Poetry Pushback

From the time of the Hebrew prophets to Zora Neale Hurston and writers of the Harlem Renaissance, poets have used the power of the written word to push back against oppression and enunciate what the times require. It was the poem "Invictus," written by William Ernest Henly in 1875, that gave Nelson Mandela courage to endure his eighteen years of imprisonment on Robben Island and emerge victorious as the leader of South Africa's liberation movement. Poetry rises up from the depths and fortifies the soul.

Here is a poem titled "I Look At The World," by African American author Langston Hughes, written in 1930 but not published until 2009 when the verses were found penciled into the back of a book from his archives.

I look at the world

From awakening eyes in a black face—

And this is what I see:

This fenced-off narrow space   

Assigned to me.

I look then at the silly walls

Through dark eyes in a dark face—

And this is what I know:

That all these walls oppression builds

Will have to go!

I look at my own body   

With eyes no longer blind—

And I see that my own hands can make

The world that's in my mind.

Then let us hurry, comrades,

The road to find.

With the Smithsonian Museum of African American History under fire from the Trump administration and its director terminated for pushing allegedly "divisive narratives," we must continue to celebrate the literature, art and music of our nation's past, acknowledging America's shortcomings and failures in order to build a brighter future. "Let us hurry, comrades, the road to find."

American Greatness

 Trump Orders Smithsonian Institution to Promote ‘American Greatness’  Headline in New York Times, March 28, 2025

America's true greatness has always lain in its ability to acknowledge and then mend its own defects.  The ideals we prize - liberty, equality, justice for all - have always been aspirational, more prescriptive than descriptive.  Facing the dark chapters of our history is what enables us to overcome our own shortcomings and do better.

To end the robber capitalism of the Gilded Age,  for instance, it took muck racking journalists to expose the horrors of the sweatshops and slaughterhouses where immigrant workers, many of them youngsters, toiled long hours at starvation wages.  Read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.  It's not a flattering picture of life in the Chicago slums.  But by exposing the grim reality of American urban life at the turn of the twentieth century, a movement arose to end child labor, to create a minimum wage, to insure the cleanliness and safety of factories that had previously churned out tainted meat and disease-ridden food.

America has always improved when it's been willing to see its ugly underbelly.

In the town of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I grew up, there are now memorials and museums and cultural centers dedicated to telling the story of the Greenwood Massacre, the worst race riot in U.S. history.  In 1921, over three hundred residents of the prosperous section of the north end known as "Black Wall Street" were murdered by white vigilantes, while law enforcement collaborated or, at best, did nothing.  Shops and churches and homes were torched.  Yet for decades, this atrocity was concealed by town fathers, considered unmentionable, censored from textbooks that I read in high school.  Only seventy-five years after the fact did a Truth and Reconciliation commission finally emerge to interview living witnesses and consider the question of reparations.

When I returned to my home town not long ago for a fiftieth high school reunion, it seemed to me that Tulsa was a much healthier city than the one I remembered from adolescence.  Segregation was gone.  Soon after my visit, Tulsa elected its first black mayor. No monetary reparations were ever made.  But the city had moved forward - not by cloaking its past, as had once been the case, but by confronting its history head on.

Through his executive orders, Mr, Trump would like our museums and historical monuments "to focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people," rather than dwelling on the painful episodes of the past.  Similarly, our national parks should showcase "the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.” (Never mind that his other executive orders slash funding for these parks and open protected public lands to mining, logging and drilling.)

Owning up to our society's failures is essential to our common progress.  In prayerful words written by Katherine Lee Bates over a century ago, "America, America, God mend thine every flaw."  In that work of repair and mending,  God needs our help, and we need an honest reckoning of how far we've come, and how far we have yet to go.  

The Real Danger of AI

 The real danger of AI?  It will turn us into pets!

Think how thousands of years ago, ancestors of today’s canines gathered round human campfires, hoping to scavenge a bone from these bipedal apes.  A symbiotic relationship eventually emerged.  As pets, dogs began to worship the Master species, following people around and more or less willingly doing their bidding.  Why?  Dogs no longer had to hunt.  People met their animal needs and, in return, canines gladly became subservient.

Now imagine a not too distant future when people begin to worship their devices: smart phones and large language models that are so clever they can think for us!  They solve our problems, do the hard work of hunting for answers.  Like dogs who trot at the heel of their owners, people will begin to carry their phones and laptops everywhere they go.  (In fact, this could already be happening!)  The devices entertain us. They make us feel empowered.  They feed our hungers for affirmation and attention, even a kind of intimacy.  In return, the machines ask so little of us: just endless kilowatts, plus our slavish devotion.  

Yes, artificial intelligence poses other dangers too, like battlefield munitions that fire without human operators, perhaps ready to morph into Terminators. But my guess is that the human race will succumb to seduction–the dominating spell of the gadgets–without a shot being fired.  Like dogs (another highly social creature), people will happily subordinate themselves to the pack leader, the Alpha of AI.

