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.