Our Lady, Our Promise

 A couple of weeks ago, I sailed across the North Atlantic from England. It was the end off a month-long adventure that included a study-abroad experience called Royals and Rebels that completed my requirements for a bachelor's degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, followed by a couple of days in Paris, part of which was spent learning some new cooking techniques, and a week on the Queen Mary 2, which treated me to seven days of nothing by ocean. But when people ask me my takeaway from it all, the first thing on my mind was this - sailing into New York Harbor on a sparkling Spring morning.

After having spent a month studying and talking to Brits about our relative political woes and hypothesizing their contradictions and solutions....well....this. There were nearly 2000 guests on board ship that day, and not since the sailaway party had they all been in one place at the same time until that morning. The top decks were shoulder-to-shoulder as we approached the harbor and all eyes trained on the lady who greeted us on behalf of the United States of America. My companions were citizens of dozens of countries from all over the world, but an unprompted hush came over them all as we looked at her shining in the sun.

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 

the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 

Send these, your homeless tempest-tossed, to me. 

I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

Everyone there, even if they didn't know the words inscribed under that raised lamp, knew what she stood for. There we were, a ship peopled with privileged humanity from almost every continent, remembering a French gift to an American people who had done something no one had ever done before and are still trying to figure out how to succeed in it over the long haul.

The morning before, a very distinguished British gentleman had challenged me with this: he encouraged me to picture our country twenty or fifty years from now after we, having relaxed our borders, lived in a land taken over from people from everywhere else. Then I saw that he wasn't talking about us, the United States, but about Britain. England, after having been master of the world and maintaining a stranglehold over, in particular, India, is now a startlingly cosmopolitan nation, with a quarter million Indian immigrants settling there in 2023 alone. He was looking around at what he saw in his own country, didn't like it, and assumed we wouldn't either. 

But there was something that distressed gentleman didn't understand. The UK rests on its tradition and history, one rooted in centuries of kings and queens stretching back in traceable lines. This country does not. The United States is what people from other places made it. 

My grandparents, all of them, made a journey across the ocean similar to mine. They sailed into that same harbor, saw that same monument to hope, and made a life here. A good one. And I'm not the only one. Everyone I know is descended from immigrants. It is immigrants who made this country, ones who trusted the promise made by the monument. Consequently, change may not be that by which the United Kingdom identifies itself, but it is at the root of who we in the U.S. are. 

It's not possible for a people from a foreign country who settles here with the intent to share in our heritage of freedom to "take over". They simply become the latest in the unbroken chain, not of kings and queens, but of people who have a dream for something better. Will we change as a nation because we have welcomed them? Of course, but that, too, is who we are. It's our responsibility to recognize ourselves in them, because a striving toward hope is something we share. 

This is the Fourth of July, a time to celebrate independence from tyranny. That, too, is who we are, even when the tyranny comes from within. As long as this great lady stands at the entrance to our nation, we have a promise to keep to the world and there is a world out there counting on it. 

Photo by the author

Does Anybody Really Know What Time It is?

 

I'm in London, and the theme is time. Obviously, here, that's Big Ben, near Parliament and Westminster in the most powerful place in town. I'm ostensibly here to study and earn the last credits I need for my degree but not unexpectedly, I'm learning more than the art and history of royals and rebels. 

It started when I ran into an altar cloth in Westminster that was embroidered with one of the last lines of TS Eliot's Four Quartets: "When the tongues of flame are infolded into the crowned knot of fire and the fire and the rose are one."

These are puzzling words and when I found out they were Eliot, well, that made some sense, but when I looked at the poem, found that the poem in its entirety, all four parts of it, deal with time - its passage and nature. Eliot tries to answer the deepest questions of human experience - questions of time, purpose, futility and meaning. Of course, he concludes there are no simple answers, because there aren't, but there is hope in remembering the restoration promised by Christ. 

