It's Hot Out There

Well, of course it is. It's June in Virginia, after all. It's always hot in Virginia in June.
On the other hand, it's been pretty hot for a while. In fact, NASA reports that we just experienced the hottest April globally in its data set that dates back to 1880. January to April was the hottest such period in those records, and the same data suggest that the earth just endured its hottest 12 months in those 140 years.
As the Evangelical Climate Initiative puts it so clearly, "Now is the time for followers of Christ to help solve the global warming crisis."
The truth is clear. The planet is heating up. How much of the heating is driven by human activity is too complex to pin down with utter exactitude, but a century of research clearly shows that industrial activity (manufacturing, energy production and use, transportation) plays a significant role in the changes. Just as clearly, there are changes we could undertake that would make a huge difference.
The moral imperative from our Judeo-Christian tradition is obvious. We are stewards of what we have been given. We are part of creation and we do not stand apart from it. Moreover, we have an ethical responsibility to hand on to our children a liveable world. At the moment we are failing.
The gaping wound in the Gulf, bleeding crude oil into a beautiful ocean, is a symptom of our failure, and it should spur us to action. Oh, I know, it's not directly related to climate change, but it is a part of the same system.
That system must change, and it is up to us to change it.
Part of the solution is political and part is personal. I probably should have ridden my bicycle instead of my motorcycle to church today. On the other hand, I did leave the car at home (and it is a low emission, fuel efficient hybrid -- not to mention a pretty sweet ride.) Each of us can make changes that make a difference.
I also called both of my United States senators today to encourage their support of comprehensive climate change legislation as part of a Virginia clergy call-in day in support of a clergy statement on climate change.
Meanwhile our state attorney general is attacking climate change research both from the EPA and the University of Virginia.
Perhaps the AG is an authentic climate change skeptic or maybe he is cynically playing to his conservative political base. It could be both.
Whatever the case may be, the opposition to climate change legislation is clearly part of a conservative political program driven in significant part by corporate interests whose bottom lines could suffer if the United States adopts strict emissions controls. As the Union of Concerned Scientists reported several years ago, oil interests -- in particular Exxon Mobile -- have poured millions of dollars into funding climate skeptics.
And I've just fallen into their well-laid trap by getting lost in the political weeds of what should be, first and foremost, a moral issue.
Perhaps the fact that a growing number of evangelicals share a moral outrage about the state of the earth will change the political calculus on the issue. They understand on this issue that their interests are not the same as those of the oil industry.
After all, everybody sweats, and it's getting hotter all the time.

parting shots of spring

Spring brings our own small blossom festival, which corresponded this year with the great laptop die-off. If you'd been at our house two months ago, this is what you'd have seen on the way to the front door.

In All Things, Moderation

I don't reckon Plato had blogs and spam in mind when he suggested moderation but that's what it's come to friends. A few of you offer comments from time to time and I welcome them -- even the persistently argumentative and disputatious ones. When I started this little thing years ago I imagined that it might serve sometimes as a place of dialogue and a few times it actually has. I continue it because I find it a useful, even helpful, discipline. If a few folks find my ramblings amusing or provocative, that's an added plus as far as I'm concerned. However, when spammers start leaving comments with links to on-line Chinese pornography -- why am I surprised that there is such a thing -- I'm drawing the line. So I've turned on the "moderate comments" option. I promise never to block even the most obnoxious comments if they are remotely on point, as long as it doesn't link to something disgusting. Keep it clean, people!

Remembering

I rarely watch TV news so I don't really know how much time is being spent focused on President Obama's Memorial Day activities. I hope it's not much, because it is surely not a newsworthy item.
It seems that, like President George H.W. Bush before him, Obama is sending his vice president to Arlington National Cemetery next Monday. The president will be in Chicago and will visit a national cemetery there. Some people are trying to make a big deal out of this but I won't link to them here because I don't want to drive a single extra reader toward this one more shining example of what is so wrong with our politics.
On the same day that news of the 1,000 American casualty in Afghanistan was published we're supposed to be worried about what cemetery the president will visit to honor America's war dead on Memorial Day?
I have ancestors buried in the national cemetery in Chattanooga -- veterans of World War I. As far as I know, no American president has ever visited that cemetery. Does that make the sacrifices of those buried there less significant? Would they be elevated in death beyond what they were in life if a president did lay a wreath there? Will their deaths mean any less because President Obama visits a national cemetery in Illinois rather than one in Virginia next week? Were dead veterans dishonored when Vice President Dan Quayle went to Arlington National Cemetery each Memorial Day during the first President Bush's term of office in place of the president?
Honestly, none of those questions makes any sense at all.
The real question to be asked on Memorial Day is this: why are young men still dying in Afghanistan and Iraq?
To ask that does not dishonor their service. It is, in fact, the only question that does justice to their continued sacrifice. For if we cannot ask the central questions of our time and discuss and debate them in civil and substantial terms then nothing they have done will amount to anything more than sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Those who would distract us from that central question are the ones who dishonor the memory and the service of the men and women we remember on Memorial Day.

Russian Roulette on the Laptop

Just got off the phone with a nice Indian man who has done his best to resuscitate my practically brand-new laptop which has been randomly shutting down pretty much since I bought it two months ago.
He had me drain the power from it, which involved pulling the battery and holding the power button down for about 20 seconds. It doesn't take much to drain power.
He walked me through a couple of simple steps to reset the machines bios -- whatever that means. Whenever I see "bios" I think "life." It does seem that this machine has a mind of its own, so why not a life of its own as well.
Which brings to mind the announcement yesterday that scientists have created a cell from whole clothe. Well, that's not exactly correct. The New York Times reports it this way:

The genome pioneer J. Craig Venter has taken another step in his quest to create synthetic life, by synthesizing an entire bacterial genome and using it to take over a cell.

According to the Times article, the environmental group Friends of the Earth (whose KSU chapter I was an officer in a long time ago and in a strange set of circumstances not worth going through here), condemned the achievement as "dangerous new technology," and urged an end to the research.
Of course that is unlikely. Technologies, once out of the scientific bag, seldom get put back in.
Those who pull them out of the bag, Venter in this case, almost always trumpet their discoveries or achievements with promises for valuable advances for humankind. Venter spoke of new energy and medical advances that might emerge from synthetic cells that could be invented in the future using the technologies he has pioneered.
Sometimes -- often? not so often? too often? -- the technological advances have profound unintended consequences that the scientists, in their drive to discover, overlook.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was almost an exception, or, at least was cognizant enough of the consequences of his scientific work to say, upon the detonation of the first atomic bomb, "I have become death, the destroyer of worlds."
The edge of science is often a kind of Russian Roulette, although some of the bullets really are magic while others are deadly.
I'm playing my own small blogging version right now. I have no idea whether or not the fixes my Indian friend recommended will work. If not the laptop will shut down with no warning and I'll lose whatever I'm working on. So I'm pausing regularly to save it -- not because it's worth any great effort, but because I'm spending the time so I might as well have some pixels to show for it at the end of the day.
I would hope that scientists working in Venter's field would likewise take enough time along the way -- pausing to save, as it were, the rest of us from unforeseen shut downs.
Wow! All the way through a brief post without a shutdown. I hope the work that Venter is pioneering does a whole lot better than that.

