Travelin' John

The news of John Fain's passing came, as so many things do these days, in a social media post.  

I'd known John for a little over a decade.  I met him in the social hall of my little church, after he arrived one Sunday morning on a bicycle laden for life outdoors.  Folks in my congregation already knew him, or knew of him, and as he sat through worship that day, his lean, grizzled geniality changed the spirit of the morning.  There was, if I am honest, a tiny bit of wariness.  One doesn't ever know, when folks who are wired in radically non-standard ways enter your space, how things are going to go.

It went fine.  He sang our sturdy old hymns and prayed with us and was clearly at ease.  He knew he was welcome in that gentle little sanctuary.

Talking with him over coffee and snacks later that morning was...different.  John was different.  In a less gracious age, we'd have called him mad, or crazy.  Now, mentally ill.  Or better yet, neurodivergent, if we're feeling welcoming.  Having worked with the homeless mentally ill for years at my home church, I was more in that latter camp.  Some neurodivergence runs so deep that it sabotages and fragments the soul.  John's was, for the most part and most of the time, not of that type.  John was just very idiosyncratically himself.  He was "shamanic," or so I decided.

John was fun to talk with.  He was wildly unpredictable, utterly chill and intense all at once, with a mind that flitted from concept to concept in ways that required attention and adaptivity.  I immediately liked him, because he was immediately likeable.  I enjoyed how he made himself at home, receiving and harmonizing with the hospitality he'd been offered.  I enjoyed talking esoteric theology, or of our mutual appreciation for the music of Tom Waits.

John visited us many times over the years.  Some visits, just for a day, as he got provisioned and repaired and did what he needed to do.  Other visits, for longer.  One miserably hot and stormy summer, he camped out on our property for a bit, coming into the fellowship hall to get cool and escape the dank mid Atlantic swampiness.   He stayed with some church members for a while during a bitterly cold early Spring in 2014, when the roads and trails were sheets of ice.  That Sunday, when he came to church, he asked if he could come up to the pulpit and read the scriptures as our liturgist, and after some thought, we said...sure.  He did so ably, and with grace, like he got up and read the Gospel in front of folks every day.

John was a friend of the church, and his arrival was always welcome.  Travelin' John, we called him.

I learned things from John.  As the sort of pastor who is awkward at fundraising, John Fain taught me the art of the ask.  Because John had need, and was utterly unselfconscious about naming it.  He needed food, because he was hungry.  He needed clean clothes, and repairs for his bike and trailer.  He needed a place to stay, because it was smotheringly hot or bitterly cold.  These weren't trivial things for him, and were genuine needs that were within our power to meet.  He asked without shame, but also without any sense of grasping.  If you said no, he'd just nod, and be cool with it.  No hard feelings, but hey, could you maybe do this, instead?  And often you would, because you could, really, without even missing it.

His last years weren't spent travelling, as his discomfort around uniformed law enforcement got translated into getting into the care of the county.  Even so, he'd message me now and again, just to say hey.   I'd found myself thinking a month or so ago, when a different traveler came through looking for provisions, that I'd not heard from him in a while, and wondering how he was.

Not well, evidently.  

I and all the souls at Poolesville Presbyterian will miss his visits, and his presence, and his spirit.  

Godspeed, John.  May the sun light the long road of peace before you, and the wind be at your back.

A Eulogy for the Alderman Stacks

I am a terrible alumnus.  This, I will freely admit. 

While my education at the University of Virginia profoundly enriched and set direction for my life, and I still maintain connection with the friends I made there, the culture of the school never jibed with me.

It's a culture that I find expressed every single time I receive my alumni magazine.  The alumni magazine that my William and Mary alumna wife regularly reads cover to cover is filled with long, substantive articles about the research of professors and unusual, creative work by W&M graduates.  

