Bloomin' Onion

A couple of months ago, with the snow finally melted but spring still a distance away, I made a decision about planting in my garden.  It was, as those decisions often are, inspired by my providential forgetfulness.

One of the yellow onions I'd bought from Harris Teeter had been left unused for too long.  It wasn't rotting or foul or ready for the compost.  It was growing.  A five inch long shoot stuck out like a green spear from the non-rooted end, as despite a lack of water or soil, the life was still strong within it.

Maybe, I thought, that one needs to be planted.   I took a trowel, wandered outside, and plopped it into the soil of an unused corner of my four by eight garlic bed.  I watered it, then left it to its own devices.  

If it grew, it grew.  If it didn't, no harm, no foul.

As the weather has warmed, it's thriving.  I soon realized that atop the now two-foot long primary shoot and another secondary shoot, a scape had formed.  The scape looked remarkably like a wee little onionette sitting atop the shoot.That meant it was going to flower, and if it flowered, it was going to seed.  Or so I assumed, having only ever grown spring onions before.

A little Googling revealed that onions have, like many similar plants, a two year life cycle.  Year one, the energy pours into the root, which grows fat and tasty.  Year two, that energy-dense root pours all of the stored life into flowering bodies, which create the seeds that will continue the process.

Meaning, I might be able to get an entire bed worth of onions, if I seed-save it.  This seemed a lovely prospect, and so I've waited and watched as the scape has grown, the outer onionskin thinning, tiny little buds forming into what will be a lovely white chrysanthemum-esque blossom.

It's just bursting open now, and as a hundred little buds prepare to spread their petals, I'm eager to see how it progresses.

Remarkable, how much happens in the garden if you simply leave things to live as God intends.

The Purpose of Fellowship

On a recent Sunday after worship, I made a beeline for the van that was parked on the walkway leading from the parking lot to our fellowship hall. It's the Tibetan Buddhist van, driven by a monk, that arrives at our church every Sunday morning carrying the fruits of a trip to Trader Joe's.

I'm not sure how many churches have Tibetan Buddhist Trader Joe's Delivery Time as part of their Sunday ritual, but one of the spiritual gifts of little congregations is our idiosyncrasy. The small church can be delightfully, beautifully weird.

We've been partnering with a local Buddhist temple for years now, as their desire to feed the hungry and our desire to feed the hungry have coalesced. Their colorfully decorated van picks up food from Trader Joe's (thanks, Trader Joe's!) that would otherwise go to waste. They bring it to us, and we set it out in our Little Free Pantry. A significant portion of the thirty-five tons of food we together offered up to the food-insecure in our town this last year came from that fruitful partnership.

The thing is, this all now happens during our fellowship hour, and it's changed the dynamic of that event.

The drop off used to be on Wednesdays, mid-day, and a small group of church folk would gather to help unload. But for the last little while, it's been on Sunday, immediately following worship, right at the very start of the hallowed social hour. It's a question of timing, because the good folks at the nearest Trader Joe's set out their pallets for the community at 10 AM Sunday morning.

Change in the small church happens differently. It’s an organic process, as a community encounters a new thing and adapts, embraces, or resists. It’s less a question of formal processes of decisionmaking, and more a question of how the qualitative character of the congregation is impacted. Can this change be joyfully integrated into the ephemeral “us,” or will it tear us apart? This means that small churches will both fight imposed change to the death and, simultaneously, can turn on a dime. Like I said, we’re weird.

That first Sunday, I will admit to having felt a little bit ill at ease.

Is this an intrusion? What impact is this having on our life together? Does this change serve a clear and evident purpose?

The answer was immediately apparent. People were still socializing. But they were doing so while moving, sorting, weighing, and stocking shelves. We were still gathered around food, just...differently. One can talk over a meal, but one can also have a good chat during the shared preparation of a meal, and that is precisely what we were doing.

There were other things I noticed. Like, say, the visitors to our church who, coming into the social hour, immediately found their place working side by side with long-time church folk, as the bucket-brigade of souls moving boxes of food for the hungry opened for each new participant.

Or, just as notably, the children of the church, who took to the unloading like ducks to water, eagerly working side by side with the grownups. A task done joyously and together feels a whole lot like play, after all.

This last Sunday, it was two of the little boys of the church, rambunctious little buddies, who were eagerly and voluntarily taking point in the process. One arrived grinning wide with his faceful of new adult teeth, at the helm of a push cart. We piled it high, and the smile never left his face as he pulled away.

The other...much smaller...wheeled up with a handcart that was as tall as he was.

"Are you sure you can handle this box," I said to him, seriously. "It's very heavy." "Very heavy," he nodded, just as seriously. "I got it." He repeated those words like a mantra of encouragement as he wheeled the box away.

Back and forth they went, until the job was done.

All of us, young and new and old, can appreciate a clear and self-evidently good purpose, and the blessings of a new and gracious thing.

Particularly if afterwards, we know there will still be snacks.

Every No is One Step Closer to No

Yesterday was Tuesday, which meant it was task, shopping, and lunch day with Mom.

The tasks were multiple.  The bush by her front door needed trimming, as did the shrubs and trees around the path that leads from her screen porch to the back yard.  The screen porch also needed a good sweep. 

It was a beautiful day, blue skies and puffy clouds and still-crisp late spring morning air, so the work was a pleasure.  With three exceptions.  The boxwoods were thick with pollen, which my trimming cast in thick particulate clouds around me as I worked.   There were gnats by the thousands, blossomed out into the world with the first warmth and rain, pressing in like willful pollen around my eyes.  

And there was a door to door salesman, one of those aggressive young guys in company monogrammed t-shirts who ride through neighborhoods on their knockoff electric Segways.  I was in the zone getting stuff done, and had no desire to hear from him about how he was just there because he was doing work for a neighbor, and had a special deal to offer on internet/phone/roofing/tree work/gutters/windows.  He hummed around on his wheels, pausing briefly on the sidewalk in front of my Moms' house to fiddle with his tablet.  I put out as radiant an "I am a Man Working who does not Wish to be Disturbed" vibe as I could.  He moved along.

Once that was accomplished, it was time to head over to Safeway to get groceries for the next week.  Mom doesn't need all that much, but the walking involved in shopping has become too uncomfortable as the years have progressed, so I'm happy to oblige. 

The last couple of weeks, I've also picked up a few things for a dear old friend of Moms' from the neighborhood.  She lives alone like Mom does, and is in treatment for cancer, which makes life a bit more difficult.

Yesterday, we'd gotten some over the counter meds for her, and Mom and I dropped by her place to deliver them.  While Mom waited in the car, I walked them in and then chatted with her friend for a bit, because of course I would.  As I was preparing to leave, she said, "Hey, David, looks like there's a salesman at the door.  I don't want to talk to him.  Could you run him off?"

It was the same dude on wheels, of course, and as I headed over to the door, he wheeled over to the car where Mom was patiently waiting.  Great.

I went out, and he was mid-schpiel with Mom.  "Hey there," I said.  "We're not the homeowners here."

He continued with the pitch as if I hadn't spoken.  "We're not the homeowners," I repeated.  "We're dropping medicine off, and the homeowner has cancer and doesn't want to come to the door."

He looked at me from the perch of his machine, with bright and uncompromising eyes, behind which seemed to be a non-sentient process with only limited reply options.  There was no evident emotional response to "medicine" or "cancer."  

"Well, I can come back later, then."  

"No," I said, a little more emphatically.  "She has no interest in anything you're selling.  She does not want to come to the door."  

"I've helped seventy percent of your neighbors save money today," he continued, lying so brazenly it could get him a position in the current administration.

I ignored that, and shifted to a more sympathetic tack.  "Look, I know it's hard going door-to-door," I said, getting into the car.  "Did it myself for a while.  All those turndowns aren't easy."  Oy, that was a merciless job.