Then yesterday our little group went to see Henry the IV, ostensibly to witness old Gandalf, Ian McKellan, as Falstaff, 

but then I heard what Shakespeare had to say there about time, how it passes and what it brings. What it is and what it is not...because there is no time. Not really. Time is a construct, a way to describe what we understand as reality and, regrettably to try to measure it. That doesn't work well. There is only living and the moments of it, not only one by one, but the rush of them and the wind they create. The moving urge of it is here today, in the room where I write, at the hotel breakfast table surrounded by a hundred others speaking a dozen languages I don't understand, brought together by what seem to be tributaries in a vast stream. Our rubbing up against one another may be accidental or it may be a destined nature, but it doesn't matter. I feel like Millais' Ophelia, which we saw at the Tate Britain Gallery the other day...floating along in a beautiful stream and content to be so, whatever comes.

Like that.

It's About Time!

This May 19, I'll walk across the stage at a downtown arena and graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee after starting my freshman year 55 years ago in 1969.

Yes, 1969. I know. It's crazy. But it's also been eye-opening.

You see, I had to. I just got tired of kicking myself for dropping out. And also, I needed some answers. After living a looooong time, I found I still had too many questions and no one in my usual circle of wonderful family, patient friends, and fellow wonderers had the answers. You see, after all these years, I was still asking WHY. 

Why do we humans continue to mess up in the same ways over and over again? (we do) Why do we not do better even when we know better like the common trope says we will? (we don't) Why do so many people still think that humans are basically bad and infallibly handicapped, condemned by original sin by a God who loves them perfectly? (we aren't)  Why still can't we forgive more easily? (we can't - darn) Why are young people so impossibly blind to it all, just staring at their phones? (they aren't). Why don't younger generations fail to see how much better a handle we had on the world than they do? (We didn't. Besides, it's not the same world, dude)

I mean, humans have been wondering the same things since Diogenes held his light up to the faces of strangers in the street looking for an honest man in 300-something BCE (I knew that before I went back to college, by the way) and we still don't have many answers. Or don't we?

Actually, there are more answers to be had than I thought. Here are some of the things I learned:

• Body, soul, and spirit feel like three things (Socrates and Plato thought they were, and from them and Aristotle, Augustine built our theology), but they're not. Humans have a single perfectly cohesive existence that has lots of moving parts. (Thank you, Marty Heidegger). Either that, or life is subsumed into a continuous stream of existence we share with every other living thing (Thank you, Nagarjuna). They aren't as different as you think. 
• Freedom is a two edged sword. While it brings autonomy, it also brings so many mind-numbing choices that it's beginning to paralyze the modern consciousness so that it feels like the only thing for GenZ to do is to hide their heads in escapism in an effort to stay sane.
• When examined closely, life gets more and more absurd. The point of doing Philosophy is to find a reason not to commit suicide. (Thank you, Camus)
• Social media was made to be the perfect place to share laughing babies and mutual victories, but has become the Valley of Despair.
• Modern people are monetized at every turn. Our value to our social system isn't who we are but what we spend. Count the ads on your newsfeed sometime.
• We might be in danger of becoming slaves to our own algorithms. (Alexa is always listening. You know she is.)
• The pace of life has increased to the point where it feels like we are constantly racing toward nowhere.
• The pandemic scared us to our core.

No wonder 20-somethings have been hiding. They're terrified. They still have a whole life to live and they're not sure how to do it. 

• They understand that Socrates was right. The unexamined life is not worth living and they are on the brink of that examination.

And in examining it, we find that in spite of all the terror and confusion, people, all of us, are infused with a dazzling glory - a kind of radiance that gives hope even in the face of all the weirdness of life. If we have the courage, even once in a while, to look at the hard questions together, we may not be able to solve them all but at least we'll be together. Even after all the desperation, if we have the courage to be honest together, good things happen.

And they happened right in front of me. In classrooms. In coffee shops. In chance meetings in the Union. In the caring, brilliant natures of several professors, but one in particular. I will not forget the grace he showed me. In intentional, unpredictable friendships between me and smart, insightful young people who ended up wanting the same things I did and were willing to talk about what might be done to make this world a better place. 

