Time It Was

My brother Michael and I have been talking about the old days. "Old when you gain as much pleasure from memory as from prospect," an old friend once told me. (He also said, "Old is when physicians become impotent.") I am not one who subscribes to Old in religion as an unquestioned virtue, as in "Gimme That Old Time Religion." But there is something to be said about having a firm grasp on the journey. Michael and I had a seminal conversation last Sunday evening as we remembered the year 1969. The first astronauts landed on the moon in July of that year. Woodstock happened. For me, a peraonsl event involved the March on Washington, when hundreds of thousands expressed themselves against the war in Vietnam. I shudder when I think back on those days, when one generation was willing to sacrifice the manhood of another, seemingly without question. It turns out that Michael and I we had both come to that march by different routes. We did not know the other was there. We marched.

I recall the trip from Northern Lower Michigan to Washington D.C. in Joe Sobel's battered Mercedes Benz. The car was a rolling wreck. Six of us packed on its bench seats. The car had no functioning brakes. As we motored east across the mountains, I can recall being terrified for the entire trip, so terrified that my digestive tract punished me for days to come. We made it there and back, by the grace of God. But the car became a metaphor for me of that moment in our national life. The nation careened ahead with no brakes. Vietnam did, in fact had crashed our armed services. The consequences of the crash still haunt us in the vaunted "all volunteer military."

Each age follows on the foundation of another. When the Greeks translated the Jesus stories, they did so in the familiar Greek. There, the word for time is rendered by two words, chronos and kairos. Chronos attends to marking the passage of time. It is the consciousness of the clock. Listening to the Naval Observatory's exact treatment of time in seconds, minutes, hours and days is the mesmerising sound of chronos. Each tick has its own sameness, but over the short wave it had a peculiar texture. Chronos is hypnotic. When Jesus spoke about time, "the time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand," the word is kairos. This is a notion that time is like a vessel, as it fills up with events. This time is shaped by events. Old men talk about kairos. And by the time you reach my age, the impact of events on character becomes ever clearer. We were of a generation on a fools errand, a careening Mercedes, condemned to great suffering among the compliant and among the resistant. Some sacrificed their lives. Others watched as our brothers fell to their deaths. I am still amazed how this shared tragedy created an enmity within a generation. How could that have happened?

1969 was the year that imprinted a generation with conflict. We continue to live the tension between mistaken official world and the truth of our own consciences. The Bush administration's fantasy government is the direct heir to the Vietnam fantasy. When I see the sign, Support our Troops, my visceral response is suspicion. "Support Our Troops lacks context. It is meant only to line up sides in a bitter conflict. Support our troops in Abu Ghraib? Of course not. Support Our Troops is but an introductory phrase. It requires completion. Support our troops, bring them home. The machinery of death rolls on the wheels of Support Our Troops. The focus never seems to wander to those who bear the weight of responsibility.

Truth is that way. It is chronos. It must be talked about and requires stories. How might we learn the empathy that can help us to understand one another? How can we look at Vietnam in wasy that reflect what actually happened to us?

We are again writing the story of a nation at war. How badly we want it to have a happy ending. Yet we pay no attention to the way we have set out to create it. The world tells us that we are again officially misguided. But we are far from any awareness of that ourselves. This is no surprise to Vietnam era folks. But it seems slow to dawn on the body politic.

The time is fulfilled. I do not regret the marches and the Days of Rage. Many will trivialize the resistance born of official treachery. They will speak of hippies and free love and Haight Ashbury. But that will miss the point. The kairos that still shapes us must be understood if we are to avert future Iraq catastrophes. When will we understand that we are together in a car with no brakes. Decades ago over 50,000 of us paid with their lives. Again, a generation is being winnowed with maiming and death. And for what? That is why it is essential that old men talk.

Can the Dream be Silenced?

I am old enough to remember the delivery of the "I Have a Dream" Speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. I am also old enough to recall the backlash from that speech. In those days, Martin Luther King, jr's name was whispered as a rabble rouser, a troublemaker. And while his speeches were broadcast, they spoke of change to come. That change was, at first, mightily resisted. Happily, on this day before Barack Obama is made our President, we can see progress in the fulfillment of that dream.

The Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire invoked God's blessing upon the Inauguration Celebration, last evening. His speech was blacked out, by mistake some say. Whether or not it was an intentional oversight remains to be seen. But that it was not broadcast to the nation is an ugly fact of life. Already, the whispering voices of fear and hate can be heard in the background. (to the eternal shame of the community the leading voices are those of Christians) The whispers seem to have carried the day. It is all very unpleasant.

