A Diet of Desires

I was walking the dog on a Sunday afternoon when the anxiety hit like a thunderbolt.  Earlier that day, I'd preached on the omnipresence of marketing in American life, and how what we desire is a factor of powerful systems that manipulate our interests.  It folded in neatly with a talk about my book on prayer and our desires, and how we must learn to unwant the things that we are taught to want so very badly.

I'd cited a dollar figure on the scale of the American advertising industry, and even though I'd found it multiply attested earlier in the week, I suddenly got a bad case of the yips.  Did I get that number wrong?  Had I erred?  Maybe I'd mistyped it.  Maybe I'd misread it.

If I had, my mistake was likely not a rounding error.  Not off by two percent, not off by ten percent, but off by 100,000%.  The number was the total 2024 spending on advertising, which came in, averaging from various sources, at just a smidge over $500,000,000,000.  

America spent five hundred billion dollars on marketing in 2024, I declared publicly, while church folks shook their heads in amazement.  

Surely that was wrong.  It couldn't be right.  It's a staggering figure, a preposterous figure, one that I presented with confidence.  Had I made a mistake?

The dog did his business, and I slogged home, suddenly certain that I had catastrophically embarrassed myself.  I checked the numbers again.

There'd been no mistake.

Five hundred billion dollars, more or less, against a global total of one point one trillion.  

I didn't know whether to be relieved or re-horrified.  In context, it does make sense.  Americans see more advertising than any other culture.  It's that money that feeds Facebook, that feeds X, that feeds Google.  It's that money that fills our mailboxes with crap, that forces us to pause multiple times during a show, even if we've paid Bezos for the frickin' "privilege" of Prime.  We've been taught that ads are fun, that ads are cool and great and creative, but Jesus Mary and Joseph, that's insane.

For that price, we as a nation could have Medicare for all, and a fully funded USAID, and retool our economy to actually compete with the Chinese, and have a MoonBase, and be going to Mars.  But instead, we get...what?  We get a cotton candy nothing.  We're penned up and stuffed full of manufactured desires like foie gras geese or penned up veal calves.

None of it, not a bit of it, is necessary for the functioning of a healthy society.  Would we not remember to eat?  Would we forget that we need a roof over our heads?  Would our doctors not recommend appropriate medications?

Of course not.

Imagine an authoritarian regime that spent that much on propaganda, where that amount of energy was spent manipulating the hearts and minds of an endlessly anxious populace.

How is that not what's happening?

A Fierce and Joyous Voluntarism

Last year, my butternut squash really struggled.

Voracious chipmunks devoured the seedlings, necessitating multiple replantings.  Deer savaged the spreading vines.  It was a horticultural debacle.  I got a quarter of my usual yield.

This year, things are different.  I moved our bird feeder out of the front lawn, reducing the attraction for rodents.  I've been more diligent about applying deer spray.  

Out front, it's a riot of sprawling fan leaves and questing vines.  The most vigorous of my butternuts this season is, as it happens, not one that I planted at all.  It's a volunteer, one that came up early in a four by four raised bed where I'd intended to grow okra.  I didn't, at first, even know it was a butternut.  I could tell it was a squash of some sort, but that thumb-high sprout could have been zucchini, or perhaps a cuke.  Cucurbits...that's the common name for that family of plant...all kinda sorta look the same early in their development, at least to my amateur eye.

I thought about rooting it up, as I often will with volunteers.  I Had A Plan, after all, one that involved okra and not butternut.  But I had okra growing elsewhere.  Given the failure of my squash crop last year, I was inclined to give it a chance.  That, and if it turned out to be a butternut, it would have room to run, and butternut does the best when you let it sprawl out wild and free.

It was a butternut, and Lord, has it run.

It quickly leapt out of the bounds of the raised bed, as every single day the tendrils extended their reach.

  Its goal, best I could tell, was the sun, as it pressed due East towards the dawn.  The plant is now about thirteen feet long, the striving vines and sprawling leaves inscribing the shape of a beleafed comet onto the green of my yard.  Along those abundant vines, the glorious yellow blossoms have drawn a host of bumblebees, who will often fall asleep deep inside of the flowers, cozily cupped and pollen-drunk.  

From the female blossoms, with the help of the bees, a half-dozen squash have begun to form and fatten.  More than my entire harvest last year.

From just one plant, that showed up unexpected and was given the freedom to use its gifts.  This feels, as so much gardening does, flagrantly metaphorical.

There's a tendency amongst Professional Jesus People to assume that our task is to set agendas and establish plans and be all Leadershippy and stuff.  We are the prophets and the vision-casters!  We dream the dreams!  We know the knowledge!  Without the byzantine complexities known only to us professionals, poor hapless amateur Christians would wander around like little lost lambs in the great deep darkness.  

This is a spiritually dangerous assumption.  It's why we pastors overfunction.  It's why we're so prone to getting anxious, exhausted, and overwhelmed, as we take the entire weight of our local universe onto our shoulders.  It's why we can become megalomaniacs in microcosm, and get prone to doing things we oughtn't.  

Our pastoral task, instead, is mostly to encourage, inspire, and occasionally give some gentle redirection.  The vital and creative energies that keep our communities healthy extend far beyond our egos.  They rest within the souls who choose to give their time freely and joyously to music and mission, to service and care, to teaching and reaching out.

The best measure of a healthy church, as some of my choir folk so perfectly put it while chatting before the service this last Sunday, is that people want to be there together, pursuing a commonly held joy.

The heart of a vital and free society, as Alex of Tocqueville famously put it, is "..the art of pursuing in common the object of their common desires."

Without our fierce and joyous voluntarism, nothing good can stand.

The Big Beautiful Lie

The email came on the morning of the Fourth of July.  It was from the Social Security Administration.

In it, folks like me with a social security account were informed that we should celebrate and rejoice in the passing of the recent budget bill.  That bill eliminates taxes on a significant portion of social security benefits, which...according to Trump-appointed Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano, will do amazing things.

By significantly reducing the tax burden on benefits, this legislation reaffirms President Trump’s promise to protect Social Security and helps ensure that seniors can better enjoy the retirement they’ve earned.

Yay money back! Yay Trump! Promise kept! 

Problem is, it's all a lie.

The Trump bill, as enacted, pretty much guarantees that the Social Security Trust Fund will run out of money by late 2032.  That's seven years from now, kids.  One year of solvency has been sliced away, giving us one less year to deal with the future America has been putting off for decades.

Remember what you were doing in 2018?  For oldsters and my fellow middle-aged, that doesn't seem like that long ago.  Heck, I've had both of my current cars longer than that.

That's how much time we have.  In seven years, thanks to Donald J. Trump, Social Security runs out of money.  Benefits for seniors will be slashed by 25%.  There are ways around this, of course.  I mean, the easiest solution?  

Plan on being dead by then.  

But those of us who are still alive and have spent our working lives contributing to Social Security will all be royally screwed.  Don't believe me?  Read this report from the leftist socialist communists over at FoxNews.   Their opinion bull[horn] might be all in with the Big Beautiful Lie, but their business folk know what's coming.

Everyone knows it.  All of us have known this was coming for years.  

Even the liars and thieves who are trying to buy our favor with money they just stole from our future. 

Beans and Berries and Sweat on the Brow

This morning, as the sun crested the small rise to the East, I was out in my garden picking the last of the blueberries. 

 The day was going to be fiercely hot, stinky sticky smothering hot, with humidity in the eighties and real temperatures potentially cresting one hundred degrees Fahrenheit.  It's the sort of day when spending time outside is best done early, the sort of day when the heat doesn't dissipate with the setting of the sun. 

