Saturday, November 25, 2023

In the Turn of Time - poetry

 And, so, in the turn of time,

the wheeling of the stars, if you can see ‘em,

the earth swinging around the light,

and the light swirling amid the Milky 

expanse of a small to middlin’ galaxy, 

in one far corner of something

beyond imagination and grasp,

measured in time impossible, and distance

at the speed of light.


And, so, here I am.

A blip … a speck … a mote of dust.

Dust, would you believe?

The Bible says God shaped the dust,

and then blew something of God’s heart

into the dust, into it’s nostrils, the nose.


The nose knows, I suppose, what the rest of the body

has been trying to figure out forever.

Where did this stuff come from?

This dust, this breath, the nose, the madness.


I’m here, and so are you.

And we’re working at something called love.

“Love one another” says Jesus.

And we can barely manage it.


What we do well is hate.

We do that with skill and cunning and brilliance.

For every love we might manage, we’ve got a ton

of hatred, ill-will, suspicion, and malice of forethought.


The nose still knows … the breath of God.

Like a dog on a walk, suddenly stopping

to sniff the air, we catch a hint of the original wind

that made this little heap of dust become a living being.

A soul, a nephesh, nearly divine, even as the dust

swirls around our feet, and fills our homes with

the past.


DNA and tribal instincts makes us hate.

Original sin?

We wanted … and we suspected God

cheated us.


We took it, and damn, if God wasn’t right.

Take it, and you’ll die, said God.


And we thought God was b-s-ing us.

But God wasn’t, not at all.


Death has been stalking us ever since, 

and to ease the burden on our minds,

we give death away by the handful, 

every day … we give it away,

and dress it up with our righteous hatreds,

and wonder why death still clings to us

like some kind of black mold in the corner

of the drawer.


Ah, yes, so here I am … this little dust mote, 

a fly speck, some might say.

A smear of nonsense on the wall.

A stench to the earth and its water.

A blot upon the snow.


The nose knows … and I pause for a moment

in the hush of the morning, and I lift my

head to the hills, just north of town.

And I think of God … and hardly know

what to do with it.


But God remains in my mind, stuck there,

like a nagging thought, that I am what

I am, and then some … a bit more than

meets the eye.

Could be, I think, could be.







Monday, May 1, 2023

Hell? Some thoughts about this hot topic

A friend asked me about hell ... for a study group.

Here's what I wrote in reply ...


1. In the end, only God … some will stand in that presence and be utterly
joyful … others will stand there, and it will feel like hell … for some, God-in-the-end will be the culmination; for others, it will be the last thing they want.

2. In the end, it’s the culmination of our life’s trajectory … not just of our own doing, but a strange mix of our dirt and divinity, if you will … the primordial will of God to seek and to save the whole of God’s creation, and the day-to-day interaction of God with willful creatures who genuinely have a mind of their own, even when they’re not in their right mind.

3. Like John Steinbeck says, in “East of Eden,” "there are monsters" - you allude to that.

4. Question for me - will God be satisfied if any single creature will be forever barred from peace - as some have suggested: forever burning? Is God’s final will determined by sin, or is sin overcome by God’s final will?

5. Shout what we know: God is love, of a kind more overwhelming than we can ever compute … more pure, more good, more expansive, and creative, than we can imagine or describe.

6. What we don’t know is the fulness of God’s mind - after all, the “knowledge of good and evil” belongs only to God - when we try for it, we die … and then we start killing one another, in fact, or by words.

7. Some forms of Christianity have used hell as a cudgel … a very effective cudgel, to get the sheep in line … but I don’t think it did much good, because it appeals to the basest instinct in human DNA - self-preservation … no matter the cost … in order to “preserve” the self, it feels good to damn others to some everlasting hell, or literally, to take their undeserving life and destroy it.

8. Love is by far the gospel, but it takes a beating … something most American Christians want no part in - hence, the prosperity gospel, the comfort-stuff, and all the other nonsense that focuses relentlessly on the self.

9. There’s a huge difference between covenant-centered Christianity (which generates confidence, peace, and hope) and conversion-centered Christianity (which generates anxiety, pride, judgement of others, and ever-greater self-centered efforts) … conversion-centered Christianity has always relied a great deal on the threat hell, the trump card, if you will. Covenant-centered Christianity relies a great deal on the trustworthy character of God’s love, God’s purpose to save, and the work of Christ to “take away the sin” - not just of the few, but the whole wide world, forever and ever … and that’s why Jesus declared in his final moments, “It is finished.”

