A Better Way

“And during supper Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him.” - John 2b-5


I look at my disciples tonight and I wonder.
Will they ever understand?
James and John continue to jockey for position.
Judas is playing games; for the right price
he will throw me under the bus.
Even Peter wants to be sure he is not left behind.
I think they want to form a corporation.

I told them many times that this is not the way.
Day after day I tried to teach them
that our Father’s realm is different.
I took them into small towns and rural areas,
urban tenements and posh suburban neighborhoods.
I took them into palaces and hovels where
we befriended the righteous and the criminal alike.
I wanted them to see how people wasted their lives chasing
after shadows. It is not to be like this for them.
I wanted them to know that in order to be first in our Father’s realm
they must choose to be last in this one. To be great
they must choose to serve others. To be wise
they must see with the eyes of a little child. To be rich
they must share everything they own.
I want them to know that the entire world is theirs,
but they cannot embrace it when their arms are so full of things.
Our Father’s grace is everywhere, but they will not see it
as long as they think life is a zero-sum game.

Tonight at the Passover feast I will show them.

I will put on an apron. With a basin of soapy water I will kneel
before each one. I will look up into their faces,
into their eyes. With the infinite love I feel for each one
I will untie their sandals. I will scrub their feet
until the muck and mire of this night
is washed away, until their feet are as clean as a baby’s.
On this night, our last together, I will fold each foot
in the softest towel and massage it until dry.
Then, perhaps, they will understand.

I did not come to be served
but to serve. I did not come to receive,
but to give. I did not come to be loved,
but to love. I did not come to stand above them,
but to stand with them. I am not their master,
but their brother. I am not their judge
but only one who wants to show them a better way.

(Photo by Billy Hathorn, 5/24/10, LeTourneau University, Longview, Texas)

How Charles Ives Saved My Soul

Thank God for Charles Ives! Without him I couldn’t have gotten through seminary. To be more precise, without his The Unanswered Question, I might have lost my sanity altogether. I discovered this short piece of music as I was plowing through the writings of the Early Church Fathers. (Yes, they were only Fathers in those days.) Mystics and theologians battled – literally - with one another over words and even over the spelling of those words. They argued with a vitriol I had not heard since I stopped listening to radio preachers years before.

One evening in Bound Brook, NJ, as I poured over these ancient texts, unable to fathom the light within them that had animated and agitated so many, the local public radio station broadcast Ives’ piece into my study: The Unanswered Question. Fittingly, it is subtitled “A Contemplation of Something Serious.” The music struck a chord with me, if you’ll pardon the expression. It is hauntingly plaintive and inconclusive, and it has stayed with me ever since. It is a deeply humane composition.

Ives wrote The Unanswered Question in 1906 along with its companion, Central Park in the Dark in the Good Old Summer Time (subtitled “A Contemplation of Nothing Serious”). Within its simple structure there are three distinct kinds of music layered upon one another: a string chorale, an unchanging trumpet phrase and a chattering woodwind response. Ives wrote,

“The strings play pianississimo (very softly) throughout with no change in tempo. They are to represent the ‘Silence of the Druids — Who Know, See and Hear Nothing.’ The trumpet intones ‘The Perennial Question of Existence,’ and states it in the same tone of voice each time. But the hunt for ‘The Invisible Answer’ undertaken by the flutes and other human beings becomes gradually more active, faster and louder.... ‘The Fighting Answerers,’ as the time goes on and after a ‘secret conference,’ seem to realize a futility, and begin to mock ‘The Question’ — the strife is over for the moment. After they disappear, ‘The Question’ is asked for the last time, and ‘The Silences’ are heard beyond in ‘Undisturbed Solitude'."

The contrast between the words on the page and the music in my ears was startling. The apodictic certainty of the theologians paled before the “Perennial Question” put by the trumpet’s voice. I experienced great empathy with the Questioner, and a deep yearning for The Silences, but I felt the theologians were the “Fighting Answerers” whose many words lead nowhere. In that moment I gave up forever the search for all-explaining dogmatic formulations. I turned whole-heartedly toward ambiguity and embraced it. Henceforth The Question, not the Answerers, would be my guide.

Left to my own devices, I would choose to dwell within the Silence of the Druids. This is the “tacit dimension” about which the Hungarian physicist Michael Polanyi wrote so perceptively. It is the “imaginal world” of the 12^th Century mystic, Ibn Arabi; it yields real knowledge though it can be accessed only through the creative imagination. It is the Tao of Lao Tzu, the Logos of St. John and the Wheel of American Indian spirituality. “We know much more than we can tell,” wrote Polanyi. And we love much more than we can know.