The last of the succulent deep-purple berries hung fat on my bushes, though, and my greenbeans were poppin', so there was harvesting to be done.  After walking the dog, drinking my coffee, and attending briefly to the daily mess of world news, I took a couple of shiny metal bowls out into the yard and started picking.

I'd already pulled a gallon and a half worth of berries off of our two bushes, and so there wasn't much left worth plucking.  Just about a cup of ripe fruit remained, the berries perfect and ready, popping off their stems with only the very lightest of effort.  The dull faint tink of each falling fruit against the bottom of the stainless steel bowl was pleasing to the ear, chiming to mark the sultry end of my blueberry season.  

Then it was on to my four by eight bean patch, where I squatted and plucked again, pinching beans from stems with thumb and forefinger.  My trusty old bush beans, seedsaved for nearly a decade, were starting to produce.  

As I picked, the heat continued to rise, and sweat prickled across my forehead beneath the shade of my hat-brim.  I felt the effort in my middle-aged thighs as I squatted, moving counterclockwise around the raised bed.  I peered into the dense interwoven foliage, gently parting it with my hand, eyes moving from bean to bean, my mind sorting between those that are ready and those worth leaving for another harvest later in the week.  About a half-gallon of beans today, filling my larger bowl.

It's simple work, physical and wholly engaging.  For forty five minutes or an hour before the heat of the day becomes too much, it's no great burden.  But for a whole day?  For eight hours, even with breaks?  It would be utterly exhausting, and the endurance required to work in the fields seems...to my flaccid suburban flesh...herculean.

Gardening, I reflected as I popped plump beans into my bowl, is a good reminder of what it takes to bring food to our tables.  It's the most fundamentally necessary labor, but also the labor that we've chosen to ignore as a society.  It's viewed as unworthy of our effort, as the most menial and lowly of tasks, to be performed by those at the very bottom of the economic food chain.   It is the work of migrants and the imprisoned, not that there seems much difference between those two categories in America these days.

That such labor is disrespected is an abomination.  That it is a thousand times less lucrative than dooping around with some AI-enhanced blockchain folderol seems a perversion of the order of things.  It's an inhuman and unnatural misvaluation.  As a substantial portion of our culture turns snarling against those whose sweat and strain feeds it, this seems a form of madness.  Is it seething resentment at our dependence, that we rely utterly upon the work of others, and that our "superiority" is nothing but a mask for our weakness?  Perhaps. 

Or perhaps we're just fools.

Perhaps we are as brimming with hubris as the Spartans, who imagined that their monomaniacal worship of Ares made them stronger than their slaves.  For without the humble helots who grew the crops and tended the livestock, all the martial disciplines of Leonidas wouldn't have kept him alive for a week.  Or are we like Midas, perhaps?  Are we about to break our teeth on grapes gone hard to our touch, feeling our thirst rise as we peer down at the unquenching metal of our Mammonists desire that now fills our glass?

A little less time in the false halls of golden delusion might clear our addled minds, and return us to right appreciation of the things that matter.  

A little more time in our gardens, with the fruit of the earth before us and sweet honest sweat on our brow. 

 

A Most Profitable War

So here's a thought, one that I've not seen pitched out in the bizjournals or propagated by the business-oblivious American Left.

As America starts dropping bombs on Iran, and Iran inevitably chooses to retaliate in the only way it can, there'll be disruptions to Persian Gulf shipping.  Iran's Houthi proxies will start lobbing antiship missiles at passing commerce.  Shia Iran will pitch ballistics at the wealthy Sunni petrostates, and we'll see burning refineries and damaged or sunk tankers.  

Even if we don't see that happen, the markets will price that potentiality into a barrel for a while.

So the cost of a barrel of oil will rise, as will the price at the pump.  That's not collateral damage.  I'm kinda sorta of the mind that this is a goal.  Meaning, somewhere, someone knows that war with Iran is in America's financial interest.

I mean, the primary goal is advancing the interests of Bibi and the Arab Petrostates, who are largely now aligned.  But as a secondary goal, rising oil prices are in the direct interest of American petroleum producers.  

Because right now, the United States of America is sitting on a huuuuuuge reserve of shale oil.  In Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming, we have the largest such reserve known to humankind.  It contains within it trillions of barrels, enough resource to keep us all burning carbon unabated for nearly a century.

But using that oil is very resource intensive.  It's a highly technical process, requiring substantial research and engineering, and thus has a far higher profit threshold than old-school oil drilling.  

If the price of oil, per barrel, is less than sixty five to seventy dollars?  Some production becomes unprofitable.  The farther below seventy bucks a barrel it falls, the more the business model for shale starts to collapse.  Below fifty bucks a barrel, it's time to shut down production.  You're spending more to get it out of the ground than you're making.

Three months ago, oil was running at $58 per barrel, meaning production was getting right near the edge of viability.

Now?

Now it's soared, up to nearly $75 a barrel, comfortably above the point at which domestic shale is commercially profitable.

For OPEC nations that traditionally drill, some losses and damage to production will be more than made up for by soaring profits.  For American production, this war could be a lifesaver.

Which is just such an odd, unpleasant business.

 

Nos Nunquam Movere

Nos Nunquam Movere, or so our informal family motto goes.  We Never Move.

This was not always the case.

As a Foreign Service brat, I moved every four years.  From DC to Nairobi, when I was a toddler.  From Nairobi back to DC, when I was about to go into first grade.  From DC to London, when I was in fourth grade.  From London back to DC, as I turned thirteen.  At eighteen, I moved to Charlottesville and college at UVA.  There, I shifted spaces every year.  One year in a dorm, and then three different rooms in my fraternity house.

After graduation, I moved to Williamsburg for a year to live with my fiance.  Then back in with my parents in Northern Virginia, where we lived for six months after getting married.  Then into an apartment in Arlington, followed by another three years later.  

We bought our home back in nineteen ninety nine, and the whole process came to a halt.  

Parties, or so Prince Rogers Nelson sang about the year we moved into Annandale, weren't meant to last, but we've lasted.  Twenty six years, we've called the same little suburban rambler home.  It was close to grandparents, when kids came along.  It's close to aging parents, now that the offspring are grown.    It's been right sized for us, cozy with four souls, spacious for two, walking distance to stores and restaurants, but kinda quiet.  Around us, the faces have changed, as neighbors have moved out, new neighbors moved in, again and again.  We remain.  Rache and I have both sacrificed the arc of our careers to the comfort of place, choosing again and again to remain.

This isn't the standard for Americans.  Here in this country, we move, on average, once every eleven years.  More when we're young, less as we age, but we're always on the go.  Always pulling up stakes, heading for better ground, always seeking greener pastures and new vistas.  

If you live that way, there's much that you gain, but there are also experiences you do not have.  There is much that you miss.  Your sense of connectedness to the land, and your ability to see the world changing around you?  That doesn't happen when you're in constant motion yourself.

When you set down roots, you see the wear of time, cast against longstanding memory.  You know the ebb and flow of seasons.  Sometimes change is for the good.  Sometimes?  Not so much.

There are a pair of towering poplars near our carport that simply weren't there when we moved in.  I remember when they were saplings, twenty years ago.  I considered cutting them down, but relented.  They're not nuisance trees.  They're indigenous and vital to the local ecosystem.  Now they reach sixty feet skyward, casting shade in the summer and providing sustenance to the few remaining butterflies.  They are good and lovely.  