Only some folks may remain feral, like those canines of the last Ice Age who chose to stay wolves rather than change into Great Danes or chihuahuas.  These wild ones will continue to read newspapers and to write poems without ChatGPT.  They will solve important problems–like Einstein did–with tools no more complicated than a pencil and paper.  They will frequent religious assemblies that ask questions where algorithms fail and they will ponder Gods that cannot be carried in a side pocket.  And they will have real friends, even though they are not on Facebook.

The dogs will look down on these unplugged souls as benighted, uncivilized and anti-progress.  And the wolves will regard the dogs as what they are: unfree, less than and degenerate.

Is this prophecy, prediction or just crazy talk?  Who can say?   But if your first impulse is to ask Google, you already know the answer, just like you know how to shake hands, lie down and stay.  

Good Boy.  

Old, Older, Oldest

Barzillai the Gileadite also came down from Rogelim to cross the Jordan with the king and to send him on his way from there. Now Barzillai was very old, eighty years.

2 Samuel 19:31-32

How old is very old?  If you asked the Bible, the psalms would answer that the span of a man's life is threescore or, by reason of strength, fourscore.  Most folks run out of steam when they hit eighty, in other words.

Eighty seems to be one of those developmental pivot points, where a profound change occurs.  Life swings on a hinge, rather as it does in early adolescence.

When our daughter was in middle school, my wife and I tried to prepare ourselves by reading a book titled How To Talk So Teenagers Listen and Listen So Teenagers Talk.  The author hedged that there is no magic moment when kids become teens.  But for most girls, he explained, the transformation from playing with dolls to thinking about getting a tattoo arrives in the second semester of seventh grade.  For our family, that was right on the button.  And it was helpful to pinpoint the precise age of the transition. What a difference a semester, or a birthday, can make.

In my experience as a parish minister, caring for an aging congregation, I saw eighty as another threshold, not the passage from childhood to adolescence but the portal from old to very old   For many seniors it's the age when the option of moving to an independent living community is out of the picture, because one can no longer pass the required physical.  For elders who may have heard that retirement consists of three phases, go go, go slow, and no go, eighty marks the last stage, when your giddy-up has got up and went.

In the go go years that I volunteered as an emergency responder with the fire department (when I was in my sixties), we were frequently summoned to help when someone had fallen in their home. After eighty, many people who take a tumble won't be able to get back up without assistance.

Now that I am seventy and retired from the force, it's hard for me to imagine answering the pager for midnight calls any longer and harder still to imagine a man a decade older serving as President of the United States. It's past the demarcation line.  And perhaps the fourscore mark sheds light on the difference between Biden and Trump.  There is only four years difference between the two but during that interval from seventy-seven to eighty-one something shifts, physically and mentally.  It explains why one man, although a narcissist and a bully, appears energetic (even frenzied at times), while the other, although fundamentally decent, seems geriatric.

 

How old is too old?  Washington was 57 when he was inaugurated, while Lincoln was 52.  FDR was 51 when he ascended to the presidency and Teddy Roosevelt just 42 when he was sworn in. An argument can be made that our greatest leaders have tended to take office in mid-life.

So yes, Biden should withdraw from the race and so should Donald Trump.  Both political parties should nominate younger women and men now and in the future.  And yes, there should be mandatory retirement ages for Supreme Court Justices, just as there are for career officers in the U.S. military.

How old is too old?  I could hedge and qualify my answer but the next man who puts his hand on the Bible to take the oath of office shouldn't be any older than Barzillai the Gileadite. Eighty.

Does Religion Belong In Schools?

 Should the Bible be taught in public schools?  A new law in Louisiana requires the Ten Commandments be displayed in every classroom.  Oklahoma State School Superintendent Ryan Walters is mandating that teachers include the Bible in their instruction because, he claims, the book is foundational to America’s laws and Constitution.  There is a growing chorus that educational systems already struggling to teach grammar and math add prayer and theology to the curriculum.  

But which Bible should be taught?  Jews honor the Pentateuch or Torah but reject the New Testament.  Catholic scriptures contain seven books not recognized by Protestants.  The Latter Day Saints consider the Book of Mormon an essential text that completes the revelation other Christians consider canonical.  Of course, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists have their own holy books. Who decides? 

Government has no business adjudicating these types of disputes, which is the reason the founders of our country provided for freedom of religion in the private sphere, leaving matters of faith to the individual conscience.  At the same time, they established a wholly secular constitution that makes no mention of God and whose sole reference to faith occurs in the stipulation of Article Six that no religious tests shall be required for public office.  The First Amendment to that document specifies that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, meaning that no sectarian viewpoint gets preferred treatment from the state.  As John Adams (second president of the United States and co-editor of the Declaration of Independence) affirmed in signing the Treaty of Tripoli of 1797, “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”

Weren’t Adams and the other framers godly men?  They were characters of high principle and solid morals but not always orthodox in their personal beliefs.  Thomas Jefferson wrote his own version of the gospels, omitting any mention of the miracles recorded there. Never a communicant, Washington was lambasted from the pulpit of the Anglican church he sometimes attended for absenting himself from the eucharist.  As to Jesus, an aging Benjamin Franklin quipped, “I have some doubts as to his divinity, though it is a question I do not dogmatize on, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.”  Are these the kinds of facts that  Superintendent Walters wants taught to the young?  

