So, we got back from Baltimore, helping with the granddaughters, last night. (A 4 hour and 45 minute trip--a new Personal Best, amazing! Driving 70 or more from the Baltimore Beltway exits off 95 through Delaware and New Jersey and across the GW Bridge in exactly 3 hours--slowing up for the toll booth only because we needed to, not because any cars were in front of us.)
When we got home (our friend John had picked up Bela-dog from the Puppy Motel and left him at our house about 3:30) we couldn't wait to greet Bela and let him out for a while. But on our porch were two mysterious boxes and a wondrous black case. I took them inside. The boxes were wrapped in white paper with black bows. It was an incredible assortment of gifts.
Two towels that said "The Best" on them. A red tie (though I never wear a tie I might have to since it is so great) and some cedar planks you use on a grill to cook fish. The other package had a vegetable bowl to use on a Weber grill. And the black box was a Cuisinart set of grill tools--an amazing assortment. All told, the gifts, I estimate, were several hundred dollars.
Here's the mystery. We have no idea who they were from or why. No card. No name. Nothing but the gifts.
I'll ask my neighbors if they had some special occasion on Wednesday that might have prompted such a gift. Maybe they were left on our porch by mistake.
If anyone reading this left them there, let me know so I can thank you and ask you why....
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Mammaw Jones, once more...
My Mammaw Jones used to say, "you have to be bigger than the weather...."
How true. How true.
Over my 30+ years in Connecticut, I have come to wonder if CT is in New England at all. I think of New England folks as saying 'posh' to the weather and soldiering on no matter what. Maybe in VT and NH and Maine, but not here in southern New England. We're, for the most part, real wooses about weather. People in CT seem to react like people in Atlanta to snow and rain and high winds. Troubling in the least....
People have been calling the Cluster and sending me emails about whether to cancel church on Sunday. It's 'Thursday', for goodness sake, Sunday is like a decade away in the way life passes for me. And I happen to trust people enough to believe they will wake up Sunday morning and look out the window and say, "it looks fine" or "it's not a fit day out for man nor beast" and decide whether 'church' is on the agenda as hurricane Irene bears down on us.
When I lived in Charleston, WV back in the late 70's, Governor Jay Rockefeller, now a Senator from the Mountain State, declared an emergency regarding the snow storm of the century bearing down on all us Mountaineers. People emptied stores of water, batteries, canned goods and made a run on liquor stores like hadn't happened since the end of prohibition. Chaos reined. Life as we knew it ended. Every event in the state was canceled in anticipation of the storm that would end the world, perhaps.
Some low pressure system caused the storm to hope over WV and blast Pennsylvania, Maryland and Northern Virginia instead.
We all had water and batteries and canned goods for the next few years.
I told Bea, the Cluster's Administrator, today how when I was 17 years old, I'd put the chains on my father's big old Ford LTD and go across a mountain that was 5 miles up and 6 miles down to see a movie in Bluefield, 29 miles away, in the middle of a snow storm. Mountain people give a fig about the weather. Life goes on. We're simply bigger than what nature throws at us.
People in CT don't go to church when it's raining hard. Give me a break....
Weather happens every day. Every day there is weather. And we are expected to be bigger than the weather. So, on a perfectly wondrous June day when the temperature is 70, the sun is shining and the wind is out of the southwest, we need to be 'bigger than that weather."
No different that hurricane, flood, earthquake and blizzard and the apocalypse.
We all need to have common sense, know our limitations and 'be bigger than the weather' for goodness sake....
How true. How true.
Over my 30+ years in Connecticut, I have come to wonder if CT is in New England at all. I think of New England folks as saying 'posh' to the weather and soldiering on no matter what. Maybe in VT and NH and Maine, but not here in southern New England. We're, for the most part, real wooses about weather. People in CT seem to react like people in Atlanta to snow and rain and high winds. Troubling in the least....
People have been calling the Cluster and sending me emails about whether to cancel church on Sunday. It's 'Thursday', for goodness sake, Sunday is like a decade away in the way life passes for me. And I happen to trust people enough to believe they will wake up Sunday morning and look out the window and say, "it looks fine" or "it's not a fit day out for man nor beast" and decide whether 'church' is on the agenda as hurricane Irene bears down on us.
When I lived in Charleston, WV back in the late 70's, Governor Jay Rockefeller, now a Senator from the Mountain State, declared an emergency regarding the snow storm of the century bearing down on all us Mountaineers. People emptied stores of water, batteries, canned goods and made a run on liquor stores like hadn't happened since the end of prohibition. Chaos reined. Life as we knew it ended. Every event in the state was canceled in anticipation of the storm that would end the world, perhaps.
Some low pressure system caused the storm to hope over WV and blast Pennsylvania, Maryland and Northern Virginia instead.
