“We Shall Overcome” - An appropriate Christmas song?

I was searching YouTube last week for traditional Christmas music to marinate my holiday nostalgia. I was feeling classical, so I checked out a few of my favorites - the St. Olaf College Choir, the Atlanta Boy Choir, Chanticleer, the Cambridge Singers. Finally, I landed at the Konzerthaus in Vienna[i], surely the most opulent setting for Christmas music in all Christendom. Right on cue, four of the world’s greatest soloists came on stage, in resplendent dress, and they began to sing. Their first song?

“We Shall Overcome.” 

In German, of course.

What?

Richard Harrington in The Washington Post called this song a “Hymn to Hope,” an “extraordinary song that remains at the heart of an extraordinary movement…” Rooted in American slavery, developed in the labor struggles of the '40s and counterculture of the late '60s, it became the identifying anthem of the US civil rights movement. It was the song on Viola Liuzzo's lips when she was gunned down during the march from Selma to Montgomery. It was on the lips of the young son of slain Freedom Rider James Chaney at his father's funeral, where he sang bravely while tears streamed down his face… It resounded from the war-wounded in Beirut, students in Korea, farmworkers in the American Midwest, children in the (former) Soviet Union, peace activists in England, and the disenfranchised in Northern Ireland…[ii]

And now, behold, it launches the Christmas season in one of the world's most exalted artistic venues. 

At first, I felt a bit of cognitive dissonance. Did Mary dream of a White Christmas when she made her birth announcement? Hardly. Hear what she said: "He brought down the powerful from their thrones,  and lifted up the lowly; he filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty." 

Perhaps this is the song the angels actually sang. I like to think that "We Shall Overcome" is what “Glory to God in the Highest” really means. It's not an obsequious groveling before an autocratic Deity, but true liberation from all that oppresses, from all that weighs us down. 

“We Shall Overcome!” We are not alone. We are not afraid. We’ll walk hand-in-hand. We shall live in peace. We shall all be free. 

Can you think of a better song to sing over this child's manger? 

Or today too? As we face Covid, climate change, and corruption in high places, is there a better song to sing? “Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, that we shall overcome some day.”

 

---

[i] “Christmas In Vienna 2018”, YouTube, December 24, 2018.

[ii] Harrington, Richard. “The Hymn to Hope”, The Washington Post, August 28, 1988.

© Budd Friend-Jones

December 2021

Babi Yar

 Eighty years ago, September 29-30, 1941, the killings at Babi Yar began with the mass execution of 34,000 Jews. The estimated total of those who were massacred at this site now stands at between 100,000 and 150,000.  I wrote this shortly after visiting Babi Yar in 1990.

Outside the lovely city of Kyiv a towering and stark monument rises tragically from the depths of a vast pit. Tangled human bodies reach upward into the weeping sky. Some are strong Ukrainian sailors. One is a defiant young woman. They are Jews and homosexuals. A mother raises her child in desperation as she is pulled downward. An old man — dead — slides back into the pit. Clinging to him is another woman, not comprehending the magnitude of this savagery. She too is being sucked into the muddy, bloody oblivion of Babi Yar.

Busloads of visitors approach the monument in silence. They walk quietly around the pits. Laying stones and flowers on the inscribed plaque, some fall to their knees. Some weep softly to themselves. Some gently intone the Mourner’s Kaddish, the daily prayer to be prayed at the death of a loved one.

There is no record of the names of all who were slain here. In the first five days, more than 55,000 died. Soldiers were told to conserve bullets by shooting two or three at a time. They were ordered to throw children in alive. Witnesses tell us these soldiers grew weary of the bloodletting but were encouraged to be strong. “Let your will overrule your heart,” they were told. “Do not be swayed by children, old people, or women. Kill them all. After the war, a new world will dawn for you and your families. You will settle new lands. You will be cleansed and purified of these horrible deeds.”

The soldiers were implementing the Nazi’s Ost (East) Plan, a plan that had been carefully and rationally developed long before any shooting began. They were to eliminate 100% of the Jews, and 85% of the Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, and Byelorussians. The remaining 15% were to become slaves of the Reich.

This slaughter really happened. This really happened in our time. Intelligent human beings, lovers of Beethoven, Bach and Mozart, rationally decided to exterminate and proceeded to enslave races and nations of peoples. Against all objections about the gross inhumanity of such a project, they counseled, “Let your will overrule your heart.”