But across the street and at the top of a small rise, the seamless green canopy that graced the neighborhood two decades ago is now irregular, where a score of chestnut oaks struggled and perished.  That was part of a mass die-off all across the Mid-Atlantic, one that played out over three-quarters of a decade.  Changing climate, dontcha know, as our world shifts fast enough that if you hold still you can see it.  

There are other benefits to remaining where one is.  One can think longer term, and taste the fruit of seeds planted many years prior, seeds both metaphoric and actual.  Thirteen years ago, I dreamed that my yard might one day be more than just an expanse of grass, and made my very first stab at growing a garden.  Today, I sit out on my sheltered porch on a misty morning, and see flowers and beans, tomatoes and squash and okra and a panoply of herbs.  Over three hundred square feet of raised beds, added in considered iteration over time.  Time is so necessary for growing things, and some things take more than a season.

More than a decade ago, I planted a couple of blueberry bushes just to the right of our front door.  Six years ago, I put two apple tree saplings into the ground in our front yard.  Five years ago, I put some asparagus rootstock into the soil of a raised bed, just to the left of our driveway.

It took three years for the asparagus to produce.  It took five for the berries to really start popping, and ten for me to figure out how to keep the birds away.  One of the apple trees, this year, is heavy with reddening Fujis. 

For the ancient Biblical prophets, the gift of patiently appreciating and harvesting from one's place was a mark of a just culture, and of the great blessings of God's purpose.  

When times are hard, the prophets proclaimed, you let roots run deeper.  Like Jeremiah, you buy that field, claiming a deeper stake in place and the potential of the future.  I have, as the prophet Isaiah promised, planted my gardens, and stayed long enough to eat of them.

A crisis might change this, I know.  The time will certainly come when mortality will move me to another shore.  But for now, I'll remain, and enjoy the pleasures of holding fast to what is good.

Father Timex

It's been just under two years since Dad passed away, and I'm still wearing his old Timex.

I took it off his cool lifeless wrist on the day that he died, and put it on my own.  It's told the time with reasonable accuracy ever since.  A simple mechanical watch serves many purposes.  Telling the time, of course, but other purposes that have value in our digital age.  It reduces the number of times per day I feel compelled to look at my magic devil box, which is a blessing.  It ticks audibly, as the mechanism physically marks away the seconds remaining in my own mortal coil.  This feels real and tangible, an analog actuality in a vaporware age.  It does one thing well, without distraction.  These are good things.  

That's not to say there aren't challenges with an old watch.

The watch will need a new battery soon, as the Timex IndiGlow (tm) feature for nighttime timekeeping has started to dim.  It's started slowing down a little bit, requiring readjustment through the little twisty knob on the side.  Again, a new battery is all that's needed. 

The primary fail-point, though, has been the band.  It's a simple leather thing, faded and worn.  The watch lug loops have given way multiple times, the leather yielding to entropy, the machine-stitching well past its functional lifespan.  I've been tempted, each time, to replace the band.  

I mean, it's a band.  Just a strip of cheap hide.  It's not expensive.

But like everything that matters, the watch isn't just about function.  It rested on my father's wrist for decades, and the band...being organic and slightly permeable...carries with it more of him than the metal watchbody itself.  It's stained and suffused with his sweat.  Some of his DNA, no doubt, is sequestered away in the folds and cracks of that old leather, as surely as it is in my own flesh.

Letting go of the band, or so my utterly illogical sentimentality dictates, is letting of a substantial portion of that intimate reminder of him.  So what to do, when that band fails?  

Given that my leatherworking skills are non-existent, I've taken the easy route, applying a classic Dad-fix to that memento of my own father: epoxy.  Just glue it back together.  It works, right up until it doesn't.

Last week, my most recent repair failed, and the watch fell from my wrist.  Undamaged, thankfully, but the whole leather lug-loop was gone.  There was nothing left to glue, nothing left to wrap around the bar of the lug.  This, I thought ruefully, might finally be the end of the band.  I let it set for a little bit, as I mulled my options.

A fierce sentimentality can be the mother of ingenuity, and time for reflection stirred a thought.  

The band was two stitched pieces of leather, and were I to carefully slice them apart and trim away one half, I could construct a new lug-loop.  Simply slice, apply epoxy, and boom.  It'd be back on my wrist.  Why not?  If it failed, I'd just sigh and get a new band.  If it succeeded, I'd still have that soft worn remembrance snug wrapped around my arm.

So I sliced it carefully, opening up the seams of the leather.  I whittled about the edges with the blade, and then...with vise and glue and time...remade what had failed.

This Father's Day, that old Timex still rests on my wrist.

Our Father

I was sitting at table with a group of fellow Presbyterians, where they were pitching out their reactions and thoughts around my recent book on reclaiming the Lord's Prayer.  It was an engaging conversation, and their frank comments and thoughtful ponderings made for some delightful back and forth.

During the discussion, one of the folks around the table started chatting about the very first chapter of the book.  It being a book about the Lord's Prayer and all, it tracks through that ancient prayer phrase by phrase, and the very first phrase is "Our Father."  Pater Hemon, in the Greek of Luke 11 and Matthew 6, although without the italics or capitalization, because common Greek didn't roll that way.

One of the participants, an Older White Gentleman, had something to say about that.  "I was struck," he said, "by that first chapter about fathers."  "I didn't think," he continued, with a mischievous grin on his face, "that we were allowed to use that word any more."

This, I will confess, did occur to me in the writing of the book.

It is the strong preference of my comrades in the Presbyterian People's Front to avoid male pronouns in the evocation of God.  Growing up in a very progressive church, this would typically manifest in prayer language that either centered the divine feminine or attempted to avoid gender altogether.

There's a strong and relevant truth to all of that effort, because YHWH ain't a male bipedal hominid.  We're not talkin' Zeus here, not some towering white bearded dude in a robe glowering down from His Obviously Anthropomorphic Throne.  Theological assumptions of male dominance or superiority rising from that language aren't to be tolerated.

I steer away from the use of gendered language to describe God myself, truth be told, and at no point in the book do I ever refer to God as "He."  Not even in the chapter where I talk about God the Father.  Not even once.

I also don't mind if folks want to use other terms to describe God.  So many other words and images point to the Divine Nature.  God is Love, of course.  And Light.  And a Consuming Fire.   If Scripture's cool with God being like a mother hen with sheltering wings, or telling us the Creator of the Universe can manifest as an incandescent shrubbery, then all bets are off.  You do you.

So in that spirit of inclusivity, I'm not of a mind to abandon the use of the word Father in prayer, because it, um, works.  It ain't inherently broke.  Is it perfect?  No.  Of course not.  No human language, none, can bear the full weight of God's reality.  We could theologically wordsmith until the end of time, and still not fully capture it.  Our efforts to use our categorical semiotics more precisely just ends up creating a muddled, clumsy tangle.

Were I to reword the prayer to my own heretical idiosyncracies, I'd be forced to acknowledge that "Our Numinous Omnipassible Multiversal Panentheist Reality Engine" just doesn't flow off the tongue.   

Father isn't that.  It's not an academic abstraction.  It's a concrete, actual, material relation that's comprehensible on a human scale.

And we human beings, with our propensities for overcomplicating our lives?  That can be helpful.

Power and Pride

Pride month began this last Sunday, as Rache and I went to see a revival of HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH, a fiercely brazen 90s rock musical about a trans woman's journey.  I'd seen the film, back in the day when I imagined myself edgy and progressive, but the musical itself?  Never.

The show was well worth seeing, with excellent performances from the two gifted actors playing Hedwig and her lover Yitzak, and a tight and kickin' backup band playing the Angry Inch.

Hedwig's tale is a rough one.  