We all had water and batteries and canned goods for the next few years.
I told Bea, the Cluster's Administrator, today how when I was 17 years old, I'd put the chains on my father's big old Ford LTD and go across a mountain that was 5 miles up and 6 miles down to see a movie in Bluefield, 29 miles away, in the middle of a snow storm. Mountain people give a fig about the weather. Life goes on. We're simply bigger than what nature throws at us.
People in CT don't go to church when it's raining hard. Give me a break....
Weather happens every day. Every day there is weather. And we are expected to be bigger than the weather. So, on a perfectly wondrous June day when the temperature is 70, the sun is shining and the wind is out of the southwest, we need to be 'bigger than that weather."
No different that hurricane, flood, earthquake and blizzard and the apocalypse.
We all need to have common sense, know our limitations and 'be bigger than the weather' for goodness sake....
Friday, August 19, 2011
nobody asked me, but....
Back when I worked for a living, every Friday was 'movie day'. In any given year I'd go to 40+ movies, mostly Friday matinees because Friday was my day off and I honored it by turning off my cell phone and going to a movie.
Since I retired, even though I do lots of things and actually get paid by the Middlesex Area Cluster Ministry for being their interim missioner (frankly, since 1975 I've been rather shocked that a three churches and now a Cluster actually paid me to be who I am! What a toot!) I have lost the routine of going to movies. I've been to a dozen or so movies in the past year. But in the last two weeks I've reinvented 'movie day'. I think I have it down. I can have a day off even though I'm retired and what I'll do to honor that is turn off my cell phone and go to a movie.
The first two movies I've seen--last week and this week--make me want to tell you about them. Nobody asked me to, but I'm going to. If you are a movie person at all these are 2 'don't miss' movies.
The first is RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Now, if you weren't into the original string of 'planet of the apes' movies (and they got progressively worse--like the novels of American suspense writers like Patricia Cornwall) you probably want to pass of this. But if you can still see that final scene of the original movie where Charlton Heston approaches the nearly buried Statue of Liberty (which was actually shot on a beach near Malabo) and screams "you blew it up!"...then you're going to love this prequel. This movie tells the story of 'what happened' to earth. It is remarkable and speaks to a much more contemporary fear than the 1968 fear of nuclear destruction. Franco and Pinto--the male and female love interest--are rather vacuous, even though in the plot they are both remarkable scientists. John Franco raises the chimp who is named Caesar by Franco's father, John Lithgow (who is amazing) as a man suffering from Alzheimer's . The actor who plays Caesar as an adult is remarkable. I forget his name. The technology is so advanced from 1968, but remember, Heston and the others had been on a 2000 year trip that aged them only 18 months when they landed on the Planet of the Apes. (By the way, if you remember, we all figured out it was earth long before Charlton did....) The special effects are riveting and the plot is tomorrow on steroids. The world as we know it, we find out from RISE, ended not with a bang but with a whimper.
Must see for Sci-Fi fans and people who were alive and going to movies in 1968.
This week's movie was THE HELP. I read some reviews, which were mixed, but I think it was a remarkable achievement. Emma Stone, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer should all be considered for Oscars. I went because I wanted to have a good laugh at the stupidity of white people in Mississippi in 1963. I got that, but what I didn't expect was the undercurrent of real danger and possible death in the Jim Crow South. Bryce Dallas Howard (maybe she should change her name) deserves award consideration for doing something that is incredibly hard to do: play an utterly charming and totally evil character. Not since Hannibal Lector has a screen presence made me to anxious as hers. This is, in the end, a woman's movie (not a 'chick-flic) but a movie about the dignity, integrity, strength and tenacity of women in a world turned against them. (Remember, in the south in those days, the only person less respected than a Black man was a Black woman.) There's not a single male character (except the quirky newspaper editor who can really dance) worth the oxygen that keeps them alive. And many of the women aren't worth much more--but the ones that are are heroines, remarkable creatures, the best that human beings can be.
Go see it. Even men, if they're anything like me, will come away feeling better about being human (and regretting how awful humans can be....)
Since I retired, even though I do lots of things and actually get paid by the Middlesex Area Cluster Ministry for being their interim missioner (frankly, since 1975 I've been rather shocked that a three churches and now a Cluster actually paid me to be who I am! What a toot!) I have lost the routine of going to movies. I've been to a dozen or so movies in the past year. But in the last two weeks I've reinvented 'movie day'. I think I have it down. I can have a day off even though I'm retired and what I'll do to honor that is turn off my cell phone and go to a movie.
The first two movies I've seen--last week and this week--make me want to tell you about them. Nobody asked me to, but I'm going to. If you are a movie person at all these are 2 'don't miss' movies.