Memorials such as Babi Yar are proliferating the world over. No longer tributes to heroic victories, our monuments increasingly offer poignant witness to immense tragedies. Each gives testimony to the violence and suffering that continues to engulf the world. Each represents the heart’s response to the will’s assertion. Each protests, for all to hear, “Never again! We will not forget! Never again!”

It would be less disturbing if this calculated and loathsome brutality were confined to one era, ideology, or circumstance. Then we could isolate and analyze it as a grievous aberration. But sadly, the holocaust did not end. Shoah continues. Other names and nations now offer other rationales but killing fields multiply. From Siberian river camps to Rwandan farmlands, Bosnian highways to Kampuchean forests, urban centers to remote tribal regions, human beings have savaged each other and destroyed all pretense to innocence. We have done it for many different “reasons” and we have done it unto the least of our own.

Is there another way?

In a small village in Kenya, an African woman was carving a sculpture outside her thatched house. She was wearing a dress so colorful that   the rainbow would be jealous. A visitor, Sue Monk Kidd, engaged her in conversation:

‘What are you making?”

‘This is Ujamaa,” came the reply. “What is ‘Ujamaa’?”

"Ujamaa means family.”

“Your family?”

“No. God’s family.”

Would you like to know what God’s family looks like? It is not unlike the monument at Babi Yar, yet there is a profound and life-affirming difference. Imagine an ebony totem. Sitting at the base are five human figures.

Sitting on their heads are five more, and on their heads are five more. It could go on indefinitely.

If you saw it, you would be struck by how inextricably all these figures are intertwined. They grow out of one another. Their heads join, their faces blend. One person’s foot flows from another’s hand. All their arms wrap around one another like vines encircling a great tree. This is God’s Ujamaa. This interconnected human mass is not sliding into a pit, but rising toward the sun, not collapsing from despair but energized by fellow feeling. Where is God in this Ujamaa? Not presiding in some distant realm but within and between all the figures of the sculpture.

Ujamaa and Babi Yar are two striking images of the human race, and both are true. Both evoke the most profound emotions. Through memorials and monuments, we remind ourselves of our capacity to inflict or suffer great harm. Through finely worked art we recognize deep and sacred ties that bind us together. Which image controls the future?

If we were not Ujamaa, would we weep at Babi Yar?

Said Ms. Kidd upon seeing the Kenyan Ujamaa, “This image shattered my illusions of my separateness. It pried open my heart. How can I not help but twine my arms around this vast family?”

Can we stop the violence and halt the bloodshed? I don’t have mega-answers to the mega-suffering of our time. I do know it is time to allow our hearts to overrule our wills.

© Gilbert Friend-Jones, Faith in A Minor Key.

Planning Today for the Yesterday of Tomorrow

 Recent conversations in the newspapers, social media, and on cable news have had to do with our national story. Who are we? What is our country about? What is the truth about our heroes? Our history?

How are we to teach our origins? What is true patriotism? How do we explain what happened on January 6 at the nation’s capital?

When the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth in 1620, were they escaping the tyrannical oppression of an English king? Or were they bent on impoverishing and disenfranchising a continent full of First Nations peoples?

Were our Founding Fathers visionaries giving birth to a society even more humane than they could imagine, or slave-holding egoists hell-bent on their own aggrandizement?

January 6, 2021 at the US Capital

What shall we make of Critical Race Theory? What was the role of racism in our history?

It is no accident that these questions are bubbling to the surface now. In our reading just now Arundhati Roy said, “pandemics force us to break with the past and imagine our world anew.” That is what is happening now.

In 1984 Tengiz Abuladze, a renowned Soviet director, created a film that altered the nature of political discourse in his country forever. It has an eerie relevance to what’s happening in our country today.

Called Repentance, the film languished, unseen, for years. Those who helped make it were punished for anti-Soviet activity. It took the intervention of Gorbachev himself to stop the censorious persecution and protect the director. Abuladze released the film about the time that the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded. It was equally explosive and devastating. (Parenthetically, the film was shown again last month - as a Cannes classic - at the Cannes Film Festival.)

Repentance is the story of a corpse that won’t stay buried. 