There was a faint hint of a reaction buried under the sales pitch, and it wasn't the relief that comes when the souls who are doing those godforsaken jobs realize I see them as human.  

It was defiance.  

The blunt algorithm that seemed to have control of this particular human fished for an automated retort.  "I'm good at what I do.  I'm a good salesman.  Every no is one step closer to yes.  Every no is one step closer to yes."  With that more-than-a-little-rapey sales mantra hanging in the air, he wheeled backward.

"I am not going to let you bring me down.  I am one step closer to yes."

And with that, he whirred away on his little machine wheels.

Lord have mercy on his soul.

The Cage of Asparagus

It wasn't the best harvest season for my little asparagus plot this year.

It's been five years since I put that rootstock into the soil of a four by six bed, and I've been tending and feeding it ever since.  The first two years I just let the bed run, tall sprawling ferns rising taller than I.  For the last three, I've taken the first month of growth, a modest yield of tasty spears to begin the spring growing season.

This year, the weather has wildly oscillated, and the asparagus got a little caught out.  Two weeks of summer-warm heat back in April started the spring growth cranking, but things suddenly shifted back to near freezing many nights.  The surge which began with the ferocity of an advancing phalanx petered out to near nothing, with yields significantly below the prior two years.  

After four weeks of harvesting a small handful a day, I decided to call it.  I didn't want to strain the roots, pushing those plants to the point where I was actually harming them with my picking.   Like all living things, asparagus officinalis needs rest, needs a time of Sabbath from the demands of production.  If you take and take and take and take, what you end up with a dead plot the next year.

There's a metaphor in there for our compulsive busyness, I think. 

So I let the ferns grow, and set about building a structure around the bed to support their growth.  I've done this in prior years, as I realized that those six foot plus ferns weren't exactly stable.  As they leaned to the south to catch the light of the sun, they'd flop down onto neighboring beds, or collapse during high wind events.

The structure is made entirely of the growth of my garden, as I take the dried stalks of last year's sunflowers, a roll of garden twine, and with a little snipping and securing, hey presto, I've got a structural cage for asparagus.  They're stablised, protected from the wind and errant lawnmowers.

I suppose the next step would be to add a movable protective cover, to shield those delicate ferns in the event we get significant hail.

As every gardener knows, it's important to have an awning for the cage of asparagus.

The Logic of Worldly Success

 

"The logic of worldly success rest on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men!  A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!"

Thomas Merton, Seven Storey Mountain, p. 362

Wordsmithing is not a Spiritual Gift

Continuing on from my prior meditations on the PCUSA's Proposed New Confession:

Having laid out the nature of God and our stubborn violation of the good in its first two sections, the third section tells the story of God's response.  It describes the point and purpose of Jesus, and the blessings of the Holy Spirit as it gathers and empowers those who are moved by the grace of the Gospel.

There are things, of course, that one can pick at and quibble with.  

Calling Jesus a "Palestinian Jew," for example, is comprehensible but peculiar.  Would any Judean of the first century have spoken of themselves in this way?  Would Jesus?  Generally speaking, the understanding of that region as uniformly "Palestine" is a historical imposition of imperialism, both Roman and British, which means it's got some wildly ironic resonances.  Colonizing history with ideological anachronisms isn't just a venial sin of right wing nationalist hagiographers, eh?

Or in the very next sentence, where we are told that "Jesus showed that the brutality of facts does not define the truth of God."  It's a very pretty sentence, but...huh.  "The Brutality of Facts?"  What exactly does that mean?   Is factuality a problem?  It sure is in our post-reality culture, where facts are whatever we say they are, and alternative facts are the wormed tongue of tyrannical systems.  "We will not allow Our Truth to be defined by Facts," sounds like the sort of thing one hears from a White House spokesperson these days.

Saying "the brutality of facts" seems far less sharp than "the facts of brutality," which creates a cleaner mirrored couplet with "the truth of God."  Assuming, of course, that this is what was meant.

I could keep going.  

But I won't.

Mostly, this is because as I engage with these latter two sections, I can feel the Dark Spirit of Wordsmithing rising within me.   Picking over language and legalistic quibbling are both bitter fruits of the Presbyterian compulsion to wordsmith, in which we imagine that we can build a semiotic tower to heaven if only we can workshop just the right words.  I succumb to the prideful, perfectionist, endlessly dissatisfied obsessions of that particular demon just as easily as any other Presbyterian.

And mostly?  Mostly these last two sections are lovely and thoughtful, gracious and faithful and hopeful.  Really solid work.

I would have no trouble integrating large sections of them into my little congregation's weekly Affirmation of Faith, where we read from the Confessions as a shared expression of what we hold together.

Once I've stopped worrying at it, that is.

Murderous Birds

In the cycle of liturgical readings this last week, we were again served up the story of the murder of Stephen by an enraged mob.

Lord have mercy, is it a violent, unpleasant scripture. We’d rather not see it, rather not have to deal with a brutal death, not on a Sunday morning.

It’s one of those texts one struggles to find a framing for, not because it’s hard finding some contemporary analogue from our fevered newsfeeds, but because there are just too many. Perhaps a failed assassination attempt might best reflect the blight of violence this week, I thought, assuming we hadn't forgotten about that already. 

I was fiddling about with several options, sitting at my kitchen table workspace working on the sermon, when a sound caught my attention.

It was a frantic chirruping, loud and relentless as an alarm, sounding from the bush just outside of my window. I glanced over, and I saw a big bull bluejay, six feet away from me, pecking intently at something on a branch. “What’s it eating,” I wondered, as the sounds of avian distress continued. It looked like a little strip of thin sliced chicken. Then I said, “Oh,” because attached to one end of the limp chickenslice, there was a single lifeless leg. And on the other end, a bald beaked big-eyed head. It was what was left of a chick. 

I realized that this was likely one of the offspring of the shy Carolina wrens who flit about in the leafy underbrush beneath that bush, and I was right in the mess of watching one-a-them old school 1970s nature documentaries that used to traumatize me when I was eight.  

Oh, my poor sensitive vegetarian eyes! 

The jay took its time, gulping down the strip, and then the head, and then all of the leg but one tiny pinkish claw, which it left draped over the branch.

Then it turned, and winged deeper into the foliage. It returned to view with a frantically struggling baby wren in its beak, bludgeoned it to death, and then…the cries of distress that had caught my attention now silenced…proceeded to tear it to bits and devour it, right there in front of me.

Ah, I thought. The nature of violence.

Because for all of our romantic suburban haute bourgeois daydreams of how lovely it all is, nature is at the same time pretty danged harsh. 

That jay does not care about the lives of those wrens. The wrens do not care about the caterpillars and spiders and beetles that they eat. The spider doesn’t care about the fly. None of them are aware of one another, or of the suffering that their predation inflicts. That violence is done without thought, without reflection, purely driven by the need to eat, the need for territory, the need to defend oneself. It’s unpleasant to watch, but it isn’t evil.

But we, we who are supposedly sentient beings? Why do we carry that with us? Why do we hold on to the inflicting of harm, we who are aware?

Stephen likely would have had something to say about that.

The Deathbed Confession

Confessions, if one is a reformed Christian, are the place where a church stands and makes a statement about a crisis facing the church.  Who are we, and how do we retain our integrity as God's people given a moral challenge that faces us right now?  What is it that subverts our discipleship?  What must we declare together, if we are to follow Jesus as authentically as we can?

It is, in that, a declaration intended to be both unifying and integrative.  

Like the Barmen Declaration, which challenged the usurpation of the church by the Nazi regime, or the Belhar Confession, which renounces the spiritual blight of racist segregationism from the depths of South African apartheid, most confessions rise from a condition of conflict, and give the faithful a clear vision of where the Beloved Community must stand.