In the process, I found out how to care about those young people. They are much smarter, much kinder, and much more thoughtful than I think we were at the same age. Remember saying "Don't trust anyone over 30" and meaning it? They don't. They not only respected me, they made me their friend. And they made me want to do something for them in return.

So I'm going to. I advise you to do it, too. Listening, really listening, would be a good start.

More on that later. For now, I'm just going to finish the semester and celebrate. If you want the details, and a taste of some of the wonderful people I met, the link to the University article appears below. Thanks for asking, Pat Kaasa. 

Click here to connect to the full article.

February 29 is not a real day

 

Leap Day. Really?

No. It's Not.

In fact, February 29 is not a real day at all, and I have proof.

It was developed as a place holder, after all. An adjustment to keep the calendar in line with the sun and the passage of the actual astronomic year. With that purpose in mind, it was given a purpose, but no significance. All it has to do is come and go so as to keep the other days in their proper places. Nothing is supposed to happen on February 29. No one plans anything on it because it cannot have an annual anniversary. No one gets married or graduates or anything. Heaven help the person who is born on it, who is condemned to get older without getting to celebrate their actual birthday.

And this year, February 29 has proven it's non-dayness even more. Even the weather has deserted it. Today is February 28 and here in Wisconsin, Spring has already arrived. The perennials are sprouting in my garden, we've put away our winter coats, the sun will shine and the temperature will reach nearly 70 degrees. In two days, on March 1, predictions (which are usually right regardless of how much we complain to the contrary) are that it will be the same. 

But the weather on February 29 doesn't fit. It's either been transported from another dimension or has just decided to take a day off altogether. Nineteen degrees and snow. I keep looking at the forecast to decide whether someone has made a horrible mistake or is playing some kind of joke. Nope.

But in the context of the calendar, it makes a wierd kind of sense. February 29th doesn't belong.

Nineteen degrees doesn't belong.

Snow doesn't belong. 

And no one is leaping. 

It is just God's nudge to see whether we're paying attention. 

I think I'll stay in bed.

In fact, I think I'll publish this today just in case it doesn't come after all.

Building a Life, Stone by Stone

 

Did you know that when the builders in the Middle Ages erected their cathedrals with their great barrel vaults and pointed arches and flying buttresses, it was the not the mortar between the stones that kept them standing? The mortar didn't serve as medieval masonry glue but as a thin layer of leveling, smoothing the imperfections between them, one to another, to provide a continuous contact surface so that when one brick sat on the one before it and was followed by the rest, their combined weight would press them into a geometric shape whose weighted thrust extended in straight lines right through them into the ground.

It wasn't the mortar that kept the building together. It was the horde of gradually assembled stones that wouldn't work until each had taken its place. Not until that had happened, and the stones had time to sink into one another firmly by virtue not of a masonry glue, but only by their own accumulated pressure, would the great soaring structure be finished.

And so it is that the weight of years forms a life.

It has often seemed that as the years of my life increase, so does the weight of them so that I carry them as a kind of burden, like a sack I have to throw over my back before I can go anywhere. But I've been looking at them wrong, I think. Maybe they aren't a burden, but a building - a magnificent cathedral of lived days that I don't carry, but live in, roaming its rooms, examing its structure, admiring its beauty. Each stone has been laid painstakingly on the one before it day by day, adding weight, yes, but also creating stability. 

My building isn't complete yet until I've lived my last day, but it is taking shape into something I couldn't see coherently until now, when the building is nearly complete. What began as a fortress has morphed into a cathedral of Gothic lace, and I can't help but think that is what it was meant to be all along. 

And it is beautiful.

Who's Your Daddy?

 

I gave the following message at the First Congregational Church, Rochester, WI, January 21, 2024

I’m going to talk about Abraham today and I’m going to start with the lyrics of a song, not a hymn, but a song Bob Dylan wrote in 1965....