That's not what I get.  The slight, slick magazine that arrives for me is almost invariably a paean to wealth, privilege, and material success.  It's a magazine for strivers, stuffed full of advertising for Charlottesville area estates, most of which are priced either in the high seven digits or without a pricetag.  Because if you have to ask, eh?  

Most of the rest of it revolves around fundraising, which seems absurd for an institution that rests upon a thirteen point six billion dollar endowment hoard.  My wife holds it up as evidence that W&M is an institution more serious about its educational mission, and I have to admit she has a point.

I usually just recycle it.

But the magazine I just received was different.  On the cover, an image of the new humanities library, the former Alderman Stacks.  I spent a great deal of time in the Stacks, and my memory of them is strong.  Like so many things, it has been recently remade, the old facility gutted and "reimagined."  That reimagining was celebrated in a short article, filled with pictures of the new, light-filled spaces.  It began with this opening description of the old stacks:

"There was always that distinct experience when you headed to the back of Alderman Library.  You'd cross the connecting bridge, never looking down the barren window wells on either side, and confront cold steel--an old elevator beside the metal chute they called a staircase.  The ceilings lowered to half height.  The walls closed in.  Windows disappeared.  Time stopped.  Your internal compass lost its polarity.  You had descended into the dark night of the Stacks.  Retrace those steps today and it's like a morning-sun realization that it had all been a bad dream."

A "bad dream?"  Really?

I had the experience of entering those Stacks countless times, but my encounter with that space was completely different.

That bridge was liminal, a place of crossing over, of transition between the outside world and the Stacks.  Because the Stacks were dreamlike.  They felt like a different world, whose internal logics and peculiarities were like those that fill our time in the Land of Nod.

The Stacks were a little close and crepuscular, the low ceilings and tight, functional staircases creating a labyrinthine warren whose twilight aesthetics spoke quietly of deep reflection and intimate focus.  The study carrels were more than a little monastic.  It felt old, even back in the late '80s.  

But "old" isn't a pejorative.  It felt rooted, a part of the written history whose memories filled the volume within.  

It was a place created for books, defined by books, and seemingly comprised entirely of books.  Words on paper hemmed you in, around, below, and above.  The scent of ancient paper filled the air with a rich sweet must.  It felt peculiarly organic, a sanctum of deep soft quiet and distance from the world, separate from the rush and hum of life.  

It was the sort of place that felt worth exploring. It was a little magical, the sort of place where one wouldn't be entirely surprised to encounter Galdalf the Grey seeking a particularly obscure scroll.  It was a place where you could focus, where you could be undistracted, where you could lose yourself in words.  It was not a place of this scattered, Adderall age.

That soft magic is now lost, washed away from the University of Virginia...like the humanities, like the study of literature, like the arts...by a space that dazzles.

The Day Fred Met Jesus

It had been dark for a very long time.

There'd been pain, and it was everywhere.  He'd snarled and raged at it, but it was everything he was, and his anger was helpless against it.  It would wear him and wear him hard until he faded back into the dark again.  His thoughts had become scattered fragments, his soul an empty bottle of Thunderbird smashed behind the Highs.  But then the pain stole away, off into nothing, skittering away like a spider before the light.

The light came, golden and alive and bright, and he was himself again.  It had been a very long time since he had been himself.

The light was everywhere, and it took form before him, and looked at him.

"I...um..."

The man's voice felt peculiar, like it was not his own.  He could barely feel himself, but it wasn't the strange haze of dream-life.  It was fuller, more real.

"So," spoke the form before him, in a voice that could have been his own.  "How did you do?"

He felt faint, as he tried to reach back into himself for some sense of who he had been.  He remembered anger, rage, a seething near-madness of hatred.  He remembered passions that had surged in him, that as a young man had shattered and reformed him into a broken thing.  He remembered shouting, and signs, and blows delivered by his hand.

He tried to remember the hate, but in the presence of the form and the light, it all felt unreal, a shadow.

"I...don't...really remember."