They are a fierce call to integrity in life together.  It's why Presbyterians remember confessions, and why the Book of Confessions is part of the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s Constitution.

Our era poses plenty of challenges for the church, and so...Presbyterians being who we are...we've convened a committee to come up with a statement that speaks powerfully to where God is calling us right now.  They've done the work, and now we've been asked, by that committee, to give that confession a read.  

Then, we have been asked to sit with it a while.  Where it troubles us, reflect meaningfully on why, and then consider it some more.  When we've done that, respond.

The confession they've drafted for our consideration does not yet have a name, other than "Proposed New Confession." This doesn't quite have the ring of "Second Helvetic" or "Westminster," although it's probably already catchier than "Brief Statement."  Were I a marketer, I'd really want us to have a stronger brand identity at launch.

So how does it read?  What does it say?  What are we called to affirm, and what crisis calls us to a moment of choosing and shared witness?

The language is reflective of the academic-progressive character of the PC(USA), and marks our denomination's continued emphasis on inclusion and welcome.  It has four sections.  The first, entitled Image of the Triune God, lays out our understanding of the nature of...surprise surprise...the Triune God.  It does so in language that moves even further down the inclusive language path than the Brief Statement of Faith.  In tone and semiotic choices, it's fuzzier and more prone to poesy than other confessions, but nonetheless retains a vital and necessary core witness to the nature of our Creator. 

I particularly appreciated its Augustinian expression of the Trinity as Love, which shows some solid theological chops cast with concision and poetry.  It's in essence the same understanding of an interrelationship of love that C.S. Lewis expresses in Mere Christianity, even if it's wearing some soft flannel pajamas.  

One could quibble, I suppose, with some of the language.  Like, say, the use of the word "affection" as a wiffle-ball euphemism for "sexual orientation."  Them's ain't the same things, y'all, not by a long shot.  στοργή is not Ἔρως is not ἀγάπη, right?  

Generally speaking, it's perfectly fine.

The second section, Turning Away From God's Image, establishes the nature of the crisis.  

In four powerful paragraphs, it lays the essence of the challenge of our age.  The first three name that challenge: that humankind has once again lost itself in the thrall of wealth and power.  This love of Mammon and the sword has corrupted the witness of faith, and as a prophetic critique, it's dead on.  It stings like Amos and Micah, and delivers the sort of uppercut to heresy that would do Saint Nicolas proud.

In the final paragraphs, there's a clear naming of our deepest moral and spiritual challenge: the mutual careening towards the sabotage of our entire ecosystem.  Taken together, those paragraphs are succinct, cogent, and complete.  

But in the midst of that fierce declaration, the confession takes a detour.  There's an abrupt tonal shift, the punch is pulled, and instead we get the rote neo-Cistercian self-flagellation of the Presbyterian People's Front.  

Meaning, all of a sudden we've donned our best intersectional sackcloth, mourning our Complicity in such pressing contemporary crises as...checks notes..."manifest destiny."  What follows, if one knows generic progressive discourse, is the usual performative litany of historical wrongs.  We're colonialist, and racist, and sexist, ableist and queer-o-phobic, all of us damnable sinners, pie Crenshaw domine, dona eis requiem, whack. 

I find this both baffling and frustrating, for a variety of reasons, three of which I'll pitch out here.   

First, all of these lamentations seem to operate under the assumption that the PC(USA) is made up entirely of cisgender White men who can trace their lineage back to the Mayflower.

"We have," the Proposed New Confession intones, again and again, but that "We" is not a "We" that the church as a whole can confess together.  Sure, our demographic skew is heavily towards being the Presbyterian Home of Honkeytown, but...and I don't know if you've noticed this...that's not who all of us are now.

Can a Korean American choir director or a Ghanaian elder claim to have reviled their immigrant neighbors?  Can a historically Black church say that it has covered itself in racism's robes?  Can the women who make up a supermajority of our membership lament their complicitness in their own self-denigration?  Can the Queer folk who have fought for decades for inclusion declare themselves morally responsible for the harm inflicted upon them?  None of them can, not meaningfully.

All of these Christians are (and here I'll turn on all caps) PART OF THE (PC)USA.  They are not they.  They are us.  They are we. Yet those members of our shared fellowship are all positioned as the objects of the confession, not the ones proclaiming it.  It's an exclusionary, neosegregationist liturgy, which is jarring given the confession's stated purpose. 

Second, it just doesn't resemble the PC(USA) I've known for the entirety of my 57 years as a cradle Presbyterian.  Every Presbyterian congregation I have worshiped in, been a member of, or pastored?  None of them have lived out their lives together in a way that would justify these laments.  In the more recent cases, be it the civil rights movement, the ordination of women, the inclusion of Queer folk, or the embrace of those who live with disability?  In every one of those instances, we've fought our way through to an authentic witness, and at nontrivial cost in relationship and membership.  Saying, for example, "You took a consistent stand for women's voices, but, you know you could have done more, and you're part of The Patriarchy, so you are automatically complicit?"

I don't buy it.  I've looked at it, sat with it, thought about it, and...no.  One cannot repent for a sin they have not committed.  We have plenty of concrete and material sins to attend to, and repentance...understood from the whole witness of Scripture...just does not work that way.  Here, I'm very much aware that I'm not compliant with the demands of our particular denominational Newspeak. I still view persons as the fundamental unit of moral analysis, for example. I'm guilty of so many doubleplus ecclesiastical thoughtcrimes.  Mea culpa.

And finally, it feels, and here forgive me...Old.  Not just Old, but Old Old, in a very particular gerontological way.

The laments themselves are cast in semi-chronological order, a retelling-in-negation of the history of the Presbyterian church in this country.  They are decades out of date and centuries passed, sepia and crumbling.  None of them, not one, meaningfully reflects the PC(USA) now, or the specific crisis we inhabit.

It's almost like we don't know where we are anymore, like we can't remember what we did yesterday, or the names of the people around us.  But oh, do we remember the past, past struggles, past traumas, and past conflicts.  We remember when we mattered, back when we once shaped the direction of a nation, when our voice made a difference.  Remember at the General Assembly of 1818, when we let expediency and groupthink water down our witness, where we made a bold statement and then equivocated?  Remember when we marched at Selma?  No-one else remembers that, not anymore, but we're lost in the thrall of wouldacouldashoulda.  It's a little solipsistic, a little maudlin, and more than a little morbid.

This section reads, to be blunt, like the deathbed confession of White Liberal Christianity.  

"The Deathbed Confession?"

Do we want that to be what this is?  An end of life groan of regret at mistakes made and things left undone, croaked from dry and dying White throats as the denomination falls into the Consuming Fire?   Maybe we do.  Maybe that is what we want.  I know that's what some of y'all want.  

The time for that church is over, some folks say.  It should just cash out. Think of the things we could do with that money!  Choose any charity!  Give to the poor!  

But again,"The Deathbed Confession" has kind of a ring to it, if we're talking brand identity.

As a foundation on which to build, though, and a naming of the spiritual battle facing the church, this section might not be the best step forward.  

Because we're not dead yet.

To those who've labored long and hard over this work, in the unlikely event you find yourself reading these reflections: I recognize that some of these responses might feel uncomfortable.  But, you know, just sit with them for a little while.  And anyway, it's just one portion of one section, and y'all did ask for responses.  I mean, you did.

There's so much more to the Confession than this, though, and I'll get to that in another post.