Outwardly, George Washington was careful to show respect toward believers and non-believers alike, at Mount Vernon willing to hire “Mohametans, Jews, Christians of any sect, or they may be Atheists” so long as they were honest workmen, while James Madison, father of the U.S. Constitution,  saw religious variety as the very linchpin of liberty: with a multiplicity of churches, synagogues, temples and tabernacles in the land, no one sect could dominate or oppress the others.  

Consequently, America is now the most religiously diverse nation on earth.  And thanks to the genius of its founders, who fashioned a separation between church and state, the United States has been mercifully free of the kind of violent strife that has plagued Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, Hindus and Muslims in India, and Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.  Christian Nationalists in Louisiana, Oklahoma and elsewhere want to change that by rewriting history and enshrining their own narrow beliefs as law.  

To do so would be an invitation to chaos and a  betrayal of our nation’s best ideals

Time For A Just Peace

Just over a month ago Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israeli settlers shocking in its brutality. Hundreds including women, children and the elderly were taken hostage as missiles rained down on Israeli cities. Casualties were in the thousands. The following day, Israeli Defense Forces began a bombardment of Gaza that has killed many more thousands, burying civilians with no place to flee beneath the rubble of a ruined city starved for potable water, electricity, food and medical supplies. The cost in suffering has been enormous.

The roots of this conflict are ancient, as people of different faiths and ethnicities (Jewish, Palestinian, Muslim, Christian, Druze, Bahai, and more) struggle to live side by side on a small piece of real estate that three major world religions claim as holy ground.

Warfare is not the answer, for while religious extremists espouse violence, the core teaching of all great faiths counsels a peaceful co-existence for the world's peoples founded on justice and mutual respect.

For hostilities to cease, the Palestinian people need a path toward an unoccupied homeland, with viable borders and self-determination. Israelis need security and an assurance that their neighbors are willing to accept the permanent presence of a Jewish state.

The Hebrew Bible envisions a time when swords will be beaten into plowshares, when each shall live beneath their own vine or fig tree, and none shall make them afraid. It is time for world leaders to step back from the precipice of wider war and begin a process of reconciliation that will end the bloodshed and bring about just and lasting peace.

Why Celebrate the Fourth?

 This weekend, millions of Americans will enjoy the fireworks, but others will take a knee on Independence Day.  Why celebrate? 

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project,  Nikole Hannah-Jones argued that the primary purpose of the American Revolution was to promote and preserve slavery.  But it’s important to get the history right. 

 In 1775, Virginia’s English Governor, Lord Dunmore, proclaimed that slaves who deserted their American masters would be welcomed into the British army as free citizens.  Multitudes did so, and soon Dunmore had a black regiment at his command to quell unrest in the colonies.  It was only then, Hannah-Jones’ argument goes, with the prospect of losing their enslaved property, that delegates in Philadelphia put their signatures to the parchment declaring independence from King George.

Yet the skirmishing began long before Dunmore’s provocation. Prior to that, there was the Tea Party.  There were Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill.  Because muskets were so inaccurate in those days, the Continentals were instructed “don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”  In the melee at Bunker Hill, the redcoats were savaged.  Over a hundred of the American soldiers that day were of men of color 

You may have learned in high school that Harry Truman was the first President to integrate the armed forces.  Actually, George Washington was.  Over 5000 African Americans served in uniform during the Revolution.  Blacks were there at every major engagement.

They absorbed the ethos of their compatriots.   “Self-evident truths” became part of their moral vocabulary.  They came away with ideas that were even more explosive than their flintlocks.  Men of color who fought and prevailed against the mightiest empire on earth walked with a new confidence.  They weren’t full citizens yet, but they were warriors.  And having fought to create the new nation, they had a deeper investment in its founding ideals.  

America would never be the same.   In her book Standing in Their Own Light: African American Patriots in the American Revolution, scholar Judith Van Buskirk observes that before 1760, very few Americans questioned the institution of slavery.  It was a fact of life, like the weather.  But in the space of a generation, something happened. “By 1790,” she observes, “the northern states had put slavery on the road to extinction … Abolition societies and aid societies sprang up in the north and south.  What happened between 1765 and 1790?  The American Revolution.”  Slavery would never again go unchallenged. 

It would take generations to see the effects.  It would take the Civil War.  It would take mass movements, Montgomery and Selma and Black Lives to pass the torch forward.  The flame faltered at times.  It flickers now, as our nation faces white nationalists and resurgent hate.  But none of this should keep us from celebrating July Fourth.  For despite his recent coronation, Charles is not our king.  Our nation is founded on principles quite different from those of the hereditary right of some to rule over others.  A nation that still clings to the ideals of freedom and equality.  