Varlam Aravidze, a Stalinesque character, is the mayor of the city when he dies. He is buried with great ceremony. The next day the grieving city awakens to find his stiffened corpse leaning against a tree. He is reburied, but on the following morning, his corpse appears in a park.

“We have to arrest the corpse,” the officers say as they load it into a police wagon and drive off. He is reburied again. A protective metal cage is built over the grave; the door is padlocked. Police with guns and attack dogs take positions. That night a woman is captured as she begins digging at the grave.

“I confirm the facts, but I deny my guilt,” she says at her trial. “For as long as I am alive, he will not lie in a grave. This sentence has been passed and is not subject to appeal. I will exhume him 300 more times if necessary.”

 “It is not my wish to settle accounts with a dead man,” she proclaims, “but I have no choice in the matter.” She tells the story of his rise to prominence and his exercise of power. It is a tale of falsehood, intimidation, brutality, arbitrary arrests, exile, torture, executions, the separation of families, terror, and endless persecution.

The people don’t like her version of their history. Crowds tried to shout her down, but she remained determined. “On my own behalf, and on behalf of all innocent victims, I demand that Varlam Aravidze be exhumed by his kin.”

“Aren’t we to bury the dead?” they yelled.

“No,” she answered. “To bury him means to exonerate him. I say to you again: if you don’t exhume him, I will. I won’t leave him in the earth.

“How many times will you exhume him?” they ask. “Until you stop defending him. Aravidze is not dead. For as long as you continue to defend him, he lives, and he continues to corrupt society.”

Varlam’s corpse keeps showing up at inopportune times and places: when a couple is making love, when a man is doing calisthenics. The re-appearance of the corpse is inconvenient, to say the least, and distressing for the townspeople. But most of all it is embarrassing because it becomes the material manifestation of Varlam’s much more destructive presence in the minds and psyches of the people. Because the leaders refused to face the brutal facts of the past that he embodied, he continued to have all the more power over them.

They are simultaneously victims and collaborators, survivors and sycophants, hardened and vulnerable.

In today’s America, I suggest that these same people would embrace ceremony over accountability, reassurance over protest, 1776 over 1619, fake news, over critical theories of race or anything else.

This “corpse that won’t stay buried”, whether in the Soviet Union or in our contemporary reality, represents all the unresolved, unrepented, shadowy, repressed pain and evil that locks people into continuous bondage to their lesser angels. It prevents their growth and thwarts their true liberation.

The gravedigger in Repentance knew intuitively that, in order for the town to heal, the townspeople needed to face their past. They needed to own the harm that had been perpetrated in their name. They needed to acknowledge and repent of the evil that had transpired. “Hurt people hurt people.” People wound others when their own wounds go untended.

For the director, the people were “the dead trying to bury the dead”. They were the unfeeling trying to bury their conflicted feelings. They were the un-alive trying to bury the cause of their alienation. They were spiritually empty. They had lost faith in the future. They had lost confidence in the unknown. They had lost hope for a better world. They were choosing death over life, stagnation over novelty, and cloying respectability over spiritual rebirth.

The grave digger? They called her insane, but she was the community’s one voice of sanity and conscience. She was their witness. Her anguished appraisal promised new possibilities.

She was saying that the way to gain freedom from past harm is to face it with courage. The way to be rid of the burdens of our history is to acknowledge them, repent of them, and move on. Don’t glorify them. Don’t defend them. Don’t bury them. “You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

Abuladze’s film was powerfully specific to contemporary political realities in the U.S.S.R. Yet he exposed a theme more breathtaking and universal than even he dreamed of.

I once heard a radio announcer from the land of Garrison Keillor describe, in a Keilloresque sort of way, the formation of a fictitious group to be called Future Historians of America. Its motto was going to be, “Planning Today for the Yesterday of Tomorrow”. In an odd way, Abuladze was trying to teach the Soviet people how to prepare for the “yesterday of tomorrow,” for the day when the USSR would be no more.

We’re all deeply interested in tomorrow, and what the future holds.

What do you see? Are you Utopian? Dystopian or Apocalyptic? What must we face today to get to a better tomorrow? What must we do to go from the “no longer” to the “not yet”?

Unfortunately, there are many “Varlams” buried in our consciousness—sins unadmitted, pain unacknowledged, evils unexplored. Their unacknowledged existence will continue to divide and corrupt us until they are acknowledged and healed.