Frass

The morning sun rose

Over the trees on the hillside

And a new day's light 

Shone so bright

Through a thousand drops

From the rain last night

'Cross that sea of stars, from left to right

A single bee, caught gold in flight

And as I, like caught in reverie

Was glorying in that radiant bee

Out of that bug's tiny ass

Came a spray of bee poop frass

Which glowed illumined by the sun

Fell fulgent bronze and then was gone

I laughed, how wondrous and absurd

The sun, the light, the bee, the turd

Ends and Means

 

"Is it possible to achieve progress in charity by means that are essentially uncharitable?  If we dispassionately consider our personal experience and the records of history, we must conclude that it is not possible.  But so strong is our desire to believe that this is a short cut to Utopia, so deeply prejudiced are we in favour of people of similar opinions to our own, that we are rarely able to command the necessary dispassion.  We insist that ends which we believe to be good can justify means which we know quite certainly to be abominable; we go on believing, against all the evidence, that these bad means can achieve the good ends we desire."

Aldous Huxley, from Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods employed for their Realization, pp.27-28

Stirring My Scots Blood

No one told me how pleasant an MRI could be.

I'd expected it to be a little challenging, to feel a little bit entombed in that tube, surrounded by unsettling roarings and thumpings and rhythmic pulses as magnetic energies surged around and through my body.  Claustrophobic panic isn't ever helpful in a procedure, so I'd considered calming exercises, tools from meditation and prayer that would gird up my loins for the process.

I needn't have worried.

It was profoundly restful, and on several occasions, I had to attend to not falling asleep, which might have messed with the imaging process.  But it was more than restful.  No-one had told me that it was possible to feel the magnetic fields as they surged through your body.  It's not common, but there are folks who swear up and down that the electromagnetic pulses set off a response in their nervous system, and given that I'm just the teeniest bit hypersensitive to things, I guess I'm in that camp.  

CHUKCHUKCHUKCHUKCHUK, the machine would go, and with each beat, I'd feel a peculiar tickling, like every nerve along a plane would activate.  It felt like I was being bisected, over and over again, each slice very faintly pleasurable, like a caress of energy, an aurora in my flesh.  With that came a deep, comfortable warming, and it was lovely.  

"This is really nice," I thought, "I'd pay money for this."

Which, Lord have mercy, I did.

The bill, when it came, was well over four thousand dollars.  That's for the procedure only.  Having a radiologist look at the results for ten minutes was another two hundred dollars.  

I have insurance, thank the Maker and my congregation, so my out of pocket costs were less.  Blue Cross Blue Shield negotiated the asking price of the procedure down to a wee bit over three thousand bucks, of which the "patients responsibility" was eight hundred bucks.  I paid seventy two dollars and seventy three cents of the two hundred dollars for the radiologist.   Total cost to me: over nine hundred dollars.  Total cost to the insurer:  over four thousand dollars.

So, combined, roughly five grand total, for a thirty minute non-invasive procedure and ten minutes to assess the results.

I have Scots blood, through my paternal grandmother Arline Tionesta MacDougall, and this outlay stirred that thrifty gene more than electromagnetic pulses ever could.  I know, we all know, all of us, that this is too much money, that we're being fleeced by a system that doesn't even begin to represent the actual costs of the services provided.

Let's do that familiar "how much does it cost elsewhere" exercise.  Were I to get an MRI from a private clinic in Glasgow, Scotland, how much would it run me?  Here, I'm talking about going outside of the public health system in the United Kingdom to a privately operated for-profit clinic, and paying out of pocket.  I found a nice little clinic in Glasgow.  Costs for the process there varied, based on location and procedure, but for the lower pelvic/prostate, I could expect to pay about four hundred dollars, exchange rate dependent, and that includes radiological review and a formal actionable medical report.

Four hundred dollars.   A round trip flight to Glasgow?  Nine hundred dollars.  Two nights in a nice hotel in Glasgow?  Four hundred dollars.  Meals?  Two hundred dollars.  A rental car to putter around Glasgow for two days?  Three hundred dollars.

Total cost, to fly across the Atlantic, stay in a nice hotel, eat well, have the procedure, do a little tourism, then fly back?  Two thousand two hundred dollars, nearly two thousand bucks less than the "best price" Blue Cross Blue Shield could negotiate here.  

Same procedure, same results, half the price.  How many times have you seen this same exercise done?  The "you fly halfway across the earth, get a procedure done, and fly back for cheaper" schtick is well worn, and yet still we tolerate the parasitic drain of our bloated mess of a health care system.

Defenders of that system claim that it's the "gold standard," the best in the world, and that we should be grateful for the privilege.

But we know that's a load of bollocks.  

The Art of Not Getting Into It

I was in the waiting room of a medical office, waiting to be called back for another round of imaging, and I was filling out forms on a tablet.  You know, the forms you've already filled out a dozen times, and filled out online before you came, but still have to fill out again?  Those forms.  

We all love those forms.

I was absorbed in the process of checking boxes when I heard her voice.  It was a loud voice, a we're-fighting-right-now voice.

"This is all your fault!  I couldn't do it because of you!  I've waited years and years for today, and you ****ed it all up for me!"

I looked up.  She was in her thirties, best I could tell, disheveled and awkwardly dressed, and the older man she was yelling at was likely her father.   From context, I figured she'd failed to tolerate an MRI, which I was looking forward to encountering myself just a few minutes later.  For some folks, the enclosure causes a claustrophobic panic response, and sedation is necessary.  I was about to find out whether I fit into that category.

"All I wanted was ten dollars, and would you give it to me?  No!  Just ten ****ing dollars, that was all, and you're too ****ing cheap and selfish to ****ing do even that."

This seemed a little baffling, so I continued to listen, as the father sat quietly while she paced and ranted at him.  "Just a little ****ing weed, ten dollars for a little weed to calm me down, and you wouldn't do it.  I can't ****ing believe you!  I've waited five years for that test, and you couldn't give me ten ****ing dollars!"  

It seemed fairly clear in that moment that ten dollars worth of cannabis would not be likely to solve that young woman's primary life challenges.  I wondered if that MRI would have been of her brain.  It seemed possible.

He began packing up a bag, still silent, and her raging intensified.  "I wouldn't be so ****ing ****ed up in the first place if it weren't for you!  You and Mom are the worst parents!   You're a ****ing sadist!  A sadist pervert!  You're PERVERTED, that's what you are!  A PERVERT!  A perverted masochistic SADIST!"  

The father looked up at her and smiled at this phrasing, just a little bit, as if he was suppressing a laugh.  Then he got up, and began walking to the elevators at a calm pace.  He seemed neither embarrassed nor angry.

She followed, cursing and berating.  But following nonetheless.

There is so much that a parent can endure for the love of their child.

A Scripture for the President

When I heard it, I laughed.

This last week, the Least Christian President in American History (tm) sat at the Resolute Desk and recorded himself reading from Holy Scripture.  It was part of a week-long cover-to-cover Bible reading with scores of participants, one whose intent was to remind America of the power of reading the Bible, or so the organizers hoped.  

I am, rather obviously, fond of reading the Bible on the regular.  It's not a single book, mind you, but a Sacred Book of Books, a collection of texts assembled over a millennia that reflects the journey of a covenant people with their God.  It has many authors, but also one Author, and all of it, every last bit of it, speaks transforming truths that we need to hear and understand.  Reading it changes us, if we're willing to read it deeply.

And so it was that Donald J. Trump, Forty Seventh President of the United States of America, a man who is happy to hate his enemies and whose not-going-to-church-today golf-trip-motorcade blocked the Beltway and almost made my family late for worship this most recent Easter morning, recorded himself reading from 2 Chronicles. 

Trump?  Reading from Chronicles?  It was perfect, just perfect, so much so that again, I laughed.  The textual portion itself centered around national humility and repentance, which is not something Trump's America does, ever, not ever.  Demanding that people you despise repent, sure.  But actual, sackcloth-and-ashes we-messed-up-Lord repentance?  That's a sign of weakness.  The cardinal rule of MAGA is to always double down and punch back, and never, ever admit fault. 

It is, in a plain reading, wildly ironic.  

But it gets weirder if you go deeper.  