Between them sprang a book, or at least, he thought it was a book.  It seemed so, but it shifted and danced.  He tried to look at it, but as his eye would light on a word or a phrase, it would open like a window, and the reality it described would be right there before him in all of its wild complexity.

It was too much, more than he could bear, and he looked away.

"There are different ways we can look at this," the figure said, and there was the hint of a growl in its voice.

"You did not mean to feed me.  You did not want to clothe me.  You did not intend to visit me in my imprisonment."

And the figure brightened, and the light warmed, and warmed still brighter, until it was the tropical sun at noonday.  He tried to step back, but there was no back.

"You knew that I am a consuming fire, and yet you did not even try to do these things.  You cursed the oppressed, and cried hatred against the suffering, and danced and sang at the tears of others.  You were a curse to your children, and you made your family a hated thing."

The light grew fiercer still, shifting red, pressing into him, and his fear began to rise.

And then, as it almost reached the point of pain, it dimmed, just a little bit.  And on the lips of the figure, something that might have been a smile, a little wistful.

"But I'm not done.  There are other things you accomplished, with that little flicker of life I gave you.  You didn't make a single convert, not one, to your hatred.  In fact, you made a point of driving people away from that peculiar little church of yours.  So, well, there's that."

The man remembered, remembered that even his children fled, and his throat closed.

"You took the most hateful things people say they believe about me, and made them real.  You took the mask off of hatred, and did so without ever resorting to violence, not once.  You made hate truly hateful, so that no one could lie to themselves about what it was they were really saying.

Wherever you went, with your signs and your curses, people would gather in defense of what is good.  Police and students, soldiers and peace activists, bikers and mothers, the young and the old, people from every walk of life, from every political persuasion, they'd all come together to resist your strange, precise madness.  Everywhere you went, you summoned the best spirit of a nation to stand against you."

The man watched and knew, as images and voices leapt and danced from the book.  People sang, and they stood together.  They honored the dead, and each other.  Then the book showed a courtroom, and judges.  The figure went on.

"You convinced a nation to reaffirm the rights of the unpopular, to allow everyone to have their voice.  You forced them to write freedom more deeply into their laws, to insure that oppression would be just that little bit harder."

"And for those who I made just a little different, your words of hate might have stung, but they did something deeper.  They helped turn a nation's heart away from an ancient hatred.  Your actions, horrible as they were, turned a people towards giving justice to all of my children.   Your actions, insane as they were, helped remind a people of what matters.  Without you, those who love a little bit differently would not be welcomed and accepted as they are now.  You made your tiny little world a better place, though it was the last thing you wanted."

The book whirled, and told the stories of thousands of human beings, surrounded by their families and friends, celebrating and having blessings spoken over their commitment to one another.

The figure laughed, and shook its head.  The thing like a book closed upon itself, and vanished.

"Fred, I don't hate fags.  I can't.  I am Love.  And though you didn't mean to serve me, you did.  You did an amazing, amazing job.  You couldn't have done better if you'd tried."

The figure changed, and shifted, and grew.  "So, as much as it seems strange to me to say this, well done, you poor, broken, and hateful servant."

The light rose, golden and fierce and inescapable.

"Oh, and this might burn a little bit at first.  But it'll get better.  It'll be wonderful.  You'll see.  Welcome home, Fred."

Eulogizing Harold Camping

"I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.  For the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."  

Ah, Harold.  It was tough to see you go.

It's not that I agreed with you theologically.  I don't, and we wouldn't have seen eye to eye on almost anything where our relationship to the Creator of the Universe was concerned.  I suppose you now know the truth of it, as I will one day.

Here's hoping I'm right, because I'd like to share this with you, and maybe talk for a little while.  Or do whatever it is one does where you are now.

Though we wouldn't have agreed about most things, it's still hard to see the way that you are remembered, with slight snickering.

