To Kiss the Ground

What gestures are fundamentally human? Is it to reach out and help someone? Is it to lash out in anger? Is it to sing? Or fall silent?
Perhaps the answer is the question itself. We are the species that wants to -- that must -- figure out "why?"
In the aftermath of something seemingly inexplicable like yesterday's bombing at the Boston Marathon we do want to know why, but why is not enough. We need something more than the answers to "why" in response to the horrors of violence that we will probably never fully comprehend even when we learn the identity of the perpetrator(s) and their twisted motivation.
Why is not enough. Why will not put back together what has been rent asunder in the lives of scores of individuals and families. Why won't even put back together what's been pulled apart in the minds of thousands of runners.
Having completed a half marathon just Sunday morning, the images from the finish line at Boston yesterday caused incredible cognitive dissonance for me. I cannot reconcile the pictures of mayhem from Boston with the joyous celebration that marks the finish of distance races. Those parties are not the only thing that runners run for, but they are the culmination of hours of mostly solitary running and they bring a simple, tired, joyous sense of completion to all that work. I think most of us who run are probably feeling a similar sense of dislocation as we contemplate the horror, suffering and loss from Boston and place those empty feelings alongside what the finish line should feel like.

I've seen lots of pictures over the years of marathon finishers kneeling down to kiss the ground just beyond the finish line. That's what the finish should feel like: kissing the ground in exhausted gratitude.
Rumi wrote, "let the beauty we love be what we do. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground."
The poet pushes me beyond "why did this happen" to "how to respond." We may not ever be able to answer the first question satisfactorily, but there are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Last evening we hosted an impromptu gathering on our front porch. A friend from our Cleveland days a decade ago is in town for her work and is staying with us for a couple of days. She invited a friend of hers who recently immigrated to Arlington from Nicaragua to join us. The friend is trying to learn English and really needs some local bilingual American friends, so we invited another Arlington friend, fluent in Spanish, to come on over.
The wine flowed. Our laughter rolled out across the neighborhood. We shared incredible stories and simple ones, too. We kissed the ground.
Barbara Brown Taylor says "in the eyes of the true God the porch is imperative."
I don't know why Boston ... or Newtown ... or Va. Tech ... or any of the other scenes of mass violence in America happen, but I do know what I will do in response. I'll keep gathering friends and loved ones on the porch. It's how we kneel and kiss the ground. It's what makes us truly human, and we'll do it over and over and over again in the face of all that would try to separate us from the common ground of our shared humanity.
How will you kneel and kiss the ground today?

The parade is over now

The parade is over now.

Bright flags furled. Songs faded. Signs tossed aside.

We marched right up to the seat of power

Up to the pillars. Domes gleaming in the morning sun.

Pressing forward with demands for justice

against an ancient insistence.

Thrilling with our own power in what feels like triumph.

Now the marchers have gone home

Back to families, back to business.

The route still strewn with debris

to be picked up by the guys in orange jumpsuits

less passionate about their work than we were

leaving behind wind-blown palms and paper cups

drying now back to dust.

Only a few stragglers remain

Undecided as the hours pass

Until a biological imperative insists on a choice: eat!

Accepting an invitation the stragglers gather,

Grain from the earth, fruit of the vine; bread broken and shared.

And it still feels like triumph up to that very moment when

the powers that be – defending privilege in the name of tradition –

fight back, swords drawn.

And we, who are called to respond to such force

with hearts and hopes. What of us?

The moment demands a decision:

Defy them; deny him. Follow him. Crucify him.

But it has been a long, long journey

and it’s time to get some rest.

No more miles before we sleep.

Let tomorrow bring what it will.

Still, we will remember this night

and what it demands of us. Still.

Hope Runs Through My Veins

Here's another of the Lenten poems.
Sleep-filled eyes open slowly to dull light
seeping through the east window.
Ears open, too, now to the whistle of a
north wind beneath the corner eaves.
Lips manage morning oats without enthusiasm.
Quiet heart quickens one brief beat
to the beauty of a poem
that names the loveliness of a
predawn run through the cold air of late winter.
Uninspired legs trudge out to put in their own miles and minutes.
Feet pound to an easy rhythm, but
still my mind anticipate more perspiration than inspiration
as lungs pull cold air into blood that pulses
through veins open to the warm hope of spring.