Honor and Lies

The sad, strange and silly saga of Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut's attorney general and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, has prompted a lot of commentary. It seems that Blumenthal has claimed, falsely, that he served in the American military in Vietnam.
It's not the first time and probably not the last that someone who did not serve in that war has claimed to have done so.
In this morning's Post, former editor and reporter and Vietnam vet Henry Allen decided to answer the question of "why they lie about Vietnam."
Allen puts it this way: "The fact is that regardless of whether a war was moral, justified, won or meaningful, having served in one -- particularly in combat -- confers prestige."
I suspect that he is correct, but in a limited way.
Chris Hedges, in his brilliant War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, writes, "the rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug."
I doubt that Allen would put much stock in Hedges' opinions because Hedges only covered wars and never fought in one. After all, in this morning's piece, Allen also writes,
"Once I listened to a former war-zone correspondent who was eager to demonstrate that his time under fire was the same as a soldier's. He said, I'd get up in the morning and face the decision of whether I should head out where it was really dangerous.
But soldiers don't get to decide. They don't have choices. That's part of the hell of war."
Allen would likely have more respect for the observations of Tim O'Brien, whose towering work, The Things They Carried, includes this observation:
"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil."
One wonders why participating in an addiction to obscenity and evil continues to confer prestige. That it does strikes me as incredibly sad. It's like the old drinking stories of recovering alcoholics -- they know that the drink could have, and maybe should have killed them, just as it did so many of their buddies, but they cannot let go of the irresistible feeling that the drink gave them.
There have been 6,492 coalition casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq as of May 20, including 37 this month in Afghanistan.
The prestige toll continues to rise every day.
As to Vietnam, well, I was 15 years old in April of 1975, when the last Americans left Vietnam. I organized and participated in my first protest against American militarism on Armed Forces Day in 1978.

So, where was I ... Oh, yeah, Kent, 1970

Oh, yes. May 4. Kent. 1970. Busted laptop. Hm, one of these things is not like the other.
In any case, the story I wanted to tell goes like this:
In the spring of 2000 the organizers of the memorial events that year invited all of the survivors of the shootings to Kent. I don't know if that happens every year. I do know that in the early years, including the years that I was a student, the school administration really did not want the survivors on campus because they were a visceral reminder of something the university simply wished to forget.
But in 2000 the surviving victims of the shooting were invited back and many returned, which was really neither here nor there for me except that in the spring of 2000 I was serving a church in Mt. Lebanon, PA, a suburb of Pittsburgh.
In 2000, May 4 fell on a Wednesday. It was both a work day for me and a school day for our children so we quickly concluded that the trek to Kent, about two hours west of Mt. Lebo, was not going to happen. I was at the church on that Friday afternoon later than usual, and the rest of the staff had left for the day. I was walking around the front of the church, something I rarely did because the main entrance off the parking lot actually went into the back of the place. I noticed a middle-aged man and woman and a teenage girl trying the door to the fellowship hall, so I walked over to them and asked if I could help.
The man said he had grown up in Mt. Lebanon and attended the church as a child, and was back in town for the first time with his daughter. He wanted to show her some of the places that had been important to him and the church, which had hosted dances for high school kids on Friday and Saturday nights in the late 60s, was one of those places.
One of the family, I don't recall which, was wearing a 30th anniversary May 4 t-shirt and I remarked that I was a KSU grad.
That was when Jim Russell introduced himself. He told me that he had been shot at Kent on May 4, 1970. He was standing at a 90-degree angle from and more than a football field's distance from the National Guardsmen who turned and opened fire on the students that afternoon. He was shot in the thigh and the forehead by the only Guardsman firing a shotgun. The rest had machine guns.
In 2000 he lived in Oregon, having moved west in the mid-1970s to escape the shadow of Kent. He shared with me the bitterness he felt toward the university and the authorities, who wanted either to forget the whole thing or blame the students.
He vividly remembered the calls to "shoot 'em all," and the names -- "worse than brown shirts and night riders" according to Ohio Gov. James Rhodes -- that the students were called by high ranking government officials.
He shared with me that he'd lost a job in Ohio in the early 70s when his employers learned of his connection to the shootings, a story he also shares in the story linked above. He also noted that a new university administration during the 1990s had changed the way the school dealt with the survivors of the shootings and had made them feel welcome on campus for the first time in a quarter century. While time had healed his physical wounds and many of the psychological ones as well, I doubt that Jim Russell ever felt completely at peace with the events of May 4, 1970. He died in 2007 at 60.
A memorial service was held at Kent and the story on it in the Akron paper at the time drew echos of the same response the shootings did in 1970: the students deserved what they got.
Forty years later the shootings continue to haunt the lives of those caught in the crossfire. In fact just this week Alan Canfora, who was wounded on May 4, asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to reopen the investigation of the 40-year-old case based on new evidence from an audio recording of the shootings. A Cleveland Plain-Dealer investigation this spring used new audio enhancement techniques and discovered a voice clearly ordering the Guard to "prepare to fire" seconds before they opened fire for 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others.
Doris Krause, the 84-year-old mother of Allison Krause, who was 19 when died from fatal wounds received on a campus parking lot more than 100 yards from National Guardsmen, said of the new discovery, "I'm an old lady, and before I leave this earth, I'd like to find out who said what is on that tape."
Forty years on and it remains true that the powers that be will bring to bear deadly force on those who threaten the base of the power, and they will also go to any length to avoid being held accountable for their actions.
They used to produce t-shirts each spring at Kent that read, "long live the spirit of Kent and Jackson State." I never bought one because I was always skeptical that there was any such thing as a spirit of those places and the killings deaths of the spring of 1970. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps the spirit is simply the tireless search for the truth about what happened that day and the pursuit of something like justice even all these years later.

Tin Soldiers and Nixon's Coming

Forty years ago today Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on a crowd of unarmed college students at Kent State, killing four and wounding 13. In the aftermath of the shootings President Nixon remarked, "when dissent turns violent it invites tragedy." Of course, it was not the dissenters who turned violent that Monday morning. It was the empire's police, armed with weapons of war trained on unarmed college students in the middle of a campus that was stirred in protest against the empire's war in Vietnam.
I graduated from Kent 13 springs after the shootings, and participated in memorial vigils each of the five springs I was on campus. I've stood in the spots where the kids were mortally wounded, and I've stood on the spot where other kids turned and fired their weapons.
In other words, I've looked at the shootings from both sides now, and from both sides it has always been clear to me that had Nixon been capable of honesty he would have said, "when dissent begins to threaten the foundations of established order then the established order will bring to bear deadly force to quell the dissent." But no president can ever be that honest.
As a Kent alum I have a bagful of memories of May 4 memorials, but the most affecting May 4 connection for me happened more than 15 years after I'd graduated during the time when I lived in Pittsburgh.
I'll share the story in a subsequent post. My laptop is, once again, seriously misbehaving -- crashed twice since I began this post. Urrrrg.

