Pondering Politics on Super Tuesday

I’ve lived my entire adult life in an odd space that finds me smack in the center of all kinds of seemingly random American trends, on the one hand, and on the left-hand margin of American political trends. Beginning with the election of 1980, when America swept Ronald Reagan into the White House, I was finding a glimmer of hope in the 4,330 residents of Brattleboro, Vermont, whose votes made Bernie Sanders as their mayor. Meanwhile, I was helping make Pink Floyd’s The Wall one of the best-selling albums of all time.

If demographers want to know what the next big thing is going to be, they could do way worse than simply checking in on our household regularly. Seriously, within a few months of our moving to Pittsburgh in 1999, the New York Times ran a front page story headed “Pittsburgh: The Next Big Thing.”

That one didn’t quite pan out for us or for Pittsburgh, but most of the time, whatever Cheryl and I are into is about to become culturally and economically central. It makes sense. After all, more babies were born in the United States in 1959-60 than at any other point in the post-war baby boom. Although culturally, we fall into the cracks between classic Boomers and Generation X, we are part of a cohort that has a huge amount of buying power. (So, as an aside, if you’re looking for the next big thing check out elder co-housing. Trust me.)

On the other hand, politically, I’ve rarely been in the middle of any wave. The one exception would be the 2008 election of President Obama, but that increasingly looks like a great outlier. After all, he united and excited a coalition that included millions of voters who, like me, are significantly more progressive than he is.

What does any of that have to do with politics on Super Tuesday, 2020?

Writing in the Times today, Michelle Goldberg observes that:

College-educated white women, for example, helped flip the House in 2018. They favor Biden over Trump by double digits, but Sanders by only two points. Sanders, however, seems to see little need to reach out to them. Speaking to The Los Angeles Times editorial board in December, Sanders said he didn’t believe the way to win against Trump “is to just speak to Republican women in the suburbs.”

That jumped out at me even though none of it is about me. It is, however, close to me, because I’m married to a college-educated white woman who (see above) is part of a huge cohort that includes way more than “Republican women in the suburbs.” If Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic nomination he will have to figure out how to reach out to that huge cohort or else President Trump will be re-elected.

I certainly cannot speak for any of those women – especially not the one to whom I am married. But I do know some things about them, and one of the things I know is that they vote. Another thing that I know is that many of them are more than a little tired of choosing between old white men when they step into voting booths. More to the point, they are tired of old white men whose most consistent rhetorical strategy amounts to mansplaining the world.

Way too often that’s the way Bernie Sanders sounds to way too many people, and, critically, not just “Republican women in the suburbs.”

If he really wants to win a national election, Bernie needs to figure out how to connect with people like my beloved. She is one of a kind, but there are millions of others who are also ones of that same kind. I’m betting that they’ll decide the election next fall.

Resolved: to Continue the Journey

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I don’t tend to make New Year’s resolutions. They usually just turn into a nice litany of things I failed to do: run more, write more, cook more. Stop laughing, Clark and Cheryl. I have thought that last one from time to time. See? It’s the department of transportation’s paving plan for the highway to hell.

So, rather than resolutions, as I pause for a moment on this last day of the 20-teens, I’m thinking more of practices. Earlier this month I bought an old-fashioned date book primarily for my work life. As interim pastor of a congregation that has some sorting of roles ahead of it, one of the gifts I will give to them in the coming year is as much detail as possible about how I divide the time of each day to meet the demands of the work.

practice noticing

I am imagining keeping a diary every bit as dull as the one George Washington famously kept. “At home all day, writing letters.” That was the good general reflecting on a Sunday in 1789. I’m certain that no one 250 years from now will be leafing through the pages I write in the coming year detailing the minutia of my work, but I think it will help the church make some significant decisions about staffing patterns.

As I reflect on this intention to practice diary keeping for the coming year, I think it will also be a gift to me because it will a way of holding myself accountable to some practices like setting aside set times to study, set times to write, set times to reflect. Leaders in faith communities – really, in any communities – cannot long thrive if they don’t take time to study, reflect, and communicate.

Brian McLaren posted a brief and compelling set of resolutions for pastors for the coming year, and I think he’s on to some important commitments that ought to be common for leaders in faith communities, including: taking time to notice and enjoy the gifts of the day; clarifying roles; and engaging the politics of our time.

To do any of those things takes intention and practice. If I name those three – or any other set of resolutions – but I don’t set aside time to practice them then I’m right back where I began with writing a litany of future failures.

So, I’m not going to resolve to write a weekly blog post or finish a novel or complete “Generative Church” or write 12 new songs (though I do have song-cycle concept I’m toying with). Instead, I’m going to put “writing” on the calendar and then check the diary against it to hold myself accountable to the writing. We’ll see what comes out of that practice as time unfolds. I imagine this blog will be part of my accountability, too. I don’t think the next year will look like Advent did in this space, but I anticipate posting more frequently here (and less frequently on Facebook).

Similarly, with the other practices I want to frame my living with, I’m not going to resolve to achieve any particular set of performance goals. Instead, I’m just going to name a set of practices I intend to follow, including the practice of attending to the process. That is to say, as always, it is about the journey, not the destination.

Advent. Beloved

Our small circle of beloveds will all gather in our little living room tomorrow morning for Christmas morning. It’s been a year of great change as our circle turns with the tides of time.