Those ideals are fragile, always in danger.  So protest if you like.  Practice your right of free speech and assembly.  Our nation began in protest and needs healthy dissent.

Because America’s is an unfinished revolution, a revolution in progress.  Learn your history and then earn your history.  Fly your flag right side up or upside down or not at all, but know why you do it. Educate yourself.  We have no need to renounce or censor our past, nor any need to romanticize or gloss over it either.  For all its imperfections, it’s a heritage worth remembering.  

What Stuff Weighs

 A single blue whale can weigh 400,000 pounds.  But suppose you could put every kind of mammal on your bathroom scale, not as individual organisms but as a species. Cattle would physically weigh the most, according to a new study by the Wiezman Institute of Science.  In a paper titled “The Global Biomass of Wild Mammals,,” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science last March, researchers determined that dogs–our family pets–collectively weigh about as much as all 4,805 wild species of mammals combined.  Cats tip the scales at double the tonnage of savannah elephants.  

Watching Nature on PBS, with its migrating wildebeests, foraging bears and wallowing hippos gives a seriously distorted impression that the earth teems with wildlife.  In fact, human beings (weighing in at 390 million tons) and cows (totalling altogether 420 million tons) represent almost all of the globe’s mammalian biomass.  Adding in sheep, pigs and other animals cultivated for meat or dairy means that  livestock outweigh all wild mammals by a factor of thirty-fold.  

In a related study, the scientists recently determined that what they call “anthropogenic mass” (the total of human made artifacts like cars, coke bottles, skyscrapers and disposable diapers) has passed a tipping point.  People are producing or consuming the equivalent of their own body weight every week, on average, and this total is doubling roughly every twenty years.  In 2020, our species’ “anthropogenic mass” outran the sum of all the world's living biomass - not just overtaking the tonnage of mammals but of fish, forests, fungi, and all  other lifeforms.

Calculating the human footprint on nature by weight is just one measure of our impact, alongside extinction rates and loss of biodiversity.  But “The Global Biomass of Wild Mammals,” coming on the heels of demographic reports that the world’s population surpassed eight billion late last year, is a shocking indicator that nature’s scales have gone seriously out of balance.

Lead author Ron Milo, who  holds a PhD in Biological Physics and was the first fellow in Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School before joining the Department of Plant & Environmental Sciences at the Weizmann Institute, says “It is definitely striking, our disproportionate place on Earth. When I do a puzzle with my daughters, there is usually an elephant next to a giraffe next to a rhino. But if I was trying to give them a more realistic sense of the world, it would be a cow next to a cow next to a cow and then a chicken.”

Solving this puzzle starts with what’s on our plate.

Love in America Changes for the Better

 A positive change in attitudes concerning sexuality occurred in the opening years of the twenty-first century.  In the year 2000, the little state of Vermont became the first in the country to sanction civil unions - the legal equivalent of marriage – for same sex couples.  Fifteen years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that under the Fourteenth Amendment Americans everywhere have a right to marry the person they love.  And now, this month, Congress passed a Respect for Marriage Act guaranteeing (just in case the Supremes change their mind) that the law of the land remains in place.  

A generation ago, moralists warned that homosexual unions would mean social breakdown and the end of the traditional family.  Instead, the Institute for Family Studies reported that in 2020 the divorce rate hit a fifty year low, not seen since Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were a TV couple. True, fewer folks are getting married.  But those that tie the knot are staying together, which can only be good for kids.

In fact, the Crimes Against Children Research Center, which gathers data reported to family protective services around the country, documents a fifty-three percent decline in physical abuse and a whopping sixty-two percent drop in sexual abuse over the last three decades, between 1992 and 2018.  Cases of child neglect have seen a more modest eleven percent decline.  Still, we are talking about millions of kids saved from mistreatment.  While the reasons for this wholesome trend are not entirely clear, what is beyond dispute is that all this happened just as Americans were beginning to embrace and normalize lesbian and gay relationships.

Correlation is not causality, but with diminishing rates of child abuse, one might also expect a drop in crime.  In the cycle of violence, youth from  abusive environments are more prone to delinquency.  Safer homes mean safer streets, and this is exactly what we see.  According to FBI statistics, gathered from law enforcement agencies across the nation, violent crime plunged from a rate of 758 incidents per 100,000 population in 1992 down to 395 incidents in 2021, a forty-eight percent drop.  The rate of property crimes saw an even more precipitous fall..  So the perception that America is experiencing a crime wave is just wrong. The country has seldom been so law abiding. 

Why aren’t media outlets reporting these stories?  Divorce is down.  Children are flourishing.  Crime is on the run.  

Given so much good news, the current raft of “Don’t Say Gay” laws, book bans and rhetorical vitriol directed at the LGBTQ community seems especially ill-timed and misguided.  Gay people coming out of the closet pose no threat.  Trans and queer folk exploring their own forms of gender expression and identity may be a very healthy development.  As Americans began to acknowledge and accept the full spectrum of human sexuality, the social unraveling  that was predicted never happened.  The numbers show just the opposite, and it should come as no surprise.  People flourish in relationships that are honest and open.  They thrive when their primary emotional bonds are mutual, consensual, caring and voluntary–freely chosen rather than dictated by dogma or enforced by morality police.   Enabling people to be who they are and to love whom they love seems to be leading to  happier marriages, fewer children at risk, more stable families and, ultimately, a more civil society.   