State of the Union

Here's a silly little bit I wrote a couple of weeks ago when the prez gave his annual report:
The paper had a quiz today
to rat the passion in your life.
A friend reports, on Facebook of course,
that his love for his partner of 25 years
rated "not bad for a middle-aged guy."
I didn't take the quiz.
Too busy today because my love is ill,
and so is our daughter,
and our son had his wisdom teeth removed.
I cooked bland eggs, washed dishes,
delivered ice bags and drugs,
cleaned the toilet and every other germy surface
for the ones I love.
Passion? I don't know.
But the state of the union is strong.
So good night. And, really, God bless America.

Politics of Sequester

(Cross posted on the blog of the Journal of Political Theology.)

In the interest of full disclosure I’ll note at the outset that I am married to a federal government employee. The idiotic faux crisis of the sequester, like its recent precedents, is personal in our household. I read the end of the gospel passage for this week and think, “hell, they’ve put plenty of manure around this fig tree of Washington politics and it hasn’t produced fruit for years. Let’s cut the damned thing down.”

The problem with Washington politics is that nobody on the inside gets touched by the decisions made here no matter which way they go. The only thing felt by the decision makers is the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat in the great sport of power politics.

No. That’s the wrong metaphor, for what happens here is less like a game and more like an auction or, perhaps a casino. There are still winners and losers, but victory goes not to the winners of a game (which still implies a degree of merit) but rather to the one who can pay the highest price. The folks in this town – lawmakers, pundits, the entire insider class of powerbrokers – are perfectly content to eat the finest foods and drink the finest wines their money and power can procure, and they cannot conceive of the food and drink of which Isaiah speaks, much less receive the invitation he articulates. Never mind the invitation that Jesus always issues: “follow me.”

This is a nonpartisan, or, better, a bipartisan rant (thinly disguised as a lectionary blog post). While the Republicans bear an outsized share of the blame for the current political paralysis, both sides continuously show a perfectly balanced willingness to play politics with other peoples’ lives and livelihoods. Are today’s Republicans worse sinners than the Democrats? Maybe yes, maybe no. But unless all of us repent we will perish together.

Us? All of us? Well, yes. Along with a million other households, we sit here anticipating the seemingly inevitable furlough. While waiting to be victimized by the politics of the day it is incredibly tempting and overwhelmingly easy to blame it all on the politicians. I can recite that rant with the best of them!

That may be the biggest temptation of them all: to place blame. The politicians do it all the time. Blame for the deficit? It’s either the fault of the “takers” who receive various government entitlements or the “makers” who do not pay their fair share of taxes. I buy into that framing for one sentence for the sake of an easy rhyme, but the blame game is far from poetic. Blame the previous administration. Blame the banks. Blame the bureaucrats. Blame the military-industrial complex. Blame corporations. Blame the Supreme Court. Blame the pundits. Blame the president. Blame the one percent. Blame the 47 percent.

Nevertheless, the blame for a politics that produces no fruit, that spends our money for that which is not bread, and our labor for that which does not satisfy, falls on each of us. Blame the one-hundred percent.

The blame falls on each of us because politics is not reducible to the decision-making games of our dysfunctional national political institutions. Politics properly understood, is always larger than the squabbles between two parties beholden to moneyed interests. This must be true, all the more so, if we imagine that politics has something to do, however indirectly, with Jesus.

To practice the politics of Jesus means setting aside narrow political concerns – the creation of fake crises to win or lose – for a much broader understanding of politics. Politics, where Jesus is involved, is about the ways that power is exercised in the city for the purposes of justice and shalom. Such politics compels us to embody grace always, because power gets exercised in the city not just during Congressional contests, but in every single moment of every single day.

Take your daily bread, for an example pertinent to our texts from Isaiah, the psalms and 1 Corinthians: without getting into the nitty gritty of food production, processing and so on, it is enough to say that the entire food system and agricultural economy is what it is – for better and for worse – because of the ways that power gets exercised in the city.

The politics of Jesus invites us to live each and every aspect of our lives with eyes wide open to the realities of the exercise of power, and to pay particular attention to those who are powerless or who are victims of power exercised without regard to justice and shalom – for power exercised without regard to God’s steadfast love (Psalm 63:3). The politics of Jesus is the embodiment of grace in the city – and city means where ever human beings live and move and have their being.

The church is to be the provisional embodiment of that grace lived out in community, and, therefore, the place where we teach, learn, experiment with a politics that aspires to reflect the head of the church. We embody grace in response to the grace that has been freely given us (as Paul reminds again). In receiving grace, we are called to respond in gratitude by living lives worthy of the calling we have received with that grace.

And, of course, all along the way we fall short, we are broken, we sin and we suffer.