God said to Abraham, kill me a son.

Abe said, man, you must be putting me on.

God said no. Abe said What?

God said you can to what you want to, but

Next time you see me coming, you better run.

Abe said, where to do you want this killing done?

God said out on Highway 61.

 

Okay, so I used this because it’s fun, but also to show not only how famous Abraham’s story is that even a not so good Jewish boy from Minnesota knew his Old Testament well enough to write a protest era rock song about Abraham. But also to show how easy it is to get stuff within the story wrong. Dylan got the killing part right, but he missed something important about God.  Anyway, Abe’s story starts a long time before the killing incident, so we’ll start with a brief review.

Abraham, one of the Old Testament patriarchs, is often said to be the biblical example of faith. Born almost 2000 years before Christ, Abraham did a lot of traveling under God’s direction, but didn’t start until he was already an old man. When he was 60, he left his home in Ur to go to Haran because God told him to “Leave your country and go to a land I will show you. I will make of you a great nation.” He didn’t know where he was going but he believed God, so he did it.  Fifteen years later, when Abe was 75, God sent Abraham to Canaan. God said, “I will give this land to you and your descendants” and this was harder to believe because Abraham and his wife, Sarah, had no children and he couldn’t figure out how, at their age, that was going to work. He didn’t understand, but Abraham still did it. A year later, after he took his family to Egypt to avoid a famine and returned to Canaan, God said again, “I will give this land to you and your descendants.” This time, Abraham spoke up. He asked God how in the world he was going to do that because he still had no children. By then, Abe’s wife Sarah thought God might need some human help, so when Abe was 76, Sarah told him to sleep with her handmaid and sure enough, Abraham had a son, Ishmael, but God was not distracted by that. Ishmael was not the promised son. Finally, 24 years later, when Abe was 100 years old, after they’d waited 40 years and Sarah was 90, she finally had a baby by Abraham – Isaac. Isaac was the promised child. Isaac would be the future of the Hebrew people. They were overjoyed. Their belief had been rewarded. Abraham, through Isaac, WOULD be the father of a great nation.

This is how Hebrews 11 summarizes the story: By faith ^qAbraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place ^rthat he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. 9 By faith he went to live in ^sthe land of promise, 10 For he was looking forward to ^vthe city that has ^wfoundations, ^xwhose designer and builder is God. 11 By faith ^ySarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered ^zhim faithful who had promised. 12 Therefore from one man, and ^ahim as good as dead, were born descendants ^bas many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.

So far, so good.

Then when his son Isaac was 33 years old and in the prime of his manhood, God told Abraham to kill him. After all the moving and waiting, God was asking Abe to do the one thing that would make all God’s promises impossible. He for sure didn’t want to do it. He loved his son. But he also wanted to obey God. It didn’t make sense to kill Isaac, but it hadn’t made sense for God to send him moving from place to place either and God had made all of that work out. Everything had happened so far exactly as God promised. So Abe would kill Isaac to obey God and God would after Isaac was dead, make him, through Isaac, the father of nations. He just didn’t know how God would do that. So Abe went, not to highway 61 but up to Mount Moriah, to do the deed. He took His son, and a rope, and tied him to an altar meant for sacrifices. And Abe raised the knife.

This is what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about what Abraham did and why he did it. We’re going to talk about how Abraham believed and who he believed in. And we’re going to talk about how it would look for us to have the same kind of faith.

 

The thing about faith is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A person has faith in SOMETHING. Faith doesn’t exist apart from the object being believed in. In order to have faith at all, we have to have a clear picture of the thing believed. And then, because of what we believe, like Abraham, we DO something.

 

For Abraham, he believed God was his sovereign King and he acted like it. He listened and obeyed. He also believed God was trustworthy. God had promised the birth of Isaac against every common sense and delivered on his promise. God had also promised him that Isaac would be his inheritance and his gateway to a nation of descendants. Abe, standing on Mount Mariah with the knife in his hand, didn’t know how God was going to do build a nation from his descendants if he killed his only son, but he knew that somehow, God would do it, just like he’d done everything else.