The first is RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Now, if you weren't into the original string of 'planet of the apes' movies (and they got progressively worse--like the novels of American suspense writers like Patricia Cornwall) you probably want to pass of this. But if you can still see that final scene of the original movie where Charlton Heston approaches the nearly buried Statue of Liberty (which was actually shot on a beach near Malabo) and screams "you blew it up!"...then you're going to love this prequel. This movie tells the story of 'what happened' to earth. It is remarkable and speaks to a much more contemporary fear than the 1968 fear of nuclear destruction. Franco and Pinto--the male and female love interest--are rather vacuous, even though in the plot they are both remarkable scientists. John Franco raises the chimp who is named Caesar by Franco's father, John Lithgow (who is amazing) as a man suffering from Alzheimer's . The actor who plays Caesar as an adult is remarkable. I forget his name. The technology is so advanced from 1968, but remember, Heston and the others had been on a 2000 year trip that aged them only 18 months when they landed on the Planet of the Apes. (By the way, if you remember, we all figured out it was earth long before Charlton did....) The special effects are riveting and the plot is tomorrow on steroids. The world as we know it, we find out from RISE, ended not with a bang but with a whimper.
Must see for Sci-Fi fans and people who were alive and going to movies in 1968.
This week's movie was THE HELP. I read some reviews, which were mixed, but I think it was a remarkable achievement. Emma Stone, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer should all be considered for Oscars. I went because I wanted to have a good laugh at the stupidity of white people in Mississippi in 1963. I got that, but what I didn't expect was the undercurrent of real danger and possible death in the Jim Crow South. Bryce Dallas Howard (maybe she should change her name) deserves award consideration for doing something that is incredibly hard to do: play an utterly charming and totally evil character. Not since Hannibal Lector has a screen presence made me to anxious as hers. This is, in the end, a woman's movie (not a 'chick-flic) but a movie about the dignity, integrity, strength and tenacity of women in a world turned against them. (Remember, in the south in those days, the only person less respected than a Black man was a Black woman.) There's not a single male character (except the quirky newspaper editor who can really dance) worth the oxygen that keeps them alive. And many of the women aren't worth much more--but the ones that are are heroines, remarkable creatures, the best that human beings can be.
Go see it. Even men, if they're anything like me, will come away feeling better about being human (and regretting how awful humans can be....)
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Naming of parts...
Human beings, it seems to me, are naturally thrown to 'name' things--to categorize, catalogue, separate out, group, sort, look for patterns, file, put things in geniuses and species. We, as a species ourselves, tacitly and subconsciously believe there is an 'order to things', that the universe is ultimately understandable. Whether or not that is true is worth pondering but not what I want to talk about now.
One of the things we name and label and distinguish between are other people. Some of that sorting out is quite simplistic.
My Grandmother Jones, for example, divided all people into two categories: "church people" and everyone else. "They may be a bit odd," she once said about a nearby family, "but at least they're church people." There wasn't a lot of subtlety in her categories and very little judgement. I never heard her imply that 'church people' were morally superior to 'non church people'. It was simply her way of making sense of things. All Gaul is divided into three parts and all people, for Lina Manona Jones, were divided into two groups.
Young children, it seems to me, tend to divide all people into two groups as well: good guys and bad guys. That was obvious when I played cowboys and Indians or Natzis and Americans, or cops and robbers as a boy. My twin grand-daughter often ask, about someone they don't understand, "are they good?" Small Children and Santa Claus are always sorting out naughty and nice.
When I was in college, those I knew divided humankind into hippies and squares. Actually, that's not quite accurate since the people I knew weren't real hippies--we were 'pretend hippies', weekend hippies. So the real categories were hippies, wannabe hippies and squares. We only worried about sorting out people under 30. Everyone over 30, of course, couldn't be trusted.
"Pretend hippies" reminded me of the conversation I never tire telling people about that I had with my granddaughter Morgan once. "Grampie," she said while drawing strange lines on a piece of paper, "are you a Dr. too?" Her other grandfather is a big deal at John Hopkin's Hospital--a thoracic surgeon.
Remembering my Doctor of the Ministry degree earned at Hartford Seminary, I replied. "Actually, I am, Morgan. But I'm not a medical Doctor." She thought for a minute and said, "Oh, you're a pretend doctor." "Actually, Morgan," I said, "I am....".
Note how St. Paul automatically categorized people: Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. This irresistible urge to name and label has, of course, been the sword the powerful have always held over the powerless. The powerful 'name', the powerless 'get named'. The most obvious example is the 'Black is Beautiful' movement when Black people named themselves and shrugged off the label of 'negro', or worse.
All this is prelude to what my current operating categories of human beings is: the world is divided, for me right now, into Fundamentalists and people who aren't.