The passage from Luke this week insists on two crucial and interrelated truths: first, no matter our politics or our faith, some things just happen to people. The fundamental truth we are reminded of in Lent – we are dust and to dust we shall return – is dependent neither on our political persuasion nor our moral turpitude. An accident at a construction site (Siloam, perhaps) can bring the tower down on the sinners and the saints. Hurricanes will wash away the good, the bad and the vast majority of us who inhabit places along the continuum. God makes the rain to fall of the just and the unjust. There is nothing of which to repent in the exigencies of life.

Jesus refuses (in Luke, but see also John 9:2) to make the easy connection between moral choice and suffering. He eschews the blame game. Yet he insists on repentance.

Our failure to repent still matters whenever, wherever and for whatever repentance is needed. It remains, in fact, a matter of life and death, according to Jesus (Luke 13-3).

Without repentance we cannot get beyond the gridlock of the present moment. We cannot get our minds beyond (metanohte, or repent, in Luke 13:3) the present time. We will continue to search merely for what can be purchased in the marketplace and not seek that which, Isaiah suggests, can only be had in the economy of the kingdom, beyond price, beyond sequester.

Interestingly, this word of the moment in Washington has its roots in the Latin sequi , to follow. The Latin sequester likely meant follower. Perhaps Jesus really would understand the politics of the present moment. I’m not saying that the disciples had anything to do with the first sequester, but I would  suggest that if our current politics involved a little more discipleship then those politics would involve a lot less blame shifting and a lot more repentance.

Google Resolutions:

Did you see the Google doodle for New Year’s Day? After a short video of highlights from 2012 the screen resolved into a map of the world and resolutions for the new year popped up from various places on the globe where people entered commitments for 2013.

I was struck by the similarity of resolutions across the world – both in what was there and in what was not. There were precious few promises related to work life and finances, and a whole host of promises about things such as these:

Loose weight; spend more time with friends; better work/life balance; travel more; make music; run; get engaged; learn Italian; cook something from other cultures; shop less, save more; invest in humanitarian projects; join a theater group; volunteer monthly; cook every day; spend more time with family; play guitar at least a little every day; do a wine tasting; learn computer science; take life easier; yoga; get a puppy; make my wife dinner once a week; take care of my body; smile.

People everywhere around the world really do want the same kinds of things, and we all want lives that are richer in joy.

What do you want in life at this point? Are you resolving to do anything about it? What gets in the way?

Happy New Year!

Happy Christmas

To everything there is a season, and the calendar says it’s the season to say, “season’s greetings, and God bless us, everyone!”

Hannah at the Hall of Fame

 Hard to fathom, but it’s almost Christmas again according to the calendar on the kitchen wall. That particular calendar came from the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown where Cheryl and I took Hannah last June to celebrate her 13^th birthday. Yes, having failed miserably to pass along to two sons my lifelong love affair with the summer game, I have raised a baseball-loving daughter – and what a great year it was for that in these parts!

We live our days, as you probably do, according to many calendars and the baseball calendar is one among them. Of course, according to the Mayan calendar, you might never get to read this at all if I don’t rush on quickly and get this year posted to the blog. So, according to the calendars …

Mike, Cheryl and Clark

The travel calendar was full of lots of small jaunts: the five of us spent a grand long weekend at a house on Virginia Beach in early spring; Martin and I journeyed down the Crooked Road to record what became his senior project; Cheryl and I joined a couple (Clark and Mike) from church for a long weekend on the Outer Banks where Clark and I ran a half marathon (while Cheryl and Mike created a fantastic breakfast for the conquering heroes!); Cheryl and I had another lovely short trip through Virginia’s wine country to celebrate our 30^th (!) anniversary; I attended General Assembly in Pittsburgh in early July; and the whole family journeyed to Chattanooga in later July. Other travels crossed onto other calendars, as you’ll see.

The academic calendar saw one major milestone: Martin graduated from Wakefield High School in June! With appropriate fanfare – which is to say very little for our introverted middle child – we trooped down to Constitution Hall on a steamy summer evening and witnessed Martin march across the stage that famously barred Marian Anderson from performing. Wakefield has to be one of the most racially and ethnically diverse public schools in the country (and the one where President Obama delivered his Faux-News-controversial“back-to-school” speech a few years back), so it was fun to sit in those seats and imagine the 1930s Daughters of the American Revolution revolving in their graves! One of the “just-plain-cool” aspects of life in metro DC is how often the ordinary parts of life intersect with momentous pieces of American history.