Arundhati Roy is not alone in observing that we stand now at a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can, she says,

“choose to walk through it, 
dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, 
our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas,
our dead rivers and smokey skies behind us.
Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, 

ready to imagine another world.” 

 

“Black Lives Matter” knows this. “Me too!” knows this. The Lincoln Project knows this. Conservatives and progressives among us are digging up Varlams from our collective past - not to punish but to heal us.

If we fail to acknowledge and deal with them courageously, they will continue to sap our energy and diminish our vision.

Repentance, metanoia, conversion, a paradigm shift, a changing of mind and heart, ‘making amends’, reparations, letting go—whatever we want to call it—this is the door through which we must pass. We need to learn new ways of listening to one another, respecting one another, learning from one another. This is the only way all that is dead within us can truly die. To repent of harm done and good left undone, to grieve what was and what will never be, to acknowledge our emptiness and the pain of our lot - this is the precondition for our healing.

Despair and cynicism are merely defenses. To experience our fear, feel our powerlessness, acknowledge our shame and take steps to rectify – this is how we begin again.

Let us trust in the goodness of Life to bring us to healing. Let us trust that, in our free-fall, Life will reach into the maelstrom of our own time, catch us in flight, hold us gently, and restore us to the fullness of a healthy social existence. Let us trust that together we can find a way out of no way, and discover real community.

If we find the will, the resources we need to make things right will become available. If we seek to develop a new ability to care for one another, then, and only then, shall we truly cherish the gift of our days upon the earth.

 

 © Budd Friend-Jones

Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, Florida

29 August, 2021

Mourning With Bumps and Band-Aids

 I was in a hurry. Bending to pick up a shoe, I banged my head on the sharp corner of a shelf. A huge bump — my nurse friend called it a ”hematoma” — immediately rose on my forehead bringing pain to me and horror to my children. No serious injury occurred but the wound remained visible for days. I covered it with a band-aid - more to spare others its unsightliness than to protect my head. I soon discovered that the band-aid and the bump served a purpose I had not anticipated. They signaled to the world that I was hurting and vulnerable.

My mother died a week earlier after a long and painful disability. Her death left a deep psychic wound. There was a rawness about my pain. Sometimes I needed to talk about it. Sometimes I couldn’t. Meanwhile, the business of my life continued relentlessly. Healing had to be squeezed in between the carpool and the church meeting.

However, this band-aid stopped people. “What happened to you?” they asked. Sometimes I responded, “I bumped my head.” Sometimes I said, “My mother died.”

I wanted the world to know of my loss but I didn’t always want to talk about it. The bump and bandaid were my psyche’s way of declaring my need for special consideration.

Grieving is neither well understood nor accepted in our culture. We seek to tame its wildness by describing a predictable “process” with inevitable “stages”. We are told to “work through” our grief as we “let go” of our loved ones. There is, it seems, a “right way” to grieve.

I long for the days when grieving was more mysterious and we who grieve were given time and space to allow the inevitable transformations to happen within us. To burn a candle, to gather after a month or forty days, to ritually observe the loosening of the bonds — these make sense to me. They are public ways of honoring private grief without dictating the form or content one’s healing should take.

Black armbands or head coverings, crepe hanging over doors — these were the bumps and band-aids of past generations. They discreetly informed the public that here were individuals in a special condition of vulnerability. Here were people adjusting to a world that had been made unacceptable by their loss. Here were individuals, they signaled, who bore within them a need for special care.

Alas! Crepe no longer hangs over our doors. Armbands and head coverings no longer protect us. We are left to heal as best we can in the spaces we create. Bumps and band-aids will have to do.

© Gilbert Friend-Jones, Faith in A Minor Key.

Play

Our verb “to play” gets a lot of work. It comes from a very old Dutch word that means to “dance, leap for joy, and rejoice”. The dictionary tells us that a person is playing when they “move about in a lively, irregular, or capricious motion”.

We like the word “play”. We use it for lots of reasons. We have playmates and playgrounds, and we attend plays in theaters. We play chess, music, ball, cards, and so many other activities. We play musical instruments. If we can’t instruments, we play radios, records or a tape.

Sometimes we use the word to describe a mechanical defect. We say there’s too much “play” in the steering wheel. Sometimes we just play “at” something rather than seriously pursue it.

It’s not always pleasant. No one likes to play second fiddle, and certainly no one wants to be played.

