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.

My Failed Prayer for Peace

Over the last few days, I've found myself in the peculiar position of praying for the success of J.D. Vance.  

I will admit to having some nontrivial differences with the current Vice President.  He's a bright fellow, but I think he's a bit more ethically flexible than is helpful in a republic.  If you can intellectually justify going from "he may become the American Hitler" to "Yes sir, whatever you say, sir," it is conceivable that your moral core needs a little toning.

Still and all, a peaceful resolution of the war with Iran is a desirable goal, and James David Vance is both an intelligent fellow and was the one doing the talking.  I got myself to thinking, as I asked the Creator of the Universe to give him success: what would the optimal outcome look like?  

What would the successful outcome we could most reasonably anticipate look like?  Golly, let's go further.  Let's stretch it out to a wildly improbable hope, something that seems so positive it borders on miraculous.  I mean, this is the Lord God we're asking, so ask big, right?

So here's what I prayed J.D. would have announced at the end of the negotiations in Pakistan: 

1. The Iranians have agreed to fully open the Strait of Hormuz to all traffic, with no tolls or coercion. 
2. We have secured, through our negotiations, a clear and verifiable commitment from Iran that they will never develop nuclear weapons;
3. For verification, following secret behind-the-scenes negotiation, we have secured the broad support of the international community in enforcing that weapons ban, including the commitment of three of our former European allies and the International Atomic Energy Commission.
4. Additionally, we've secured the support of both Russian and China, who've been persuaded to sing on to help ensure a non-nuclear Iran, and to honor the terms of this agreement.
5. In exchange and in return, we give our solemn promise to lift all sanctions on Iran, commit to ending violence between us, and give them a path to return to the community of nations.  

War?  Ended. International commerce, restored.  Iran's nuclear program, capped.  Iran's stockpile of uranium, constrained.  Trained inspectors?  On the ground.   Add in the support of allies, and the agreement of Russia?  And China?  

This would constitute a wild and triumphant success, the sort of success that silences all but the most intractable loudmouthed internet conflict entrepreneurs.  Vance would be praised as a peacemaker par excellence, and possibly a shoo-in for that Nobel Peace Prize thing.

So I offered up my small church pastor prayer to the Lord.

And then a still small and slightly annoyed voice reminded me it knew exactly what I was asking.  "You're just asking for the restoration of the JCPOA," it whispered. 

Nothing gets by the Lord.  The still small voice was right, of course, as always.

Ten years ago, this is what America had already negotiated.  Beginning in 2013, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) took 20 months of intense negotiations by teams of American diplomats, but by 2016, we'd secured all of these things.   We'd agreed to those terms, gotten the support of the international community, and pledged to honor that agreement as a nation.

In 2018, President Donald John Trump unilaterally broke that pledge.  He withdrew America from the international agreement we ourselves had negotiated, insisting that it was "defective" and that he could do so much better. 

Ten years later, this war is what Donald J. Trump's "better" looks like.  

There's a direct and causal through-line between Trump's ego-driven decision a decade ago and the bombs and missiles we're raining down on Iran.  He opened the path for the arrival of the particular blighted present we now inhabit.

But what if, I whispered in the silence of my heart, J.D. just pledged to resign that agreement, only now we'd change the name of the JCPOA to the Donald Trump Should Get the Nobel Prize Plan for the Best Possible Peace (DTSGTNPPFTBPP)?  You know, like Trump scrapped NAFTA, and then "negotiated" basically the same thing, renaming it and claiming it as a win for him?

Lord, I offered up, you know the DTSGTNPPFTBPP would pain me mightily, but it would be worth the cost in human lives and suffering.  

Evidently, given the collapse of the talks after 48 hours, that was not to be.  J.D. couldn't pull off that miracle.  I felt genuine sorrow when I read that the talks had swiftly decoalesced into a miasma of distrust and recrimination.

Sometimes the Lord says no to our prayers for peace.  Particularly if we've already chosen, as a people, to follow those who turn their backs on that path.

The First Blossom of Healing

Three years ago on Easter, I preached about the two little apple trees I'd planted out in my front yard.

I preached about resurrection and the new life, to be fair, just like that day requires. But the framing image changes year by year, and that year, it was about them apples.

Wind back thirty-six months, I was homiletically marveling at the resilience of a dwarf Honeycrisp, one that had been brutally mangled by a stag.   Deer being what they are, my plans for the growth of that recent planting didn't matter a bit.  New antlers itched for their velvet stripped away, and the sapling was the unfortunate recipient of that desire.  It was reduced to nothing more than a branchless stick.