It seems right to make the annual Christmas post an Advent meditation because seasons of change are more about preparation and expectation and reflection than about presence or presents.

The extended family gathered for
my mother's memorial; we took
time to go to the house where my
sibs and I grew up to take this
shot of two generations

Time may seem to unfold in one direction, but history certainly does not – even when speaking on the scale of family histories. Time and history are more like tides, flowing in waves that seem quite organized until they break into chaos along whatever lines and ridges reach up to disrupt them.

Birth, death, and the various intersections, choices, and decisions along the way form those ridges, and upon each of them some waves crashed in our lives this year. Like the waves hitting the shoreline, some of it was hard, some of it was gentle, and, in its own ways, all of it was filled with grace and a certain beauty.

The year began, at least for Cheryl, Hannah, and me, far from familiar shores – literally. We rang in the new year in Paris! The three of us had a grand adventure doing lots of touristy things in the City of Light for a few days before heading to Italy for a bit more than a week. We ate our way from Venice to Florence to Rome, and walked it all off visiting museums, ruins, and as many remarkable works of art as we could get to along the way. We’re all dreaming of return trips.

Hannah & Cheryl in our
Venice hotel

Hannah got home just in time to head back to school in Charlottesville. She is now in the middle of her third year at UVA, and is beginning to ponder what will come after she graduates with a comp sci degree in the spring of 2021. She's doing great in school, and loving life on campus, including being captain of one of the women's ultimate frisbee teams. She began last summer having one of her hips surgically repaired, and then spent the rest of the summer once again as the high ropes coordinator at Camp Hanover. So, yes, the surgery went well. It seems likely she'll be seeking an internship for the coming summer. If 2020 is the year she moves on, it will mark the first summer since 2006 that none of our kids will be at camp as either campers or staffers.

Martin with one of his bandmates

That does not mean none of the kids will spend significant time on that holy ground in 2020. Martin’s big news of the current year is his engagement to Delanie. They met at camp many years ago, and will celebrate their wedding at camp next August. Delanie is a delightful, creative, kind young woman who teaches art at Mechanicsville’s high school. Martin is working at a brand-new public library in Richmond, and is working on his masters in library science on-line from the University of South Carolina. He’s also making lots of music with his band, 8-track Almanac, which boasts more banjos per capita than any other band in RVA. It will be a joyous welcome to the family next summer, though, to be fair, Delanie has been part of our circle of beloveds for many years now.

We did have one lovely brand-new addition to the circle this year, as Bud and Monica welcomed

the sibs and Ollie

Oliver Beckett to the family. Smalliver, as Martin christened the little guy, made his grand debut on October 30, about two hours before the Nats won the World Series. Bud reported that he fell right into the whole fatherhood thing, spending the first couple of hours with a baby napping on his chest while he watched a baseball game. Bud and Monica are enjoying the great transitions into parenthood, and we are loving seeing them embrace the joys and challenges of loving a newborn into the world. They have a lovely townhouse in Reston, and have been doing some serious nesting this year. Bud is still enjoying his work at Vigget and slowly plugging away on his dissertation, while Monica is on leave from her work at Heeling House.

Smallie & Mimi

Cheryl still has the best job in the world as an education outreach specialist at the Library of Congress. The core of the staff team she serves with has been consistent across many years now, and they do important work well together. Most days, Cheryl loves heading off to work. Well, at least that’s what she says. I’m almost always asleep when she catches the 6:00 a.m. bus and heads toward Capitol Hill. But, since she does it every day, I figure she’s telling the truth about enjoying it. She still comes home with great stories about new-to-her discoveries in the library’s collection, and how she can help K-12 teaches use them in their classrooms. It might seem like an exaggeration to claim new discoveries after 16 years, but when you consider that the library holds more than 160 million discreet items she’d have to have examined more than a million per year to get through it all!

I, on the other, felt I had come to the end of learning and growing in my service to the wee kirk at

I'm gonna kiss you on the
Champs-Élysées

Clarendon, so after more than 16 years as their pastor, I left CPC at the beginning of November to accept the invitation to serve as intentional interim pastor at Burke Presbyterian out in Fairfax County. CPC and I were both ready for transitions, and so I am leaning into a call to do intentional transitional ministry as the final chapter of my paid pastoral work for the church. To the extent that one can plan such things, I imagine that I’ll serve three or four congregations over the next six to ten years. Eventually, we plan to move to Richmond (and next year maybe this missive will include real news on that), and I may well do similar work in congregations in that presbytery as part of our transition to retirement.

holding mom's hand

Contemplating that can of change reminds me that we are definitely entering a different stage of life. That reality was brought into sharper focus over the summer when my mom died. She was a few months short of her 92^nd birthday, and had lived a rich, full, and remarkable life. She died knowing that one of her grandbabies was about to become a parent, and becoming a great grandmother was one of two items that stayed in her bucket list. She also wanted to see someone else in the White House. Alas, for us all, that wish was also unfulfilled. We miss her greatly, but remain committed to the ideals that shaped her life: a world of fairness for all, with particular attention to the needs of children and marginalized communities.

As Christmas rolls around once more, hold your beloved ones close. May the light of love shine brightly on you, and may it shine through you, as well in your own work to make the world a brighter place for all of God’s beloved ones.

Peace.