It's a distinction that is obviously flawed but functions pretty well. Fundamentalists of whatever ilk are much more alike than they are like non-Fundamentalists. This is obvious in religion. It's a helpful distinction. But there are 'fundamentalists' of other genres. Anybody who divides the world into those who are Right/Saved/Pure and those who are wrong/lost/tainted--is a fundamentalist in my book. Islamic fundamentalists and Christian fundamentalists share a lot of characteristics even though, by definition, both groups abhor the other. There is 'one way' for both of them and anyone who isn't following that 'one way' is lost and not worth saving. There can be no compromise with 'the other'. And, within the fundamentalist world view, anyone who disagrees should be shunned (if not killed).
When I was the part-time chaplain to West Virginia State College as part of my first clerical job, I would meet with students as part of the required freshman seminars. Many of the young people were very conservative Christians and I was a Liberal Fundamentalist at the time and convinced it was my job to show them the error of their ways. (Like I said, fundamentalists come in all hues!)
So, I would talk with them about 'salvation'. I suggested that for some people 'salvation' was a thing certain, like, for example, Cleveland. You're either in Cleveland or not. The suburbs are not Cleveland and Toledo certainly isn't Cleveland. So the 'saved' knew they were in Cleveland. My ploy was to argue with convincing logic that another way of seeing 'salvation' was to 'be on the Way to Cleveland' and that there was lots and lots of ways to get from Institute, West Virginia to Cleveland. Brilliant, I thought, though the truth was that I was as big a fundamentalist about 'being of the Way' being right as they were about being in Cleveland.
Then one day, when I thought I'd about perfected my argument, having done it 10 or so times, one student in the back raised his hand. "Who says Cleveland is where we should be going?" he asked.
My days as a fundamentalist ended then. "Being on the Road" is how I seek to work out my own salvation with fear and trembling and not a little good humor. But may way is certainly not 'The Way'.
(I was going to close this by pointing out how fundamentalism--on both sides but mostly, honestly, on the Right of the political spectrum--had thrown a monkey wrench into the cogs of our constitutional government. But, as I think of it, the point is obvious....)
We'd all be better off to ponder how to strip away labels and names and judgmental thoughts and try to figure out how to work together somehow....
One of the things we name and label and distinguish between are other people. Some of that sorting out is quite simplistic.
My Grandmother Jones, for example, divided all people into two categories: "church people" and everyone else. "They may be a bit odd," she once said about a nearby family, "but at least they're church people." There wasn't a lot of subtlety in her categories and very little judgement. I never heard her imply that 'church people' were morally superior to 'non church people'. It was simply her way of making sense of things. All Gaul is divided into three parts and all people, for Lina Manona Jones, were divided into two groups.
Young children, it seems to me, tend to divide all people into two groups as well: good guys and bad guys. That was obvious when I played cowboys and Indians or Natzis and Americans, or cops and robbers as a boy. My twin grand-daughter often ask, about someone they don't understand, "are they good?" Small Children and Santa Claus are always sorting out naughty and nice.
When I was in college, those I knew divided humankind into hippies and squares. Actually, that's not quite accurate since the people I knew weren't real hippies--we were 'pretend hippies', weekend hippies. So the real categories were hippies, wannabe hippies and squares. We only worried about sorting out people under 30. Everyone over 30, of course, couldn't be trusted.
"Pretend hippies" reminded me of the conversation I never tire telling people about that I had with my granddaughter Morgan once. "Grampie," she said while drawing strange lines on a piece of paper, "are you a Dr. too?" Her other grandfather is a big deal at John Hopkin's Hospital--a thoracic surgeon.
Remembering my Doctor of the Ministry degree earned at Hartford Seminary, I replied. "Actually, I am, Morgan. But I'm not a medical Doctor." She thought for a minute and said, "Oh, you're a pretend doctor." "Actually, Morgan," I said, "I am....".
Note how St. Paul automatically categorized people: Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. This irresistible urge to name and label has, of course, been the sword the powerful have always held over the powerless. The powerful 'name', the powerless 'get named'. The most obvious example is the 'Black is Beautiful' movement when Black people named themselves and shrugged off the label of 'negro', or worse.
All this is prelude to what my current operating categories of human beings is: the world is divided, for me right now, into Fundamentalists and people who aren't.
It's a distinction that is obviously flawed but functions pretty well. Fundamentalists of whatever ilk are much more alike than they are like non-Fundamentalists. This is obvious in religion. It's a helpful distinction. But there are 'fundamentalists' of other genres. Anybody who divides the world into those who are Right/Saved/Pure and those who are wrong/lost/tainted--is a fundamentalist in my book. Islamic fundamentalists and Christian fundamentalists share a lot of characteristics even though, by definition, both groups abhor the other. There is 'one way' for both of them and anyone who isn't following that 'one way' is lost and not worth saving. There can be no compromise with 'the other'. And, within the fundamentalist world view, anyone who disagrees should be shunned (if not killed).