In the 18th century, there was a proverb that went “the wise child handles father and mother by playing one against the other”.

Some players are “professional" - as in baseball, blackjack, or bassoons. But amateurs play these things too. The difference is in the money. 

Animals play. Even machines play. For example, until very recently everyone had either a record or CD play-ers

Savvy scientists are developing sophisticated robots that seem to “dance, leap for joy, and rejoice”. They certainly move about with “lively, irregular, and capricious motions”. But as Mr. Shakespeare would say, “there’s the rub”. There is nothing spontaneous about robotic play. The playfulness of robots, if such there be, resides in their human creators. 

In an extraordinary book written in the 1930s, Johan Huizinga demonstrated that nearly everything we do is an expression of our innate playfulness. Playfulness is the fecund fountain of all human invention.

A new recipe? Play. A new mobile phone? Play. A new go-cart for a Sunday drive on the Martian surface? Play. A world war? Play. A treaty to end the war? That's play too. Seriously!

Even the most somber religions embody a deeply playful impulse. Their adherents may not know it, but a gloomy countenance may be their way of playing. Why are there so many theologies, liturgies, and practices? Because without these playful inventions, religion grows stale. Without an awareness of its playful, inventive core, religion becomes oppressive and fuels our worst impulses.

It matters a great deal what we play and how we play. Too often the joyful and life-affirming spirit of playfulness is perverted. Too many people today play only sinister and violent games.

Every day our elected officials play. But what games do they choose to play? “Sim City”? Or “Mortal Kombat”? “Coop-etition” or “Game of Thrones”?

Intentional play is humanizing, empowering, and life-affirming. It expands our capacity to interact joyfully with the world. It is the defining characteristic of all life on this planet. Play is a sacred gift to be cherished and developed for as long as we live.

Silent Places of the Past

Ask the Horse

Zen in Black and White Art Watercolor

(Pinterest.com 570 x 814) 

Hans Küng, a great 20th Century theologian, passed away last month in Tübingen. I remember a moving speech he gave at Riverside Church years ago. He described the spiritual desolation he has known after the Shoah. Someone asked him how anyone can believe in anything after the Holocaust. How can we believe in a higher vision, a nobler calling or a greater purpose for our lives?

He paused and breathed deeply. "I can understand those who turn away after this. But as for me, I can only go on because I believe in God. Belief in God helps me overcome such catastrophic events."

About the same time, I heard Dainin Katagiri, a Zen Roshi, speak about our situation. Contemporary civilization is like a rider who storms through a village on a runaway horse. People shout, "Where are you going?" He yells back, "Ask the horse!"

Once we were confident of our purposes and destiny. We trusted the advances won by education, the inventions spawned by technology and the idealism generated by liberal faith. For lots of reasons, this confidence has been shaken. The vast gains of knowledge, our technological strides, and the rich accumulations of centuries of cultural development — these only render more tragic our present disarray.

Ask the horse! We find ourselves in a world we can neither fully understand nor can reject as unintelligible. We are driven by goals we cannot hope to reach yet cannot accept as unreachable. We teeter between belief and unbelief, between an almost limitless faith in our own abilities and a disgust at the pettiness, stupidity and cruelty of a race bent on conflict and destruction. Hatred - and fear - in countless variations perpetuate human degradation.

Ask the horse! Shall we agree with Thomas Hobbes that human life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”? Or reconcile ourselves to what Sigmund Freud called the “normal unhappiness” of human existence?

For Küng, “No!” “Belief” means we may expect to know someday the answer to the question first posed by Leibniz: “Why is there something and not nothing?” For Katagiri, “No!” as well. “Liberation” comes in realizing that “something” and “nothing” are the same. For both Küng and Katagiri, the suffering of this world can awaken deep compassion in us. Compassion is the bridle that controls the horse. For both savants, all striving for justice is absolutely justified. For each of them, in vastly different ways, truth will be known and divisions will be overcome.

© Gilbert Friend-Jones

A Doll for Mom

My mother came to me in a dream, but she had something real to say. Both she and my father had passed away a few years earlier. Apparently, in my conversations, I would talk forever about my Dad - a firefighter, my scoutmaster, my sister's Sunday School teacher, etc.