In later years, I came to understand that theologians also are “Questioners” first, whose “certainties” grow out of their struggles with all that is unresolved in their own hearts and in our world. I accept their words as their hypotheses, their attempts to cross the chasm.

Charles Ives was a church-going New England organist, and a Transcendentalist, but he was more. He was willing to let words fail and answers dissipate. "Vagueness,” he said, “is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth." Today, when too many are too certain about too much, a little vagueness would be salutary, and the Silences most welcomed

Wales forever, Amen!

When the train doors opened, a veritable sea of excited sports fans flooded toward Cardiff Arms Park. Like small figurines in a swift current, we were swept with them through narrow lanes of vendors hawking fish and chips, beer and leek soup. Leek soup? Yes, the aroma of leek soup wafted over us in the damp March air, as pervasive and enticing as the smell of sizzling bratwursts at a Vikings opener. The Welsh National Union rugby team soon would take the field against their vaunted English rivals. Two of the greatest players of all time, Gareth Edwards and Phil Bennett, would lead the charge. Spirits were unbelievably high. Little did I know I was about to witness one of the finest games in what later came to be called the “second golden era” of Welsh Rugby.

The rivalry between the Welsh and the English is especially deep-seated and arouses the most intense emotion. It is rooted in the long and unfortunate history between these two nations. Just before the match, I later learned, Bennett rallied the team with words that became iconic throughout the country:  "Look what these bastards have done to Wales. They've taken our coal, our water, our steel. They buy our homes and live in them for a fortnight every year. What have they given us? Absolutely nothing. We've been exploited, raped, controlled and punished by the English — and that's who you are playing this afternoon."

Rugby occupies an exalted place in the Welsh consciousness. It is said that one Sunday morning worshippers entering their chapel were confronted by a huge sign on the communion table.  Cymru am byth! (Wales forever!) The minister was perturbed and had the Deacons remove it because it lacked religious significance. But when he returned that evening he found an even bigger sign that now read, Cymru yn oes oesoedd. Amen! (Wales forever and ever, Amen!)

Indeed, in Wales rugby approaches the status of a national religion. A Welshman in Hong Kong, Gareth Thomas, declared that Twickenham (England), Stade Français (France) and other national stadia “are great fortresses of the game, but its cathedral is in Cardiff.” He observed that anyone who has experienced the unique atmosphere in the Welsh capital on the day of an international  “cannot but subscribe to this notion.” Comedian Max Boyce said that the roof over the new Millennium Stadium is pulled back when Wales attacks, “so God can see us play”. It was even suggested that a church be built on the spot where Edwards once scored a “try” over Scotland in the mud.

The two other great passions of Wales are poetry and choral singing. Although the “Chairing of the Bard” is perhaps the grandest annual ritual in the country, it is for their music that the Welsh are justly famous. Every Sunday afternoon in chapels across the land they gather to practice their four-part singing of sacred songs. Cymanfa Ganus (Singing Festivals) are held in towns throughout the year, and annually at their great cultural event, the National Eisteddfod. Throughout the world, wherever two or three (of Welsh descent) are gathered, there are Cymanfa Ganus.

Oh, and I forgot to mention one other favorite pastime: the pub! Many a Welshman - and woman too - repair often to the pub for a good time and good conversation. In Pontardawe even the local A.A. meets in the pub. (“Recovery means drinking less,” I was told.) The Welsh insist on distinguishing between “chapel” and “pub” folks - you are one or the other - but many households have a foot in both. The proof of this soon will become obvious.

We entered the stadium and found our way to our places. Cardiff Arms Park was built to hold 53,000 people, more or less. The announcer told us the crowd that day numbered in excess of 60,000. Among the throng of people were many of the rich and famous. The announcer even welcomed Frank Sinatra. There were no seats or bleachers to be seen. Sinatra et al. may have had seats but the rest of us stood through the game. (That’s why they are called stands!) Forget any sense of personal space. We were a single collective mass who raised a deafening roar when the Welsh players ran onto the pitch.

Though we were packed elbow-to-elbow and front-to-back, somehow vendors made their way to and fro, up and down among us. Beer was abundantly available, and abundantly consumed.  As my fellow stand-mates began to drink, they also began to sing.

They sang in four parts, and they sang the great hymns of their great tradition. The more they drank, the more they sang. They sang and drank and cheered and sang some more.

How gloriously they sang! They sang the sweetest of lullabies, Ar Hyd y Nos, with an unimaginable tenderness, and they sang their stirring national anthem, Hen Wlad fy Nhadau with patriotic fervor. Imagine 60,000 Welshmen, with no apparent concern about designated drivers, singing in practiced harmonies: Cwm Rhondda. Aberystwyth. Bryn Calfaria. Llangloffen. Ton-y-Botel. Hyfrydol, Calon Lân. (Now I understood Vernon Davies' comment about his son’s decision to play for England: “I knew he would never play for Wales," he said. "He’s tone deaf.”) Raucous cheers punctuated their singling when Wales scored or made a play, and indignant boos when England did the same. 