10. Sin is not an easy business - it takes an enormous amount of work on God’s part to undo its damages and set a new course - to straighten the road, smooth out the rough places, lower some of the mountains of pride and raise up some of the valleys of despair. Using traditional language, “the harrowing of hell” is God’s ultimate achievement.

11. I’m a universalist … I believe that every last inch of God’s creation will be recreated and made new …

12. Purgatory isn’t entirely a bad idea … for me, it represents a time-lag, if you will, in how it all gets worked out, some sooner, some later, maybe even much later.


13. The Devil’s in the details is evident in how Christianity has dealt with hell … parsing the human race … who’s in, who’s out; who’s saved, who’s damed … and so on … it all ends in a lot of mean-spiritedness …

14. Our task is to love one another … and that means justice and peace …

15. As God has made our eternal future secure (not something to fuss about or worry about), our energies are refocused on the here and now, caring for the Garden, and the needs of the neighbor, and the need, a huge need, to tell historical truth - about all the ills of the world - that’s why CRT is so important to me, and freedom of the press, and well-funded schools.

16. I love the Heidelberg Q/A 1 - that I belong … in Calvin’s Book Three of the Institutes, there are some marvelous passages about “I am not my own, but belong to Christ” …

17. Karl Barth corrected Calvin’s error with “double predestination” - some eternally damned for hell, others for glory, and that’s just the way it is. Rather, says Barth, all the saving and all the damning took place within Jesus the Christ … he was damned, and he was saved … for all the world. It’s our task, our joy, to approach the world with the good news (no fine print here) … some receive it, others reject it, many are somewhere in between.

18. In the end, God! And all will be good … so, as the angels said to the disciples, “Don’t stand there looking up into heaven. Go to Jerusalem … power will come upon you, and then you can get to work.”

I hope these musings make some sense.

Let me know how it goes.

Tom

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Protestantism on Lewis' "Main Street"

Published in 1920, Lewis nails it again and again - the arrogance of the Midwest, its self-satisfaction, it's hatred of socialists, organizers, and unions ... and in this "sermon," Mormons, too. 

Is this a caricature?

Of course it is, but the very nature of a well-done caricature is to capture, in exaggeration, the nature of whatever's being described.

The easy cruelty of pompous religion, the vanity of dogmatic finality, tickling the ears of the already-convinced, ever so confident of their chosen status with Divinity, the rightness of their lives, and the truth of Capitalism, and how wrong everyone else is.

Chapter 28


With a rustle of starched linen skirts and stiff shirt-fronts, the congregation sat down, and gave heed to the Reverend Mr. Zitterel. The priest was a thin, swart, intense young man with a bang. He wore a black sack suit and a lilac tie. He smote the enormous Bible on the reading-stand, vociferated, “Come, let us reason together,” delivered a prayer informing Almighty God of the news of the past week, and began to reason.

It proved that the only problems which America had to face were Mormonism and Prohibition:

“Don't let any of these self-conceited fellows that are always trying to stir up trouble deceive you with the belief that there's anything to all these smart-aleck movements to let the unions and the Farmers' Nonpartisan League kill all our initiative and enterprise by fixing wages and prices. There isn't any movement that amounts to a whoop without it's got a moral background. And let me tell you that while folks are fussing about what they call 'economics' and 'socialism' and 'science' and a lot of things that are nothing in the world but a disguise for atheism, the Old Satan is busy spreading his secret net and tentacles out there in Utah, under his guise of Joe Smith or Brigham Young or whoever their leaders happen to be today, it doesn't make any difference, and they're making game of the Old Bible that has led this American people through its manifold trials and tribulations to its firm position as the fulfilment of the prophecies and the recognized leader of all nations. 'Sit thou on my right hand till I make thine enemies the footstool of my feet,' said the Lord of Hosts, Acts II, the thirty-fourth verse—and let me tell you right now, you got to get up a good deal earlier in the morning than you get up even when you're going fishing, if you want to be smarter than the Lord, who has shown us the straight and narrow way, and he that passeth therefrom is in eternal peril and, to return to this vital and terrible subject of Mormonism—and as I say, it is terrible to realize how little attention is given to this evil right here in our midst and on our very doorstep, as it were—it's a shame and a disgrace that the Congress of these United States spends all its time talking about inconsequential financial matters that ought to be left to the Treasury Department, as I understand it, instead of arising in their might and passing a law that any one admitting he is a Mormon shall simply be deported and as it were kicked out of this free country in which we haven't got any room for polygamy and the tyrannies of Satan.