In your latter years, you crossed a line, one you'd been toeing for a while.  From your earnest, self-taught heart, you made a deeply unwise call that made you a global laughingstock.  Pesky thing, this social media era, particularly for the unwise.

But you weren't a charlatan, a two-faced huckster just out to fleece his flock so's he could have another Bentley for his "ministry."  There are plenty of those out there, but you weren't one of them.  You really believed what you said, which made it painful watching you fail.  I never thought you were right, of course.  You were wrong in some very significant ways.  But that does not give me the right to mock  you, or to snicker and smile at your pain.

Your response to your error was telling about your soul.  You didn't double down.  That's what cultists do, and the insane, and the evil.  They find a reason they were right.  They cling to their error, no matter what.

After a humiliation of global proportions, you said, publicly, to everyone: "I was wrong.  I wasted my long life on this pursuit.  Faith is about other things.  I'm sorry."

No excuses.  No rationalization.  Just, "I was wrong."  That takes a certain type of person, it does, and it speaks well of who you were.

We probably still wouldn't have agreed about most things, even then, but let me share with you three good things that I can honestly tell you about your life and the effect you had on me.

First, in the midst of the hubbub of your globally publicized mistake, you stirred my thirteen year old Jewish son to talk with me about what it meant to be a faithful person.  Did I, as a Christian, believe what you believed?  I was able to tell him that I did not, and to explain why.  Teens are notoriously hard to open up, particularly about matters of faith and meaning, and double-extra-particularly if you're their father.  I still remember that conversation, and I'm grateful to you for making it possible.

Second, as I've grown spiritually over the years, my worldview has changed.  I'm shaped by a peculiar fusion of faith and science, one that you'd probably have found a bit heretical.  OK, a lot heretical.  Given that your creation was only 6,000 years old, and mine is…well…an infinite multiverse…we understood our place in the scheme of things rather differently.

What's peculiar about my view, though, is that within it, there's a place where you weren't wrong.

Oh, sure, you were completely wrong in this space-time.  But in the wild and crazy multiverse of creation, there are functionally countless universes, identical to our own.  In more times and spaces than we can shake a quantum stick at, a six-kilometer wide hunk of mostly-iron came barreling out of the inner solar system on October 21, 2011.  Blinded by the sun, all of our sensors and telescopes would have missed it.

Just as we were all collectively tweeting our snarkery to #haroldcamping #lol, the heavens would have lit with the fire of a species-ending epochal asteroid strike.   I'm not sure how validated you would have felt by that, but hey.  "Close enough" counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and apocalyptic events.

More importantly, in the infinite multiverse of God's creation, some mistakes are wrong, and some mistakes are evil.  You were just wrong.  Your life has reminded me, as I often need reminding, that there is a difference.

Third, I've found myself reflecting on the impact your wrongness had on your followers.  Here's what they did.  They gave up all their possessions.   In those months before things did not go as you'd said, those who took your message seriously lived their lives as if every moment mattered.  They abandoned the drab routines of our culture, and set themselves towards doing something they viewed as being of ultimate importance.  That thing did not involve doing permanent harm to themselves, or harming others.  They just set all the crap aside…all of it...for a season.

This, in reflecting on your life, strikes me as interesting.  Because Lord knows I feel that desire now and again, as materialism and consumerism sits heavy on my soul.  But I am just too much of a coward to do it.

In countless churches around the world, that's what gets preached every week, and particularly in this season of Advent.  This time matters!  Possessions are not what counts!  Wake up! Spread the word!

This is kinda sorta what Jesus asked us to do, thems of us who take him seriously. We preach this from our pulpits, but more often than not we fail to live it.  Sometimes I wonder, frankly, if the only way to pull people out of the mire of our broken culture is with a message as radical as yours.

And wondering that is a good thing.

So, Harold.  Thanks for really apologizing, in an era when that skill is almost forgotten.  Thanks for helping me talk with my son, and for the way you were wrong but not evil, and for the reminder about what it often takes to stir us to action.  I'll see you on the other side.