When I was the part-time chaplain to West Virginia State College as part of my first clerical job, I would meet with students as part of the required freshman seminars. Many of the young people were very conservative Christians and I was a Liberal Fundamentalist at the time and convinced it was my job to show them the error of their ways. (Like I said, fundamentalists come in all hues!)
So, I would talk with them about 'salvation'. I suggested that for some people 'salvation' was a thing certain, like, for example, Cleveland. You're either in Cleveland or not. The suburbs are not Cleveland and Toledo certainly isn't Cleveland. So the 'saved' knew they were in Cleveland. My ploy was to argue with convincing logic that another way of seeing 'salvation' was to 'be on the Way to Cleveland' and that there was lots and lots of ways to get from Institute, West Virginia to Cleveland. Brilliant, I thought, though the truth was that I was as big a fundamentalist about 'being of the Way' being right as they were about being in Cleveland.
Then one day, when I thought I'd about perfected my argument, having done it 10 or so times, one student in the back raised his hand. "Who says Cleveland is where we should be going?" he asked.
My days as a fundamentalist ended then. "Being on the Road" is how I seek to work out my own salvation with fear and trembling and not a little good humor. But may way is certainly not 'The Way'.
(I was going to close this by pointing out how fundamentalism--on both sides but mostly, honestly, on the Right of the political spectrum--had thrown a monkey wrench into the cogs of our constitutional government. But, as I think of it, the point is obvious....)
We'd all be better off to ponder how to strip away labels and names and judgmental thoughts and try to figure out how to work together somehow....
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Milestones
My son is 36 today. God bless him. He is a joy and wonder to me. A man from my loins. And a good and remarkable man. I love him so.
My daughter turned 33 last month. "As old as Jesus," I told her. She was not impressed. And she is a joy and wonder to me. A lovely and gifted woman. I love her so.
When I was 33, in 1980, I had just become the Rector of St. Paul's in New Haven. We lived in an astonishing rectory, Bern and Josh and Mimi and I.
Trudy M. told me, when she met me, "my priest and my gynaecologist are both younger than me".
Trudy was only 35--a couple of years older than Mimi is now and a year younger than Josh is now.
Bern and I had been married 10 years in 1980. Hard time were coming and we didn't know they were and somehow, beyond all comprehension, we survived them.
On Josh's 36th birthday, we've been married nigh on 41 years. September 5--Labor Day this year--will be our 41st anniversary. 41 years is a long, long time. No kidding. And, as I often estimate, we've been 'truly married' at least 35 of those years. The good news is, the last 20 or so are part of that total.
Milestones are remarkable.
Who knew we'd be married this long--given that I was the first 'sager' to marry into her extended Italian/Hungarian, so Roman Catholic family and I was the second member of my so, so Anglo-Saxon Protestant family to marry a Roman Catholic. The first was my cousin, Marlin, whose marriage to his Italian/RC bride barely survived the reception! So no one gave this union a chance in hell of succeeding.
Nearly 41 years later, we have 'given the lie' to what everyone thought would happen.
It is raining and raining. I love rain. But our dog 'hates' rain. He needs, I know and he knows, to go out and have a bowel movement. But he's hiding from me because he can still hear the rain though inside the house. I'll try to drag him out in a bit. It would be best if he had a #2, best for him and for me.
Sometimes a milestone is a poop in the rain.
Ponder that and tell me life isn't strange....
My daughter turned 33 last month. "As old as Jesus," I told her. She was not impressed. And she is a joy and wonder to me. A lovely and gifted woman. I love her so.
When I was 33, in 1980, I had just become the Rector of St. Paul's in New Haven. We lived in an astonishing rectory, Bern and Josh and Mimi and I.
Trudy M. told me, when she met me, "my priest and my gynaecologist are both younger than me".
Trudy was only 35--a couple of years older than Mimi is now and a year younger than Josh is now.
Bern and I had been married 10 years in 1980. Hard time were coming and we didn't know they were and somehow, beyond all comprehension, we survived them.
On Josh's 36th birthday, we've been married nigh on 41 years. September 5--Labor Day this year--will be our 41st anniversary. 41 years is a long, long time. No kidding. And, as I often estimate, we've been 'truly married' at least 35 of those years. The good news is, the last 20 or so are part of that total.
Milestones are remarkable.
Who knew we'd be married this long--given that I was the first 'sager' to marry into her extended Italian/Hungarian, so Roman Catholic family and I was the second member of my so, so Anglo-Saxon Protestant family to marry a Roman Catholic. The first was my cousin, Marlin, whose marriage to his Italian/RC bride barely survived the reception! So no one gave this union a chance in hell of succeeding.
Nearly 41 years later, we have 'given the lie' to what everyone thought would happen.