The books of 1 and 2 Chronicles are among the most MAGA-friendly books of the Bible.  Or, to be more accurate, they're all about Making Judah Great Again, even if M'JuGaH doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.  Sounds too much like meshuggah, eh?

Like the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, Chronicles was most probably written in the period closely following the Babylonian exile.  The people of Judah were rebuilding, having been returned to their land by Cyrus of Persia.  Tradition holds that the author of Chronicles was Ezra the scribe, and though there's the inevitable scholarly debate around that, it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.  Rebuilding requires having a powerful sense of what came before, and, well, that's the whole point of Chronicles.

1 and 2 Chronicles are a scribal retelling of the history of the national aspirations of the Hebrew people, as Ezra took the story that spans the older books of 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings and edited them to meet his interests.  He cuts and pastes those histories as vigorously as Thomas Jefferson, and those editorial choices are striking.  They speak to the purpose of Chronicles.

Because Chronicles...like Ezra...tells of a deep yearning for the restoration of a nation to greatness, and looks to the past with a powerful hunger.  That shapes the way memory is recalled, and the way that the story of the past is told.  

There are many changes, like largely ignoring the history of those cursed "northern Kingdom" Samaritans.  Most relevant, given the liturgist in question, is how Chronicles approaches King David, first and greatest of the kings of the Jewish people.

In the older stories of David, those told in the Deuteronomistic History, he is remembered as deeply human.  In 1 and 2 Samuel, David is an emotionally complex soul.  He cares deeply for Saul and his son Jonathan, even though the erratic, moody Saul threatens his life over and over again.  When David's son Absalom rises up to take power from him, David desperately clings to hope for reconciliation, and when the news of Absalom's death is brought to David, his heart is utterly broken.  David knows indolence and lust, murdering the honorable Uriah to cover up his infidelity with Uriah's wife Bathsheba.  The prophet Nathan is forced to confront David with the horror of his actions, and David is shattered and repentant.  At the end of his life, David is a weak and diminished old man, easily manipulated by Nathan and Bathsheba so that Bathsheba's child Solomon can take the throne.  

These are meaty, real, earthy stories, ones that speak to the truth of our human mess and the ways even the best of us fail to uphold God's covenant.  They teach and they preach powerfully to the human condition, and are willing to question power.  Particularly the power of kings, because kings are people, and people are a mess.

That ain't how Chronicles presents David.  

Even though Chronicles is almost entirely reliant on the history recorded by those earlier books, it spins their story with the doggedness of a White House Press Secretary.

David, or so Chronicles describes him, was perfect.  He's buffed and without blemish, run through an Instagram filter, naturally tan and with a full thick head of hair.

Ezra's David almost never puts a foot wrong or makes a bad choice, unless Satan himself leads him astray.  He never weeps or shows weakness.  The conflict between David and Saul is only mentioned sotto voce, and there is no discussion of any of the intrigue in David's house.  There is no Bathsheba-canoodling in Chronicles.  The fight with Goliath isn't mentioned, likely because that would suggest David was once small and not mighty.  David fights, and wins, and fights, and wins, and gives long set piece speeches about building the temple with specific attention to the choice of only the best and most expensive materials.  He hands over the throne to Solomon completely of his own volition.  

As narrative, it's pretty danged flat, and Ezra's scribal compulsion to insert Lists of People and Things don't help that cause none, neither.  There's a reason that all the stories we retell and remember aren't from Chronicles, because generally speaking, we don't read aloud from spreadsheets in worship. 

Taken as a whole, Chronicles is history as hagiography, history as a glossing-over of anything uncomfortable or difficult or messy, history that desperately wants to find perfection in the glories of the past and the shine of remembered wealth and power.  

Which, I would contend, is precisely why it is God's will that Chronicles remain forever part of sacred scripture.  Because human beings are great at editing out the hard parts, not being challenged or changed, and utterly failing to learn from our mistakes.  We need to remember

Lord, does history teach how we're great at that.

Pride and Courage

"Do not pursue spectacular deeds. We must deliberately renounce all desires to see the fruit of our labor, doing all we can as best we can, leaving the rest in the hands of God. What matters is the gift of your self, the degree of love that you put into each one of your actions.

Do not allow yourselves to be disheartened by any failure as long as you have done your best. Neither glory in your success, but refer all to God in deepest thankfulness.

If you are discouraged, it is a sign of pride, because it shows you trust in your own powers. Never bother about people’s opinions. Be humble and you will never be disturbed."

Mother Teresa, from Called to Community

A Post on Virginia Gerrymandering, One Day Late

How do we get what we want?

As a Virginian, I’ve been musing about that a bit over these last few weeks, as my state dips into the well of gerrymandering to tip the scales of power one way or ‘tother.

Gerrymandering, as we all know, is the process by which the size and shape of political districts can be fiddled with to ensure that a particular political party has more representatives. Typically, it involves diluting the influence of another party by concentrating their voters in fewer districts, or creatively recombining regions. Gerrymandered maps are filled with snaking, convoluted lines, creating districts that bear no connection to regional identities and that are intentionally designed to disadvantage and disenfranchise opponents.

Across the river these days, Virginians are wrassling with whether to abandon the current, nonpartisan districts, and replace them with maps that…well…they’re not. My congressional district, for example is VA-7. VA-7 would be redrawn to run from Annandale westward, all the way out through the Shenandoah Valley and right up to the border of West Virginia, with another section snaking south to around Goochland…yes, Goochland. 

If the change is made, VA-7 will look something like a stylized crawdad, or perhaps a ghost wearing boxing gloves.

All to regain a political advantage, because Dear Leader has taught us that maintaining political advantage is more important than having a representative democracy. Once you’ve got power, there are countless perfectly rational-sounding reasons for you to use that power to press your finger down on the scales, and for some reason that troubles my soul.

It’s the temptation that power always dangles before us, as we allow ourselves to believe that dominance is our goal and purpose in life.

At the beginning of the season of Lent, rolling ‘round every year, we Christians retell the story of the temptation of Jesus, of his trial and challenge in the wilderness. 

In the first of the three tests, Jesus is tempted with physical need. “You’re hungry, but you don’t have to be ,” comes the seductive voice of the whisperer. “Turn that rock into bread, my friend. Don’t feel limited to matzoh, I mean, you’re the son of God, and those desert nights are cold, so how about some warm-from-the-oven chocolate chip banana bread? Wouldn’t that be just right?” But Jesus responds with Deuteronomy 8:3, a snippet of the Law which declares that our relationship with God is more important than anything else.

All of a sudden, the scene changes, with the Tempter and Jesus up on the highest point of the temple.

“You say you trust in God above all else,” comes the sly suggestion, as they teeter on a ledge. “Then jump. Surely God will protect you from harm.” And then, well, then comes the kicker. “Angels will protect you,” he hears. “They’ll bear you up.” Both words from scripture.  Jesus responds with a single verse, from Deuteronomy 6. “Don’t put God to the test.”

Alrighty then, says the Man of Wealth and Taste. Let’s take this higher still. Suddenly he and Jesus are way up on a mountaintop, with the whole world spread out below, like Mufasa and Simba overlooking the pridelands at Sunset, only Mufasa would have to be the Devil and Jesus his Simba-cub-son, so that way of visualizing it breaks down pretty quickly.  

Still, you get the image.

With the whole world before him, Jesus is tempted with political power, with control over all of it. “It’ll all be yours, if the price is right,” smiles the Tempter. “Just worship me.” Again, Jesus responds with a passage from Torah, from Deuteronomy 6:13. And again, he affirms that his relationship with God is central, vital, and unshakeable, and that the human hunger for power doesn’t rule over it.