"Buddy," she said in this dream, "all I hear is 'my father this' and 'my father that'. Well, I had a hand in raising you too! Who sat with you when you had all those broken bones? Who helped you with your homework? Who was your Cub Scout den mother? Who got you dressed for church on Sunday mornings and school days the rest of the week? Didn't I play a role in your upbringing?" Well, she was right. I was embarrassed and apologetic. She had done all that while working a difficult nursing career and helping lots of others in the family, church and neighborhood. At only 4'6" at her tallest, nevertheless she was a powerhouse. I wouldn't have had as satisfying a life had it not been for my mother's tireless care.

 
Years later I bought her a porcelain flamenco doll while in Spain. (She had a large doll collection.) My friends laughed at me because she was, well, no longer living. "Just because she's dead doesn't mean I can't buy her a doll," I said defensively. Mom came to me in another dream that night too. She wanted to thank me for the doll, tell me she loved it, and reassure me that the journey home would go smoothly. It did.

 
We never outgrow our parents; they leave us all too soon. Sometimes memories are all we have. I have many wonderful memories, but we (mom and I) also have that doll!

© Gilbert Friend-Jones

Ancestors

Camp Ihduhopi, Loretto, MN

It rained all weekend. We gathered in the lodge for our annual retreat. A large fire crackled in the massive fireplace. We had been instructed to bring photographs or other objects from at least one of our ancestors, people who had gone before us and helped shape who we are. 

Our leader met us at the door. Lakota by birth, for years she helped deepen our understanding of our place in the universe. Now she asked us to put our chairs in a circle and place the photographs and memorabilia of our ancestors behind us around the circle. We never formally introduced these ancestors, yet they became a real presence through the weekend. We came to realize that we live always in their presence; they are with us even now.

While we were conducting the business of the church, a large spider lowered herself from the ceiling. “Ah!” Wilma said. “One of our relatives has come to visit.” With that, she began to help us understand how we exist in a living biosphere of interdependent life forms. Two-legged, four-legged, eight-legged, no-legged, thousand-legged - each has a niche, a sacred place. Trees too, and birds and fish. share this web of life. The massive outcroppings of rock rising from deep within the earth have stories to tell. We are relatives. We must live and make decisions that are respectful of all these relatives.

This was a planning retreat. She wanted us to see that every decision affects our children and their children, but also the progeny of all our planetary relatives. She encouraged us to consult our ancestors when we were uncertain.

She talked of spirit guides and the Great Spirit - whom she called Grandfather and, sometimes, Wakan Tanka. She spoke of the Medicine Wheel and gifts that proceed from its sacred directions.

That was many years ago. But as we move through Covid, police violence, and our polarized political landscape, as we witness now and anticipate more devastation wrought by climate change, I often return to that rainy weekend and roaring fire, that descending spider and sacred circle. We were friends and ancestors sitting together. We were not alone. We never are. I want to live in such a way that I honor our ancestors, care for our relatives, and prepare a brighter future for our children.

© Gilbert Friend-Jones

From: Faith in a Minor Key

Homily or Sermon?

In recent months I have found myself wanting to substitute the word “homily” for “sermon” in our Sunday orders of worship. “This is curious,” I said to myself. “What is this about?”

At first, I suspected my desire to appear more southern than I have a right to claim to be. Homily. Hominy. Homily. Hominy. Homily.  Hominy. This word association evokes all things truly southern. The very sound of it suggests a languid, non-pretentious, warm morning, southern repast. Perhaps I will even develop a drawl.

“Hominy” derives from the Algonquin term for grain; it never occurs alone. What is its partner? “Grits.” True grits. Real Southerners spot us interlopers a mile away: 

"Sir, what would you like for breakfast?" 

“I’ll have a grit.”

“A grit? I’m sorry, sir. They never come alone.”

I think a good sermon ought to be a little “gritty”, don’t you? Grits on your plate keep you humble. The best upscale sermons ever savored still have some down-home common sense about them.

But I don’t think this is it. My Catholic friends point out that they “do” homilies while Protestants “do” sermons. So maybe there’s a wannabe priest lurking in my robe. But while I confess to being an ecu-maniac, and believe with every fiber of my being that we should work that “all may be one”, I have no desire to exchange the riotous freedoms of my tradition for the particular restrictions of another.