Her character is...complex.  She's fierce and fabulous and talented, of course.  But there are strong intimations of sexual abuse in Hedwig's nascent queer boyhood, coupled with a relationship with an American G.I. that's blatantly predatory.  Her transition is botched by an East German back-alley doctor, leaving her with a residual male stump...the eponymous "angry inch."  Her one great love...a geeky army brat who's into D&D...abandons her upon being forced to confront the fact that she's not biologically female.

Darkly funny, relentlessly profane, and unquestionably fabulous, Hedwig is also kind of a horrible person.  She's carrying so many scars, both figurative and literal, that she spreads her damage around.  In particular, she's gleefully abusive to her lover Yitzak, a beaten-down drag queen who she berates, belittles, and oppresses with a performative and casual cruelty.  It's a show with emotional depth, and for all of the rock-and-roll sturm und drang, remarkable subtlety.

Which made this a pungent show to begin a Pride month.  

"Pride," glower Christians who have beef with Queer folk, "is a sin.  Pride goes before the destruction, and a haughty spirit before the fall, Proverbs 16:18, right there in the Bible."  Which, on one level, is true.  

But on another level, it's completely and willfully missing the point.  Being Queer isn't itself evil, brothers and sisters.  It's a person's nature.  It's morally neutral, and has no bearing on a human being's decency, compassion, or capacity to live according to the teachings of Jesus. 

"Only if you're in power," comes the progressive reply, "because the First law of Intersectionality is that those without power cannot sin."  Which, on one level, is true.  If you are utterly powerless and have no agency, you cannot sin, because you can neither intend nor act.  

But all human persons have agency.  We are gifted at finding those weaker than themselves, and as hurt people, we hurt people.  Queer folk are persons, not flawless magical fairyland creatures.  All of us are beautifully gifted and a hot mess, all at the same time.  And Lord have mercy, do we hunger hunger hunger for power.  

Hedwig, as a character, is just such a soul.  She finds power in her performances, power in creating desire in others, power in the attention her musical giftness creates, power in her charismatic forwardness.  She's filled with pride, and it is from that pride...her sense of her own dominance, her power of role and place...that she dehumanizes and demeans Yitzak.  Pride as sin needs inferiors, needs dominance, needs to belittle and oppress.

Like Mister sins against Celie in THE COLOR PURPLE, so does Hedwig misuse her place of agency.  It's only when the hold of power is broken that Hedwig's tale takes a turn towards healing and a willingness to let go of her hunger for dominance and let others thrive.  Humbled, Hedwig makes space for her lover to express their gifts...which only pride imagines diminish her own.

Better to be lowly in spirit along with the oppressed than to share plunder with the proud, and that we Christians so easily forget.  

Proverbs 16:19, eh?

Blueberries and Catbirds

As the first wave of summer heat spools up, my little garden is almost ready for the second wave of harvest.

Asparagus is the tip of the spear, rising when spring first whispers at warmth.  Those delectable first fern shoots are now long gone, allowed to grow to their natural man-height, a riot of delicate whiskers and poisonous berries.

This week, I'll be gently digging out my overwintered garlic.  Their great-great-grandmother bulbs were Trader Joes organics, which I bought five years ago to plant rather than eat.  They're an indeterminate softneck variety, which I plant copiously in early fall.  Last year I got 25 bulbs, and as I'm of the "triple the garlic" persuasion in any recipe, they go to good use.  This year, I'm hoping for thirty out of two four-by-eight beds.  It's the most I've ever grown, and I may even try intercropping this year, as Nosferatu's Bane seems to ward off early season deer depredations. 

While the garlic hangs dangling in the shade of our carport to cure, I'm also turning my attention to the blueberry bushes in front of my house.  They're a twelve year old planting, and at this point every year they're fat with bunches of ripening blueberries.  Hundreds of berries hang heavy on the bush, and as they blush green to pink to lavender, I'm always convinced we'll maybe this year have enough for a pie.

Until the grey catbirds arrive, that is.  Unlike the local mockers that have taken up regular residence in one of our boxwoods, catbirds aren't seen much around my garden most of the year.  But when the blueberries arrive, it's a catbird feeding frenzy.

Now, I don't mind sharing.  Setting aside something for our avian friends is a fine Mary Poppins thing to do.  For a few years, I'd tried putting "bird netting" over the bushes.  But "bird netting" required building a frame, without which the mockingbirds and catbirds just ate the berries right through the mesh.  Then I tried putting small fine mesh bags around individual bunches of berries, leaving others for the birds.  This worked for one half of one season.

But unlike our fractious, combative, disposable sparrows, who'll also feast upon the berries but were clueless about how to circumvent the bags, catbirds aren't morons.  Like their mockingbird cousins, they're inquisitive and adaptable creatures, and they quickly figured out how to pull those mesh bags off. 

For the last few years, I've gotten no more than a couple of handfuls of berries, and the catbirds have feasted.

So this year, I tried a new tack.  I covered three quarters of my plants with some drawstring fine mesh bags large enough for me to stand in.   But not all, never all.  

Do not harvest to the edge of your fields, as the Law puts it, and that applies to humans and catbirds alike.   That, I thought, will surely do it.  They'll go for the easy pickings, and we'll be copacetic.

After putting the nets on, the very first thing that happened?  

I netted a catbird.  Glancing up from my laptop "office" by the kitchen window, I saw a wild fluttering of grey wings inside the netting.  Rather than eating some of the dozens of ripening berries I'd left easily available, it set hungry eyes on the portion I'd set aside for myself.

The net being fine mesh, the persistent little critter wasn't tangled up at all.  It had just figured out a way to nose through the inadequately tightened drawstring opening, at which point it realized that getting out was going to be a little more challenging.  It flapped around in a panic, the berries forgotten.

I wandered out, and after opening up the netting, with some encouragement got it to fly away, meowing anxiously.

Don't get greedy, little birds.  Don't get greedy.

Prayer and Preparation

Growing up, personal prayer disciplines weren't really a thing I learned in church.

I did pray, but it was primarily something I did at home.  There was a simple grace before meals, an offering of thanks for food and fellowship.  At night, as a small child, I'd pray with Mom before bed, after which we'd tell each other "Sillies," meaning the silliest thing we could think of.  That usually got me giggling, which may or may not have been the most efficacious thing to get me to sleep.

But in church?  Not that I can recall.  I mean, of course there were prayers in worship, which my preteen and adolescent brain mostly tuned out.  In Sunday school, we learned Bible stories, talked about helping people, and did actually service work.  All of that was lovely.  There was much progressive activism, and some marvelous opportunities to serve.  The life of the spirit wasn't really front and center.  My Presbyterian denomination being of a strongly intellectual and liberal bent, the point and the purpose of the practice of prayer wasn't really presented.  

In my late teens, I can't really recall praying at all, and when my home church split in one of those tempest-in-a-teapot ego-pissing-contest fractures that so often happen in congregational life, that was that.  Prayer didn't seem to change the arc of anything in the world, and church?  It was just precisely the same human mess you found everywhere else.  Church folks who thought otherwise were, or so my late adolescent thinking went, either earnestly naive or hypocritical.  At best, church was unnecessary, so I went with the naturally solitary tendencies of my introversion, and just stopped going.  

But the yearning for meaning didn't fade.  

In college, I found myself praying infrequently and clumsily, usually in the form of calling out to the heavens in the wee hours of the morning when God's presence seemed close. 

