A lion cub got separated from the pride and was raised by mountain goats.

The cub ate grass, though he thought it vile, and ran with the goats at any strange noise.

For all the cub knew, he was a mountain goat.

But one day, when he was still quite young, the goats were on a hill above a river and there was a loud noise down by the river.

The cub started to run with the goats, but something in the noise struck him in the heart.

He crept to the side of the hill and looked down at the river. He saw a full grown lion feasting on a deer.

The lion saw him and said, "come down here and look in the river with me".

The cub was terrified but something made him creep down. He stopped to take a bite of grass.

The lion said, "why are you doing that? Doesn't that taste vile?"

The cub knew it did and with great bravery got  himself to the bank of the river.


 When he looked in the river, he saw his face and the face of the lion.

"I'm like you," the cub said in astonishment.

"Yes you are," the lion said. "Have a bite of real food.

The cub bit at the deer and then let out the first roar of his life.


We're like that cub. We think we're goats, but we're lions, made to battle evil and set things right.

Be a lion, my friend. Look into the river and recognize who you are.

You are lions, beloved!

Now, as never before in our lifetimes, we need to roar....