It is raining and raining. I love rain. But our dog 'hates' rain. He needs, I know and he knows, to go out and have a bowel movement. But he's hiding from me because he can still hear the rain though inside the house. I'll try to drag him out in a bit. It would be best if he had a #2, best for him and for me.
Sometimes a milestone is a poop in the rain.
Ponder that and tell me life isn't strange....
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
9/11 looms
I got an email from the deacon who is working with us for a while in the Cluster about whether we'd planned anything for the four congregations on September 11--the 10th anniversary.
I hadn't because I'll be traveling that Sunday. And her question made me ponder some things.
First of all, I returned to that fateful day. Bern had gone out and I had watched the second plane hit the second tower on live TV, brushing my teeth, stunned, flabbergasted, almost unconscious with the impossibility of what I was watching.
The cognitive dissonance of it all had caused me to be unable to remember that both our children were in New York City at the moment I was watching on TV. Bern's truck screamed back into the driveway and she took the steps two at a time until she was beside me.
"The kids," she said, having heard about what was happened on her truck's radio, "We've got to reach the kids...."
Eventually we did. Our son was safe in Brooklyn but his girlfriend, Cathy, now our daughter-in-law had been on one of the last trains out of Brooklyn. She'd been taken off the subway and herded, along with hundreds other people, into Chinatown. Hours later, she walked across the Williamsburg Bridge, back to Josh.
Our daughter was beginning her first day of work at the American Ballet Company. She came up out of a subway close enough to the end of the island to see the first tower in flames. She, with thousands of others, walked back home in the midst of total confusion and chaos.
So, I have very personal connections to 9/11. I have a friend who lost 7 of the 11 guests she had at a dinner party a week or so before. One of my parishioners watched the people jump from the top of the towers and isn't over that experience yet. How could she be?
I've been trying to remember what we did at St. John's the Sunday after 9/11. I believe it was either a healing service or the Ash Wednesday Service. Either makes sense to me. Either we needed oil and hands upon us or to confess our sins. Not that our sins caused 9/11, not in any way: but because the enormous chasm between September 10, 2001 and September 12 made it impossible for us to continue to ignore our brokenness.
We were horribly broken on that day. Those young me who took over and flew those planes 'broke' us and shattered us totally. All the king's horses and all the king's men could never put us back together again after that lush September morning. (Odd, isn't it, that I remember what a perfect and lovely day September 11, 2001 was. Glorious in every way save one. And that one way made all the difference.)
Here's something I ponder, those terrorists who were striking against the 'Great Satan" of the United States, have, in remarkable ways, done enormous and possibly irreparable damage to us, much more than the loss of life and property of that day could have foretold.
First of all, they took away our innocence. No one alive that day remembered the last time an act of war had taken life on our soil. All the combatants in the Civil War were decades dead. The wars since then we've fought on someone else's soil. All the loss of life and hope we've endured was across some ocean or another. But 9/11 ensured that 'it can't happen here' would disappear forever from our vocabulary. Suddenly, in a matter of minutes, we realized we were part of the planet, not some idyllic oasis where truly bad things didn't happen.
They also took away our sense of safety. We've never been 'safe' in any real sense. Life is always out there ready to commit mayhem. But 'we thought we were' safe. For almost a decade now we've been living with a new-found anxiety, and, unlike most of the people on the planet, we're newcomers to that kind of fear and it has infected us at every level. We're more afraid of everything now than we were on 9/10/01--more afraid of strangers, aliens, emigrants, terror, people different from ourselves. We're more afraid of all those than we've been for a century or so. And we don't believe 'everything will be alright' any more. We doubt the Future in a way Americans haven't ever doubted what was coming. Being a young, naive nation, we always believed the 'future' would bring progress and hope and better days. We don't believe that anymore. 9/11 stole that from us.
9/11 also plunged us into to seemingly endless wars that have sapped our strength and killed our next generation and plundered our wealth. This is the ultimate assault that those terrorists made upon us. All our debt problems (and the debt problems of Europe to some extent since 'when America sneezes, Europe catches a cold') were planted on 9/11. Please remember, as few people seem able to, that Bill Clinton left George W. Bush a surplus when he took office. A SURPLUS...how soon we forget. He would have frittered it away to some extent by tax breaks for the wealthy but if we hadn't been in Iraq and Afghanistan because we had to attack someone after 9/11, we wouldn't be in the financial crisis and debt problem that spawned the Tea Party and the absolute gridlock in Washington.
Without 9/11, I suggest, 'rational people' would still be directing the government and we would be, as a nation, investing in education, research and infra-structure rather than having almost bankrupted our nation in two unwin-able and seemingly unending wars that have cost us trillions of dollars while the gap between rich and poor has widened and the middle class has shrunk.
