Garlic Harvest

It was time to harvest the garlic.

Those winter-blasted shoots, which had endured the long winter of snowcrete and bitter frigidity, regreened and surged with the coming of spring.  But as May waned away, they were folding in on themselves, the long spears buckling and pointing earthward to where bulbs waited.  The plants were done.

I don't ever totally trust myself on the timing of that particular harvest, invisible as it is.  And so, even though the greens had told a very specific tale for a few weeks, I gave it a bit more time.  That, and I'd gently probe down into the soil around a few representative shoots, parting the earth with the gentleness of an archaeologist's brush.  Down, down, bit by bit, until fingertips met the swelling fatness of a fully formed bulb.  

Finally, finally, I was ready, and with a long trowel levered each bulb from the ground with great care.  Up they came, one by one, and as I carefully brushed the soil away, I could at last see the results of my planting.

Every year the garlic harvest is different, as individual cloves grow in unexpected ways.  This season, a significant minority of my fall planting had spawned free-standing satellite cloves, either around a primary bulb or as a blossom of unattached cloves.  The depth of the cold and the fierceness of the freeze might be the governing factor in that, but I can't say for sure.

No matter, because the harvest was successful and abundant, and I now again have garlic enough to last me the next twelve months, and more to spare.

That harvest now dangles in my carport, shaded from sun, protected from rain, and turning in the wind, where for three weeks it will dry and cure to perfection.

Swindlers and Pimps

In our societies men are paranoiacally ambitious, because paranoiac ambition is admired as a virtue, and successful climbers are adored as though they were gods. [...] What must be the day-dreams of people for whom the world’s most agile social climber and ablest bandit is the hero they most desire to hear about? 

Duces and Fuehrers will cease to plague the world only when the majority of its inhabitants regard such adventurers with the same disgust as they now bestow on swindlers and pimps. So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable. The proper attitude towards the ‘hero’ is not Carlyle’s, but Bacon’s. ‘He doth like the ape,’ wrote Bacon of the ambitious tyrant, ‘ he doth like the ape that, the higher he clymbes, the more he shewes his ars.’

Aldous Huxley, ENDS AND MEANS, p.50-51

Adapting Together

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.

from a piece in The Presbyterian Outlook, highlighting the unique loveliness of my little congregation.

Organized Lying

"At no period of the world's history has organized lying been practiced so shamelessly or, thanks to modern technology, so efficiently or on so vast a scale as by the political and economic dictators of the present century.  Most of this organized lying takes the form of propaganda, inculcating hatred and vanity, and preparing men's minds for war.  The principal aim of the liars is the eradication of charitable feelings and behaviour in the sphere of international politics."

- Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, p. 7

He'd have loved social media.  /s

Wary in the World

It’s been a weird spring, and it’s hard to believe that the official start of summer is still a month away. The leaves are green and new. My gardens, filled with soft rising fronds of post-harvest asparagus and the splash of potato greens. My green beans are once again shouldering themselves up through the rich amended soil. And all around the neighborhood, scampering here and there, there is a fresh harvest of gray squirrels.

Squirrels, let it be said, are not my friends. At this time of year, they’re fond of digging up my gardens looking for the nuts that they assume I must have buried there for them. 

"Oh, you’ve turned that earth? Maybe you’ve hidden a nut under this green bean seedling. Let me dig it up to see! No? What about this one?"

At this time of year, the juvenile squirrels are out and about, just now down from the nests, noodling about in the grass. These little critters are cute as can be, but they’re also tiny little fools.  They're oblivious to the world even though their parents clearly haven’t gotten them a smartphone yet.

This last week, on one of my morning walks, two adolescent squirrels were noodling around at the base of an oak as my dog Norm and I walked towards them. Norm noticed their presence, but seemed a little befuddled, because the adolescent squirrels paid him no mind. 

They just sat there as we approached. Seven yards. Still sitting. Five yards. Still those squirrels didn’t seem to care. Three, and they weren’t moving. Norm was being a very good boy, and not lunging, because again, he was being a very good boy, but Lord have mercy, did he want to go get ‘em.

So at two yards out, I said, “go-git’em” and he surged forward, and both of those nonchalant little rodents suddenly realized three things. 1) the world is a scary place; 2) dogs have mouths full of big teeth, and 3) there’s a reason they live in trees. Up they scurried in a panic, Norm literally inches behind them.

Did he catch them? No, no he did not, because he was still attached to me. But as we passed that tree, I looked at the nattering, panicked squirrels now high above and muttered to myself, “Well. Did we learn a valuable lesson today?”

Young squirrels aren’t yet wary. They haven’t learned yet the way of the world around them, filled with dogs and cars, hawks and cats. Faced with something they don’t recognize, their instincts haven’t yet been honed by the perils of the world. 

Just because you’ve discovered Christ’s new path of life, it doesn’t mean you’re not as vulnerable as a kit. 

All those old hungers...lust and greed, hatred and bigotry, anxiety and paralyzing fear? Those are all waiting, prowling, lurking within you. There are still people who will hate you for no reason, or harm you to further their own desire for power. There are still blighted souls who will manipulate you and betray your trust.

All of that remains true, even though Jesus has shown us the way not to let that be true for us and our dealings with those around us.

Keep yourself disciplined, maintaining your focus and your commitment to the Way of Jesus, because complacency just makes you easy pickings for the brutes, hucksters and demagogues outside, and the stirrings of your own worst self within.

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.

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.