Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony
Side by side on my piano keyboard, oh Lord, why don’t we? - Paul McCartney 1980

Just recently I had a request from a reader friend who grew up in the North to write about my experience growing up in a racially divided South especially in light of the current retraction of voting rights for African Americans throughout the south and the nation. I was gratified that the Georgia legislature declined to address gerrymandering our state in its special session this summer – at least for now - but it is coming. I suppose that postponement is partly explained by the intense politics of the upcoming election season which will see a black Atlanta woman running against a white MAGA billionaire for governor of our state.

My brother and I grew up in the south, in two small North Georgia towns, in the 1950’s and 1960’s so our experience is likely not as dramatic as some of our friends who grew up in Atlanta or Birmingham. Our parents grew up, however, in deeply and decidedly segregated southwest Georgia in the 1920’s and 1930’s so we were influenced by their lived experience of racial violence and strict Jim Crow laws.

My mother told me tales of her growing up years when her little town had equal numbers of black and white families. There were unwritten rules about how they interacted. Every white household had black help but the black people went to their own homes at night. White children could go to the black people’s houses and eat and even sleep if need be but black children could not eat or sleep in white houses. I asked her why this was so but there was no answer to that. She didn’t know. She was a child herself in those years – she probably told me that that was just the way it was.

My father grew up in a poor family near Americus, Georgia. He knew many black people, mostly field hands and one of his father’s jobs was as a chain gang guard. There’s a picture from the 1930’s of him holding a rifle and wearing a big hat and supervising a group of black inmates chained together on the side of a dirt road picking up trash.

As a side story to Americus – much later after I was grown I heard about the Koinonia community outside of Americus. I realized that not one time in my childhood had I ever heard that word, much less anything about the farm of the same name where black and white people lived and worked together under the guidance of Clarence Jordan who translated the Cotton Patch Gospels. My father’s family lived not ten miles from Koinonia but it was almost as if it did not exist. I asked my mother about that, too, and she did not have an answer. She had grown up 100 miles away.

When my brother was born in late 1953 my mother hired a black woman named Loretta to help her during the day with the new baby and me, just turned two. I remember Loretta as kind and quiet. She had a sister and they lived in the black part of Toccoa in an old house up on a hill on a quiet street not far from the movie theater. It had a screened front porch and inside there was dim light, old furniture and it smelled like cooking. The back yard was fenced and bare dirt with a tree or two and a chicken coop. I have written in an earlier post - The Meaning of Easter - about our multi-colored chicks who went to live with Loretta and her sister after they grew too old for the small box we kept them in.

In the 1950’s the city of Toccoa had an African-American population of 21.5% against 78.5% white. There were no Asians or Hispanics. There was a black school – Whitman Street – but I didn’t know any of those kids and did not have occasion to know them. When we moved to Dalton when I was twelve I had never talked with a black person other than Loretta and her sister. I had seen plenty of black people in town. The biggest gathering of black people I had ever seen was at the Ritz theater downtown, the only theater in town. One day our neighbor invited Morris and me to go with her and her two kids to the Ritz to see a movie.

Before the movie, she had arranged for us to go upstairs to see the projection booth – a magnificent machine in a dark little room. I found out that day that black people had to sit in the balcony and they watched us a little warily as we made our way to the projection booth. I do not recall asking my mother about this segregation though I am sure I did and she came up with a plausible explanation – probably along the lines of “that’s just the way it is done here.”

In Dalton, there were more people in the town - almost 18,000 - but the percentage of African Americans was even smaller than in Toccoa – only 3-4%. Even now with a population doubled in size, 6% of the residents of Dalton are black according to the 2020 census.

These are important numbers because Mr. Google says that integration did not come to our city school system until 1968, long after Brown vs Board of Education fourteen years earlier. And yet I am looking at our annual for 1966 and there are plenty of black faces in every grade including the seniors. Which tells me that this is a case where A.I. is incorrect. The powers that be in Dalton must have decided to go for broke and integrate earlier rather than being forced to integrate a few years later. Any Dalton readers might be able to provide more detail.