But the prophets remind us that change is coming. Christians in particular are called to resist legalized mistreatment and to speak out against vigilante violence. Will the dreams of gays and lesbians; bisexuals and transgendered citizens be silenced? If history is any guide, we will look back upon Bishop Robinson's muted prayers straining hard to recall the hate that so permeated this moment. Even as we are being urged to "see ourselves in one another," let us include the nation's GLBT citizens in that invitation.

Clearly, we have a ways to go along the gender road, before we can be said to have arrived. "Now is the time," Martin told us in his dream. "Now is the time" for our GLBT sisters and brothers.

A Prayer for the Nation and Our Next President, Barack Obama

By The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire

Opening Inaugural Event
Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC
January 18, 2009

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for ALL the people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.

Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.

AMEN.

Orwell in Winter

George Orwell's name has been a staple during the past eight years as the language has been twisted into a kind of magician's "sleight of hand." Orwell was a master of the word. There follows a snippett of reflection on the literary giant.

The evening's reading includes two of George Orwell's essays, "Down and Out in Paris," and "The Poor Die." They chronicle a sojourn in Paris shortly after World War I had ended. They are, at once, exotic and familiar. They pull the reader into the situation of the underclasses in postwar France, as if by the lapels. There, to find a world that is at once exotic and painfully familiar. The discovery of it is that poverty is not as awful as one might imagine. The insight is a flash of brilliance. It is simply the way of things. Sickness, on the other hand, is not so easily embraced. The hospital, invented as a refuge for the poor, became a dumping place for those who were unable to summon a physician to their homes. So sickness is poverty's younger sibling. Privation and illness are the constant companions of the poor. To Orwell, they are outrageous intruders.

But Orwellian is not the "end of the world" sort of vision. It is its polar opposite. In a curious way, he is a man of abiding faith. His loathing is a sort of hope. For these are things about which we can do something, were we to focus our attention on them. I admire his rapierlike penetration of the human condition. Like a finely tuned seismograph, he can magnify the most subtle of turnings of the soul. He can evoke in a nod of recognition the web of the human family.

The faithful one requires an Orwell, if for nothing more than a point of departure. His vivid sketche evoke what are our partners in compassion. It is a brilliant light shed on our condition. How contemporaty is the need for an Orwell. In a time when the condition of the poor approaches the great middle classes, increasing numbers of the world's citizens fall into its grip. We need to pay heed.

Reading Orwell is something to do in winter. I wonder what might have happened had his work included Christmas. Divine entry into the human condition is a natural counterpoint to his penetrating vision. Should the vivid chronicle of misery turn an eye to the redemptive power of love, Orwell's gift might have found its completion. As it is, his essays are fragments of reality.

Nonetheless, he shows the way. Would that the heart of love had the power to invite that does Orwell's practiced eye. I have seldom encountered such power to involve me in the situation of complete strangers. An Orwell essay is to literature what a stereoscope is to photography. They are provocative Advent reading.

-December 15-16, 1997

Orwell died on St. Agnes Day, 1950. Maybe it is the spirit of Agnes that inhabits his work. Who knows?

Turkey Day, 2008

National Holidays make me suspicious. It may be something Anglican in me that leads me to approach Thanksgiving and its noble Pilgrims with trepidation. An apocryphal story is told about the Bishop of South Carolina, Fitz Allison. Bishop Allison when confronted with his child dressed as a Pilgrim for the Thanksgiving Pageant is reported to have asked, "Why are you dressed like the enemy?" As a preacher, the annual Community Thanksgiving Commemoration (complete with the mayor's intonation of the presidential proclamation) gave me the creeps.

H. L. Menchen's definition of Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy," takes me to a place I would not rather go either. The problem with Thanksgiving is not gratitude, nor is it the pursuit of happiness. My problem with thanksgiving is empire. It is the same kind of avarice that has transformed Mother's Day from a lament over wholesale destruction in our own Civil War into a Sentimental Hallmark Day. It is that greed that makes of the end of the carnage of World War I in an Armistice into a happy little "support our troops" day. Empire does that. It takes the deeply painful and transforms it into a cartoon that serves its own ends.

Nowhere have I read work as keenly sensitive to the dynamics of American Empire than the new book, The Wordy Shipmates. Sarah Vowell uses Thanksgiving themes to explore what has happened to us in these days since the winter of 1620. She does it with depth and great good humor. What fascinates me most is the intentional meeting of politics and religion in the Pilgrm narrative, manipulating both our politics and our faith. That modern day t. v. evangelists and even Roman Catholics more resemble each other than those long ago renegade protestants is quite astonishing. As the groaning Thanksgiving table invites all to eat too much, the religious fare invites all to talk too much. Vowell's explorations give some important hints about all that religious yammering on the multiplying religious channels. Television, it turns out was not the first of the genre of overheated one way communication in American history. Pious New Englanders had mastered the craft fully three centuries before t. v. showed up. So, if you like to talk back to the one way politics and religion of our day, you'll love a day spent in Vowell's company.