with the Bishops and Elders

I spent much of the past two days with the Bishops and Elders Council of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Monday we met with Josh DuBois at the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
The first thing that should be said is that Josh DuBois is one whip-smart young man. The amount of information that he holds in his head is more than most of us hold in our electronic data bases. Oh, to be young!
The second thing to be said is what a difference an election makes. The Bush Administration steadfastly refused to engage national GLBT leaders on the pressing concerns of the community: employment and housing discrimination, GLBT poverty, the issues that uniquely confront aging gays and lesbians in health care, housing and family law matters. Monday afternoon it was clear that the Obama Administration is informed and engaged on the issues that actually comprise anything that might be called "the homosexual agenda." That agenda has nothing to do with "spreading a lifestyle" and everything to do with protecting lives and rights. The present Administration, while far from perfect on these issues, simply sees them far more clearly because they do not come at them with blinders provided by leaders from the Religious Right.
Those leaders include folks like Lou Engle, founder of The Call. Engle is reportedly headed to Uganda to support its off shoot program, TheCall Uganda, whose stated mission includes praying for help with "the challenges in our country such as ... witchcraft and human sacrifice, homosexuality and increased immorality."
While there is a certain attraction to having the Lou Engles of the world out of the U.S., we really ought to export the best of what we are not the worst. Uganda has plenty of problems with the U.S. exporting hate.
Engle's visit is timed to support Uganda's much-discussed anti-homosexuality bill, a law that would make same-gender relationships a capital crime and, if I were Ugandan, even criminalize this blog for failure to report known homosexuals and leave me liable for up to seven years in prison for my associations.
Meanwhile a bit further south, two young men in Malawi, Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, remain in prison, facing sentences of up to 14 years, for the crime of professing their love for on another.
Yesterday, on the steps of National City Christian Church, a young African gay man named Moses gave thanks to God that "something good is happening" as he prayed for the safety and liberation of his family, friends and gay and lesbians brothers and sisters in Africa.
As Dr. King put it, we are all bound together in an inescapable web of mutuality. Whatever effects one directly effects us all indirectly. The freedom to love one another must not be bound by any government, and just as we must be concerned for the rights of marginalized people here we must stand in solidarity with the marginalized and oppressed everywhere.

Earth Days

It is a beautiful day in the neighborhood, as my favorite Presbyterian minister used to say.
I got a note from my uncle this morning. Yesterday was my late aunt's birthday as well as the anniversary of their engagement. He recalled that their first book was on creation care, although long before that term of art had come into use.
John's note details what is happening in his garden this spring, and notes that both of the camps that he directed over the many years, Hanover and New Hope, had substantial demonstration gardens that helped feed the camp community.
None of that particularly suprised me. I have seen John in the garden many times over the years at Hanover -- the first time he met my two sons he was working in the garden, dripping sweat and loving life.
But reading his note prompted me to wonder where his love of the garden came from. My father, John's younger brother, never muched cared for gardening. My mom loves it, but dad never had any interest that I could discern. He knows nature that way one might know a set of facts. He always knew what kind of tree was growing in front of him, but as he grew older it seemed that trees were mostly obstacles to mowing the grass.
To be sure, my dad has always been an environmentalist in his convictions, but not so much a practicing one beyond the point of basic stewardship of resources -- and on that point I have always had the impression that it was more about saving a nickel than saving the planet.
Until the past few years I would have said that I was much more like my father than like my uncle. As urban dwellers in Chicago we rarely had any green space in which to garden, and we never went out of our way to create any.
During our interim sojourn between those years and our Arlington time we did have yards, and we did some basics, but those were also the years when our children were young and so time was always at a premium.
But I think the bigger issue was that we did not stay put long enough to put down roots, literally.
Now we've lived in the same house for almost seven years, and there's no move on the horizon. We've planted a tree, an autum blaze maple, and stayed put long enough to see it grow taller than the house. We just planted another, a Japanese emperor maple, that will never grow as tall as the house, but I hope to stay put long enough to see it broaden across one half of our small front yard.
Tending to the earth requires time, and time spent in one place. It also requires focusing on that one place with considerable attention. I think this was the great difference between my father and his brother.
Now my dad is slipping gradually into Parkinson's dimentia, and he lives pretty much out of focus all the time. But long before the disease struck, my dad's restless, creative energy drew his focus always to the next thing, while my uncle not only stayed put physically, he also stayed put emotionally.
I have always been, in that respect, my father's son. The horizon has always beckoned, and I've always looked for the next thing. I'm sure that will always be true, but I have learned that the only reason the grass if ever greener on the other side is because someone stayed put long enough to make it that way.
As I watched the pictures from the Gulf oil rig disaster this week, it struck me that we need all of that oil because we are a culture that does not value roots. It is altogether fitting that the great crises of our time are and will be about what our lifestyles are doing to all of the roots that we are too busy to tend.

Greetings from Asbury Park ...

Well, not exactly, but I did pass the exit as I was counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike on my way up to Stony Point this afternoon. And there's your two pop cultures nods for the day.
It has been a while since I last posted; in fact, it's the longest pause since I started this blog four or five years ago. I've come face to face with my own ridiculous dependence on convenient technology. It's not just technology I'm dependent upon, it's convenient technology.
As noted last month, my laptop died a sad and overheated death. I spent several day in vain hope and resucitation efforts loading and reloading operating systems and so forth, only to conclude in the end that it was a hardware issue. Apparently the video card melted down, almost literally, due to overheating.
That happened the same week I severely sprained an ankle (trying to keep up with a kid half my age on the basketball court). All of that happened just before Holy Week.
All of which was enough to make a preacher cuss -- holy @#$!, as it were.
So, just in time for Easter I got a new laptop. But by that point not only was I in the midst of the business of the season, I was also out of practice, or, better, out of the practice of writing.
We are what we practice. When we set aside practices for whatever reason, it is all too easy to leave them set aside. Sometimes that is not a bad thing. To every thing, and every practice, there is a season.
But often we leave practices set aside because they are either habits or they are not. The practice of eating well, the practice of living lightly on the earth, the practice of worship, the practice of prayer, the practice of sport or art or music require, well, practice.
Contrary to the old saying, practice does not make perfect. Practice does, however, make us. Moreover, practice is not always convenient, and for one as addicted to (or practiced at) convenience, temporary inconvenience becomes a too easy excuse for setting a practice aside.
So I'm picking this practice back up, even as I engage again the practice of making peace as part of the Presbyterian Peacemaking Fellowship at its first ever convocation of peacemakers this weekend at the Stony Point Center in New York.
I am spending the next couple of days in the company of a wonderful collection of remarkable people whose experience and wisdom humble and inspire me. The grace of being in their presence this evening has, if nothing else, given me the energy to wake up the blog and pick up the practice. Not empty and aching ... but still off to look for a new, more peaceful America.
Sorry, the New Jersey Turnpike just does that to me.

Patience

This week, in a book I'd set aside at least two years ago, I found a slip of paper on which I had written a couple of commitments: to practice patience and to find moments of joy to celebrate each day.
I was an excellent reminder to stumble across just now. We are almost to the end of Lent, and stand at the moment on the edge of Holy Week. Holy Week demands patience, as we move from the waving of palms and the loud "hosannas" to betrayal, crucifixion and the longing for new life.
Personally, I'm forced to wait right now, as I continue to be homebound with my injured ankle. Moreover, my laptop has resisted all efforts at resurrection! So, I can't get out because I can't drive or walk much, and I can't communicate with the ease we've all become accustomed to.
Obviously my Lenten commitment has gone the way of the laptop!
The situation has also challenged that old commitment to patience and celebration, to be sure. On the other hand, it has driven me back to some books I'd set aside, including John Crossan's God & Empire, in which I found the slip of paper.
Crossan invites us to confront the questions that inevitably arise when Christian faith confronts political empire. As we marked last week the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and as we mark next week the death of Jesus at the hands of the empire of his day, it seemed a timely coincidence that I should return to this book and find in it my own promise to practice patience and to seek joy.

Saving ...

As noted a couple of days ago, my laptop is misbehaving. As a result, I've spent a lot of time -- writing time -- backing up files in case this is a sickness unto death.
Backing up files reminds me of one of the Platonic dialogues about writing. I don't recall which dialogue -- Phaedrus perhaps -- but the conversation concerns the notion that writing is a secondary and thus lesser form of communication than speech.
Backing up files would come way down the road, then, and the entire internet would as well.
There was a time, not that long ago, when I would happily have gone on at length on this stuff, but I've forgotten most of it and I guess I didn't save the files. Ah well.
Back to backing up.