So those Islamic Fundamentalist terrorist, as I ponder it, have done what they meant to do almost 10 years ago. They have brought the Great Satan--the United States--to our knees.
That's really something to ponder and wonder about as the 10th anniversary approaches, looming ahead for a day I'll be driving from North Carolina back to New England.
Take a deep breath and ponder all that.
I hadn't because I'll be traveling that Sunday. And her question made me ponder some things.
First of all, I returned to that fateful day. Bern had gone out and I had watched the second plane hit the second tower on live TV, brushing my teeth, stunned, flabbergasted, almost unconscious with the impossibility of what I was watching.
The cognitive dissonance of it all had caused me to be unable to remember that both our children were in New York City at the moment I was watching on TV. Bern's truck screamed back into the driveway and she took the steps two at a time until she was beside me.
"The kids," she said, having heard about what was happened on her truck's radio, "We've got to reach the kids...."
Eventually we did. Our son was safe in Brooklyn but his girlfriend, Cathy, now our daughter-in-law had been on one of the last trains out of Brooklyn. She'd been taken off the subway and herded, along with hundreds other people, into Chinatown. Hours later, she walked across the Williamsburg Bridge, back to Josh.
Our daughter was beginning her first day of work at the American Ballet Company. She came up out of a subway close enough to the end of the island to see the first tower in flames. She, with thousands of others, walked back home in the midst of total confusion and chaos.
So, I have very personal connections to 9/11. I have a friend who lost 7 of the 11 guests she had at a dinner party a week or so before. One of my parishioners watched the people jump from the top of the towers and isn't over that experience yet. How could she be?
I've been trying to remember what we did at St. John's the Sunday after 9/11. I believe it was either a healing service or the Ash Wednesday Service. Either makes sense to me. Either we needed oil and hands upon us or to confess our sins. Not that our sins caused 9/11, not in any way: but because the enormous chasm between September 10, 2001 and September 12 made it impossible for us to continue to ignore our brokenness.
We were horribly broken on that day. Those young me who took over and flew those planes 'broke' us and shattered us totally. All the king's horses and all the king's men could never put us back together again after that lush September morning. (Odd, isn't it, that I remember what a perfect and lovely day September 11, 2001 was. Glorious in every way save one. And that one way made all the difference.)
Here's something I ponder, those terrorists who were striking against the 'Great Satan" of the United States, have, in remarkable ways, done enormous and possibly irreparable damage to us, much more than the loss of life and property of that day could have foretold.
First of all, they took away our innocence. No one alive that day remembered the last time an act of war had taken life on our soil. All the combatants in the Civil War were decades dead. The wars since then we've fought on someone else's soil. All the loss of life and hope we've endured was across some ocean or another. But 9/11 ensured that 'it can't happen here' would disappear forever from our vocabulary. Suddenly, in a matter of minutes, we realized we were part of the planet, not some idyllic oasis where truly bad things didn't happen.
They also took away our sense of safety. We've never been 'safe' in any real sense. Life is always out there ready to commit mayhem. But 'we thought we were' safe. For almost a decade now we've been living with a new-found anxiety, and, unlike most of the people on the planet, we're newcomers to that kind of fear and it has infected us at every level. We're more afraid of everything now than we were on 9/10/01--more afraid of strangers, aliens, emigrants, terror, people different from ourselves. We're more afraid of all those than we've been for a century or so. And we don't believe 'everything will be alright' any more. We doubt the Future in a way Americans haven't ever doubted what was coming. Being a young, naive nation, we always believed the 'future' would bring progress and hope and better days. We don't believe that anymore. 9/11 stole that from us.
9/11 also plunged us into to seemingly endless wars that have sapped our strength and killed our next generation and plundered our wealth. This is the ultimate assault that those terrorists made upon us. All our debt problems (and the debt problems of Europe to some extent since 'when America sneezes, Europe catches a cold') were planted on 9/11. Please remember, as few people seem able to, that Bill Clinton left George W. Bush a surplus when he took office. A SURPLUS...how soon we forget. He would have frittered it away to some extent by tax breaks for the wealthy but if we hadn't been in Iraq and Afghanistan because we had to attack someone after 9/11, we wouldn't be in the financial crisis and debt problem that spawned the Tea Party and the absolute gridlock in Washington.
Without 9/11, I suggest, 'rational people' would still be directing the government and we would be, as a nation, investing in education, research and infra-structure rather than having almost bankrupted our nation in two unwin-able and seemingly unending wars that have cost us trillions of dollars while the gap between rich and poor has widened and the middle class has shrunk.
So those Islamic Fundamentalist terrorist, as I ponder it, have done what they meant to do almost 10 years ago. They have brought the Great Satan--the United States--to our knees.