I asked my erudite colleagues to tell me the difference between a homily and a sermon. No one seems to know. I asked you who sit through them. “Homilies are shorter,” you say. With all due respect, I think you beg the question. Certainly my homilies are not shorter. (“Pastor,” pleaded one member, “your words don’t have to be eternal in order for them to be immortal.”)

Finally I looked in the dictionary. Homily is rooted in the Greek homi-letikos, meaning "conversation." Sermon comes directly from medieval Latin for "speech", and that probably derives from serere, “to link together or string together” like beads on a necklace. While both words carry the meaning of “a religious discourse before a congregation,” the nuance of homily is “an informal exposition usually of Scripture.” Sermon carries the additional shade of “an annoying harangue”.

I am allergic by temperament to harangues. I cherish dialogue. I like the thought that what I say from the pulpit is one piece of a much longer conversation that has been going on for centuries.

So as I prepare for our worship, perhaps I  am asking myself this question: “What shall it be this Sunday? An informal exposition, or an annoying harangue? A speech, or a searching  conversation?”

© Gilbert Friend-Jones, in Faith in a Minor Key. 

Sacred Clutter

 Our neighborhood had a garage sale today, the first in its history. It lasted three hours and was closed to the public. Most of the neighbors skipped it too. No traffic. No customers. No sales. It was a real bust. 

On the other hand, it prompted Gretchen and me to get off our butts and make decisions about all the stuff we brought with us to Florida. Well, some of the stuff, anyway. We barely made a dent in this Herculean task. I still have the 1946 Lionel train my dad bought me when I was eleven months old, and all the post-war cardboard houses  – “made in Japan” – that we bought to go with it. There is my Little League uniform with “Little Buddy Jones” imprinted on the back, the glove for a small hand, and a miniature bat. There’s my merit badge sash and a whole lot of other Boy Scout paraphernalia, including my Dad’s badge when he was a scout in the 1930s. I have cars, guns and planes that I played with as a child. I even have the toy chest I kept my things in – so small by today’s standards. 

All my elementary school artwork, my 10^th grade biology notebooks, and many of the papers I wrote are well preserved.  We have quilts by my grandmother and paintings by my wife. We have a pie safe and antique chairs - my Dad’s handwork - that we’ll never use again. Add to this the hundreds of letters, newspaper clippings and magazines my mother treasured. Don’t forget the boxes of Christmas ornaments, the family heirlooms, and all the photos Gretchen spent hours organizing and digitalizing. Did I mention my father’s coin and postcard collections? My own Easter egg collection? My elephant collection? My icons? My CDs? My books?

Until our neighbors announced this sale, I couldn’t bear to part with any of it. Then something snapped. Now I want it all to go away! If I spent the first 75 years of my life collecting this stuff, I'll be spending the next 75 finding it good homes.

But Florida is a terrible place to do this. At least 75% of the people here are in the same boat. They don’t want to pick through the flotsam and jetsam of someone else’s life. I have enough stuff for a small museum, but no one really wants to visit it. These objects are sacred to me, but they lack meaning or significance to everyone else. 

The Bible says that the sins of the fathers (and mothers) are visited upon their children until the umpteenth generation. I’m going to do my best to prevent the fulfillment of this curse, but what a daunting task it is. 

(Photo by Andrew Evers, CNBC, Ocrober 1, 2017)

Do not go gentle...

"All relationships lead toward separation."

- Clark Moustakas (Loneliness)

I was pondering the sermon I soon would deliver when I found myself drifting into a reverie of the snow sculpted landscape outside my window. The winds were picking up. Tree branches were encased in ice. They were bending and swaying, dancing in mysterious synchronicity. 

I noticed a single oak leaf attached to a branch high in a tree. It was being blown fiercely in every direction. On no other branch, on no other tree, did I see a leaf. This one was dry, shriveled and encrusted in ice. It refused to fall to the blanketed earth below. The winds attacked it ferociously. 

I wondered: Was the leaf tenaciously clinging to the tree? Or was the tree refusing to let it go? Did the leaf fear the fall, or was the tree holding on to this last vestige of warmer, greener times? Was it mutual? Were they clinging to each other out of their separate needs? Were they desperately defying the inevitable separation?

I continued to watch. Is this not what most of our struggles are about? I admired their pluck, but I felt a sadness too - a tree and its leaf against the universe's inexorable demand to let go. 

© Gilbert Friend-Jones

From: Faith in a Minor Key