The Welsh triumphed over the English, 14-9, in that well-contested match. I had gotten to see Gareth Edwards and Phil Bennett at their peak, even as they were nearing the ends of their storied careers. In high spirits when the match was over, my friend and I sang our way out of the stadium with the boisterous crowd, down the narrow streets and back onto the train.

I always will remember that day - not as much for the match as for the music. Not as much for Gareth Edwards or Phil Bennett (or even Frank Sinatra) as for the thousands of anonymous Welsh men and women under that gray March sky who sang of their homeland in the language of their ancestors. I have been to many cathedrals in the UK and elsewhere, but never have I been so stirred. Leek soup and Welsh hymns were not what I expected when I left Pontardawe that morning.

Esther's Sea

Esther loved the sea. In her apartment were her father’s photographs of the sea. Rocks and clefts along the Atlantic coast, with names like Purgatory and Camel Rock, shaped her childhood consciousness. She once wrote:

“How I pity those who have never had the opportunity to fall in love with the sea. Even at its most peaceful moments there is movement and rhythm and a tremendous tranquility that can put at ease even the most disturbed frame of mind. But when it is at its wildest, whipped by winds of hurricane force, with waves and spray flying high above the cliffs and rocks, then the sea is its most thrilling self.”

Esther’s sea and Esther's life mirrored one another: tumultuous and powerful one moment, serene and gentle the next. As she was an enthusiast of the sea, so was she an enthusiast for life - from family and gardening to the reconciliation of peoples distanced by conflict. To be alive for her meant to engage life passionately, and to embrace it immodestly, whatever her circumstance. Even when she battled the ravages of cancer she did not give in to negativism. She had an untethered optimism and an abiding faith in life's possibilities.

The sea is a wise teacher. Esther was its discerning student. She came to know intuitively what the sea was eager to teach: that the web of life is seamless and complete and that divine reality encompasses all in a loving embrace.

(Photo from Widescreen Wallpapers)

The Tomb and Womb of Life

Bonnie and Duke were with us that day. We arrived in Shepherdstown around 4:30 p.m. After stopping at the only stop-light in town, we drove past the college, the abandoned train station and the shanties huddled under hickory. We continued over a pocketed, dirt road until we could drive no further. With supplies in our arms, we walked the last half-mile through brush and bracken to a deserted mansion. The moist black earth hushed our eager tread. Squirrels heralded our arrival as they called their greetings from the limbs. Sparrows took note of us, but continued their more important work overhead.

According to townsfolk, this house had been built by a local man in the early 1900's for his young and lovely European bride. But soon after it was completed, the house and its lady within - its soul, its raison d’être - were consumed by a raging fire. Only the shell remains - a home now for all manner of other-than-human life. They say the man despaired and never returned. It is clear that he never reclaimed the home which housed his dream.

Our Lady of Nature has dreams of her own. She has begun the slow, healing work of destruction. Scavengers have stripped the interior of its paneling, exposing red clay block walls. Trees have sent roots into beams and stone walls; saplings spring from the remaining sections of the roof. Rains are attacking the foundations. Pipes, cables and even nails, corroding under the coordinated assaults of wind and water, are returning to the dust from which they came. Vines have scaled the walls, exploiting every crevice.

Wildflowers now grow in fireplaces high above the foundations. Blooming roses poke their heads above the ferns. They are all that remain of once-formal gardens overlooking the Potomac.

We approached deferentially. Soon the smells of burning wood and cooking hamburgers mingled with the honeysuckle and nearby river odors. We ate our bread and drank our wine in silence: the bittersweet Eucharist of friends too soon to part. We laughed at the follies of our childhood and grew pensive before the hopes those children entrusted to us.

We tried to see the future; the house loomed before us. Its enigmatic presence commanded our attention even as it commanded the landscape. Without its soul, it became the soul of the larger wilderness. Embracing earth and sky as one, it welcomed all into its sun-warmed cavities - to rest and peace, to the tomb and womb of life.

 All too quickly the sun, that benevolent tyrant of our lives, hastened westward. Shadows climbed the walls to join the coming darkness of the skies. We turned away from this strange presence and retraced our steps to the car. Along the way we stopped to examine other half- hidden buildings. They also were beginning the long transformation.

We loaded the car and drove the last seven miles through the gentle West Virginia countryside -- back to the towns, our homes and the on-going busyness of our species.