One Ton of Fanmail ... or They Just Don't Write Hate Mail Like They Used To

The piece I wrote for People of Faith for Equality Virginia responding to Attorney General Cuccinelli's recent actions ran today as an op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. By this evening I've only received two e-mail condemnations, neither of which was particularly interesting or creative.
Times have changed. Ten years ago I was forced to resign a church in Pittsburgh after preaching a sermon on same-sex marriage rights. Five years ago we got threats after Clarendon announced its marriage rights policy.
Today? A couple of lukewarm e-mails that don't even rise to the level of hate mail. I am somewhat disappointed. After all, if we're not getting hate mail we're not doing our jobs, a colleague once reassured me.
On the other hand, the nonresponse is informative on at least two levels.
It could be further evidence of the rapid decline of print media and simply indicate that no one is reading op ed pieces anymore. There is a sad truth to that. It's not sad because of what it says about the failures of the media (which are many and manifold), but rather because increasingly we only find opinion pieces in electronic space that is finely sliced and segmented, and where we seldom encounter voices we do not already agree with. To that extent, the death of the tradition of Sunday op eds saddens me.
The nonresponse could also be evidence of the continued rapid cultural shift that makes speaking out for the rights of GLBT people far less likely to engender angry response than it was just a few years ago. When we did the marriage policy change at Clarendon in 2005 the mail did not stop for weeks and the response included threatening phone calls to church.
The best this round of mail could produce was a bit of pathetic partisanship from someone in Mechanicsville: "Gays don't want equality, they DEMAND superiority; and, 'want to be out there' (pun intended) flaunting on television as often as Obama is...which is way too often!"
Harry Knox, from HRC, preached at Clarendon this morning. He was speaking with a group of us following worship and noted that roughly 90 percent of the American public now supports ending Don't Ask Don't Tell, including a majority of Republicans.
Times are changing ... and you have to work a lot harder to generate good hate mail these days.

Everything Put Together Falls Apart

The curly haired boy pictured further down has infected me with his cold.
Some strange viral thing infected my laptop yesterday.
Everything put together falls apart.
One could go lots of places from there, but my head is stuffed with anything but thought today so I'm just going to leave at that.
All the king's horses and all the king's men cannot but this back together again.

Sometimes a Cigar Is ... Just Another Day

The great privilege of ministry comes in walking through the valleys and across the mountain tops with people. I've had my share of such experiences, and they inevitably remind me of what I love about my job. Celebrating with couples who have become friends as they marry. Weeping with friends who have lost loved ones. Marching with friends seeking justice. Organizing with friends seeking peace. Studying with friends seeking wisdom and understanding. These are the moments of ministry that I, and most of my colleagues, love.
If we're lucky, we serve in communities that offer many such opportunities. I am lucky.
If we're unlucky, we serve in communities that are riven with strife over old wounds never healed. I have been unlucky.
But lucky or unlucky, all ministry has -- like all work -- its days of merely pushing the paper into the next tray. It's almost 5:00 p.m., and I've pushed a lot of paper today: session packet e-mailed - check; session packet copied - check; bulletin copied - check; e-mail blast out - check; sanctuary prepped for Sunday - check; web page updated - check.
Sometimes a day is just a day.
On the other hand, even on such a day, I managed to have lunch with one of the wise elders of the community and to share some organizing materials with colleagues in justice work.
Inspiration comes on such days as this in the details -- where God is.
So when the day gets long and seems to be dragging on tend to some details and seek the Lord where she may be found.

Something's Happening Here ... What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear

I spent several hours yesterday serving as a peace marshal at a health care reform rally sponsored by Health Care for America Now. While the event was rowdy, it never veered toward anything nonviolent so I didn't have much to do other than watch and listen.
The target of the rally was the meeting of the insurance industry group America's Health Insurance Plans, which gathered at the Ritz-Carlton in DC. The choice of hotel was as tone deaf as the recent rate hikes announced by several insurance companies. One wonders who does PR for these folks. Are they simply so removed from the reality of this particular moment that they don't realize how they look, or are they so arrogant that they don't care how they look?
As one industry employee attending the conference said, “Why don’t you just pull up in Rolls-Royces and Porsches?”
It reminded me of the auto executives flying into DC on their private jets to meet with congress and ask for a bailout. Who advises these folks?
On the other hand, I'd ask the same question of the rally organizers.
Some aspects of the event were well planned. Some 5,000 people participated according to an estimate in this morning's Washington Post. The target of the demonstration -- AHIP's meeting -- was well chosen, and the speakers did a good job of posing health care reform as reigning in the well chronicled abuses of the insurance industry. For what it was, the demonstration was a fine and successful event.
But while I am all for taking to the streets in protest, more than a decade after Seattle the rallies and demonstrations with drums and puppets and street theater all begin to look and sound the same. It seems too pat and predictable, and too easy to dismiss. I wonder what it would feel like to ask participants to dress up rather than down, to walk in silence rather than making noise, to disrupt business as usual in a completely different manner, and to engage the issue in a way that challenges the system and demands its end in uncompromising language that does not simply demonize those who profit from it and support it.
What if 5,000 people, all dressed in dark suits or skirts, walked 10 across through the streets of the headquarter cities of the insurance companies and marched into those office buildings -- or into the arms of arresting police filling the jails -- presented tons of claim forms, or read off a list of thousands of names of people who died last year because they did not have insurance, or simply stood in silent mass witness to those lives?
Such a demonstration would take incredible discipline, and a huge amount of organizing and training not to mention money. In other words, it might take way more commitment of time and treasure than people are willing to give -- which may just be why we've been stuck with an inefficient and unjust health care insurance system for more than 100 years.
Then I spent last evening at a gathering of the Luke 6 community in formation. We spent our time studying the founding text. The sixth chapter of Luke is Jesus' sermon on the plain and Luke's version of the Beatitudes. Luke's version of these teachings is famously more challenging than that in Matthew 5 (which is challenging enough for me).
I was struck, yesterday in particular, by the opening stories of the Luke text. In it Jesus is practicing direct action and protest. He goes straight into the territory of those who oppose him -- the scribes and Pharisees. In Luke 6 Jesus goes to the synagogue and scandalizes the religious leaders with his teaching about what is appropriate to the Sabbath. Without ever speaking a personal word about the people he opposes, he calls into question everything that they support.
While they may have felt humiliated, their humiliation is never the point of Jesus' action nor of Luke's writing. Both the actions and Luke's account leave open the possibility of restored relationship while completely undermining the system that has broken relationships to begin with.
Like the rest of Luke 6, the opening stories present incredibly difficult challenges to those who would try to follow Jesus, in this case, into the streets. I ended up yesterday feeling completely inadequate to that challenge and rather glad to be on the rolls of Blue Cross than on the way to the cross.

What? Pastor Glenn Beck ...

Apparently Fox News' Glen Beck was talking about churches recently. This is all hearsay because the only time I actually hear Glen Beck is when Jon Stewart plays clips of Beck for the sole purpose of mocking him.
Anyway, apparently Beck was telling his listeners to be wary of church web sites that use words or phrases such as "justice," "social justice," or "economic justice." I hear that he told folks that if their church's sites used such phrases then they should quit the church because it was no doubt a den of socialists.
I thought I'd better check my church's site to make sure that we're not socialists, so I clicked on the home page. Damn! There it is. In the center of page. Quotated. In italics.

God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

OMG! We're socialists! To make matters worse, we claim, as part of our mission statement, that we try to live out the love and justice of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
One wonders if Beck has ever actually opened a Bible. Mine has more than 300 verses that explicitly speak of God's deep concern for justice for the poor. But then again I probably have the revised socialist edition.
It reminds me of the days when I was looking for ministry positions. I noticed that liberal church's church information forms (sort of a reverse resume) always used the phrase "social justice." Conservative churches always used the phrase "Bible believing." I never did find a "Bible-believing congregation deeply committed to social justice."