In the fall of 1965, I was fourteen and in the ninth grade. I am almost sure that was the first year that we had black kids in the band, my closest official group at school. I remember the band director announced that Emery Street school was closing and all the kids there were coming to Dalton High. There was an expectation of tension and potential trouble but in the end nothing happened and we all got along famously.

I had girls in my squad who were black and the next year when I played trumpet I marched next to James Neal, called Turkey, and we became friends. He was funny and smart. I heard he died not too long ago in Los Angeles.

My mother told me later that the parents were worried but her take on integration was that she thought the parents of the black kids were likely more troubled than the white ones and that if my brother and I had been told to attend the black school she would have been scared to death.

My father, a more died in the wool Yellow Dog Democrat from South Georgia than my mother, knew lots of black men in Dalton but he liked them “individually instead of as a group,” he said. Somehow he had grown up with the overriding fear that a group of black people would overrun the white people and there would be trouble. A fate worse than death for him would have been for me to date a black boy. He never expressed concern about black kids in general at Dalton High though my mother probably got an ear full. He was not very upset in 1968 when Martin Luther King was killed. Not happy but not upset either.

I remember we discussed what would happen if a black person or couple showed up at our church. Our whole family agreed that they should be allowed to come in and would not be barred as we had heard about in the big city of Atlanta.

My Uncle Bill, the union electrician, had bought a little ranch house in Gresham Park in Atlanta but by 1970 there were too many black people so they moved to Gwinnett County with some buddies who also bought houses out there on the same street - part of the infamous White Flight – a much bigger ranch house for Uncle Bill and Aunt Betty and my little cousin, Donnie.

Much later when I got a real estate license, houses during the recession were selling for $25,000 in Gresham Park and I found their house looking much the same as in 1970. The irony was that the black families who had moved into the houses there in the late 1960’s had raised their children there and now their children were selling the houses they had grown up in to white young professional families gentrifying the neighborhood. Everything old is new again.

By the time I got to the University of Georgia in the fall of 1969, the university was integrated but in a very small way. Of the 22, 600 students on campus that year fewer than 100 were black. But those years brought big changes in the social and racial life of the University.

I have no recollection of “colored and white only” water fountains or bathrooms growing up and was totally unaware of black motels or restaurants. It was simply not part of our experience. After I was grown and was a struggling filmmaker in Atlanta I remember riding through Cabbagetown – a white cotton mill worker’s neighborhood on Memorial Drive - where as late as 1979 there was a building with two signs by the weedy back doors that said Colored and White with arrows pointing to each.

When I was in seminary in the late 1970’s I took a class about different styles of worship and we had to choose several kinds of worship services to attend that we had never attended before. Most of us had been Presbyterians all our lives. I remember going with a fellow student to West Hunter Street Baptist Church, a large black church in Atlanta’s West End. Civil Rights leader Ralph David Abernathy was preaching that day (it was his church) and we were obviously the only white people in the sanctuary. We were terrified to walk into the church but we did and were warmly welcomed. We spoke with Dr. Abernathy at the end and he invited us to come back.

I imagine someone of my age who grew up in Atlanta might have seen and experienced vastly different things in the black and white communities in the 1950’s and 1960’s but small-town Georgia was a world apart and slow to join the tide of civil rights change around us. We were big Vietnam War protesters though!

My mother was a staunch Kennedy fan and my father was not. I am sure he voted for JFK because he was, as I said, a Yellow Dog Democrat, but my mother wholeheartedly supported the Kennedys. My father would bait her at the dinner table and many friendly but tense arguments ensued. I am equally sure that the underlying tension had to do with the Kennedy’s being supportive of civil rights. My father’s worry about and animosity toward black people “as a group” stemmed from his early 1900’s childhood and reached as far as the 1980’s and 90’s until his death in 1993 at the age of almost 80. My mother had none of that animosity and though she was not in the forefront of the civil rights movement by any stretch of the imagination she believed in equal rights for all and was as color-blind as a white woman could be from deep southwest Georgia from the 1920’s until her death in 2009.

She was able to vote her entire life; my father witnessed women’s suffrage and their right to vote which was granted when he was 9 years old. I do not know if either of my grandmothers every voted. One died in 1939 and the other in 1970, both in South Georgia, both products of their time – as are we all.