“And, to digress for a moment, especially as there are more of them in this state than there are Mormons, though you never can tell what will happen with this vain generation of young girls, that think more about wearing silk stockings than about minding their mothers and learning to bake a good loaf of bread, and many of them listening to these sneaking Mormon missionaries—and I actually heard one of them talking right out on a street-corner in Duluth, a few years ago, and the officers of the law not protesting—but still, as they are a smaller but more immediate problem, let me stop for just a moment to pay my respects to these Seventh-Day Adventists. Not that they are immoral, I don't mean, but when a body of men go on insisting that Saturday is the Sabbath, after Christ himself has clearly indicated the new dispensation, then I think the legislature ought to step in——”

At this point Carol awoke.

She got through three more minutes by studying the face of a girl in the pew across: a sensitive unhappy girl whose longing poured out with intimidating self-revelation as she worshiped Mr. Zitterel. Carol wondered who the girl was. She had seen her at church suppers. She considered how many of the three thousand people in the town she did not know; to how many of them the Thanatopsis and the Jolly Seventeen were icy social peaks; how many of them might be toiling through boredom thicker than her own—with greater courage.

She examined her nails. She read two hymns. She got some satisfaction out of rubbing an itching knuckle. She pillowed on her shoulder the head of the baby who, after killing time in the same manner as his mother, was so fortunate as to fall asleep. She read the introduction, title-page, and acknowledgment of copyrights, in the hymnal. She tried to evolve a philosophy which would explain why Kennicott could never tie his scarf so that it would reach the top of the gap in his turn-down collar.

There were no other diversions to be found in the pew. She glanced back at the congregation. She thought that it would be amiable to bow to Mrs. Champ Perry.

Monday, September 20, 2021

A reply on a friend's page complaining about "illegals" ...

Thank God there are no "illegals" in God's Kingdom ... and on a more practical level, a nation that has
spent trillions on war certainly can handle this. 

It's people, just plain people, looking for a better life. Driven by desperate circumstances, love for their children, hope for the future, seeking safety and refuge. 

God's arms are open; I pray that ours are, too. 

Sure, some will say, "Criminals are in their ranks," and that may be true ... but there are thousands of people willing to work hard, to make a contribution to our nation's future. 

When the Italians came, when the Hungarians and Irish came, when the Poles and Germans came, they were labeled "second class," "criminal," and "low-lifes." But millions came, and lifted up this nation, and their children went to school, to become doctors and scientists, ministers and teachers, librarians and engineers. 

It's all about the future. Some won't make it; some will make the wrong turn; but millions will become Americans - true blue Americans. 

And that's what makes this nation great.
9.20.21 - Happy to be Presbyterian

1 Corinthians 5 ... I wonder what's up?

Started reading through 1 Corinthians a few days back, and stopped for awhile this morning on the 5th chapter, wondering, and googling ... what were the circumstances?

And how easily the women in question is dismissed - and the man so easily condemned.

Sounds like a bunch of busybodies holding their noses without any regard for the two people in question, running off to Paul like 4th grade tattletales.

It occurred to me: was she much younger than the man's stepfather?

Was she abused?

Was the son rescuing her?

Were the woman and her "husband" divorced, or was she abandoned? Or had she run away?

With the uneasy feeling that, then or now, women are treated as property ... women belong to the men, and in this case, the son is "violating" property law - stealing from his father, if you will.

This morning, I wanted to ask Paul:

"Don't you have bigger fish to fry?

Have you looked into the matter?

Or are you just going by what the busybodies offer?"

I read Paul with the greatest respect - he gets a lot of things right, as I see it.

But his easy condemnation of the man, with no interest in the details, or the possible suffering of the woman, and maybe the man's kindness to redeem her, leaves me uncomfortable.

With years of ministry behind me: I know something of "sin," in my own life, and in the lives of others - there is sin committed with hubris, arrogance, and ego, power, and domination.

Then, there is "sin" committed because there's no easy answer to so many hard moments in life. And what the community busybodies might label as "sin" is nothing less then folks caught up in a messy situation, not directly or immediately of their own making, working to make the best of it, to mitigate further harm, and to practice kindness, and to find a way through.