That deepened and became more pressing, and as I returned to church seeking meaning, I was drawn powerfully to service ministries.  But I also found I hungered for prayer.  Again, I didn't have deeply ingrained personal rituals of invocation and supplication.  It just wasn't taught, because what mattered was justice and equity and service.  The spiritual thing was your own journey, utterly idiosyncratic, do-whatever-floats-yer-ark-if-ya-feel-like-it kinda way.  Or you can just not, because, again, it's all about your unique journey.

This is, I am now convinced, one of the primary reasons the progressive church has withered.  A disciple of Jesus who does not pray is like a Buddhist who scoffs at meditation, a Muslim who thinks alms-giving is for suckers, or a Wiccan who turns up their noses at incantation.  You've neglected the roots, and if the root dies, so goes the plant.

Prayer shapes us, both individually and collectively.  It deepens our sense of God's presence, enriches our connectedness as a Christ-centered spiritual community, and refines and reinforces our integrity as persons.   When we neglect it, over-intellectualize it, use critique to distance ourselves ontologically from it, or generally fail to make it a vital part of our practice of the Way, we fragment and fail.

Even just the rote practice can shift the way we conceive of the world, as described years ago by writer/journalist AJ Jacobs in his entertaining THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY.  

Jacobs noted, as urbane-liberal-he committed to adhering to biblical injunctions for twelve months, that the regular practices of the faith had an unanticipated effect.  The more he prayed and kept the rules of Torah...even as a stunt intended only to provide grist for a manuscript...the more he felt that something was at work in the world.  He'd notice odd resonances, and had a stronger sense of purpose   He'd temporarily tuned his mind to the frequency of faith, and it changed him...temporarily.

That change is the goal of prayer.  

It's not about control, or about getting what we want.  

It's about opening up our perception of the world.  It's about priming us to see the workings of God's grace.

Being in on the Grift

One of the more peculiar things about our recent road-trip through the American South was the presence of Trump Stores.  

Generally speaking, I appreciate the South.  The pace of life, the easy sociability, and the use of the second person plural?  There's something to be said for Y'all Country.  But there's weirdness, too.  There's the juxtaposition of faith and decadence, of extreme wealth and poverty.  And, of course, the lingering racism.  The Trump Store is definitely a bit of Southern Weird.  We passed two of them in our travels, one in Western North Carolina and one in Tennessee, and both were just plain odd.

There they were, festooned with MAGA flags and images of the current president, looking for all the world like a far-right Spirit Halloween.  I was tempted to stop and check it out as we passed, just to go in and immerse the oddness, in the same way that I enjoy now and again dining at a local restaurant run by cultists.  But I didn't even suggest it to my wife, mostly because I knew she couldn't stomach the experience. 

If we were still in the lead up to an election, there'd have been a sense to 'em.  But we're not.  Trump merch just a fixture now, a permanent and peculiar part of our I'd-buy-that-for-a-dollar zeitgeist.  There's not ever been anything like this in my lifetime, this brazen embrace of politician as brand.  It's the teensiest bit pornographic.

Folks know there's money to be made off of the Trump name, and American neofascism has a healthy dollop of PT Barnum profiteering woven into its flag-festooned snake-oil DNA.

At the apex of the brand, a family business makes money hand over fist, selling access and power like never before.  It's not just cheaply made Bibles branded and sold for three times the going retail price.  Now that they're in power, it's $TRUMPcoin, a cryptocurrency that allows the wealthy to buy into the brand and get access and favors in return.  It's a $400,000,000 aircraft, offered up as a gift...not to the nation, but the president directly.   It's private clubs for the oligarchs, where just getting in the door will set you back $500,000.  Emoluments Shmemoluments!  There's money to be made!

And at the bottom of the food chain, folks buying shirts and hats and flags wholesale, which they then hawk online and at Trump stores.  

It's all just so danged crass and venal, pure 100% uncut American Mammonism injected straight into the veins of our Trump addiction.

I thought these things as I drove by, but I thought something else.  Don't be a hypocrite, I thought.

I, too, have been making money off of the Trump name.  I've self-pubbed a whole bunch of my manuscripts through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service over the years.   Of them, only one has sold in even modest numbers.  Since the election, a book I wrote back in 2022 has moved a couple of copies a day, every day.  TRUMP ANTICHRIST, it's called, and it's written in the voice of Satan himself.  It goes for $6.66 a copy, a low, low price selected more for symbolic value than for profit margin.  Amazon gets most of that, and I get about a buck.  Still, that's money.

Though I had to write the book to exorcise Trump-hatred from my soul, I've always felt a little weird about making even modest bank on it.  Those royalty checks ain't a livin', but they're not nothin', either.  How, I mused as we drove, am I different from that Trump Store owner?

Thankfully, Jeff Bezos has solved that problem for me.  

On demand printing costs have risen, and so I recently got a message from Amazon noting a rejiggering of their royalty payment policy.  Come June 10, every self-pubbed paperback on Kindle Direct Publishing that's selling for less than ten bucks will yield no royalties at all.  Not one thin dime.  So every penny of that Six Dollars and Sixty Six cents will go right into Amazon's pocket.  

In a little under two weeks, I'll get nothing from the Great Grift at all.

It feels liberating.

An Unexpectedly Fine Prayer

Rache and I have, for the last few months, been watching our way through The Righteous Gemstones.  As a lampoon of American prosperity religion, it checks a whole bunch of buttons for me.  The cast is excellent, the writing mostly tart, and it blends drama and comedy in ways that work most of the time.  It can be a little tonally jarring, and it gets a wee bit too willfully profane at times, but I enjoy it.

What's...odd...about it is that, as much as it mocks the quarrelsome, shallow, wealth-and-success obsessed Gemstone family?  Every once in a while, a bit of faith slips through.  In season one, the megachurch spectacle was juxtaposed with a genuinely earnest presentation of mission work.  

In season two?  Well, beyond a murderous band of neon motorcycle ninjas, there was a single sublime moment that still sticks with me.

It came as the patriarch of the Gemstone clan, played by John Goodman, was renewing an old acquaintance.  Eli Gemstone was sitting in a restaurant with Junior, a friend from his former life as a professional wrestler.  Junior was reminiscing about his manipulative, distant, and unloving father, and was clearly nursing some significant emotional wounds.

Seeing an old friend struggling, Eli says, "Let's pray, Junior."

He replies, apologetically, that he's not religious.

Eli returns, "Well, it's a good thing I am.  I'll show you what to do."

And then they hold hands, and they pray together.  Now, prayer in the Gemstone world is often crassly self-interested, or presented as comedy.  But not this time.

The prayer that's offered up is heartfelt, personal, and deeply steeped in grace.  It acknowledged pain endured, the strangeness of God's purposes, and the trust that God's mercy always holds out the possibility of redemption.  It was short, simple, and meaningful.

"Damn.  Kinda nice," said Junior, surprised at how moving he found such good words.

"Dang," I thought as I watched, equally surprised.  "That was genuinely a fine prayer."

Every once in a while, the light and purpose of prayer makes itself known through the absurdity of it all.

Auto Start/Stop

I have a thing about wasting fuel.

As often as I can, I get around on my 300cc Yamaha scooter, a blatty little buzzbomb of a thing that gets me almost anywhere I'd like to go.  Generally speaking, it's rated at 75 miles to the gallon, which isn't half bad.

But I get in the low to mid 80s.  My last three tanks came in at 84 mpg, in a mix of highway droning and suburban errand-running.  There are reasons for this, but the primary one is that once the engine is warmed up, I turn it off whenever I stop.  As I pull up to a red light, I hit the engine kill switch, and coast in slowly.  I'll then sit there for a bit.  Ten seconds, maybe twenty.  Thirty, at some of the more annoying ones.   Then, as the light changes and before the drivers around me look away from their phones, I'll blip the starter button.  Off I go.  No muss.  No fuss.