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Other pieces of us included in the ultra-high-tech time capsule were 90 minutes of music, sounds of surf, wind, thunder, birdsong, whales, a baby, footsteps and laughter.

There are more than 7000 languages on earth today (compared to 5000-6000 in 1977 – wait - 1000 more languages created/discovered in the last 50 years?) but obviously they could not include them all. Those aliens would have a big job decrypting so many versions of “Hello, how are you?” Interestingly they wanted to include greetings in 55 different languages so here are some of them – must have kept them short to lessen the burden on aliens decrypting the messages. Note that Amoy is concerned for alien hunger; the Indonesian greeting assumes a visit that ends at night. The Swedish message reminds me of those little drawings in the margins of medieval manuscripts – little gremlins with funny faces. In Urdu they say “Peace on you!’ like good on you! In Punjabi a jaunty “Welcome home” assumes that the aliens will want to travel at super-sonic speeds to earth after hearing our music and the sound of thunder. In Rajasthani. they are clear about boundaries. “Hello to everyone. We are happy here and you be happy there.”

Amoy (Min dialect). “Friends from space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time.”?

Arabic. “Greetings to our friends in the stars. We wish that we will meet you someday.”

Gujarati. “Greetings from a human being of the Earth. Please contact.”

Hittite. “Hail.”

Indonesian. “Good night, ladies and gentlemen. Goodbye and see you next time.”

Mandarin Chinese. “Hope everyone’s well. We are thinking about you all. Please come here to visit when you have time.”

Oriya. “Greetings to the inhabitants of the universe from the third planet Earth of the star Sun.”

Persian. “Greetings to the residents of far skies.”

Punjabi. “Welcome home. It is a pleasure to receive you.”

Rajasthani. “Hello to everyone. We are happy here and you be happy there.”

Swedish. “Greetings from a computer programmer in the little university town of Ithaca on the planet Earth”

Turkish. “Dear Turkish-speaking friends, may the honors of the morning be upon your heads.

I love the playlist (greatest hits?) of the music included as far as it goes anyway. Here are samples; Keep in mind that this spaceship took off in 1977 so Taylor Swift, Adele, Michael Jackson, Madonna, The Bee Gees, Beyonce, Coldplay, and Bruce Springsteen are not represented – they should have at least included something by the Beatles– they began in 1963! Maybe “Here Comes the Sun” or “She Loves You” or “Magical Mystery Tour.” Actually if they were fifty years later they could have killed two birds with one stone by including Adele’s “Hello from the Other Side!”

Australia - Aborigine songs, “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird”

Austria. - Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14

Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes

China. - ch’in, “Flowing Streams”

Georgia - Georgian S.S.R., chorus, “Tchakrulo”

Germany - Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Bach, “Gavotte en rondeaux” from the Partita No. 3 in E major for Violin, Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1. , Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Opus 130, Cavatina

New Guinea - men’s house song

Peru - panpipes and drum

Russia - Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Sacrificial Dance

Senegal - percussion recorded by Charles Duvelle

United Kingdom- “The Fairie Round”. Early Music Consort of London

United States - “Johnny B. Goode” written and performed by Chuck Berry, “Melancholy Blues” performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven, Navajo Indians, Night Chant, “Dark Was the Night” written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson

Zaire - Pygmy girls’ initiation song

Space Daily reports what we clearly know from personal experience that “the urge to place a durable, idealized trace of yourself somewhere beyond your own lifespan is one of the oldest human habits there is.” Grave goods? Monuments? Books? Photographs? Home movies? “KILROY WAS HERE!” we desperately want to say in answer to the eternal question of , well, the eternal and where it is and will we be remembered, does anyone care after we are gone? Or even do we care after we have gone on to the next place?

The gold-plated records could be intercepted at any time or never. I think we all assume that aliens are super intelligent and decrypting these messages will be as easy for them as Google translate is for us. I would love to see their ChatGPT creations matching the spirit of our music or our greetings. But then I also think that Aliens would likely have way more sophisticated means tocommunicate back to us.