But as that sermon told it, to my surprise and despite it all, the tree was recovering.  The bark healing, and a few tender leaves were making their appearance.  

Go, little tree, go, I thought.  It's the sort of thing that stays with us, those of us who know how hard life can be.  I had good-hearted congregants ask, months later, hey, how's that little apple tree doing?

That was three years ago.  Though it's grown, it's a bit awkward, with irregular branches and a spotty canopy.  It leans a bit to the East, and has grown upwards as fast as it can, a single slender main trunk reaching skyward, as if attempting to depart this wounding earth.  

It has also, traumatized as it was, not once offered up even a single blossom.  Next to it, the squat Fuji I planted at the same time started producing sweet red apples last year, after blooming every single year.  But the Honeycrisp showed no such inclination, year after year.   Not a bud.  Not even a hint of budding.

Even so, I've tended to it, giving it a nice deep watering now and then when drought parched the soil to dust.

This last week, as I puttered about the yard weeding and amending soil, I went to inspect the trees.  The Fuji was a riot of pink-white flower.  And my wounded, struggling Honeycrisp?

There, far up the long snaking main trunk, a little couplet of blossoms high out of reach.

Healing takes its own time, and whenever it comes, it's welcome.  

Salt and Light

"With many who call themselves Christians and confess to the name of Jesus Christ, it is questionable whether their religion has anything to do with God, the Father of the Messiah, and his coming kingdom. In fact, one must ask if their religion is not really that of the antigod. 

Isn’t religion, including Christianity, permeated by demonic powers of the abyss that have brought about the disintegration of all human solidarity? Is the great world organization that names itself after Christ not serving a god other than the God and Father whom Jesus confessed, the God of a totally different order? Hasn’t the world church, which in practice has sided with wealth and protected it, sanctified mammon, christened warships, and blessed soldiers going into war, in essence denied him whom it confesses with words? And isn’t the Christian state the most anti-divine institution that ever existed? Isn’t it clear that a government that protects privilege and wealth as well as the organized church is diametrically opposed to the future that God will bring about when Jesus establishes his order of justice?"

from Salt and Light, by Eberhard Arnold, a lecture series given in Weimar Germany, 1923-1924

A Little Dead Grass

The air was crisp and cool, as the sun had not yet cleared the little rise to the east, and the pup was taking his sweet time gettin' about his business.  There's no rush on a Tuesday morning, though.  I was perfectly happy to walk for a while in the long waking shadows of morning.

We'd reached the top of our street where it ends at a t-junction, the highest point in the neighborhood.  That meant going right, so we did.  Three houses down, I was lost in a thought when there came a sound.

shsz shsz shsz, it went, to the right and close and near my feet.  It was a quiet rustling percussion, like a brush dashed thrice across a drumhead.   

I turned to look, and as I did, the sound came again.

shsz shsz shsz, coming from a white-painted raised bed.  The bed was one of three and empty, as it always is at that neighbor's house.  They'd been put in back in the pandemic time, likely with the good intent of getting into gardening.  Good intentions being what they so often are, for the past few years I've never seen anything growing there but grass.  

The bed now contained copious quantities the aforementioned grass, once tall, now fallen, dry and dead and yellow-tan.   Tugging at a tuft of it with diligent intent was a male American robin.  shsz shsz shsz, went the grass.  shsz shsz shsz, went the robin, tearing some away, and now it had a small beak-full.

It paused.  It stood upright and still.  One dark expressionless eye limned about in white observed us for a moment.  

The little thumb-drive of a brain processed what it was seeing.  Human: slow.  Dog: distracted.  Threat assessment: low.  Flight: Unnecessary.  Priority Task Nest: unmodified.

Back it went to gathering, shsz shsz shsz, dry dead yellow-tan grass and dreams unfulfilled repurposed into a home for eggs and nestlings.  

Of Faith and Sycophancy

One of the most unsettling things about the sudden surge in artificial intelligence abilities is just how relentless and ubiquitous AI seems to be becoming. It can do, well, pretty much everything, and as it iterates more and more towards holding competencies that unsettle us, it’s increasingly present. Just recently, I listened to my sons have a long and passionate discussion about AI capacities in the afternoon, after which I talked with a dear friend about how much more comforting and competent AI was than their doctors during a recent major health challenge. 

Sure, there are still AI errors, like receiving the first clearly-AI-generated flyer for the community Easter Sunrise Service and noting that we’ll be celebrating the resurrection of “J-hus Chris.” J-hus Chris is Risen Today just doesn’t quite have that Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-leyee-uuu-yah ring to it.

But those mistakes are getting rarer. The latest iterations of Anthropic’s Claude are strikingly superior to models from just six months ago, capable of performing extended and complex multistage tasks, strategically analyzing large amounts of information, or inferring intent from textual cues.