I began this habit three rides ago, when my aging Yamaha YZF600R sportbike was struggling with a cooling system issue.  I'd kill the motor at stops, because if I didn't, the poor ol' thing would overheat.  I noticed then that I got a notable improvement in range as a collateral benefit of having to kludge a ratbike.  I've done it ever since, and increasingly, so have our cars.

Once we bought our first hybrid, our trusty fuel-sipping Prius did that as part of its design.  If you weren't on the gas, the internal combustion engine would just cut out, and you'd be either coasting or running on battery.  Our current Accord Hybrid does exactly the same thing.  The manual transmission Opel I drove on a trip to Ireland did it. The big V8-powered Mercedes Benz S-Class I recently rented for a road trip to Dollywood and Nashville?  Same deal.  

Auto start/stop generally gets you about 7% more range, all things being equal.  On my scooter, it's more like 12%.  I spend less money.  I use less fuel.  I go farther.   In the instruction manual for the scoot, Yamaha straight up tells you to do it.  "Want to save money?  Just turn the engine off every time you stop," says the manufacturer.  Starter motors are sturdy things, over engineered for countless use-cycles, or so I recall when talking to the mechanics at the alternator and starter dealer where I worked for a summer. 

There's no downside at all, way I see it.  I'm no fan of things that don't work.  But if you can improve a product so gets the job done and saves me money, I'm there.  

Apparently, some loudmouthed online influencers think saving money is a problem.  "It's annoying," they'll say, because being reminded that you're getting 5% more range every time the car fires up again is apparently something they dislike.  "It slows me down," they'll say, even though it does not.  "It wears out your engine," they'll say, showing that they don't know a danged thing about modern internal combustion engines.  

This regime being what it is, auto start/stop has now been targeted by Lee Zeldin, a fossil-fuel-use enthusiast who was appointed to be current administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.  "We're going to fix that," he said.  "Everyone hates it."  Everyone, eh?  Golly, I better go along with the herd, then.

The EPA, encouraging us to be less efficient, less thrifty, and less practical?  The EPA, celebrating pointless waste? Lord have mercy, we're in Htrae.

It's like wanting less efficient toilets, lightbulbs that produce more heat than light, wasteful showerheads, and going back to dishwashers that guzzle water and don't get your dishes clean.  It's just one part foolishness, two parts cussedness, and a little pinch of mean-crazy.

I mean, you can already turn it off if you're such a sensitive soul.  Every pretty pretty Princess can deactivate that pea if they're so inclined.  That's what the button is for.  

It ain't broke.  Something else is going on.  What might that be?  When presented with an odd course of action being aggressively presented, is to ask this question: Who benefits?

Who benefits from our using five percent more gas?  I mean, we don't.  

But our new best friends in Qatar and Saudi Arabia sure do. 

Tearing Down Memories

One of the things about living in the same area for fifty years is that your memories are of a different place, inhabited by different people.

Most of the folks I know who once lived in and around my corner of Northern Virginia are now gone.  They're either elsewhere or very very elsewhere, as moves and mortality take their toll.  I'll drive past the street where a high school girlfriend once lived, or the cul de sac that a now-deceased friend from middle school called home, and encountering those physical locations will stir my creaky neurons to remembrance.

So much isn't what it was.  Where familiar haunts once stood, there are now new developments, as the endless American cycle of diaspora, destruction, and regrowth grinds memory to dust.

Like, say, the multiplex theater where I went with my wife on our very first date.  It had, itself, replaced a drive-in theater, and it was a bustling thriving nexus of the local film-going experience...back when human beings went places to see films.  It's long gone now, replaced by a thrumming insta-city.

Before we went to see Dead Poets Society on that date night years ago, I'd taken her to dinner at a little Vietnamese place where my family were regulars.  I'd sussed that she was vegetarian, and I knew there was a solid tofu option on the menu, so there we went.  Cha Gio closed decades ago now, replaced by another restaurant under different management.  

But the tiny, slightly dumpy strip mall it inhabited remained, awkwardly sited at the crossroads of Graham and Route 50.  It housed pupuserias and bodegas and a beauty supply store, but it was clearly not thriving.  The pandemic had killed off the largest tenant, a sprawling Chinese place that my parents would take the boys to when they were little.  Harvest Moon...or "The Rice House," as the boys called it...had itself taken the place of my parents steakhouse of choice.  Back in the 1970s, that box of a building housed one of their prime Friday night date-night locales.  "We'll be at the Black Angus," or so Dad would announce portentously to the sitter, because calling the restaurant landline would be the only way to reach them in an emergency.  The place had a dance floor, where Dad and Mom would spend a wide-lapeled seventies evening of dinner and dancing. 

For special occasions, we'd get to go there too.  I remember once, when both sets of grandparents were visiting, getting out on the floor and dancing with my grandmother.  It's an old sepia memory, more a series of sense impressions than a full recollection.  But when I drive to see Mom, that memory returns regularly when I pass the long-closed building.

The other night, as I drove her back from an evening at our place, we noticed that the whole strip mall was suddenly closed.  In between my picking Mom up and returning her, construction fences had been erected.  The parking lot was now empty.  Every storefront, boarded up.  The Latino food truck that's done business there for years had decamped across the way to the parking lot of a laundromat.

At some point, I'll come up over the rise to approach the intersection, and there'll be nothing there but rubble.

So it goes, as Vonnegut would say.

Difficult Weeding

As my garden stirs to life in the burgeoning warmth of early summer, I find myself engaged in some difficult weeding.

Weeding is something I enjoy.  It's primal and satisfying, as I carefully root out plants that are encroaching on the growth I'm trying to encourage.  Grasses and chickweed, clover and creeping violets?  They're all welcome to the rest of my yard, which is a flower-speckled natural smorgasbord for pollinators.  But in the 272 square feet I've got set aside as raised beds, I've got other plans.

So I take the time to root about and remove all of the growth that doesn't match my intent for that space.  It's a constant effort, but well worth it for the health of my vegetables.

Where it gets peculiar?  Volunteers.  

As most of my soil now comes from the compost piles in my shaded back yard, the last few years I've noted an ever-growing number of desirable plants rising from my compost-amended beds.  The seeds that make their way into the compost bin have a tendency to want to grow.

The familiar forms of squash seedlings rise in the middle of a bed I've got set aside for okra.  The usually welcome leaves of young tomatoes spring up where butternuts and 'lopes are intended.  This year, I counted over thirty 'maters popping up their distinctively complex first leafings.  Thirty.  That's a whole lot of unanticipated offering.

In some places, I'll leave them.  Several of the Providential tomatoes are welcome to stay in my tomato plots.  Last year, when a cantaloupe unexpectedly presented itself, I just let it run, and man, it was delicious.  I look forward to planting the progeny of those 'lopes this year.  

But in most of my garden, they're just not part of the plan.

Here, my pastoral predilections come into conflict with my gardening awareness.  As a small church pastor, unexpected volunteer energies are as welcome as manna from heaven.  Where human beings of their own free will make the choice to serve and put in effort, it's a marker of something afoot that needs to be encouraged and enthusiastically supported.  Those blessings are a vital part of God's work in the world, and the primary pastoral task is to nurture, resource, and celebrate them.  

Sometimes, a gentle nudge of the pastoral crook is necessary to keep things on track, to assuage the mutual misunderstandings that we humans are so good at, or to keep limited energies from scattering.  But mostly, it's a question of not letting my ALL-SHALL-LOVE-ME-AND-DESPAIR ego-desire to be in control become a stumbling block to what the Holy Spirit is doing.  