“The Day the Earth Stood Still” produced in 1951 would be a good example. Klatuu would be fully capable, with Gort’s help, of deciphering anything we put on what they would see as a dinky little compendium of messages, images and music. Humans in 1977 likely still believed in science fiction as much as we believed in space travel, believed in infinite possibilities in space travel as much as we believed in the power of music to change hearts and accompany interior space travel. “Please contact us,” says the Gujarati speaker in the greetings section. Please tell us we are not alone.

Remember “Hearts of Space” the ambient music show on the radio late at night? Created in 1973 in San Francisco - and still running 50+ years later - by Stephen Hill with his calm deliberate voice beckoning us to join him - “Welcome, space travelers,” he says at the start and he continues as a sign-off “safe journeys, space fans, wherever you are.” He should have been the narrator of the golden record music section. Safe journeys, Voyager, wherever you are! Sail on…

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In many ways and in a demonstration of how we are all one, the countryside of Ireland often looked like the landscape of North Georgia with the difference being housing style. But in other ways the differences between Ireland and Georgia are marked. Ireland is steeped in a sense of history that is palpable as is a sense that there is more to the world than we can see. Fairy trees and goddesses and high kings and holy wells and stories explaining everything around us go neck and neck with rules about pubs and how the school system works and how to run a dairy farm.

The Irish government will route a new highway to go around a fairy tree or call in a fairy doctor to figure out why a community has so many people with a run of disaster. And they are serious about it.

In our country we have Halloween, of course, a vestige of Celtic lore but the everyday stories of Ireland of kings and battles are like nothing we hear at home except in fairy tales and children’s books. Maybe Uncle Remus stories for Southerners or folk tales for those of us fortunate enough to hail from the North Georgia Appalachian mountains. There is more to life than we can see - just about everybody knows that! But the stories we learned are borrowed from Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson. They are not “our” stories.

The most affecting poem I heard recited in person here that demonstrates how history goes hand in hand with the other world came from an 84-year-old dairy farmer as he stood beside the 300-year-old cottage where he was born, as was his father and great-grandfather and on and on - backwards in time. He was talking matter-of-factly about his family when suddenly he was reciting poetry. No intro - just launched into it! It’s a poem by Mona Tierney called “What is it All When All is Told.”

“What is it all?
What is it all when all is told,
The ceaseless toiling for fame or gold
The fleeting joy or the bitter tears?
We are only here for a few short years,
Nothing our own but the silent past:
Loving or hating, nothing can last.
Each pathway leads to the silent fold,
Oh! What is it all when all is told?

What is it all? A grassy mound
Where day or night there is never a sound
Save the soft low moum of the passing breeze
As it lovingly rustles the silent trees.
Or a thoughtful friend with a whispered prayer
May sometimes break the stillness there,
They hurry away from the gloom and cold,
Oh! What is it all when all is told?

What is all, just passing through,
A cross for me, and a cross for you.
Ours seem heavy while other seem light
But God in the end makes all things right.
He “tempers the wind” with such loving care,
He knows the burden that each can bear.
Then changes life’s gray into heavenly gold.
Ah! That is all when all is told.”
– Mona Tierney. Irish poet

The sense of time, the grayness leading to gold, the idea of simultaneous worlds truly exists even when Noelle is talking about data centers and rules about teenagers deciding which college to go to or the price of gasoline or beef. She jumps fluidly to the history of that ruin on the horizon or the reason why holy wells have rags tied to branches or not.

The Irish are sophisticated and thoroughly grounded in 2026 at the same time that they are steeped in ancient tales that influence everyday events even now.

Speaking of Irish - children are required to learn the Irish language from kindergarten through high school. Under centuries -long English rule, Irish was eliminated from daily life but at independence it was brought back along with English and Irish signs everywhere

Yesterday we went to the Jameson Whiskey Distillery - my first such tour. Fascinating to see how a bottle of whiskey is produced. Also learned that Jameson’s is the whiskey of Ireland; Bushmills is the whiskey of Northern Ireland. (And in Scotland it is spelled “whisky.”)

We visited Jerpoint Abbey built in the 12th century and the ruins are marvelously intact.

Our last day will be where we started two weeks ago - Kilkenny - only a few short miles from Callan. We went to a falconry school and watched hawks, owls and falcons in the rain swooping and soaring to land on our gloved arms.