Each of these tests are trials because they’re entirely understandable. There are strong internal logics to the desire for sustenance, for safety and security, and for control.  Who doesn’t want, no, need food? Without food, we die, or at a bare minimum, get so hangry that we’re not the sort of person you want to spend time around. Why wouldn’t we do whatever it took to get what we biologically require? We want a sense of safety and of being protected from harm, and who wouldn’t want that?

And what wouldn’t we do to be in control, to be the king of the hill, top of the heap, A Number One?  All you need is power, and you'll use it perfectly, the best, no-one has ever seen power used so beautifully before.

Temptation finds reasons to set aside values and virtues when they become inconvenient.

I’ve always found gerrymandering repugnant, to return to the moral question I'd been wrestling with. Politically motivated creative redistricting betrays the purpose and integrity of a republic, and that is true whether political expedients or bald-faced lies are used to justify it.

I know, for example, that the relentless dark-money mailers and texts and calls I was getting "opposing" Virginia's gerrymandering are pure refined weapons-grade hypocrisy.  All of them are in the service of crass kleptofascism, which is only opposed to gerrymandering if Democrats are doing it.  

Which left me, as a voter and a Christian, with a moral conundrum.  On the one hand, a "yes" vote would have violated a bright line about representation in our tattered constitutional republic.   "We know it's wrong, but we're doing it just this once, honest," is always a dangerous ethical stance.  On the other hand, a "no" vote would have affirmed and supported a fundamentally corrupt regime that is doing everything in its power to manipulate and discredit the electoral process, and that couldn't care less about our fundamental right to choose our own leadership.

In that toxic, lesser-of-two-evils binary, I can't choose the good.  

And so I didn't.  As hard as it was to refrain from voting, that is what I did.

But I also didn't post this until after the election.

Schroedinger's Basil

Every year, I'm tantalized by the weather and my eagerness to put my hands in the soil.

I step outside, and it's coming up on mid April, and the temperature is in the nineties, and I think, Lord, but it has to be time to plant.  Then I check the calendar, and there's that average last frost date, just a week away.  And the forecast, for summerlike warmth, all the way to that average date and beyond.

Some years, if I go into the ground early, it means an early harvest.  But others?  Others are like this year, when despite a run of days hot enough to draw sweat standing, the evening wind suddenly turns cold and fierce.  

I'd gotten my basil in the ground ten days ago, all the little seedlings that I'd started back in late March.   Surely, surely we were done with winter.  But winter wanted one last word in, and so up went the frost warnings.

They were right on the cusp, particularly for life here in my inner suburb.  Heat island effect is a real thing in Annandale, with temperatures here usually running five or six degrees warmer than they do out near my rural congregation.   That's a buffer, but one can't be sure, particularly with frost sensitive seedlings.

So I covered all of them at sundown last night, putting each under an inverted growing pot.  Heat would be retained and frost staved off.  Hopefully.  Or maybe not.  My plan: remove the pots only when the morning sun cleared the little rise to the East, and the air and soil were warmed.

Stepping out into the still morning chill, I looked across the lawn, at the frosted tips of the recently mown grass.  Then I glanced down the little bed by my driveway.  There were the pots, in neat little rows.  Beneath them, there were seedlings, unobserved and unobservable, and each those seedlings were either alive or dead.  

Which was it?  Which outcome might it be?

I'd have to wait until the sunrise.

Our Many Ulterior Motives

I'm doing a whole bunch more thinking, writing, and reading around small church vitality these days, as my publishing Magic Eight Ball goes from "Reply hazy, try again" to a consistent "Signs Point to Yes."

Having served tiny fellowships for the entirety of my ministry, of the most strikingly consistent features of small congregations is that they aren't organizations, not really.  Some of the structure of institutional life filters through, but they're networks of human relationship first and foremost, with all of the idiosyncrasy and organic complexity that this entails.  Those relationships are...if healthy...a great source of congregational strength, as members of a community share life together in all of its joys and sorrows.

The character of those relationships is shaped by the core purpose of the community, which is...church being church and all...following Jesus and living as he would have us live.  That shared purpose is the common goal around which any church forms, and the closeness of fellowship in an intimate community is one of the collateral benefits of journeying along that Way with others.

Meditating on this recently while puttering about in my garden, I found myself thinking about what happens when we make the category error of seeking one of those collateral benefits instead of the thing itself.  

Like, say if your stated motive is "growth."  Growth is a collateral benefit of faithful labor and mutual discipleship, some of the time.  When and if it arrives, it is a blessing, albeit one orders of magnitude less important than deep and sustained human relationship.  But if growth becomes the emphasis rather than viewed as a side benefit, that focus skews how we view our purpose, and tends to become something less than Good News.  We all know what that looks like.  It looks like business models, marketing, and manipulation.  It looks like you've confused Mammon with Jesus, and I'm talkin' to you, Kenneth Max Copeland.

But focusing on numerical growth isn't the only way we can wander astray, because big churches and churches that strive for the gold ring aren't the only ones that wander astray.  What about relationships, then, that great strength of intimate community?  Can that become a blight?

Of course.

Let's talk about a soul we've all known (or been) who had "being in a relationship" as their goal.  Whether from the clawing void of loneliness, fitting in, hungering for intimacy both physical and personal, or any one of the many reptiles of our minds that whisper our inadequacy to us in our isolation, all that matters is being with someone.  Anyone.  The actual person doesn't matter, and Lord, does that never, ever, end well.  It's something that fails over and over again, as that benighted soul makes terrible choice after terrible choice, just so they won't have to be alone.

What about relationships that give a sense of power?  Where you enter a relationship because it can satisfy your need for dominance and control, where you can be in charge, where those around you are dependent on and submissive to your every whim?  Where everyone loves you and despairs?  I've seen what that looks like in large churches and small.  The little congregations with a patriarch or matriarch who has discovered the sweet taste of power, reigning unchallenged and unquestioned?  These are the farthest thing from a blessing. 

Pursued for its own sake or as an ulterior motive, then, "relationship" is theologically and morally meaningless.  So is "growth."  And "community."  And "political power."  All manner of things.  All of them are not why church is church.

When we gather as disciples, there is a greater purpose that defines us.

Old Seed

Last year, my gardening plans took a blow.

Every season for a decade, I've grown a crop of green beans, a trusty productive bush varietal that graces my summer and fall tables with plump and sweet goodness.  And every season, I've saved seeds from the strongest of those bean plants, so that I've developed a long and fruitful relationship with their lineage.

Twenty twenty five was to be no different.  I started the season planting a single four by eight bed of beans, which I set into the ground in early April.  By late July, that first crop was spent, providing a dozen meals worth of veggies, and a fat gallon bag full of blanched and flash-frozen beans for later.

I prepped another four by eight bed for a late season harvest, and put in another three rows of beans.  These, I'd both harvest and seed-save, following the pattern of the last decade.  The good hearty beans came up dutifully, dozens of cheery little seedlings poking up diligently as they always had.  I watered and weeded, and all was well, the plants bustling along nicely.

Then in late July, I left for a week at the beach.

When I returned in early August, they were all gone.  

All of them.  Given the hoof-prints in the completely devastated bed, the culprit was clear, one of the dastardly devouring does who wander through our green and leafy inner suburb.  I'd sprayed the young plants with repellent before leaving, but it had rained and rained again in my absence, and the spray must have all washed away.  The crop was wiped out.

I still had the bag of flash-frozen beans, which meant that my tradition of using my own beans for the obligatory Thanksgiving casserole could continue.  But I had gathered no seed stock from the spring harvest.  None of what I had expected to use to plant my crop in 2026 had survived.  Not a bit of it.

This presented me with a bit of a conundrum as the weather warmed this season.  I had no fresh green bean seed.  I had some stock left from 2024.  And I had even more stock left from 2023, because I'd had a roaring bumper crop that year, hundreds of beans in a big ol' jar.