 

Now we have to figure out who WE believe God is. Think about it a minute. Answer the question for yourself. Who is God? Complete the sentence - God is blank. Then fill in the blank.

 

How many of you thought God is Love? You’re not alone and there are lots of similar ways to express that love: faithful, good, kind, steadfast just.

the Bible agrees:

1 John 4:16 God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

Listen closely. That’s not only a definition, It’s an instruction. It tells us to do something. It tells us, that if we love, we must abide.

·      So, if God is love, we abide in Him. That means staying close. It means remembering God in everything we do. It’s making sure he has a chair at every table, a seat at every meeting. It’s whispering to him like pillow talk in prayer. It’s holding hands with him while we walk. It’s spooning with him in sleep. It’s staying so close to Him that he’s like an extension of ourselves and we couldn’t walk away even if we wanted to.

·      If God is love, we also expect and accept forgiveness for sins. Abraham never knew Jesus, but this kind of love was the reason Jesus was born and died. This love is God’s assurance that there’s nothing we can do, as long as we love Him, that’s irredeemable and even when it seems like we’re lost beyond God’s reach, we’re not. It’s having confidence that God never acts out of anger or revenge, regardless of how it looks from our point of view. This is what Dylan got wrong. God doesn’t threaten us with destruction if we go wrong. He forgives.

·       If God is love, we are loyal and forgiving not because a person earns it but because God is. We give the kind of love He gives. We treat everyone as equals because He created us all and we are equal. We look past our differences to our similarities. We act humbly and inclusively, not boasting or excluding anyone. Anyone. We’ve all heard about the tax collectors and prostitutes Jesus hung with. If God is love, we take care to recognize our own tax collectors, our own prostitute. They are there, waiting for us to love them. I was recently reminded that people who treat us badly often do it because they are afraid of being hurt themselves. We look past our prejudices by always ascribing a worthy motive to someone else rather than judging them. We think good of them, not ill. That’s what loving someone else as we love ourselves means.

God is a lot of other things, too: omniscient (all knowing), omnipotent (all powerful), eternal, sovereign (in charge of everything), and of course, holy, but the idea of transferring our understanding of who God is into action is the same for all of these cases. This is the kind of faith Abraham had. And, in a perfect world where we can do all of this, we would, too. However, what really happens can look quite different.

 Faith in action can be hard. It was for Abraham, too, because faith is more than knowing God exists. Understanding that God exists is a starting place waiting to be made into flesh and blood. Real faith is built in individual communion with God.

 

Like Abraham. He didn’t tell anybody what he was going to do when he took Isaac  to the mountain. He didn’t tell Isaac, or his wife, not anybody. Abe’s act was not a public one –It was a one on one interaction with God. He didn’t expect Isaac to survive. He expected him to die. Abe didn’t know what God would do after Isaac’s death, but knew He would do something.

 

Isaac was Abe’s whole world and future. He was the promise. In Abe’s willingness to kill him, Abe gave his everything to God. He resigned all his plans, all his future and that of his people into the unknown. Why? Because he believed. And because He believed, he trusted because if God is love, we also trust Him. We behave with confidence in whatever circumstances come, no matter how they look, remembering that God always – ALWAYS-has our best interests in mind. If the circumstances are hard, we know that the difficulty is good either for us or for someone else or both. If the circumstances appear to be evil, we remember that Jesus came to have victory over evil, so no evil can confound God’s plan. We don’t  worry about what we don’t have or what we want to happen or spend a lot of time trying to make things work out our way, but instead letting God arrange them his way.

 

The thing is, God doesn’t always, or even often, leave easily recognizable signposts saying “Here I am” and as a result, we spend a lot of time guessing, and sometimes getting it wrong. And that’s okay, because God is love, remember? It’s not about getting things right every time. It’s about wanting to. It’s about leaning into God all the time and looking for Him right there with us, because He is most likely to show up in places we least expect Him, like in a burning bush or on Mount Moriah, taking the knife out of our hand.