Here, as anywhere, the ease with which the "righteous" condemn "sexual" immorality ... it's so easy to do, and it's so rewarding.

Comments????

Wednesday, March 3, 2021

Anti-Asian Violence

Let me venture into dangerous territory - the growing incidence of anti-Asian terrorism across America.

I raise this concern because Asians have often been touted as the Model Minority - images of hard work, education, drive, and moral discipline, are lifted up and celebrated, not only to mark Asian achievement, but, I think, to humiliate other minorities.

One result of this elevation, at least in Orange County, has been a hard turn to the right in Asian politics - some of it driven by the memories of the Vietnamese who shudder at the mention of anything "communist," and some driven by the love of money and the self-righteousness induced by achievement and wealth, often believing, as did many a Jew in pre-ww2 Germany, that "assimilation" and "being a good German" would spare them. But it didn't. And now around the country, Asians are facing a White Supremacy threat of real proportions.

What this domestic terrorism says, however, is this: "You're not a part of us, and you never will be. No matter your zip code, your money, your achievement, your hard work, you're not Amerikkkan, and you don't belong here. And we don't like you."

What will this do to politics? Will it occasion a shift to the left? To something more in solidarity with other minorities? With a recognition that hard work and success is what rankles white supremacists who resent non-whites getting a share of the pie.

I'm on dangerous ground, I realize, so please forgive any inaccuracies or missteps. But at the same time, I'd appreciate some commentary here, and especially from our Asian members.

This much I know: terrorism against Asian-Americans is on a precipitous rise.

Tuesday, September 15, 2020

Finding Myself???

Earlier today, I wrote:

The far-right is completely gone; they believe the Left is preparing for war against them; they believe they're the innocent victims of racism and discrimination; they believe all the lies offered to them about climate, race, economics and foreign policy. Evangelicals, social conservatives, and the rich, all have skin in the game; they all have something to gain by the collapse of democracy. Evangelicals, theocracy; social conservatives, white supremacy; the rich, unimpeded greed.

Now is the not the time for nostrums and nosegays ... now is Jeremiah-time, a time for an honest appraisal of a nation long seduced by wealth and power, a nation full of idols crafted by religious interests as devious and duplicitous as the court-priests and prophets of Jeremiah's time, a time when the Divine grows tired of pleading with a people who turn a deaf ear to reason, and choose religions that sooth and satisfy the worst instincts of race, nation, supremacy, and greed. It was this very instinct that maddened the hometown crowd who heard Jesus preach, and, at first, thought it was terrific, but when Jesus made it clear that his people were NOT the center of God's purpose, they quickly cried out in anger and attempted to kill Jesus by hurling him off a nearby cliff.

If you dare, read Jeremiah 13-17. As one friend put it, "holy moly." And then Luke 4.16-30.

I have a hard time locating myself right now - my political nerves are edgy; my religious instincts turn to the darker themes of Scripture: Jeremiah, crucifixion, Paul’s imprisonment … the darker themes of history: the West’s embrace of white supremacy, and the failure of religion to address the various crisis of race, war, and greed.

Yes, I know that religious history gives us greatness, too … but often times the women and men of faith, prophetic faith, paid with their lives, because the establishment can’t relinquish its hold on power … and power always needs to have the powerless, and no better way to create a powerless class than with economic inequity.

I know what I believe, and I stand firm in “faith, hope, and love” … but reality doesn’t let me put on a happy face … truth be told, in the short run, it may not turn out well at all, though I hope for a Biden/Harris win, and I’ll do what I can, and bear what I must.

Is there a God?

I’m inclined to think there is.

And the moral arc of the universe does bend toward justice … but not without the 400 years of Israel’s slavery in Egypt … yes, there is resurrection, but not without a rigged trial and execution.

So, here I am … in a comfy, safe, place, with dear, dear, friends.

I hope my SS continues, with some appropriate increases, along with my pension (Hallelujah and Amen!). I love Trader Joe’s and FarmFresh delivery … I love to cook, and have folks over now and then to share our table.

'Tis the gift to be simple, Its a gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
Will be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend, we will not be ashamed,
To turn, turn, will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right

'Tis the gift to be simple, Its a gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
Will be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend, we will not be ashamed,
To turn, turn, will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right
Till by turning, turning we come round right