A farewell dinner a final breakfast and we were on our way home. A two-week immersion in a country unlike any other.

We saw a sheepdog demonstration, had lunch at a working dairy farm out in the country, rode through a national park in a horse-drawn carriage, heard some Irish music and watched some Riverdancing, had lunch in a little town, saw lots of castle ruins, marveled at incredible vistas and bought handmade Irish goods. Here are some pictures of our adventures.

To say we are staying at a nice hotel is an understatement. Ashford Castle was built 800 years ago and was owned for generations by the Guinness family. Now a hotel, it is a rabbit warren of elegance and style. 350 acres of gardens and lakefront, home to three friendly Irish wolfhounds, falcons, archery and croquet courts, horses, restaurants and shops, several bars, a boat ride and shuttles to the nearby village, it is a wonderful stop on our journey.

Today was a free day so everybody slept late and everybody is taking their time around the estate and castle. Nooks and crannies with fireplaces and easy chairs, broad lawns, shuttles wherever you want to go and the only appointment is a dinner reservation later.

A perfect oasis on the west coast of Ireland!

Tauck is a fine company with lots of experience with Americans “off to see the world” and there’s such a lot of world to see, as Henry Mancini tells us in “Moon River.” He goes on - “we’re after the same rainbow’s end, waiting round the bend.” And such is the paradox of group travel. High expectations vs logistics. Nice people vs “pills” as my Mother would call them. Brilliant experiences vs less than exciting stops. But the tour company has to cater to a wide range of people and just when you feel discouraged about highways and Circle K everywhere you come upon a herd of Highland cows and an abandoned stone cottage, crashing waves and blustery graveyards in village churches.

There are frustrating things as well as terrific things about this increasingly popular way to spend retirement time and money.

Yesterday in Donegal county we saw charming villages and bustling larger towns from our very big “coach” as they call buses here. Our guide to Donegal, Keith, is a tour guide, storyteller and Donegal county native.

Our first stop was the Belleek Pottery factory. Fine China for 100 years. And it is fine. We bought some after seeing the incredibly hands-on multi-step process of producing a plate, a basket, a vase.

Then to Donegal Town where many of our group chose to wander a couple of hours to eat, drink and shop. The rest of us journeyed back to the castle for lunch and some much-needed down time. The pace of the tour is brisk but not oppressive, set but not coercive. Tauck is nimble and experienced and are aware of too many early mornings for retirees unaccustomed to early morning “don’t miss the bus” call times, and vacationers looking for relaxation and extra sleep! So where they can we are in a hotel two nights so we aren’t loading and riding every day!

Beth and I are generally more “cruisers” than “riders” but there are both differences and similarities. On a cruise you unpack once and then get on and off the boat at different ports of call. On a tour you don’t unpack but are driven right up to the sites you are going to see! On a cruise you decide on your shore experiences. On a tour they decide for you though you often have a choice on a given day. Either way you can choose to stay on the boat or at the hotel (if the bus is coming back to base camp that day!)

The value of both tours and cruises is that the company does the planning and makes the arrangements and there is tremendous value in that. The key to a great tour is the tour director. Noelle is wonderful - Irish, knowledgeable, funny, professional. And Eddie, the bus driver, used to be a truck driver so this big bus is a piece of cake even in the tiny Irish byways with hedgerows!

The key to a great cruise is the boat! A grand ship is your home away from home and you never have to get off if you choose not to.

Beth and I have been on trips we planned and have had a great time navigating Dubai, England, Scotland, San Francisco, New York, and Paris. “Two drifters off to see the world “ indeed. Maybe it is age but now we are all about somebody else making all the arrangements. Here we are seeing all of Ireland around its perimeter in twelve days! Ireland has no train system so a self-tour would involve a car or a public bus system which would show you less of the charm of the country whose interior is vital to understanding Ireland.

Today it is pouring rain - “stealladh báistí” in Irish, the kind of rain you can hear pounding on the roof. But it is cozy in the bus and Eddie is piloting us to Yeats’ grave and church while Noelle explains the Irish language. St Columba’s in Drumcliffe is where William Butler Yeats is buried; the church had been on that spot since 574AD.