 

God, because He is unimaginable, lives in the place we can’t imagine and He reminds of this us every time He does something we didn’t think of or don’t want to happen. God lives in the unthinkable because He Himself is unthinkable. When He tells us not to fear, it’s not because nothing scary will ever happen. It’s because our plans are the only ones that will be upset. His will not.

 

But when our plans are upset, what happens? We worry. We’re afraid. We can’t sleep. When the unexpected comes, it takes us by surprise and confidence in God isn’t always our first response. So when it’s not, then there’s something in the adage Fake it Till You Make It. It works. Abraham did it. If we’re scared, behave as though we are not. If we irrationally worry, do what we should. We disarm our fears not by running the other way but by entering into them, grabbing them and shaking them until they reveal the damage they are doing. Making them show their real face. Does that take courage you don’t think you have? You bet it does.

 

One of my favorite stories is about the a Chinese Christian mystic named Watchman Nee. He was considered a holy man and one night, while he was just hanging out smoking his pipe in his living room, a demon appeared on the staircase. Now the demon was doing scary, demony things like growling and snarling and cursing him. After a minute or two, Nee stood up, walked over to the demon, looked at him and said, "Oh, it's only you." He was scared when he did this, of course, but the demon didn't know that. All he heard was Nee saying, "I know who you are. You can't hurt me because I know who God is."  The demon had no defense against Nee’s faith.

 

Remember, God only brings us what we’re supposed to have. He means us good, not harm. It’s a trust fall. Did you ever try one? To stand in front of someone and just lean back and let go without asking first, without looking to see if they’re paying attention, and just collapse and see whether they’ll catch you. It’s an amazing experience, and God wants us to do that with Him. Every time. We can fall into His arms with complete confidence regardless of our fears and reservations because that is the only way to faith, the only way to find out how magnificent God really is.

 

Remember that God asked the worst, the hardest thing of Abraham and Abe walked right up to it and he raised the knife over his son. Do you think Abe’s hand wasn’t shaking? I’m willing to bet it was. He does the same with us. God gives us situations we don’t like and puts the knife in our own hands and asks us what we will do next. When we have the faith and courage to raise it, he will say, see! Look what I am doing. I am making all things new in a way you could never have imagined.

 

To God, unexpected change cannot unmake His plans. To God, death cannot unmake His plans. When we act according to what we believe rather than how we feel, God meets us there, hands out to catch us, because we know who He is. He is love, and he is just, and he is sovereign and he is holy. When we reach back to him in return, we find, like Abraham, that God moves His heaven and his earth to give us faith and bring us rescue. That is Jesus’ story. That is Abraham’s story. It is meant to be our story, too. May it be.

Image courtesy of Third Hour

Requiem

 

Requiem

December 18, 2023, New York Times: U.S. Steel to Be Bought by Japanese Rival 

 

Pure power.

I saw it once.

Showering from the pregnant mouth of a smelter in liquid stars.

Birthing its own dawn,

cascading into wide waiting trenches,

consuming every atom it approached.

scorching even the air.

 

What began as iron and cool coke

exploded to life and purpose

from a chemist’s dream,

not steel but vision

grown into monument

carrying us shoulder high

wide as invention,

broad as courage

solid as unbound minds.

 

It was so beautiful.

 

It lost no grandeur

even as it grayed into slab,

cooling as it moved.

Dignified even while consecrated to

hot rolls pressing it to near paper,

and rocketing out, thundering, into coils,

bending into the place mortals live

to meet a Hephaestion future forged in its own furnace.

 

But when future came,

the god lingered and lagged.

Grandeur and dignity faded,

romance reduced to pragmatic function.

 

Steel still breeds from formulaic components

but the spark smoldered and died.

No fresh sun rises to the blast.

No new charge promises a bloom.

 

There is weeping in Gary.

 

Image courtesy of Science Photo Library