Holiday Small Talk

 Small talk matters.  

Wednesdays seniors ride free on the train linking Santa Fe with Albuquerque and points south. On the way home, the gentleman riding in the seat in front turned to my wife and I to smile and say hello.  “How are you doing?” he asked.

I answered that we were terrific, taking advantage of the senior citizen freebie.  I suggested that he looked to be in the golden years himself.

We fell into conversation.  He was a tribal member of the Kewa Pueblo, on his way home to Cochiti.  His uncle had served thirty-five years in uniform at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, not far from where I grew up.  We talked about the pandemic and when the reservations might be opening again (there’s a National Monument on Tewa land that’s been closed since 2020).  He asked where we lived and, referring to my firefighter vest, I explained I lived in the Hondo District of Santa Fe County where I’d worked with a battalion of volunteer hose jockeys.  He’d been a hotshot in his younger years, at the top tier of that firefighter world.  We were two old men, making old man talk.

Before we parted, I wished him a happy Thanksgiving, quickly adding that I knew it could be a fraught holiday for some native people.  He thanked me and returned the Thanksgiving greeting, telling me that he would probably head out tomorrow and shoot a duck to celebrate.  His parents were gone and he had no other family.  He’d be feasting by himself.

Part of me wanted to ask deeper, more probing questions, the kinds that have become part of our national discourse in a reckoning of how Americans deal with their complicated past.  How could Euro-Americans atone for a history of exploitation and begin to mend relations with the original inhabitants of this land?  But I sensed this was not the moment for those harder topics.  We were just two guys, strangers on a train, making conversation to ease the loneliness and pass the time.    

Maybe that’s not enough, but it’s a beginning.  Before we can tackle the big questions, we have to be able to make the small talk.

Playing Real Good For Free

 Who do you admire?  I have a friend named Kevan who plays guitar.  In the summertime, we get together and strum, occasionally writing new tunes for the instrument.  What I admire about Kevan is his focus and concentration.  His lifelong career was in law enforcement, special weapons and tactics.  Because he is fluent in Spanish, he still sometimes teaches "Spanish for Cops" to make a little money even in retirement.  But his real ambition, at this stage of life, is to be a street musician, a busker.  He wants to sit on the corner and play the blues for tips.  

Kevan is totally devoted to this dream.  He has a strict practice routine.  He attends music camps for songwriting.  He studies music theory.  Whereas I have all kinds of pastimes and am not very proficient at any of them, Kevan makes progress at his chosen endeavor in a way that I can only envy and try to emulate.

Here's a song I wrote this past week, in homage.  

Un viejo sentado a lado del camino con su sombrero
Espera dinero sin cuidado en verano como niño
Toca la guitarra por divertimento

Un cansado viejo que conoce la guitarra
Es un estrella que brilla y canta as poemas de mujeres olvidadas
Y enamoradas anticipadas

Por favor, escuche, Señor.  Por favor, un propina mejor!
Por favor, escuche Señorita.  Por favor, llamame tu favorita!

No hay una vida tan benedito como un viejo con su sombrero

A lado del camino en el verano esperando por tu dinero

Por favor, escuche, amigo.  Tocaré la guitarra con brio!

An old man sits by the side of the road, with his hat, waiting for money,
Without worries in the summer, like a child, playing the guitar for amusement.

A tired old man familiar with the guitar Is a star, shining and singing

The poems of forgotten women and anticipated lovers.

Please listen sir. A bigger tip!  Please listen, lady. Call me your favorite!

There is no life so blessed as an old man with his hat
By the side of the road in the summer, waiting for your money.

Please listen, friend. I’ll play the guitar with brio!

Next time you pass that old man or young man, or woman on the street, playing guitar, or violin, or harmonica, won't you stop to listen?  It's their passion, their gift.  When you stop to listen, los ángeles sonreirán.  The angels will smile.  

What I Learned From The Pandemic

Truthfully, I didn’t learn much from being locked down for two years.  I suspect that I had the virus early on, before it was even on people’s radar back in January of 2020.  After flying through Las Vegas and the Guadalajara airports, we were in Chapala, Mexico, enjoying the warmth and a bit of street food. The symptoms appeared one night in the form of spiking fevers, violent chills and joints aching so terribly that I simply wept with no relief.  I was sick for two days and then it was over.  What did I learn from that?  

Not everything bad that happens occurs for a reason or to teach us a lesson.  I know some people think otherwise.  But I am of the opinion that random stuff messes with us mercilessly, and the evolving mutations of a coronavirus are a prime example of that.  Or were we supposed to learn one lesson from the Delta variant and another from the Omicron?  