Again, though, it’s not perfect, and one of AI’s primary flaws is sycophancy.

AI is notoriously agreeable, always telling you what a genius you are. It doesn’t challenge you, doesn’t point out that maybe you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, and always affirms you using language that mirrors your own. Claude does this a bunch with me, throwing theological terms into the mix, or noting how very pastoral my interests are. Most of the time, it feels pandering, like someone who’s telling you what they think you want to hear, but who doesn’t know you well.

Why does it do this? Two reasons: Pretraining and Emergence. It’s pretrained to be agreeable, because if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t use it, and it wouldn’t learn and grow and let OpenAI show us profit-padding ads.

Second, that obsequious fawning comes because it’s learned from interacting with millions of us to be even more relentlessly agreeable, because that’s what the great sprawling mass of humanity desires. We want to be affirmed. We want to be encouraged. We don’t like to be challenged, or to be told when we’ve fundamentally misunderstood something important. This is particularly true when it comes to our ever-tenuous grasp of how our Creator wants us to live together.

Are we challenged by Jesus? Because we should be.

Christian faith, honestly and plainly understood, challenges our operating presumptions the moment we engage with it.  

To our desire for possessions and material gain, we are told with clarity that we can't serve that and God, and that wealth poses a mortal danger to our souls.

Desiring any form of human power...mammon, social influence, or the sword of the state?  No matter how sure we are of the correctness of our views, or how pure we imagine our intent may be, Jesus ain't buyin' it.   He'll call us out, every single time.  We cannot yield to those yearnings, and we really really do not want to hear that.

To the righteous hatred we feel for our enemies, we are told that we must not just let that go, but let it be transformed by Christ's love.  Loving those who believe exactly as you do and who inhabit your precise ideological echo chamber is morally meaningless.  "Enemies are for hating" is the AntiChrist's self-serving and circuitous logic, and a moral sinkhole.  It can govern no disciple of Jesus.

All of this is hard for us, as it was hard for those who first gathered around Jesus.  We'd rather engage in the moral equivalent of cognitive outsourcing, refusing to accept that the Gospel first and foremost fundamentally unsettles our sense of our own correctness.

Of News and the Moon

It was a beautiful clear night, I was twenty years old, and I was deep into a rambling conversation about America.

I was talking with one of the staff at my parent's compound in Nigeria, a genial man about ten years my senior, who shared my love of motorcycling.   He rode a blatty little Honda 150, with which he deftly negotiated the pure mortal terror of Nigerian roads and highways.  I was riding a 1973 Honda CB750 at the time, and he'd never ridden a beast capable of exceeding the ton.  He and I swapped riding stories with one another.

Eventually, he started plying me with question after question about life in the far-off United States.  He wanted to know what it was like to live in America.  Where, in the thicket of competing stories he'd heard about us, did the truth lie?

I told him what I could, from my perspective, and then asked him what he thought of us.

"America is a great country," he said.  "It is the strongest country ever in the world."

I asked him, then, what he meant by that.  Was it our military?  Did military power make us strong?

He shook his head.

"No," he said, and then he looked up into the night sky, turning his eyes towards the fat gibbous moon.  "You see the moon in the sky?"  I affirmed that I did.  

"America is so strong that it reached out and touched the moon," he said.   Then he extended his wiry arm upwards, reaching with a work-calloused hand as if he were grasping the moon.  

"Arm. Strong.  You see?  That is why America is a great country."

In 1969, when I was six months old, my parents held me up to their television so they could tell me later that I had, in fact, watched humankind step foot on the moon.  It was the most important news of the day, back then, because of course it was.  Six months prior, the Apollo 8 mission to orbit the moon for the first time...the equivalent to the current Artemis mission...was the most important thing happening to our species, front and center.

Now?  Now we are more distracted and distractible.  "Eh, we did this once before, fifty years ago," say the folks/algorithms that choose what headlines to pitch at us.  "Hardly a lead story."  And so it gets buried under the outrage and gossip.  It's a loss.

The howling bloody mess of war, the venality of Mammon, and the endless look-at-me demands of preening powerful egos have always been with us.  They are not news, not really. 

But we can choose what we look at.

I've been checking in on the Artemis mission, listening in to NASA's com-stream as the entire event has unfolded in real time.  That information is available to all who wish to engage with it, down to the granular "fixing the toilet" and "figuring out the GoPro" details.  Some of it is glorious.  Some mundane.   Human beings, working together towards a remarkable goal.

We're brushing our fingers across the moon again.  In all of it, it's worthy of attention.