Another Gun, Another Kid

Another gun, another bullet, another fifteen-year-old lay dead in the streets. His body was stretched out on the street where he had fallen. No one thought to cover it. No one knelt beside him. No one held his hand or head or offered a prayer. The loud staccato of police radios, the roaring engine of a passing car, the wailing siren of an approaching ambulance -- these noises masked the silence into which Torrey Milon had descended. Squad cars parked obliquely; their flashing lights swept the street. Uniformed officers paced this way and that. A news photographer bent awkwardly, trying to get the best angle of this scene. Neighbors gathered, but were kept at a distance.

A good kid, we are told. A high school freshman, a good student, the son and brother, the nephew and cousin of a loving family. He was biking home from the South Minneapolis community center when he was shot. No obvious reason has emerged. Though his slaying might be “gang-related”, family, friends and neighbors who knew him deny vehemently that he was a member of any gang. (And what difference would it make?) For his family and friends, anguish, grief and the fearful question of “Why?” make this Holy Week especially painful, and Easter problematic.  

At the site where Torrey Milon died, a neighbor erected a wooden cross. He painted on it the words, “Be With God,” and also “Please, we must stop killing each other.” The traffic has been steady at this little shrine in the center of a struggling neighborhood. Kids and adults have stopped, and bus drivers, police officers and total strangers. Figurines and flowers have been placed by the cross, and messages that say, “We miss you,” and “I love you,” and “God bless you.”

The neighbor who placed the cross is Charles Steen, a burly newspaper press operator who also bakes cookies for kids, cops and fire fighters. “I keep thinking that this is my fault and your fault,” he said. “We got caught up in having the nicer car, the better job, and we’ve forgotten the important things. Kids like Torrey are paying the price for our neglect. I had to do something. I didn’t want people to just see bloodstains on the street where the boy had died.” The world needs less rage and more goodies, he believes. “The answer is not more jails, more cops,” he said. The answer is to keep gymnasiums open late at night so kids have constructive places to go. The answer is to hire people to teach kids skills such as how to fix cars or play musical instruments. “The answer,” according to Steen, “is more chocolate chip cookies.”

(Written in Minneapolis, March 1996)

Start Seeing Motorcycles

"Start Seeing Motorcycles!" the bumper sticker screams from the car in front. No doubt an enthusiast for the open road, I think, or an anxious mom. These words assume (rightly) that most of us don’t see motorcycles. They imply (also rightly) that road running cyclists (and not the rest of us) are most at risk when drivers fail to see them. They remind us of the obvious: bikers are especially vulnerable in accidents. The conclusion surely follows that all of us on the road share a particular responsibility for the safety and well-being of motorcyclists. To “see” them means to respect them, to treat them with common courtesy, to yield rights-of-way and, sometimes, to give them the benefit of a doubt. Not to see them means to violate their space, cut them off, and “marginalize” them as citizens of the highway.

Some people don’t like cyclists. If you are one of these, already you are conjuring rear-view images of leather-clad, motor-gunning, chain-laden, grungy, frowning, freeway marauders who interrupt the serenity of your Sunday drive, who rapidly bear down on you with God knows what intent, who arrogantly weave, pass, and lean recklessly into the ground. You see helmet-less hair trailing in the wind. And you are thinking, “Who do they think they are, anyway? Why should I be responsible for them?”

But you are. And the bumper sticker is right. Whether our vehicles have two wheels or ten, highway travel is a great equalizer. We have responsibility for each other. It behooves us to see everyone on the road we share.

To start “seeing” motorcycles is to discover something important. Bikers are as diverse as shoppers. For every “Hell’s Angel,” there is a college student on a Harley. More than 500,000 bikers will converge in Sturgis, South Dakota, for the 70th Annual Road Rally in August. There may be violent types among them, but there also will be attorneys, doctors, dancers and housewives.  There will be potheads and teetotalers, carnivores and vegetarians. There will be week-end riders and those colorful free-spirits who meander the continent like medieval vagabonds. Some may be living out their wildest machismo fantasies, but most will be plain and friendly folks. They are part-and-parcel of the multi-cultural stew of contemporary America. Not to see them not only endangers them; it impoverishes our own cultural self- understanding. I wonder how many other people I see, but fail to see, because of my fears, prejudices and stereotypes? 

I wonder also how many people fail to see me even when I stand directly in front of them? Do they see only my suit and tie, my white skin and balding pate, but fail to see me? Do our jobs, gender, race, age, physique, accent, religion, or neighborhood get in the way? Do our tattoos and piercings or lack thereof make us 'invisible' to one another?  I’m ready for another bumper sticker: “START SEEING EACH OTHER!” Do you think it will sell?

Photos from Sturgis.Com