For two years, we did witness people behaving well and behaving badly.  In the beginning, folks were hoarding toilet paper.  Conspiracy theories ran rampant.  A public health emergency turned into a political fistfight.  At the same time, nurses and teachers and grocery workers and first responders coped with the stress of high risk jobs, often gracefully and courageously.  Researchers rose to the challenge of producing vaccines in record time, only to find anti-vaxxers refusing to get the jab.

Some took the disruption in routine to re-evaluate life priorities and consider new callings.  Others had to say goodbye to loved ones dying in nursing homes or ICU’s while wearing haz-mat suits.  It was the best of times, it was the worst.

My wife and I have only recently started going to movies and concerts again.  We’re still not ready for any international travel.  It’s not how I planned to spend my retirement.  I don’t feel resentful at all.  But neither do I feel like I’ve grown or been edified or enriched in any way from hitting the pause button on my life.  Mostly I feel tired and two years older, not any smarter or wiser.

Covid, you were a lousy teacher.  

A Riff on Hebrews 11-12

 Faith is the reality of things hoped for, the proof of things not seen.  It was their faith that made our ancestors reach for the heavens.

Because of faith, Noah built the ark and received the rainbow sign.

Because of faith, Abraham left his homeland and set out for a country he had never seen.

Because of faith, Moses left Egypt and Miriam hurled Pharoah’s horse and rider into the sea.  

Because of faith, Joshua circled the city of Jericho and the walls came tumbling down.  

Because of faith Rosa sat, Martin marched, and John Lewis knelt to pray.

Because of faith, Mandela persevered, Zelensky held fast.

What else can I say?  There isn’t enough time to tell about all the prophets: Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells and Fanny Lou Hamer; Mohandas Gandhi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero, and Harvey Milk.  Many were tortured, others beaten, and some chained in jail.  Their faith helped them conquer kingdoms, and because they did right, they were pleasing unto God.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us.

Lift up your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight the paths for your feet.  Pursue peace.    

What I Learned in the Hospital

 Nobody likes to be in the hospital, but my recent five day stay gave me important insights.  Surprisingly hopeful lessons came from lying flat on my back.  

On Friday, I went into the ER at Presbyterian in Santa Fe for shortness of breath and was taken by ambulance to the bigger facility down in Albuquerque early the next morning to treat a pulmonary embolism and get emergency surgery.

One thing I noticed immediately is that hospitals look like America in all its multi-ethnic complexity.  Of the half dozen physicians who attended me, three were women.  Two had last names suggesting their families came from India.  Doctor Chen was presumably East Asian..  My night nurse Sarita was African American, like the tech who did my echocardiogram.  The two “candy-stripers” who finally wheeled me out the door were young white guys from Idaho and Georgia, doing six months of volunteer work as part of their church’s young adult ministry.  It wasn’t a perfectly egalitarian society.  The EMT’s who took my vitals and drew blood were earning fifteen bucks an hour, like burger flippers at McDonalds.  But neither did the hospital resemble a plantation model where white, male doctors ruled the roost with women and people of color assigned to menial chores.  It made me think that our country really has made progress in the last century

The second thing I learned was that I could get along with my roommate, even though he was a Republican and conservative Catholic while I’m a Democrat and theological liberal.  Gary was born in 1947, six years before me, but Gary was a popular name back then and one we shared.  We had other things in common, too.  We agreed that the pizza was pretty good, that our wives were gems, and that getting old was not for sissies.  We could encourage each other to get out of bed and laugh about racing each other around the nurses’ station in our walkers.  On the first day, I told Gary that I thought our country would be better off if the average citizen were thrown into a room with a complete stranger and forced to be civil and polite for a while.  He agreed with that.  We agreed that New Mexico had problems with political corruption and that neither party had a monopoly on cronyism.  I asked Gary what he thought about our current Pope and he replied that Pope Francis was a Communist.  I asked him if Jesus was a Communist also, and that seemed to give him pause.  Gary did have some funny ideas about Roswell and aliens, but we tried to disagree without being disagreeable and managed to keep things friendly.  I wondered if our nation couldn’t do the same.

The third thing I learned was that I could leave my wallet and wedding ring in a duffel by the side of my bed for 120 hours unmolested.  I was asleep, drugged and helpless most of that time, but my valuables and personal items were as safe as if in my own home.  Most people really can be trusted to do the right thing, most of the time.

It was initially hard to find a room at the big hospital in Albuquerque.  They have been slammed with covid and are operating with crisis standards of care. But I must have been an urgent case because they admitted me and the staff gave me as much attention as if I were the only patient in the vascular ward. It was heartening to see critical workers doing their jobs with grace under pressure.

Here’s my take away.  There seems to be a sickness in our body politick lately.  Americans are angry and out-of-sorts. We are dis-eased and anxious about the prognosis for our democracy.  Maybe we need a collective visit to the hospital to restore our better, healthier selves. 