On the subject of Empire, in an accidental juxtaposition of texts, brought unexpected insight during this past week. I had picked up copies of two books in one trip to the library, reading one right after the other, quite by accident. The first was a recent translation into English of Agnes Humbert's well know French Diary, Resistance. In it Humbert chronicled her days in the French resistance. Then she wrote in painful detail about her imprisonment and use as slave laborer in the Third Reich. These descriptions of life in first prisons, then camps were genuinely repulsive. I had thought I would read a book about the glories of a resistance group, successfully subverting its Nazi occupiers. I had no idea that I would be slogging from prison to camp to factory in a dismal tale of unimaginable human misery and degradation. Next on the book pile was My Guantanamo Diary, the story of Mahvish Khan's quest to provide legal representation to detainees housed at Gitmo under our supervision and flag.

My mind went back to an evening with the grandfather of a young German woman of our acquaintance. Sharon and I were visiting the woman's family when it was announced that grandpa was coming over for a chat with the Americans. As we talked, it unfolded that grandpa had spent a good part of World War 2 in a prison camp stateside. I was not sure what to think. Should we ask about it? Should we change the subject. It turned out that grandpa was treated very well in American Custody. He looked back on his imprisonment with fondness, with laughter and with admiration for his captors.

Hearing Khan tell it, a lot has happened in American internment camps in the 60+ years since WW2. The change is not the sort of thing one wants to look squarely in the eye. My little experience peeking inside Nazi interrment camps and then into Gitmo did our Empire no favor. I was astonished to find, in this little informal comparison, that resistance fighters in Nazi Germany, while suffering horribly, held not a candle to the horror inflicted on Gitmo detainees in Kandujar or Abu Ghraib or in the one of many of the Empire's sites of extraordinary rendition sites.

National Holidays make me suspicious because Empire never insists on National Days of Contrition. In the Empire, it is always Easter and never Ash Wednesday. C. S. Lewis described one such haunted land as "always winter, but never Christmas." We are living there on Thanksgiving, 2008.

This holiday, maybe we can be grateful for the distraction of a Detroit Lions game. Otherwise, we could drive ourselves batty in search of the contrition that is required of us. But, please do not blather on about how those Germans did not pay attention to what was happening in the Camps. Pay attention and tell someone you are watching.

What Words Can Make Holy

Ian Stavens wrote the book, "Dictionary Days," several years back. Like Maggie Jackson's book, "Distracted," it illuminates the journey of the spirit at least as brightly as it does its subject. Three points Stavens has made speak directly to the journey of the heart.

Language is not, first of all, about sounds. It is about the spaces between the sounds. What is so disorienting about computer speech is that it has no sense of the spaces. Like a paint by number painting, all the shadings are correct, but the spaces have it wrong. Languages have spaces. The neophyte and the native speaker are distinguished by their use of the spaces. A sentence has insight in relation to the openings it leaves between words. I am thinking that the public discourse in our time is increasingly hot, conducted without spaces. We are willing to sacrifice deep communication because we are worried about being interrupted.

Some clutures have supervisors for their language. Some grammar teachers of my youth tried to do that with English. They failed. English resists hegemony. Our greatest dictionary, the Oxford Etymological Dictionary, in a descriptive document. It tells us what has happened with language. It does not tell how language should be. It may be that the agendas of the language supervisors among the French and the Spanish are responsible for the poverty of expression of their tongues. In comparison, the English language spews out word forms at a riotous rate.

As any comedian knows, words and timing go together. The great punch line is a work of words and of counting. Jack Benny used to wait for a punch line. It was there that the laughing began. Steve Martin's genius was to never get to the punch line. He left us with our own laughs.

It seems to me that theologians can learn a lot from these three approaches to language. Dead faith talks too much. Dead faith is dominated by the agendas of supervisors. Dead faith has no sense of timing. I wonder what life in a congregation might be like were we to give attention to these dynamics of language. I wonder. . .

About Getting Well

"Good experience" was my father's euphemism for a "bad job." - Joseph Epstein

Going forward, accountability is a word that will be on the lips of most of us. To be accountable is, first of all, to understand about one's life direction.