Roger Ebert is Going To Hell, and Other Hard Truths

It's been a bad week for writers I respect and enjoy.  First came the news from Scotland that Iain Banks, one of my very favorite hard sci-fi authors, has terminal cancer.  There will be no more Culture novels from his fertile mind, no more glorious pan-galactic tales of sentient AI starships and brilliantly realized alien intelligences.

And then yesterday, abruptly, the news of the passing of Roger Ebert.  I go way back with Ebert.  As a budding teen cinephile, I watched him go at it with Gene Siskel every single week.  This was in that long-ago era when you needed to set your schedule to make time for something you cared about.  Things of value did not come to you streaming, anytime, anywhere.  

They were more coy.  You had to seek them.  His insights were worth seeking.

He translated well into the 'net era.  That bastard cancer took his ability to speak, but it didn't take his mind, and his reviews of film and insights into culture remained cogent, smart, and graceful.

Earlier this week, I came across the announcement that he was moving on from his reviews...and from there, suddenly, that he had passed.

In my feed yesterday, there was a beautifully written piece from Ebert's own pen about his sense of his mortality.  He saw his own end as inescapable, and nonbeing as his destination.   He wasn't a Christian, not any more.  

I wouldn't concur with his view of mortality, of course, but the grace and thoughtfulness that suffused his self-penned eulogy were inescapable.  He'd found his way to a humble realism.   As he put it:

"I have no quarrel with what anyone else subscribes to; everyone deals with these things in his own way, and I have no truths to impart.  All I require of a religion is that it be tolerant of those who do not agree with it."

His worldview was not overtly my own, but from his own musings over the inescapability of death he'd come to that place where he viewed compassion and humility as central virtues.

Ebert's lovely benediction over his own life stirred interestingly in with some recent reflections I've been doing over my own work.  

Here I am, working with my editor on this absurdly ambitious book about faith and the multiverse, that fascinating new take on the nature of existence itself.  On my darker days, I look at what I'm writing and shake my head.  It seems so desperately impractical, written on a scale so far beyond the day to day as to be almost insane.

And yet on my lighter days, I find myself thinking exactly the opposite.  Thinking about being matters, because our view of the nature of things shapes how we live.  We are creatures of story, after all.   Our view of the universe, of creation, of the forces and shape of things, that view impacts how we live.  Most significantly, it impacts the choices we make, and the relationships we have with other sentient beings.

The story of life in the multiverse, for example, is one of freedom and generosity.  Such a creation humbles our certainties, stirs an aversion to speaking in absolutes, and offers us the joy of encountering realities beyond our own.   But there are other stories out there.

There are out there, for example, plenty of folks who would read Ebert's parting blessing to the world he loved being a part of, purse their lips, and shake their heads.  A pity, they'd say.  The cold hard truth is that he's in Hell.  Sorry, but that's just The Way Things Are.   For them, the universe is a binary equation, with their Truth on one side, and the fires of everlasting Heck on the other.  That is the story they tell themselves about their world, and it comes directly from their view of the universe.

As much as such souls might think they're serving the reality of my Teacher's call to radical compassion, I just can't see it.  Most dangerously, seeing reality in that way tears the grace and the mercy out of what he taught.  It shapes a soul away from compassion.

Other worldviews can tell equally dangerous stories.  There are those who see only themselves, and every other being is simply an object to slake their hungers and desires and greed.  There are those who look at the struggling and the poor and see only contemptible weaklings who deserve what they get.  There are those who look at the one with the funny accent or the strange clothing, and hate them for their difference.

But those absolutists, cold to compassion and dead to difference, are what turn our world into hell with their hard truths.

Ebert, bless his soul, was not one of them.   He had opinions, sure.  But he understood what made for a good story.  

Godspeed, and two thumbs up.

Oh, and like life, gaming is art.  But, as St. Peter reminded you recently, you know that now.