Responding to Cuccinelli

Below is a letter to Virginia's attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who last week sent a letter to Virginia's colleges and universities informing them that none of their non-discrimination policies that pertain to gays and lesbians would be enforced by his office and that the schools should rescind the portions of policies that refer to gays and lesbians.
I wrote this for the board of People of Faith for Equality Virginia and we are seeking signatures from any Virginia clergy or religious leaders who are willing to sign on. Please use the "comments" to add your name and leadership position.

Sir,
When I read of your recent recommendations to Virginia’s colleges and universities I thought immediately of the father of our great university system. Thomas Jefferson famously said of other people’s religious orientations that they neither picked his pocket nor broke his bones. I’m sure he would agree that another person’s sex life neither picks my pockets nor breaks my bones.
But when bias against a person's sexual orientation picks their pocket through job discrimination or breaks their bones through gay bashing then it is the responsibility of the state to protect them in every appropriate manner. Hate crimes laws and antidiscrimination laws and policies are long-standing, well-established and proven legal means of affording such protection. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Virginians clearly face discrimination and hate crimes and the fear that accompany them.
Failure to act in the face of that reality is a black eye on the Commonwealth, and on the office you hold. To act in direct contradiction to the reality must have Mr. Jefferson spinning in his grave.
When you know that a woman is threatened on the job because she is female would you not bring the full weight of the law to bear in any resulting legal proceeding? When you know that a family loses their home because they are black would you not prosecute? When you know that a public college or university refuses to register a Christian student group because of its faith-based bylaws would you not pursue the case with vigor?
When a college professor is fired for being lesbian or a young man is beaten and killed because he is gay why would you not do the same?
That is the question your recent letter to Virginia colleges and universities warning them on including sexuality in their nondiscrimination policies raises. When you know that more than 15 percent of all hate crimes are committed against people based on perceived sexual orientation how can you in good conscience block protection of gays, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students and faculty on Virginia campuses? When you know – and there is overwhelming evidence – that young men are victimized on college campuses because they are gay why do you use your office to enable the victimizers?
You can deny that allegation, but our state’s long history of racial discrimination and violence clearly teaches us that when public officials do not act to protect those who are victimized because of who they are then those who perpetrate such acts are enabled and even encouraged to continue. Failure to use the full weight of your office to protect vulnerable Virginians is wrong. It is immoral. It is an affront to the very One who, self evidently, created us all equal and with certain inalienable rights.
Like Mr. Jefferson with respect to other faiths, you do not have to be gay or lesbian, you do not have to like gays or lesbians, you do not even have to respect them, but you do have a constitutional responsibility to protect them and your recent actions demonstrate clearly that you are failing to live up to the responsibilities and obligations of your job.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it does bend toward justice. I urge you to reconsider your position and stand on the right side of history.
Sincerely,
Rev. Dr. David Ensign
Pastor, Clarendon Presbyterian Church, Arlington
For the board of People of Faith for Equality in Virginia

Another Opportunity for Ministry

My writing for today is an e-mail I sent to a young man in Florida whose story has been told in recent days on Daily Kos, in a diary entitled, "My Nephew Was Outed and Kicked Out of School Today." As the title suggests, the young man (18) was outed as gay and thrown out of his conservative "Christian" high school in North Carolina. His parents tried to send him to the pastor of their evangelical church where he would be told he needed to be "cured."
A similar situation in that church a bit earlier ended with the suicide of a young gay man who was told he needed to be cured from his sinful life. Lots of studies show that tragic story is repeated often among young gay men, especially when they are in unwelcoming contexts.
Instead of going to his church, the young man in the diary hopped in his car and drove to Florida to his aunt and uncle's home. She wrote the diary, and in a follow up, at her nephew's insistence, included his e-mail. I wrote him a brief supportive note last evening, and he wrote back asking a few questions.
Here's what I sent him this morning.

Hi,
I have heard many others say pretty much exactly what you've said here. The good news is ... well, the good news! The gospel is about God's love for all of creation or it's about nothing at all. As Paul wrote to the Romans,

"Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law." Romans 13:10

So when people say hateful things or act hatefully to you in the name of God or the Bible or the church they are simply wrong. They may believe they are acting out of the best intentions, but they are wrong. They're wrong to take the Bible as more important than its message of love. They are wrong to treat you as less than a neighbor to be loved, as other than a child of God made in the image of a loving God for the sole purpose of loving and being loved.
Their Biblical interpretation skills aren't very good either. To begin with, the Bible actually says nothing at all about "homosexuality" because, in fact, the word "homosexual" did not exist in any language until the late 1800s. The writers of scripture simply had no concept of committed, same-gender relationships and thus no word for it. The handful of passages that are used to condemn homosexuality have nothing to do with what we now understand homosexuality to be -- that is to say, those passages have nothing to do with you and your sexuality, which is a gift from God.
There is a ton of Biblical study on this topic, but the best relatively short piece I've come across is actually fairly old (1980s) written by a theologian named Walter Wink. You can find it on line here. The organization whose web site is linked there is called SoulForce, and it was founded by the Rev. Mel White and his partner. Mel was raised in a conservative evangelical household and trained for ministry in the evangelical part of the church. Along the way he worked with Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, Jerry Fallwell and other conservatives pastors. Mel is a warm, wonderful, grounded Christian and could be a voice of wisdom for you. His contact information is on the bio page of the SoulForce site.
Beyond the gay-related scripture stuff, I encourage you to read the Psalms. As a straight guy (married with three kids, including a son your age), I've certainly never had to go through what you are in the midst of, but like everyone I've faced difficult times and deep pain. In those moments the poetry of the Psalms has reminded me that I'm not alone, that pain and hurt and anger are universal experiences, that though we walk sometimes through the darkest valleys and feel that enemies surround us, God is with us and God's steadfast love endures forever. The Psalms give voice to all of that, and I believe that's why Jesus quoted them on the cross -- "my God, my God, why have you foresaken me" -- and, hey, if it's good enough for Jesus!
I also highly recommend getting hold of the documentary, For the Bible Tells Me So. It is a wonderful look at the lives of several families who struggle through a child's coming out and their church's response. If you follow the link to the film's site take a look at the statement of director Daniel Karslake. My good friend, the Rev. Carol Howard Merritt, interviewed Karslake on her radio podcast, God Complex Radio, a while back and it's a good listen. The religion and faith program of the Human Rights Campaign has produced a study guide for the documentary as well. The Rev. Harry Knox, who directs HRC's faith-based outreach is friend of mine and I'm sure he'd be happy to e-chat with you as well. Harry's going to be preaching at my church in a couple of weeks. He's a warm, funny, faithful, southern, gay man who is just good fun to talk with.
I hope I'm not overloading you with this, but I'm figuring you'll use what seems useful and ignore the rest. I do hope you'll get the sense from this that there are tons of faithful Christians who love God and take scripture seriously (and seriously enough not to take it literally), who also understand that the lives of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered folks are part of God's wondrous creation and they are beloved by their Creator just as they are. Lots of such folks are, like you and me, southeners, and many grew up in pretty conservative households and churches, and have walked down the road you are traveling. So you are not alone in this, and there is a place in a loving, supportive, welcoming faith community for you.
I've written a note to my friend Michael Adee who directs the More Light Presbyterians network of congregations in my denomination working for the full inclusion and empowerment of GLBT people in the life of the church. I asked Michael for suggestions of contacts in the Tampa area, and I'm sure he will have some ideas that I'll pass along. Michael is another strong, warm, funny, faithful, southern, gay man (who also has a strange sports affliction being a die-hard Saints fan which also deeply offends the Peyton fan in me -- what is it with you people that you cannot see that God loves Tennessee more and that Rocky Top is a hymn in highest heaven!). He's also an accomplished athlete and has competed in the world Gay Games in tennis. I'm sure that Michael would also be happy to connect.
Hang in there through all of this. Keep the faith, and know, above all else, that you are beloved.
peace,
David

On the Beach

As promised, a few pics from the beach.

too tired ...