It's remarkable how much of pastoring is simply not getting in the way. 

But an actual garden?  It needs a bit more focusing than the metaphorical garden of the faithful.  It only takes the form and shape we give it, as herbs and vegetables aren't capable of sharing our intent for their growth or placement, no matter how many planning meetings and visioning exercises we inflict on them.

Weeding must be done.

So, with muttered words of apology and promises to tend well to their kin, I'll dig fingers into the ground, and pluck tiny tomatoes and seedling squash from the living soil.  

The Joys of Sleeplessness

One of the great and paradoxical joys of my deepening middle age is the absence of sleep.

I remember, when I was twenty or thirty, that sleep  once filled an entire night.  I'd lie down, close my eyes, and when I awoke, it would be morning.  

Technically, this is still true, but by "morning" I now mean "one in the morning" or "four in the morning."  Some of this is a factor of my fifty six year old bladder.  Some is a factor of my tendency to go to sleep waaaay earlier.  By ten thirty in the PM, I'm typically all tuckered out.

But much of it is just me gettin' old.  I'll wake, and be fully awake, with the night still stretching out ahead of me.

There've been times, when I was younger, when I've experienced insomnia.  Typically, they were times of intense disruption and anxiety, when I'd wake with my mind churning and a knot in my gut.  In such circumstances, the absence of sleep can become a self-reinforcing waking nightmare, as you rouse, get stressed about the fact that you aren't sleeping, and then the stress of not sleeping itself is enough to keep you tossing and fitful.

For the last few years, though, I've come at those times differently.  I began using the time to pray, and now, that's become my default.  

When I open my eyes to the depth of night, it's a blessing, because that's a great time to pray.  I do pray to begin the day, and during the day, but sometimes there's so much going on that those daytime prayers just don't come.  

Lying there in bed?  It's not like there's anything else I need to be doing.  So I pray.  I'll offer a word of gratitude for sleeplessness itself, and the space it provides to tend to my soul's needs. 

I'll offer thanksgiving for whatever goodness the day served up.  I'll remember folks who are on the church prayer list, and offer words over their struggles.  I'll set the names of friends and family before the Creator of the Universe, and express my yearnings for their wholeness and health.  I'll recall the mess of our world, and those in need.

Eventually, sleep returns to me in its own time.  As I feel myself gently fading, I'll pray the Lord's Prayer, bridging my way back into dreams.

Benedictine Matins it ain't.  It's a far softer and more organic cousin to that monastic prayer.  

Yet it lends me an appreciation for that ancient tradition, one that find gracious purpose in the deep of the night.

Sleek Economies

I've got a thing for nice cars.  I always have.  I was the kid doodling jacked-up Mustangs and Barracudas on the margins of my geometry notebooks when I should have been paying attention in class.  I subscribed to Car and Driver when I was fourteen.  I went with my dad to help haggle for his new car when I was 15.

The vehicles I've owned in  my adult life haven't reflected that hankering.  They've been practical and inexpensive, because my Scots blood can't abide with the thought of spending more money than absolutely necessary.  I also prefer efficient cars, because...well...the planet isn't exactly cooling.  Still, the desire remains, and where my day-to-day is functional, every once in a while, I'll rent something that scratches my itch for power and comfort.

So when the wife said, "hey, let's rent a car for our upcoming road trip to Nashville," I knew exactly what I wanted.  We were travelling just under two thousand miles total over nine days in a rambling VA-NC-TN-KY-WV-PA-WV-MD-VA loop, serving up a mix of mountains and long stretches of superslab, and nothing but nothing is better at devouring miles than a Benz.  

The best of the Benzes is their flagship S Class, particularly in its W222 form, which was produced from 2014 to 2020.  Big, luxe, comfy, and powerful, it was a land-yacht designed for the Autobahn.  With a standard four -liter twin-turbo V8 putting out a nudge over four hundred and sixty horsepower from beneath that long hood, it's serenely capable of humming along all day at 110 while your seat gives you a hot stone massage and lightly perfumed air wafts through the cabin.  It's the sort of car driven by old-money patricians and Russian oligarchs.

Back when people bought cars, that is.

Americans don't really drive cars all that much these days, preferring Compact Utility Vehicles, SUVs, and light trucks.  We like to ride high, and the long low sleekness 1980s-me had always assumed would be the norm for future cars in the 2020s never came to pass.  That means taller and blockier profiles, which means aerodynamic inefficiency, which bites deep into our national fuel use.

That comes at a cost as we travel the wide open spaces of our nation, and I was reminded of this as I reviewed the fuel consumption data at the end of the trip.  

That big ol' Benz, with which we...er..."made good time"...over mountains and plains, as state after state whisked on by?  

Over the whole trip, it averaged just a notch over 27 miles to the gallon.  That means, excessive and powerful though the car was, it was more efficient than the average American light vehicle, which...according to the EPA in 2022...got 26.4 miles to the gallon.  

With two of us in the car, we got more Person-Miles-to-the-Gallon than had I taken the same trip alone in a Prius.  It was nearly twice as efficient as flying.

Not, of course, that being ecologically minded was the point of our trip, but it was a peculiar truth to encounter.

A Little Mammon Ruins the Whole Loaf

It only takes the slightest change to make a very, very large difference.

For example, there's the human genome.  My genetic material, the basic information written into our DNA?  It's what makes us human, and what makes each human being different from every other human being.  The tiniest tweak, and we're a different person.

Larger variances make us not human at all.

Eighty percent of our fundamental genetic makeup is identical to that of cattle.  Eighty five percent, we share with mice.  So only a fifteen percent variance, and we're scuttering around beneath the floorboards and leaving little rice-sized poop pellets on the kitchen counter.

We become something categorically different.  A cow is not a human is not a mouse, eh?

I've been meditating on difference and Christian faith lately, as I lead the adult ed class of my little church through reflections on race, difference, and what binds us together as Jesus folk.  One of the great strengths of Christian faith, as I see it, is its ability to exist polyculturally.  The Gospel speaks in every language, and can adapt to the forms and norms of every human culture.

Not that we haven't squabbled over everything and anything, including a single vowel in a single Greek word in one statement of faith.  But Christian unity is formed and shaped by the grace of the Spirit, and our willingness to care for one another despite our manifold differences.  I see Jesus in Methodist and Mennonite, in Catholic and Charismatic, in Orthodoxies both Slavic and Amhara.  We're progressive and conservative, plain and erudite, and all of it can be truly Christian.

Still, there are areas where I'll admit I have always struggled, particularly where the Gospel becomes focused on wealth and prosperity.  

That's kind of a problem right now.

The Prosperity Gospel is ascendant in our culture, the dominant form of the faith, to the point where it's really the closest thing America has to a state religion.  As acolytes of Kenneth Copeland's Word of Faith movement now sit at the heart of power, there's never been a moment when this movement has been as prominent as a form of Christian expression. 

The language of Prosperity Preachin', as I've noted numerous times over the years, about 80 percent comprised of recognizable Christian theology.  Read through the writings of Creflo A. Dollar, or endure one of Paula White's surprisingly listless sermons, and you'll find most of it almost kinda sorta works.  

But that twenty percent variance makes a difference, enough so that it is no longer reflective of the teachings of Jesus.

Money money money, gain gain gain, ever bigger ever more?  There's no version of Jesus who pointed us towards material wealth and social influence. There's no version of the Jesus we know from the Gospels that tolerated venality and indulgence as a marker of spiritual blessing.   You can bowlderize him into a shambling FrankenChrist golem that makes that case, sure, but a plain reading of the Nazarene's intent just won't get you there.  It's uncanny valley Jesus, Jesus shifted and warped to serve the demands of our endless capitalist avarices.