But beans, wonderful as they are, don't last forever.  Three to five years, typically, if kept sealed away, cool, and out of direct light.  After that, the peculiar magics of seed genetics, the complex organic triggers that wake with water and warmth?  Gone.

With the last frost reasonably behind us, and a mid-spring heatwave well underway, I decided to try the oldest seed first.   I figured I'd have a nontrivial failure rate, so I tripled the density of the spacing.  Not six inches apart in a row, but more like two, massively oversowing the rows in anticipation of a lower yield.   I planted all of that three year old seed, every last bean.

Then I watered, and weeded, and waited.  A week passed.  Then another.  The earth was warm, and other volunteers sprang up where I had planted, squash and cantaloupe, from the looks of them.  But not a single one of my beans poked a familiar head out of the earth.  Literally hundreds of them, and the success rate was zero point zero zero percent.

That's the nature of the stale and the sterile, and those things that have forgotten what they are.

You can still put them in the ground, but they dissolve into nothingness, not growing into the purpose that made them, but instead becoming one with the soil.  

They have lost their sense of self, the intrinsic and essential potential which made them alive in the first place.  The gift of life has left them.

Good thing I have that stock from two years ago, I thought.  We'll see how that goes.

Shame, Sexuality, and Presbyterians

My Presbytery met recently, as it does on a semi-regular basis, to go over items of business and approve and affirm various and sundry overtures to the General Assembly.  Those overtures are a semi-annual process that determines the direction and policy statements of the church.  Generally, these are as interesting to those outside of our shrinking fold as the census of tribal membership in Numbers 2.

The overtures before the body were four, and four was their number, and I read all of them, just as I always read every single action item all the way through.  Two dealt with matters of investment policy and grantmaking, together pushing for a reallocation of resources into sustainable and renewable energy production.  One was a paean to regenerative agriculture, encouraging Presbyterians to engage with systems of food production that don't rely on industrial and extractive methodologies.  These were all well and good, if a teensy little bit on the dry side.

The fourth was...unsettling.   I wrestled with it mightily, and struggled to process it.  

It is my responsibility, as the pastor, to report back on Presbytery goings-on to the elders who lead my little congregation.  When we met last week, I don't think I did the most effective job of it.  I hemmed.  I hawed.  I equivocated, struggling to find words that worked.  It was an awkward moment.

“On Confession, Repentance and Renewed Theological Engagement Regarding HIV/AIDS and Human Sexuality," or so it was named by the folks who want it adopted as the official policy of the church.  The essence of it is veiled in the circuitous semiotics of contemporary progressive language, but there were two primary action points.

Action point number one was a call for the church...by which the authors mean the PC(USA)...to formally confess culpability for causing the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  The logic behind this is a weensy bit convoluted, but as I grasp it, goes as follows:  In 1967, the PC(USA) formally affirmed that entropy in sexual relationships was destructive of human personhood, and that the culture of the "sexual revolution" was antithetical to human thriving.  This was defined using binary and heterosexual language.  This explicit heteronormativity shamed queer folk whose sexuality and desire for sexual expression was neither heterosexual or binary in nature, and the trauma of that shame led to actions that made them vulnerable to AIDS.  Therefore and quod erat demonstrandum, the Presbyterian Church USA and its moral theology are responsible for the AIDS epidemic, and must formally repent for all of the trauma, suffering, and death that it caused.

Action point number two was grounded in the first, and called for a revisiting of the nature of relationship itself, and a formal theological re-imagining of our understanding of the "...full spectrum of relational and family structures, exploring ethical approaches to consent, mutuality, and care."  This action point is a little more linguistically veiled, far less direct than the first.  It involves charging two General Assembly committees with establishing frameworks for the acceptance of "relationship structures beyond traditional monogamy" and "diverse intimate arrangements."

This, to the best of my capacity, is my reflecting back what I read.

To be utterly honest, one part of the reason I struggled to verbally convey this to the good souls on my Session was that the whole thing both alarmed and bugged the crap out of me.   

The call to covenant fidelity in relationship in a confession that's fundamentally about social justice is responsible for the AIDS epidemic?  The Book of Confessions, Section 9, paragraph 47, subsection D is the reason people were infected by HIV?  A denomination that sweated blood and tears and worked for decades to become a place of gracious inclusion of Queer folk must now repent in sackcloth and ashes for inflicting the spiritual trauma that caused AIDS?   Sweet Mary and Joseph, what a wild causal stretch all of that is.   

That most of it is argued using contemporary therapeutic trauma language and Newspeak was equally unsettling.  It doesn't read like theology.  It reads like carefully calibrated psychological manipulation, and in a very particular direction.

That first action point has a particular intent rhetorically.  It is, in design and argumentation, preparing the subject to accept the second action point as the necessary outcome.  Given the language used, the goal is not to get the denomination to affirm the covenant fidelity of Queer folk in their life partnerships.  There'd be no point in that, as that's what the PC(USA) already does.  This is pressing for something more.

The authors of this overture appear to be utilizing a trauma-forward shaming framework as the pretext for a wholesale re-imagining of the concepts of marriage, covenant and fidelity.  Or, to put it as my anger would put it, they're engaging in some weapons-grade gaslighting to coerce the church into blessing open, non-dyadic, and polyamorous relationships.  If you speak Presbyterian, that's what it says, depending on whether you're feeling more neutral or royally pissed off.

So, nothing controversial.  Can't imagine this proving disruptive to my community in any way.  Ahem.

And all of this got dropped on the meeting website just days before the meeting, and on which we were supposed to vote on over...Zoom.  Zoom, where discourse is constrained, and engagement is minimized, and tone and the reality of incarnate presence are missing.

It was recommended for concurrence by the committee responsible for such things.  So I realized, Lord help me, am I going to be That Guy in a hundred-plus-participant Zoom where I'm not really personally known, given my increasingly sparse connections to the Presbytery?   Still struggling to process this, I wrestled with participation mightily all day.  On the one hand, I had strong feelings.  On the other, I still had strong feelings.  I got more and more anxious about being That Guy, to where I finally couldn't bring myself to even engage in the meeting.

Which is the other reason I had so much trouble explaining it.  I felt more than a little cowardly, to be honest.

Shame does work, eh?

The Importance of Curing Hiccups

It was a beautiful warm spring night, and I was riding my trusty little Yamaha home from a church meeting on familiar but glorious country roads.   The flower-sweetened wind was in my face, the stars were bright in a moonless sky, everything was a dream of serene motoring bliss, and all of a sudden, I had the hiccups.

"You have got (hic) to be kidding me," I said, aloud, into the inside of my helmet.  How could such a sublime moment be interrupted every ten seconds by (hic) this incongruous and irritating spasm?

I couldn't, honestly, remember the last time I'd had the hiccups.  Many (hic) months?  A year or so?  

When I was younger, in my late teens and early college years, they'd (hic) show up on the regular.  Sometimes, they'd stick around for a couple of hours, which was as frustrating as any tic (hic) can be.

Fortunately, I knew how to fix it.  Not with that glass of water upside down trick, which 1) had never ever worked for me and 2) might be a little technical while (hic) riding a scooter at fifty five miles an hour down darkened roads.

Defeating hiccups is simple.  The trick, or so I discovered years ago after researching the mechanism causing the error, is control over one's diaphragm.  The hiccough itself is nothing more than a spasm of the muscles that control that membrane.  The semiautonomous organic subroutine that involuntarily breathes for us glitches out, and you get this (hic) twitch in the system.  It needs to be reset.

To fix it, I breathe all the way out.  Not just a little, but (hic) all the way, forcing every last possible cubic centimeter of air out of my lungs, putting intense and conscious demand on the processes that manage my breathing, flooding the system with demand input and the resultant neurotransmitters.  Then, with my lungs fully voided, I attempt to breathe in, while at the same time closing my mouth and not allowing air through my nose.  Again, I put as much effort into that as I can, while simultaneously resisting the intake of breath.  The nervous system that serves the diaphragm is overwhelmed with input, washing away the errant process with the outflow of conscious demands, and the glitching hic tic is...wait for it...wait for it...gone.  