Sometimes it's best simply to admit that one is too pooped to post. Forty straight days of blogging is a long time, and writing today was confined to responding to the backlog of e-mails that stacked up while we were away.
I was planning to post pictures (each worth a thousand words) from the beach, but I'm going to celebrate National Procrastination Week and put it off till tomorrow.

Sounds Like Freedom

Another long day of driving just to get back where I started. It wasn't exactly an Odyssey but it was a round trip with sea creatures -- we watched a pod of dolphins swim lazily by yesterday -- and interesting locales as well.
We went inland a bit last evening to find a place to eat open on a Sunday night off season. We found a little joint nestled down on the banks of some tidal river just around the corner from Poverty Place, a road that leads directly into a trailer park. I kid you not. We left the car in the parking lot of The Place Across the Street, or so the sign said.
As sometimes happens in such out of the way places, the food was excellent and the atmosphere was rural southern. I can drawl with the finest East Tennesseans if called upon, so rural Carolinian is not much of a stretch.
Our waitress asked where we're from and we told her. She told us she was heading to Virginia to visit a friend this weekend and was looking forward to it because she'd never been before. Arlington may have seemed down right exotic to her, although I'm not sure it would be any more strange to her than the back water -- literally -- was to us.
The distance between here and there can be bridged in half a day of driving, but the gap is larger than that in ways that resist such easy measurement. On the other hand, the historical markers here and there along the way remind one of other great distances traveled in these same parts.
The signs tell of Civil War campaigns, including the final march to Appomattox. They also carry place names -- Carolina, Virginia, Plymouth, Chinquapin -- that recall the American Revolution, the colonial era, European settlements and native peoples before.
How did we get here from there? Who along the way would have predicted it? Had those who fought and died in the various wars along the way known what was to come on that ground their lives hallowed would they have thought it worth the cost of those lives?
How strange would the trailer park look to them? How strange Arlington? How strange the road between the two -- Interstate 95, and smaller routes -- and the tens of thousands of vehicles speeding along at speeds unimaginable until quite recently in the sweep of time?
The Marine base Camp Lajeune and its ancillary airfield dominate the landscape along the coast and dozens of miles inland just a couple of miles north of Poverty Place, just as Quantico stands out on I-95 a bit south of Arlington. We saw quite a few helicopters buzzing along the coast over the weekend, and a few military jets screamed overhead this morning. We passed the main gate for the airfield today. Their sign said, "Pardon our noise. It's the sound of freedom."
It sounded a bit more like empire to me, and I'm sure that's not a sound that would have rung familiar to those whose lives are suggested by the signs along the way. But the road? It sounds like freedom, and I think those who came before us would recognize that sound even when it comes from a Harley or an 18-wheeler or the family minivan.

Coffee or Tea?

So now we have a Coffee Party to oppose the Tea Party.
I wonder if this is the next stage in the virtual reshaping of politics and the political sphere that internet theorists predicted 20 years ago. Is social networking becoming a political force beyond being used by the existing political parties and candidates and commercial/political interests?
It's far too soon to tell, especially considering that there's evidence that the Tea Party movement has had considerable corporate push behind its self-professed grass roots populism.
It seems that the Coffee Party, for now, is a spontaneous Facebook phenomenon with no discernible ties to the Democratic Party or to corporate funds.
If that turns out to be the case, and -- a much bigger if -- if the Coffee Party exerts any actual influence on political decision making, then it might be something new under the virtual sun.
Of course, the names of these countering movements indicate their deep roots in American political history, and it is no surprise that the party of tea is the conservative one while the party of coffee is progressive. After all, coffee became the American drink of choice when tea became associated with the British and with Tories -- the conservatives of their age. While contemporary Tea Partiers want to associate themselves with the instigators of the American Revolution, the name they have laid claim to suggests that perhaps they would have been aligned with King George.
Time will tell if the Coffee Party amounts to anything more than a blip, but if it does, perhaps the choice of coffee will come to mean more than merely an alternative to tea. At the very least, the option of mochas could well underscore more racial diversity in the Coffee Party than appears evident in most pictures from Tea Party events.
On the other hand, a cursory look at the Coffee Party Facebook friends list suggests that it's fairly monochrome thus far, as well. Which may simply be because Facebook is among the "stuff that white people like."

Oh, Canada

I'm not hockey fan, but watching the gold medal game between the U.S. and Canada this afternoon was about as much fun as I've had watching a sporting event in a long time.
Watching sports is an interesting phenomenon. I've been a sports fan all of my life, and can appreciate competition in most games even if I've never played the game.
Like hockey.
I can't even stand up on skates, much less try to accomplish anything remotely athletic on them. I can, however, appreciate the skill of the players and the thrill of the game. Not being a hockey fanatic, I could cheer for the U.S. of A., but not be invested in it like it seems all of Canada is. Had the Canadians lost that game winter might never have lifted from the great white north.
Playing a game is still more fun than watching one, although time and aging joints may change that perspective some day. For now, I'd rather play basketball than watch it -- even March Madness or the NBA finals. I'd rather run my three miles slowly than watch the Olympic 5,000 meter finals. I'd rather hit a golf ball into a pond than watch a professional strike one with precision.
But that was one hell of a hockey game.

Lenten Hymn

THIS IS THE FAST
Is this the fast I choose for thee
Of ashes, tears and empty misery?
Or rather this: To share abundant bread
That all my children will be loved and fed.

Why do you fast, yet still not see
Your sisters suffering in poverty?
Their children cry, and still you do not hear;
Their fathers bowed and broken by their fear.

This is the fast I choose for thee
Of justice, peace and human liberty
Not forty days, but all your yearning years
My love will wipe away all human tears.

Break, bless and eat; then drink this wine
The fast I choose makes ev’ry midnight shine
You shall be called restorers of the streets.
Arise, now shine! And make your fast complete.

TUNE: Truro (Live Into Hope!; Christ is Alive!; Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates)

Sometime a Day Off Happens

Trying to do anything beyond bodily necessities for 40 consecutive days is tough. Writing is not a bodily necessity, and it does take time no matter how much or little one does.
I've been on the road all day. Though I enjoy it, driving is rather mind numbing and it's tough to write with a numb mind! I'm sure I've written at least parts of sermons -- if not the whole of some -- in that condition.
So when a day off happens I'll just take it and not try to wake up the brain this evening. Instead, I'll enjoy watching Olympic athletes who have undoubtedly practiced when their bodies and brains were numb.
I make no claims for being a medal-winning writer.

Time Is But a Stream ...