Martin

Immediately after graduation Martin headed of for a few days at the beach with his girlfriend’s family and then decamped for camp. He spent the summer on the staff at Hanover, following in his parents’ footsteps as a counselor on those sacred 600 acres outside of Richmond. At the moment, Martin is taking a gap year before entering the U of Mary Washington next fall. The gap year is filled with a fantastic, crowd-funded film project documenting the music, musicians and instrument makers along Virginia’s CrookedRoad. This father-son filmmaking project has taken us to the stage of the Carter Family Fold, the workshop of internationally renowned guitar-maker WayneHenderson, and the dance floor of the Floyd Country Store. Early in 2013 it may take us all the way to meet and interview Ralph Stanley. We thank many of you for supporting the project and look forward to a red-carpet debut next spring!

Bud at the beach!

Martin will be following his big brother’s footsteps at UMW from which Bud will graduate next spring. He has spent a busy, focused year of study and work. He spent the summer living back home while completing a fine internship experience at a small, DC-based tech firm. During the summer he had a paper accepted at an international academic conference, and traveled to Melbourne, AU, to deliver the paper the week of Thanksgiving. Those experiences may point him toward graduate school, and his Christmas break is being filled with applications to Georgia Tech and UC Santa Cruz. He’s focused on those schools first for their digital gaming programs, but also high on the qualifying factors: good ultimate teams! The lad is mad for Frisbee, and travels extensively to play tournaments up and down the East Coast as president of UMW’s men’s team club. He is also mad for Monica (as are we), his girlfriend of several years, and the two of them joined us for a trip down to Chattanooga over the summer to visit with the southern grands, aunts, uncles and cousins. A truly lovely time was had by all, as the bucolic pics indicate.

Hannah on the beach

The academic calendar saw Hannah begin her final year of middle school, which means we’ve now attended the last school music concert that will include beginning musicians – no more Hot Cross Buns! In the way of gifted and talented 8^th graders, Hannah is a busy kid: soccer, band, model UN, honors society along with various volunteer service activities keep the family calendar a crowded mess. Add the baseball schedule to that (and we are counting the days till spring training) and you’ve got some joyous chaos. Hannah and I made it to about 10 Nats games last season, and we were in the seats for the sad end of the season as the hometown boys came up just a bit short in their last playoff game. The girl suffered a couple of bouts of “baseball fever,” a strange malady whose only known cure is skipping school to ride bikes to a big league game.

the whole crew

The work calendar continues more or less apace for Cheryl. She is now in her 10^th year at the Library of Congress, and still calls her work “the best job in the world.” Even as I jot these musings, she is anticipating a call from the Library’s human resources department with news that her job – a “not to exceed” appointment that expires soon – has been made a full-time, permanent position … at least until the whole institution falls off the fiscal cliff! (UPDATE: she got her job!) Cheryl continues to teach teachers how to use the Library’s massive on-line resources, to write and edit content for their blog, and to represent the Library at various conferences around the country. She spent some quality time in Vegas this fall, but we heard nothing about it because what happens in Vegas …. Actually, she was impressed by the sites, amused by the lights and saddened by the hopelessness that feeds the place and that the place feeds on. And work was, well, work.

My work calendar has changed rather dramatically this fall. Beginning in September I went to 3/5 time at the wee kirk. That freed up the church’s budget such that we were able to hire, for the first time in anyone’s memory, a church administrator, and, beginning next month, we’ll add a part-time Christian educator to the ministry team. More changes are coming, and I believe we’re finally living into the promise that drew us to Clarendon almost a decade ago.

in Seattle

It’s amazing to me to write that … a decade ago. Now my own calendar has turned to a new page. I don’t know what the next page will look like. The transition to a new schedule kicked off with a month-long study leave in August. The highlight of that time was an amazing writing retreat out on Vashon Island. It was the first time I’ve ever been to the great northwest and I loved it! No humidity! No mosquitos! Volcanoes! Oh, and coffee shops on every corner! I got a huge amount of writing done, and this fall I completed the first full draft of a novel. In addition, I’ve been recording a cycle of songs (with Martin playing a variety of instruments including violin, mandolin, banjo and dulcimer), and trying to get through a long list of house and garden projects. At some point the household budget will make demands on this calendar and I’ll be looking for a second part-time gig, but for now I’m taking the time to do some creative work that I’ve longed to do for years.

The liturgical calendar continues to be the dominant one in our lives. This season of Advent, of preparing our lives for the coming again into them of a light that no darkness can overcome, challenges us to seek out the light that shines forth in each soul, including our own broken ones. As the great Leonard Cohen put it in Anthem, “there’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” So, as the calendar turns to another year, pay particular attention to the broken places because, as the story of Jesus reminds me, that’s where the light will shine. Let your light shine brightly, because the world needs still more light to break forth.

Grace and peace to you all.