Erased. Reset.  Fixed.

It works, thank the Maker, even when riding.   Before the lights of the next town came into view, I was fine.

Much of the anxiety that pervades our modern and technological existence comes from our overwhelming sense of that we can't fix anything or do anything meaningful, this gnawing awareness that we have no understanding of how even the most basic elements of our existences work.   

Every waking moment of our day, that ignorance is pressed upon us and whispered in our ears by consumer culture.  Do you really know how your phone works?  How does the fuel that comes to you get there?  How does your food get produced?  How are you warmed on a cold night?  And if any of the myriad socioeconomic processes on which we depend failed or glitched out, could you even begin to know how to fix it?  How would we even live?

That extends to the state of our souls.  Why do we struggle so?  Why are we so quick to anger, so quick to misunderstand, so paralyzed by fear, so overwhelmed by even the smallest thing?

Everything around us is obscured from comprehension by systems that have been designed to be irreducibly complex, utterly beyond our ability to influence or repair.  The box is closed and sealed, and we're not even allowed to see how it works lest the observer effect voids our warranty.  It sabotages our resilience, and undermines our sense of ourselves.

Which is why we need to, insofar as we can and wherever we can, reclaim our sense of agency.  Learn to garden or how to stitch a garment.  Figure out how to replace an outlet or a fixture.  Change the brake pads on your car.   Replace the wheels on your mower.

Or know, with certainty, that you can stop those hiccups.

The Man Who Lies to Pastors

The image posted by Dear Leader of himself as a Christ-like figure the other day came as no surprise.  

It was, in context, expected.  D.J. reposts self-celebrating AI slop on a regular basis, particularly when he's trolling those who oppose him.  Remember him, in a crown, dropping excrement on No Kings demonstrators as he flew overhead in a King Trump jet?  Remember the video of Gaza rebuilt as a vacation paradise, with a golden statue of himself at the center of it all?  

Pepperidge Farm remembers.  

This was no different.  The context of this post involved conflict with a Christian religious leader, meaning the President of the United States was in the middle of a feud with the Pope.   Yes, that Pope, Leo XIV, whose congregation is slightly larger and more influential than mine.  

The Pope had noted, as leaders who actually follow Jesus are wont to do, that war is a horror, and that our little excursion in Iran seems to have none of the hallmarks of a Christian moral action.  It is transparently venal, incoherent in purpose, and has been accompanied by rhetoric...from America's President...that has been nothing short of genocidal.  "Genocide" gets thrown around a whole bunch lately, I'll admit, but when you publicly threaten to destroy an entire civilization, that seems pretty on the nose.

In response to that critique, our President described the Pope as an unpopular nobody, who hadn't WON IN A LANDSLIDE.  Also, the Pope was soft on crime.  It was into this particular tiff that he pitched out the AI generated image, which pretty much every single human being on the planet immediately recognized as Trump-as-Christ.

Again, having a pretty solid sense of the state of our President's personal relationship with Jesus, this didn't surprise me in the least.  It was just par for his course, standard-issue trollery, the sort of thing that amuses him.  But for his deeply conservative supporters, those who have mistaken him for David or Cyrus, it was a startling slap in the face. Not that he considered their feelings at 2:45 am in the morning, but reflecting on the feelings of others isn't one of his spiritual gifts.

The condemnation was swift and universal, as were calls for an apology for such an obviously blasphemous act.  These calls didn't come from the usual liberal and lefty suspects, but from the deeply orthodox, the evangelical, and those who consider themselves fundamentalist.  They looked at the image he shared and found it powerfully and shockingly offensive.  This was understandable.  We all saw the same thing.

It being a Tuesday at the time, Trump deleted the post.  But what he did not do was apologize.  To repent is to show weakness, or so he has repeatedly shown us he believes.

So instead, he lied.

He claimed he'd looked at the above image, and thought it was him as a doctor.  Which is why the American Medical Association was so very upset by it, right?

His excuse was a transparent falsehood, an obvious and flagrant lie.  It doesn't make any sense in context, and is an attempt to hide behind the deep veil of subjectivity.

No-one, but no-one, looked at Trump's shared image and thought, look, he's a doctor.  Including, I will be so bold as to contend, the man himself.

As a pastor, I get lied to.  I'm aware when, for reasons of shame or pride, someone comes to me with a story that ain't quite right.  Most often, they're lying to themselves too, recasting their actions in ways that avoid a real assessment of their own sinfulness.

My expectations for Trump are, well, they are what they are.  He lies like a wayward and untaught child, and it breaks my heart a little bit.  But I'm not the intended audience for this particular falsehood.  Christians who gave him unchecked worldly power are.  When directly asked for an apology by leaders and pastors in that group, he couldn't do it.  

He lied directly to them, explicitly to them, telling them something that is so improbable that they know...just as we all know...that he is dissembling instead of repenting.  That he is saying they just didn't understand, that the fault for this misunderstanding lies in their interpretation of the image, not his.  

He has his truth, after all, and they have theirs.

Because really, what is truth?  

Sweat and Edging

Monday afternoon was warm, feeling more like June than mid-April, and I was working up a sweat.

The task, which demanded the use of my whole body, was edging.  Edging, if I am honest, is one of those things that isn't technically necessary,   Nice, neat, clearly defined boundaries to the driveway and the sidewalk are more a matter of personal preference than some pressing exigency.  Given that I really don't mind that my lawn is a heterogeneous blend of grasses and chickweed, it seems a little silly to desire neat linear boundaries around that mottled miscellany of variant green hues and tiny flowers.  

But I do.  It's so satisfying.

I tend to use a string trimmer to edge, but as the years have progressed, the lawn has begun to make incursions onto the concrete nevertheless, soil and groundcover spreading out onto the sidewalk.  Not much, mind you.  Just an inch or two on either side.  There was still plenty of sidewalk.  But it was losing that tidyness that makes a well edged lawn so satisfying, a marker that all is in order, in the way that a perfectly made bed can some days feel like the only sanctuary from the chaos of life.

So I was doing some more aggressive edging to re-establish the boundaries.  Power edgers are the way of the American suburb now, because they get the job done far quicker and with less effort.  Just drop a hundred and sixty to four hundred bucks, and the task will be complete before you know it.

I wasn't doing that.  I was using a metal t-bar attached to a flat blade.  No battery.  No gas.  Just me, my middle aged back and arms and legs, and my middle aged mass pressing down.  I'd line the blade up to a prior cut, then step down hard, then pull the blade from the earth, then repeat.  Ten inches at a time, slowly and surely working my way down the sidewalk.  It took about an hour.

I was not Optimized.  I was not Efficient.  I was Going to Feel It Later.  I could have been Using My Time More Productively.  Let a machine do it, whispered our culture.  You have better things to do.

Do I?  What better thing is there than to work in one's garden on a spring afternoon?

We recoil at the idea that machine minds can now do all of our thinking for us, that our minds will atrophy away into nothing if there is literally nothing left for us to do.  But this loss didn't begin with AI.  If machines do everything for us, if mechanisms and conveniences mean that we never once need to strain and feel the sweat blossoming on our brows, we lose all that comes with work that is incarnate, enfleshed, and that uses the living form we've been given.  That work has value.  It's real.  And being in the world has other collateral benefits.

During that hour, I talked with passing neighbors.  "Doing it old school, I see," said one.  "Yup.  Good exercise on a beautiful afternoon," I replied, and she smiled.

I heard the squeals of delight as children up the street ran around in circles, chasing one another across their yard, delighting in the blessing of being embodied.

Work, understood rightly, can be just as satisfying.