"Paternity is a relationship to a future that is not your own." So said the great Emmanuel Levinas in an essay that I was working over as I drafted my doctoral dissertation 19 years ago.
Oh, and 19 years ago, today, our first child was born. (Happy birthday, Bud!)
As our first son grows into adulthood I gain more personal understanding of Levinas' insight.
My mother has often said to me that she has no trouble imagining the past that came before her birth but that she has a hard time imagining the world going on without her. She tells me that imagining a future that is not her own is difficult to do.
Parents can dream their children's futures, but those are not the dreams of our children. We may receive the dreams from our fathers, to borrow the title of President Obama's book, but they are not our dreams. Our children may receive our dreams for them, but they are not our children's dreams.
The relationship that we have to the future that is not ours is tenuous, but it is also inescapable and it places the primary ethical burden of history squarely on our shoulders. We are responsible to that relationship and to that future which we will not experience.
Each generation is given the opportunity and the responsibility to create the future that its children will inhabit. That's why we keep on doing the often difficult and exhausting work of trying to make peace in a world addicted to violence, and to do justice in a world of structured injustice.
That's why the work on health care reform is so important. One way or another we are going to decide what kind of system our children will inherit, what kind of costs they will face, what burdens of ours they will carry.
Oh, and it's why I'm watching the stupid summit thing today when I could be getting more productive work done!

Bread and Stories

I noted over the weekend that National Capital Presbytery on Saturday endorsed three overtures that originated with Clarendon's session. (A friend in Minnesota says that must be a record for one session for a single General Assembly. To which I could only say, "who keeps such records?") In any case, I did not note that the meeting Saturday was remarkably grace-filled and much less antagonistic than most meetings where the church gathers to debate sexuality-related issues.
Some of the lack of rancor may have to do with debate fatigue and the clear sense that in National Capital Presbytery the issues are settled. Some of it last weekend may have been the relatively low attendance, due to the hastily rescheduled Saturday meeting. (The last time we voted on ordination issues there were more than 300 votes cast. Saturday it was about 135 or so.)
But I think two larger reasons for the comity prevailed.
The meeting ran from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., and there was no provision made for lunch beyond, bring something to tide you over. When we learned of that, the board of the Presbytery's More Light chapter decided that we would bring food for everyone. So we organized sandwiches and snacks and gave them away to everyone.
Followers of Jesus know how important breaking bread is to our tradition. It is the way that we build relationships, and the sharing of bread may have helped some who disagree with us to see us as more than shrill opponents of the status quo.
While some may raise a question about the meeting organizers' lack of a lunch plan, no one should question their plans for the meeting itself. Framed entirely within a worshipful context, the gathering consisted largely of story telling around tables of six.
We were asked, initially, to share briefly a story that illuminated one of the proposed overtures. (There were five proposals to be voted on, two of which related to GLBT concerns, one on nonviolence, one on the Charter of Compassion, and one on Middle East affairs. All but the last were approved.)
I told the story of my friend, Joe. Most folks have a "first gay friend," and Joe is mine. At least he was the first out gay friend. One of my friends from kindergarten is gay and two of my hallmates from college are gay -- and have been together for more than 20 years.
But Joe was the first man who was out within our circle of friends in our Chicago days. He is a big, boisterous man -- a bit like a Labrador Retriever crossed with a Saint Bernard. He is a dangerous man to sit next to during while watching the Bears on TV -- especially in that Super Bowl year.
Joe attended an evangelical church in Chicago, and regularly told us, sometimes close to tears, about how his church condemned homosexuals. He was deep in the closet in that congregation, of course, but he loved its worship and his friends from the choir and he simply could not imagine that there might be a church that would welcome him fully so he continued to go, try to worship and come home feeling beaten up. This was at the height of the AIDS crisis, and the gay community as a whole was under assault from so many corners. As I recall those days and Joe's Sundays in them, I know that our repentance is long overdue.
Telling his story is far short of that, but it's what I could offer Saturday morning.
Others around the table shared their own stories. Our table reflected the voting pattern of the Presbytery as a whole on these issues over the past several year. Four of us were on the liberal side and two on the conservative side. The liberals' stories were about gay friends, neighbors or family members and about the experience of feeling excluded. The conservative stories were about struggles to remain faithful to strictly interpreted Biblical standards of behavior.
There was passion aplenty in the stories, but more importantly, there was an equal dose of compassion in the listening.
I am convinced, and the past 30 years of American experience seems to bear this out, that when the stories of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons are told with honesty and heard with empathy that people are moved and positions changed. As Harvey Milk put it, "when they know that they know one of us then they vote with us."
That is not one hundred percent accurate, to be sure, but it is the truth nonetheless.
How can something that is not one hundred percent accurate still be the truth? I suppose that is part of the point. Stories can be true without being told with complete accuracy or perfect fidelity to whatever passes for the accepted history.
In the end, all we really have is the stories that tell us who we are and allow us to share that with others.
As Norman MacLean wrote in Young Men and Fire, his beautiful story of the tragic Mann Gulch fire of 1949, "If there is a story in Mann Gulch, it will take something of a storyteller at this date to find it, and it is not easy to imagine what impulses would lead him to search for it. He probably should be an old storyteller, at least old enough to know that the problem of identity is always a problem, not just a problem of youth, and even old enough to know that the nearest anyone can come at any give stage to finding himself is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself."
The problem of identity is always a problem. We find ourselves in the stories that tell us who we are. If we are honest with ourselves we will also confess that we are often too busy constructive our own stories to listen carefully to the stories others tell of themselves (much less the ones they tell of us). Moreover, because our identities themselves are at stake in the telling of stories, we most often find it far easier and more comfortable to exchange arguments and propositions and talking points.
So we remain divided and alone staring across vast chasms of disagreement or simply of lonely ignorance yearning for someone to ask us, "tell me your story."

Buckstacy!

Remember sniglets? Those made-up words that are so descriptive of everyday situations?
One of my favorites is "buckstacy" which is defined as the experience of finding money in your pocket when you didn't know any was there -- especially when putting on a coat for the first time as the weather gets colder.
I experienced frozen buckstacy today when I found a dollar where snow had melted away.
I thought immediately of the story of the old native American wisdom teacher who came to New York City for the first time to speak at a conference. One of the organizers met him in the morning to walk with him to the conference center. As they walked along the crowded sidewalks amidst the cacophony of the morning rush the old man stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and said, "hm, a cricket."
"What?" asked the organizer.
"A cricket. Don't you hear it?"
"Cricket? How can you hear a cricket with all this noise?"
The old man didn't say a thing. Instead, he simply reached into his pocket and took out some coins. He tossed them on the sidewalk and immediately dozens of people stopped still in their tracks.
"It all depends," the old man said, "on what you're listening for."
So we're talking in church this Lent about listening for God.
I've used that old tale before, but this afternoon after I picked up my buckstacy dollar it occurred to me that you have to know what a dollar looks like -- or what a coin sounds like -- before you attend to it on the street.
So, what does God sound like ... to you?

How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?

I was reminded again this afternoon that you are what you practice. It's been almost three weeks since I've braved running the streets of Arlington. More accurately, there has been nowhere other than snow-narrowed streets to run until the past couple of days when sidewalks and bike paths began to reappear.
If you practice couch potatoing you become a couch potato, and couch potatoes find that first running a bit more painful than runners do. On the other hand, having been in the practice of running it was easier to start up again than it would have been had I not been running all winter.
The season of Lent invites us to take on a practice -- a spiritual discipline, if you will. Running has been part of that for me off and on for many years. I've never found that I love it, but I have found that I need it, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually as well.
We do become what we practice, and thus I have become a runner. Putting it that way, however, raises performance expectations that are ingrained in us in this culture from childhood. To be a runner -- or an athlete in general -- carries for many of us the implicit framework of winning and losing, and because I have neither the innate giftedness nor the drive and dedication to be competitive I will never win any races nor turn in any sterling times.
I'm just happy to get to the beer and pizza after the run! Nevertheless, I am a runner.
In the same way, as David LaMotte once told me, if you make music you are a musician. It doesn't matter whether or not you make great music for others to enjoy or simply sing a lot in the shower, if you make music you are a musician. You are what you practice.
The great thing about practices, from that point of view, is that it is never too late to become something new. You can take up painting and become a painter, or writing and become a writer, or cycling and become a cyclist.
The point is not to become the best in the world, but to take the gifts you have been given, even the ones you do not discover until late in life, and make the best out of them.
So it goes with my Lenten discipline this year: to write at least a little bit every day. Not with the expectation of becoming another Hemingway or Halberstam, but with the knowledge that I am a writer because I practice writing.
Practice does not make perfect, no matter what they say, because it is not about arriving at some point and crossing some arbitrary marker that makes one a writer or runner or whatever. Practice simply makes you what you are, and that will never be perfect or complete until the journey ends.