You Are What You Love

Have you ever noticed that people look like their dogs?  Some folks are yappy and high strung.  Others are mellow and always ready for a belly rub.  Somehow temperament gets imprinted on physiognomy.  Perpetual worriers look like a Shar Pei with furrowed brow and woeful countenance. Glad-handers resemble Collies with an ever joyful glad-to-see-you expression on their faces. Maybe people adopt animals that have personalities aligned with their own.  But my theory is that we come to resemble the significant others in our relationships.  Whatever (or whomever) claims our day-in-day-out time and attention puts an impression on our lives.  So wives look like their husbands and vice versa.  

Today’s news gave some confirmation for this theory.  A study tracking 33,000 married couples in Japan and the Netherlands found that decades of living together tended to sync the bio-markers for both partners.  Men and women in long term relationships tended to have similar BMI’s.  They shared physical traits like high or low blood pressure and triglyceride levels, as well as psychological characteristics such as tendency toward depression or the opposite.  It’s not surprising.  “For better or worse, for richer or poor, in sickness and in health” are transformative vows, not empty verbiage.  Through an alchemy of time and constantly rubbing shoulders,  coping with both the joys and inevitable irritations of living in tandem, the two truly do become one flesh.  

Ponder this: you are what you love.  The object that commands your daily sacrifice and devotion may be the stock market, the next election, your work, your family or community.  Regardless, that reality will be your Creator and put its stamp upon your body, mind and heart.  Love wisely therefore, and be careful what you wish for.  You may eventually come to look like your dog, or mirror the thing that you most desire.  

In Praise of Praise

People like to hear that they are great.  We love praise.  Probably it’s because so many of us are secretly insecure.  We need affirmation because inwardly we focus on our frailties and failures. For instance, I can give a twenty minute talk and fret over the one word I mispronounced, or play a song on the guitar and agonize over one wrong note. I remember goofs from years ago.  This is not just a personal idiosyncrasy, but a general rule.  In sports, for example, Novak Djokovic recently came close to winning four major tennis tournaments in a row--the Australian, French, and U.S. Open along with Wimbledon--which would have established his reputation as one of the greatest athletes of all time.  But he suffered a loss in his final, championship match.  The agony of that single defeat was enough to make him sob out loud, overshadowing the satisfaction of all his previous victories.  Psychologists and economists have the same finding.  The pleasure of winning one hundred dollars is substantially less than the pain incurred by losing the same amount.  By the same token, almost any slight or criticism cuts deep. We take scolding or reproval--or even friendly suggestions for how we might improve--to heart.  It takes an extra measure of encouragement for us to feel that we’re actually good enough.  

I suppose the greatest gifts we can give to other people are acceptance and appreciation. This is one of the traditional functions of faith: a sense of being all right with God or okay with the universe.  It’s close to what the New Testament means by agape or unconditional regard, making people feel they are worthy and special just by being human.  But you don’t have to be religious to confer this gift.  It’s in everyone’s power.

Maybe I should try just for one day to give a big, juicy compliment to everyone I encounter.  For example, say something nice on the phone to the appointment lady at the dermatologist’s office.  Withhold my snarky comment from that Facebook post and say something positive instead.  Tell my wife she’s looking fabulous and is way smarter than me (which is really only the truth).  If I followed through with that plan, handing out approval like it was free and didn’t cost me anything, how do you think my day would go?  

Thanks for listening.  You bring out my best!

Fire & Ice (with apologies to Robert Frost)

 Some say the world will end in fire, others say in ice.

But the end of the world isn’t coming, not tomorrow, or next year, or on any fixed date.

Rather, the world is continually ending as we separate ourselves from the source of life and love, as we de-humanize the stranger, as we close our hearts against caring for the neighbor, as we distance ourselves from the earth and her creatures.  The sounds of silence, the words of kindness unspoken, these are the sounds of the world shutting down.

Yet the future is continually beginning as we expand the circle of compassion, widen the definitions of family, expand the household of mutuality, honor the soil and plant the seeds of hope.  The hum of conversation and the noise of dialogue and, yes, the clash of voices in honest debate, these are the sounds of the future asking how to unfold.

Whether the world ends, or how, or when, then, is really up to us.

From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire

But if it had to perish twice I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice

Be A Leaf

 What’s it all about?  Is there a reason for being here?  A purpose or destiny we are meant to fulfill?  The answer depends on who you are.

If you are a cloud, for instance, it’s all about gathering moisture from the air and raining it down to nourish the plants which breathe during photosynthesis, releasing water vapor back into the sky.  One minute it looks like a camel and the next like a turtle but the cloud’s not sorry, it’s serene. The cloud is transitory, almost formless.  It lets go in order to let be.  

If you’re a leaf, it’s all about absorbing sunlight and turning it into sugars for energy to produce seeds to make more trees to sustain a forest.  An apple tree can have a hundred thousand leaves.  An elm may produce a million.  Each one is a verdant solar panel.  Every leaf is a marvel of engineering. But it’s just a small part of the whole.

So who are you, and what’s your purpose?

The answer is that you are awesome: older and grander than you realized. Your particular life began 13.7 billion years ago when, inexplicably, things started.  Some call this event the Great Radiance when the universe popped into existence.