There is an illusion that accountability is about "getting even." But that is an impossible demand. When a horrid injustice is done, its effects are indelible, like a tattoo. Schemes of retribution, revenge, deterrence all lead to the same dead end, a blindness to how the mistakes of others are now become a part of us. How can we repay the years an innocent has lived on death row? How can an IED injury be completely eradicated? How can we manage our ire as trickle down economics is revealed as a hoax?

Accountability is about getting well. Some call it forgiveness. Others call it restoration, rebuilding. Rebuilding begins in remembering what is real and who is involved. These recollections are like a pebble cast into a pond. They ripple and touch all of the other drops of water there. So it is with accountability. We affect one another for good or ill. My decisions and actions impinge on those around me. And when I have acted badly, they damage others. It is the sad illusion of retribution that the offender bears the weight of a mistake. The truth is that when an accounting comes, the actor and the victim are all involved. But there is still a distinction to be made. "Some are guilty, but all are responsible," Rabbi Abraham Heschel reminds us. Rebuilding happens when the guilty new direction, even as all participate in the search for new direction. And all, victims AND perpetrators are essential to a dialogue that gets to wholeness.

Getting well in our time, then, will focus on questions like these:
+ What is needed to heal all parties involved?
+ What is needed by the harmed?
+ Who can provide the solutions?

Whether it is the so called war on terror, the indifference around hurricane Katrina, the collapse of the housing and equity markets, or the old staples of gender and race discrimination; healing is not just for the guilty. Retribution against the offender, in the end, does not bring health. (Gandhi is reputed once to have said it this way, "An eye for an eye and soon we'll all be blind.") Punishment cannot be the core question of restoration. We will need to find a way to engage the guilty in ways that bring us all into the problem solving.

If you are like me, the past decade has left you tired, depleted. As one wag puts it, "when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging." That is a great place to start. We need to prepare to face the accountability questions in the coming months. If we can stop digging, later we will find in restoration a wonderful source of energy. But for now, just to rest is a good place to be.

The Least of These

for I was hungry and you gave me no food,
I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,
I was a stranger and you did not welcome me,
naked and you did not give me clothing,
sick and in prison and you did not visit me.

I have been going door to door around neighborhoods encouraging folks to vote in the upcoming presidential election and, when asked, explaining the positions of the Obama Campaign for Change. I was assigned door to door canvassing in one of Battle Creek's affluent neighborhoods. The experience was quite an eye opener. I saw, unfolding before me, the surprising nexus of spirit and politics as clear as glass. I had expected that there might not be much enthusiasm for Barack in this very affluent neighborhood. One, after all, does not get to such affluence paying large tax bills and Barack has been painted as a "tax and spender." There was some of that. But there was a whole lot more gracious and welcoming folks of all sides of the political spectrum, grateful for one who cares enough to nourish the body politic with conversation. It is clear that grace and hospitality are not the property of one political party. A good and generous spirit is available in both.

I came across some other, rather disturbing conversations. A middle aged man railed against the distribution of "MY" wealth to the undeserving. "They ought to be left to starve," he exclaimed full of hyperbole. I was shaken by that encounter, wondering what was missing in his own life. There, poverty of spirit and brutal politics were partners. There were other stops. I came to houses that clearly were just keeping body and soul together. Shabby homes. Paint peeled on the outside. Holes in the porch shouted poverty. Inside was a free market economist. S/he worried about helping the poor while oblivious to the poverty into which s/he had fallen. "Let them make it on their own." I must say, I did not get it.


The climax of the Gospel of Matthew is in a vision of lasting things, concerns of ultimate importance. "Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me." The Gospel writer puts "concern for other" in the mouth of Jesus! It is the telltale sign of the faithful, or spiritual wholeness. I am left to ponder not that folks have political differences, but that those who seem to suffer most from their politics are those who are on the margin. . . the poor man who embraces the chance at ""hitting it big" or the overworked small businessman stretched to the limit and angry about it.

What comes first, the marginal lifestyle or the pinched and angry ideology? Who knows. In a great irony, it turns out that "the least of these" are those who hold the least of these in contempt, who are afraid to share what they have. Now that is the spiritual nexus of the Gospel. It was all I could do to recall that I was there to distribute political information to these tortured souls. There was a fertile field for Pastoral Care. That will be for another day and another time. For now, I bathe in the mystery of what it is to be human, grateful for its deep contradictions.

Door to door canvassing is a great way to take one's own spiritual pulse. There was that surprising generosity of the bulk of the affluent. There is hope for the "least of these." The sign in my yard this year asks, "Got hope?" Clearly there is a hunger for hope, some gracefully expressed, others in a brutal "cri de coeur."

Political and spiritual health are in such complex interrelationship. It is striking.