That's really something to ponder and wonder about as the 10th anniversary approaches, looming ahead for a day I'll be driving from North Carolina back to New England.
Take a deep breath and ponder all that.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Involved, not 'attached'
I haven't been blogging much because I've been so involved and attached to the endless and senseless debate in Congress about the debt limit.
So, I've been serializing my mystery novel "Murder on the Block".
(Here's an aside: It was a real exercise in vulnerability to put my fiction in my blog. And I've heard nothing about it from anyone. It was a risk I took and I'd like some response. I've checked my blog for comments---Nada. If you've read the work, I'd like to hear from you. I don't care if you liked it, loved it, didn't like it, hated it. I'd just like to know. Don't comment on my blog. That's a real pain to look at. Send me an email at Padrejgb@aol.com with your thoughts about the mystery. Again, I don't much care if you thoughts are negative or positive. I just want to hear some. Thanks.)
So, tonight I reminded myself of how to be Involved and not Attached.
I have a demonstration of that. Take a paperback book and put a piece of paper--a piece of typing paper, a napkin, your phone bill--in the book. Then fold the book.
"Involved" means, literally, "in the 'volutions'" or, more understandably, "in the folds".
Then, unfold the book and remove the paper you put in it. That piece of paper is "involved", but not "attached" as the pages of the book are.
That is, it seems to me, the way we--you and I need to BE in life. We need to be 'involved' but not 'attached' to the ebb and flow of history, the give and take of events. We need to be inside of them and a part of what is happening, but for our souls' sake, we need to be detached, able to step back from the day to day and live "from" another place.
I was just out on the deck. The bird traffic, which is enormous, across our back yard, has died down as darkness begins to descend. But the evening bird songs continue.
I was reminded that the birds of the air don't care about the Dow Jones Average, or the Tea Party or the debt crisis in Europe. They live on, detached from what seems so vital and consuming to me.
Let the birds' songs inspire us to be fiercely 'involved' in what is happening around us, yet 'detached' from all that is political, social, cultural, theological, so that we might view it from a bit of distance and 'come from' that 'safe place' back into our world.
Jesus always retreated to lonely places to pray after a time of activity. He was deeply 'involved' and yet 'detached' from the crowds and the world that swirled around him. Not a bad model. Not a bad way to "BE" in the world. Coming from 'who we BE', rather than being attached to the storm and drung of life and be defined by our attachment to all that.
I thank the birds for reminding me.
I can 'come from' a place of detachment and peace and emptiness and power rather than trying to 'get to' a place of peace.
Good advice from the creatures of the air....
So, I've been serializing my mystery novel "Murder on the Block".
(Here's an aside: It was a real exercise in vulnerability to put my fiction in my blog. And I've heard nothing about it from anyone. It was a risk I took and I'd like some response. I've checked my blog for comments---Nada. If you've read the work, I'd like to hear from you. I don't care if you liked it, loved it, didn't like it, hated it. I'd just like to know. Don't comment on my blog. That's a real pain to look at. Send me an email at Padrejgb@aol.com with your thoughts about the mystery. Again, I don't much care if you thoughts are negative or positive. I just want to hear some. Thanks.)
So, tonight I reminded myself of how to be Involved and not Attached.
I have a demonstration of that. Take a paperback book and put a piece of paper--a piece of typing paper, a napkin, your phone bill--in the book. Then fold the book.
"Involved" means, literally, "in the 'volutions'" or, more understandably, "in the folds".
Then, unfold the book and remove the paper you put in it. That piece of paper is "involved", but not "attached" as the pages of the book are.
That is, it seems to me, the way we--you and I need to BE in life. We need to be 'involved' but not 'attached' to the ebb and flow of history, the give and take of events. We need to be inside of them and a part of what is happening, but for our souls' sake, we need to be detached, able to step back from the day to day and live "from" another place.
I was just out on the deck. The bird traffic, which is enormous, across our back yard, has died down as darkness begins to descend. But the evening bird songs continue.
I was reminded that the birds of the air don't care about the Dow Jones Average, or the Tea Party or the debt crisis in Europe. They live on, detached from what seems so vital and consuming to me.
Let the birds' songs inspire us to be fiercely 'involved' in what is happening around us, yet 'detached' from all that is political, social, cultural, theological, so that we might view it from a bit of distance and 'come from' that 'safe place' back into our world.
Jesus always retreated to lonely places to pray after a time of activity. He was deeply 'involved' and yet 'detached' from the crowds and the world that swirled around him. Not a bad model. Not a bad way to "BE" in the world. Coming from 'who we BE', rather than being attached to the storm and drung of life and be defined by our attachment to all that.
I thank the birds for reminding me.
I can 'come from' a place of detachment and peace and emptiness and power rather than trying to 'get to' a place of peace.
Good advice from the creatures of the air....
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