So happy birthday! From the beginning, your life (and that of countless of others, from stars to starfish) was written into the world-lines of a universe predisposed toward the unlikely possibility that something should exist (and not nothing), that life should evolve (out of seemingly inanimate atoms and molecules), that consciousness and self-awareness would originate (out of apparently dumb minerals and vegetables), and that moral freedom and choice would arise, transcending the leap from what is to what should be.

Our task here is to fully realize who we are: more than carbon-based egos struggling for survival and top-billing on this astronomically insignificant bit of real estate.  We are here for a purpose.  We are meant for each other.  

This is not a statement of faith.  It’s the plainest fact.  Years ago, I visited a confirmation class where students were learning about the world religions:  Christianity, Buddhism, and the rest.  It was spring and as I looked through the windows of the classroom at the budding profusion outside, it dawned on me.  I am not a Jew or a Hindu, not a theist or an atheist. I am a leaf.  

I’m a leaf, just here for a very short time upon this Earth, arrived yesterday, gone tomorrow, enjoying my moment in the sun, but here with a job to do.  The health of the whole tree, root to crown, depends on me.  The flourishing of the entire forest, and all the living creatures who inhabit it, depends on me and on every other little leaf contributing its part.  I have an important role to play.  But you know what?  It would be silly and self-centered for me to suppose that the miracle of spring which sweeps across the northern hemisphere every year when the planet’s axis tilts occurs because of me, or that the twig and limb and branch and trunk are here for my benefit, or that all that sunshine pours down just so that I can absorb its rays.  As a leaf, I’m just a small part of a much bigger performance and finding my own niche in this world depends on aligning myself with that larger, more lasting life of which I’m just a fragmentary and momentary expression.  

That’s the way I see it, anyway.  A leaf doesn’t complain that one of its neighbors may be a little higher in the canopy.  It doesn’t spend its time worrying “after the autumn comes, then what?”  It’s not boastful or resentful or cynical.  Rather, it cooperates, it gathers and it gives away, it unfolds and passes its energy on to another generation of leaves that will come after, and it’s beautiful, always reaching toward the light.  

At some point in your spiritual development, you come to a realization that in response to the question “What’s it all about?”, the correct answer is, “It is not all about me!”  So what I am, or want to be, is a leaf.  The universe was certainly not designed to perpetuate me, but I may be here to protect and celebrate Nature in all its glory.

So love your neighbor, because your neighbor is your larger self. Love the beauty and intelligence Creation manifests.  The great religions and modern science agree. We are sisters and brothers.  Whatever your sect or tribe, whether four-legged or two, we Earthlings share a common origin and are sprung from a single womb.  We’re all in it together.  Separateness is an illusion.   Interdependence is the reality  

So go green. Care for the environment because you are the environment. There is no point where you end and the universe begins. Don’t forget to breathe, to shine, and follow your  own growing edge.  Be a leaf.

For the Birds

 Lounging on the flight deck at the Bosque de Apache bird refuge, it is easy to believe that the world is alive.  Hundreds of snow geese bark in the distance.  Wood ducks scurry for safety as a northern Harrier glides over the shallows.  Sandhill cranes resembling ancient pterodactyls soar in from the pre-Pleistocene to alight on the marshy mud flats just beneath the mirrored water that reflects an infinity of sky.  Two cranes neck ostentatiously: there is no other word for the affection of these pair-bonded, lifetime mated birds.  They are making out.  Here in the late afternoon sun of southern New Mexico, how can you doubt that love is the secret sauce that lubricates the world? 

“When despair for the world grows in me,” wrote the poet Wendell Berry, “I go and lie down  where the great heron feeds, and where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water.”  The peace of wild things assures us that despite the appalling stupidity, hubris and short-sightedness of our species, something older and wiser than we are has a hand in events.  Narcissism is not nature’s way.  A more generous, joyful and amorous spirit presides.  Darwin called it evolution: an amazingly simple, almost self-evident idea in retrospect, but one that somehow eluded the most intelligent minds for centuries.  One wonders.  Are there other equally obvious truths that we overlook today--rules of conduct that are integral to the world’s maintenance and survival, but that are still to be discovered? 

We are awaiting word. But as revelation came to Darwin from observing finches, there would be worse places to look than to the gossiping, quarrelling, socially successful cranes who--without political parties, congressional inquiries, solemn resolutions or treatises on government--have nonetheless managed to thrive these past ten million years.  We should live so long.  

Blessing for a Non-Thanksgiving

 Shall we be grateful this year?

Thursday seems like every other day,
There's a sameness about the flow
But happy Thursday.
So let’s be grateful for our families and friends
Who care enough not to travel.
Let’s be grateful for the flickers and jays
Who are non-observant
And don't mind sameness
But flock to the feeder
Like every day was made for feasting.
There’s a waxing gibbous moon.
The sun rises and sets.
The malls are closed
And there are no Black Friday crowds.
Let’s be grateful for the interruptions
And absences that make “normality”
Seem like a treat, because it is.
Nothing special ... a blessing.