Wealth, as Jesus taught about it, is a dangerous thing for the soul.  The wealthier you are, the more likely it is that you're in some serious spiritual mess.  You have built your house on the sand of human imaginings.  Our material gain is, at best, a dishonorable thing that must be bent to the use of grace with cunning and intention.  

You cannot, said my Lord and Savior in a very declarative way, serve God and wealth. 

The Good Ache of Labor

I ache this morning, and it's a good thing.

Yesterday, the echoes of Easter still in my soul, I spent most of the day engaged in strenuous physical activity.  It began with a brisk three and a half mile walk, as I dropped off our old minivan to get a failed repair redone.  "Do you need a ride home," asked the apologetic manager.  "Nah," I said.  "It's a nice day, and the walk'll be good for me."

The morning was cool and pleasant, the clouds high and solid, and the crispness of the air felt good against my bare arms for the hour I spent putting one foot in front of the other.

For much of the rest of the morning, I was moving mattresses and disassembling beds, as every single bedroom in our house got a new bed.  Well, not "new," not technically.  But newer, as the mattresses that used to grace two rooms in the house of my son and daughter in law found their way to us.

The wife has been agitating for a larger bed in our room for some time, as the joys of perimenopause and the general creakiness of our mutual aging have made sleep an occasionally uncertain thing.  Particularly if you've got a husband who twitches and snorts and fidgets in his sleep.  

So a queen replaced our full, which was moved to our upstairs guest room, along with a beautiful but hefty handcrafted hardwood bedframe.  The downstairs guest room got another queen.  It was a day long bedding do-si-do.

And then the van was ready, and...as Rache was busy in meetings all day...I walked the three and a half miles back to pick it up.  That walk was more leisurely, as I was feeling a little spent.   As I have observed many times in such jaunts, so few other human beings are actually out on foot in the 'burbs.  The flow of our machines is endless, as we rush from place to place, and our bodies sit idle, their energies fermenting into agitation and anxiety.

I can feel yesterday in my flesh today.  Again, it's a good feeling, a feeling I appreciate.  I know, being the throes of middle age, that this sort of day will not always be possible.  That systems will fail.  Knees will go.  Hips will go.  Stamina will fade. 

So even as I walked that return trip, feeling the warmth of the late spring sun on my back, I was grateful for it.  Grateful for each step.  Grateful for another season when my body is able.  

And Lord, did I sleep well.

Jorge Bergoglio Changes Again

The first thing I learned from Jorge Bergoglio was that people can change.

He was, back when he took the reins of the Catholic church, someone that I'll admit to watching with a bit of wariness.  

Before he chose his nom de Papa, Jorge was something of a culture warrior.  He was active on the newly minted Twitter, and back in 2013 I observed that most of his pre-Francis tweets weren't the most gracious and welcoming things I'd ever seen.

On social media in his native Argentina, he learned in heavily against gay adoption, to the point where that seemed...if all you looked at was Twitter at the time...to be his primary schtick as an archbishop.  He was conservative, eh?  

But even at that point in the social media era, I'd realized that Twitter was a poisonous and unreliable thing.  "Microblogging" was already bringing out the worst in human beings, or so I'd observed in myself.  It made us prone to shallow, shortsighted, reactive thinking.  It critically sabotaged attention spans, obliterated subtlety, and caused pathological self-promotion.

And it caused us to blindly attack one another, as online mobs yearning for a daily dose of self-indulgent self-righteousness swarmed anyone for any perceived infraction.

So I committed myself to reserving judgment.  Let's see who he becomes, I reminded myself, not who he was.

In his role as Francis, Jorge was quite different.  His seeming commitment to ideological purity over grace evaporated in the light of his responsibility to minister to billions.  

At the time, Jorge/Francis described taking that mantle as a moment of real epiphany, an awareness that the conflicts that had animated him were below the role Providence had called him to play.  Like Saul of Tarsus, the man before the call wasn't the same as the man after the call.  In becoming Francis, Jorge Bergoglio was transformed.  Instead of invective, words of reconciliation and kindness.  He chose his ground, and that ground was solid rock.  Love for neighbor.  Care for the poor and the stranger.  A willingness to push back against power and falsehood.

This change infuriated those of a legalistic or Pharisaic temperament, in the same way that the actual teachings of Jesus infuriate such souls.  Not that Francis was "progressive."   He understood the task set before him by our mutual Master.

Francis did his job ably, and with integrity.  He presented the central teachings of Jesus effectively and personally.  As did Benedict before him, honestly, and John Paul II as well.

Euge, serve bone et fidelis.

  

Eating Together

For twenty years, I've led Maundy Thursday services, ever since I started down the pastoring path.

It was never a thing for me growing up in church, as my home church was a big downtown congregation at the heart of the nation's capital.  Even if there'd been a service there, it'd have been such a pain navigating traffic that my parents wouldn't have tolerated it.

As I've spent my ministry career in small congregations, I've always run the service in the simplest of ways.  No complex liturgies or innovations, just a good ol' potluck, framed by the breaking of the bread and the drinking of the cup.  It's as simple a way as possible to mark the Last Supper, and the command to celebrate communion with one another.

As a creature that takes deep comfort in habit and ritual, I've always brought both bread (challah, typically, because it's way tastier than matzoh, and the Lord's Supper ain't a Seder) and soup.  The soup is always the same soup, several boxes worth of Trader Joe's Tomato and Red Pepper.  It's pretty tasty.

This year, I started out to do the same thing.  But three things changed the arc of the evening.  

First, there was already going to be plenty of soup for everyone, a tasty homemade vegetable stew.  My contribution wouldn't be necessary, and if prior years were any guide, I'd end up taking it home.  Despite my best efforts to consume it, most of it would go bad, and then get dumped into my compost.  Composting meant that at least it returns to the earth, but it still felt like a waste.

Second, earlier in the day I'd chatted with church volunteers about the ever expanding demand for food in the town.  Our tiny Little Free Pantry pushed through twenty five tons of food last year, and with more and more economic pressure on the DC area, that seems to be increasing.  The stream of souls coming to our door in search of sustenance is swelling.  Across the way at the town's food bank, the shelves are increasingly bare.  Wasting food in that context seems even less tolerable.

And third, well, there were the words of the Apostle Paul from his letter to the endlessly frustrating Corinthians.  In preparation for the service, I'd re-read the section where he challenges them over the mess they'd made of the Lord's Supper.  They'd modeled their communion after the cultural expectations of the Greco-Roman feast.  There, the important and influential guests ate first and abundantly, and the poor and unknown were served last, getting scraps or nothing.

This annoyed the bejabbers out of Paul.  As The Message puts it:

I find that you bring your divisions to worship—you come together, and instead of eating the Lord’s Supper, you bring in a lot of food from the outside and make pigs of yourselves. Some are left out, and go home hungry. Others have to be carried out, too drunk to walk. I can’t believe it! Don’t you have your own homes to eat and drink in? Why would you stoop to desecrating God’s church? Why would you actually shame God’s poor? I never would have believed you would stoop to this. And I’m not going to stand by and say nothing.

With Paul's words echoing in my soul, I set those boxes of soup into the donation crate.  Afterwards, church folk ate and drank together, partaking of bread and cup and remembering Christ's call to love and serve.  It was a gracious time of fellowship, and there was more than enough for all.

And for those who come to us in need today, that soup will be there waiting for them.  

It's pretty tasty.