Lent One

Tis the first Sunday of Lent. We seem to give up singing good songs for Lent in the church, making this the 40 days of dirges. I don't think this was the fast that God would choose. Indeed, Isaiah seemed to have something to say about that, but it's the end of a long Sunday and I'm much more interested in a glass of wine than the 58th chapter of Isaiah. So here are a few last shots of the snow as the great meltdown continues all around us.

Presbytery News

National Capital Presbytery voted today to submit several overtures to this summer's General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Three of the overtures originated in my session and they call on the assembly to
1) delete the section of our church's constitution (Book of Order) that blocks the ordination of gay and lesbian candidates for ministry and other church offices;
2) change the wording of the church's directory for worship in the section on marriage to be inclusive of same gender couples;
3) call the entire church into a season of discernment on nonviolence and address the question of whether just war theory is an adequate response to contemporary war.
The nonviolence measure passed on a voice vote. The other two were counted and each passed by substantial margins.
It did not surprise me that the ordination overture passed by 2 to 1. NCP has supported this effort consistently for many years, and I believe this measure will pass the assembly again this summer. That the marriage amendment passed by roughly 80-50 did surprise me a bit. We have not voted on this issue here, and there remains so much anxiety and confusion around it. I doubt the assembly will endorse it, but only time will tell.
In the meanwhile, it looks like I'll be off to Minnesota this summer.

God loves dust

We are about to lose one of the elders of our community who is lingering near death today. When it comes, death will arrive as a friend to a man who has suffered the cruel symptoms of Parkinson's for many years and its accompanying dementia for the past several.
He is a few miles further down the road my father is traveling, and thus the end of his life strikes me in a more personally felt way than is often the case.
Being often with the dying was just one of the many things I did not fully consider when I finally surrendered my wrestling match with God over the whole ministry thing.
I don't know what I would have thought had I considered that reality 15 years ago. Perhaps it would have seemed frightening or overwhelming. I don't think I was wise enough to imagine that it would be a privilege.
Now I know better.
To be sure, it is still overwhelming to stand close to the unfathomable mystery of death, but it is not frightening, and it is mostly a humbling privilege.
The spirit is present in the company of death, brokenhearted in some cases I believe, filled with gratitude in others, and graciously welcoming in all.
We are dust, and to dust we shall return. But it seem abundantly clear that God loves dust.

Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin ...

Google that phrase and you get about a million hits. I didn't read most of them. Duh.
But the first couple of pages were, as one would expect, about either GLBT concerns or the origins of the phrase itself. I did find one riff on loving Mac users but not the sin of using Macs -- or maybe it was PC users. But I digress.
Gandhi actually said "hate the sin but not the sinner" in his autobiography long before the phrase's contemporary usage, and Augustine offered a variation on it -- Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum, “with love for humankind and hatred of sins,” (Letter 211) -- about 1,500 years earlier -- more or less.
It's instructive to look back to Augustine, for whom the sin of wrong belief was critical. Like so many defenders of the Roman church, he took up "the problem of the Jews," about whom he wrote, "the Lord Jesus Christ distinguished between His faithful ones and His Jewish enemies, as between light and darkness." On the other hand, while many in the church were calling for the death of Judaism -- and, thus, of the Jews -- Augustine gave voice to a more temperate perspective best captured in his phrase, taken from the Psalms, "do not slay them." Let them survive but never thrive for their existence bears witness to the prophecies about Christ in their own scriptures, he argued.
For a thousand years across Europe popes and bishops resorted to Augustine as they preached against the Jews as enemies of Christ, and again to Augustine when they tried to stop mobs of Christians -- inspired by their preaching against the Jews -- from killing Jews.
Those popes and bishops found themselves in the same impossible tension that certain American evangelical leaders find themselves in today in the face of the proposed draconian anti-gay laws in Uganda. The steady drumbeat of Christian preaching against "the sin" of being gay helped create a context for such laws, and no amount of "loving the sinner" preaching can turn that around.
What James Carroll writes in Constantine's Sword about the church and the Jews might just as well be said about the church and homosexuals if one substitutes the word "gay" for "racial" and the phrase "Christian-GLBT" for "Christian-Jewish":

Because religious dispute was the source of racial hatred, there are sweeping implications here not just for Christian-Jewish relations, but for fundamental Western attitudes about identity itself. The modern world, which prides itself on being a repudiation of the irrationalities of a culture that could give rise to an Inquisition, was in fact forged in the fires of those irrationalities, and we can still feel their heat.

Carroll's book tries to answer one central question: is there something central to Christian faith that led inevitably to the Shoah? Given that tens of thousands of gay men were arrested by the Nazis and thousands died in concentration camps a similar question presses in on the church regarding the long history of anti-homosexual vitriol that has spilled forth from its pulpits.

Ash Wednesday

This has absolutely nothing to do with Ash Wednesday, but, hey, it is Ash Wednesday so I thought I'd at least note the day.
I just finished James Carroll's Constantine's Sword, and I'm sure I'll reflect some on the book itself in the coming days, but for the moment I am thinking about why I just read this book.
Carroll published it in early 2001, and I picked it up in late 2002. It sat on the bedside table for months, and resumed its place there after we moved to Arlington in the summer of 2003. I tried to read it, but couldn't get past the first 50 pages. It simply did not grab me for some reason.
In the meanwhile, I read Carroll's An American Requiem, a couple of his novels and plowed through the monumental House of War. Clearly, I like the man's writing. I find his personal reflections insightful and moving and his historical reflections fascinating and thoroughly researched. Moreover, his theological reflections are somehow both subtle and powerful.
But I read through at least four of his books without ever picking up Constantine's Sword. In fact, the book found its way to the bottom of a basket at the foot of the bed.
We rearranged our bedroom last month, and I came across the book and put it on a shelf, still with no real intention of reading it. But one evening about three weeks ago I had finished whatever I'd been reading and was looking for what would be next and I thought I'd give Constantine one more shot.
This time around I could barely put it down. I shot through it in about two weeks, and it's a dense tome.
Obviously the book didn't change, so what changed me?
Perhaps the trip that Bud and I took to Italy last spring helped bring to life the long history of the Roman church, a struggle stretched across the Italian landscape. Perhaps reading Carroll while reading Harvey Cox's The Future of Faith provided a nice balance of historical reflection and prophetic imagination.
Perhaps the time was simply right for me to bring some new thoughtfulness to the effort of reading.
Whatever it was, I'm glad for it because the book is important and it ought to command the attention of the church entering the third millennium. As to why a book speaks to a reader at one moment but not another, I have no real clue and I still think it's an interesting question.

More Snow

We would wave the white flag of surrender, but no one could see it.


Our neighbor's car is under that mound to the left.


We thought this drift looked like a gnome, or a "snome" as it were


Joy in the snow

and now for something completely different ...

Here's a little video thing I've been having fun with.