The West coast of Ireland is wild nature - just stopped to see crashing waves, Highland cows grazing, and Lord Mountbatten’s summer home in the distance, an abandoned castle eerie in the wind and rain. It was off this coast his sailboat was bombed by IRA militants in 1972.

For a tea break we stopped at the Yeats Country Inn - like a NASCAR pit stop - twenty minutes tea and a warm scone then back on the road again!

On to County Mayo and Connemara National Forest. Mussel farms, more sheep, then Kylemore Abbey now a thriving convent but once a Victorian Castle much like Biltmore Estate in Asheville only way more remote and not nearly as large.

Rain off and on all day. Now onward to Ashford Castle…

Celebrated 20th century Irish Poet and Derry native Seamus Heaney wrote a poem called “Digging” which Noelle just read to us in her Irish accent as we traveled down from Belfast. I teared up hearing the poem about Heaney’s father and grandfather digging digging diggjng potatoes and peat. It ends like this:

“The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.”

The other poem she read, “BlackBerry-Picking,” evoked my own Georgia childhood:

“You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked and picked until the cans were full,

Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.”

When Noelle started explaining the Celtic year it all came back to me - Feb 1 Imbolc; May 1 Beltane; Aug 1 Lughnasa; Oct 31 Samhain. Bram Stoker, author of “Dracula”, also came from Derry. Halloween, the Christian nane for Samhain, the night before All Saints, has deeply felt and intensely celebrated festivals annually in Derry.

Peace Lines - the tall fences dividing Catholic from Protestant neighborhoods - still stand in Derry but according to our city guide, Charline, “they will be coming down pretty soon.”

It has rained all day in Derry and we had a lovely lunch of soup and hot tea at Claude’s - a hole in the wall - in the city center before boarding the bus again.

Ireland is hyper conscious of renewable energy, recycling and wildlife conservation.. Everything is very tidy. Park benches have solar powered phone charging ports. Water bottles have caps attached to reduce litter. People are not allowed to cut or prune hedgerows or trees along the highways between March and September because they are habitats for birds, animals and insects during that important nesting and breeding time. There are no billboards along the country roads but you can park a truck on the side of the road with advertising on the side because if it has wheels it is permisssble!!

And yes it really is this green!

We arrived at our hotel - Lough Eske Castle - to a rainy Downton Abbey welcome - and settled into a two-night stay in an overwhelmingly beautiful place. Tomorrow is Donegal

.

We visited the Giant’s Causeway- a rocky shore with crashing waves. An Irish folktale caused the name - rival kings building then destroying a roadway to attack each other. It even looked like battle!

Lunch at Bushmill’s Inn - a spread with four different meats, loads of vegetables and sticky toffee for dessert. Enough to rival Picadilly

We saw the castle where scenes from Game of Thrones was filmed and then we all slept on the way back to Belfast.

Dinner at Bert’s Jazz Bar - imagine real jazz in Belfast! Why can’t Atlanta have real jazz clubs? Ronnie Scott’s in London; Birdland in New York; Arthur’s in Dublin.

Today we are headed for a Castle - and likely more hearty Irish food! Noelle just said we are headed for the countryside today! Derry (also called Londonderry though “London” has been grafiti-ed out all over the city.)

People over 65 have learned to cope with their feelings from the bad years and for those younger than 40 it is all just history.

Belfast’s shipbuilding years are gone, lost to cheaper production prices in the Far East but the glory days of Harland & Wolff are not forgotten. Great ships like those of White Star built by H&W such as Titanic were marvels of their time.

Our hotel is an ornate former Victorian era bank with a fabulous grand room of a restaurant and the rooms are huge. Tauck Tours is doing a wonderful job!

So I leave you with pictures from our room’s window this morning as we prepare for whatever this new day brings.

We are lucky, we were told, because they are moving the Book of Kells next year while Trinity’s Library is renovated and totally fireproofed. There are numerous Kells Experience rooms but when you get right down to it the actual book - NO photographs! - is in a dark little room in a glass case opened to a random page that you gaze at and then move on to the gift shop. It wasn’t even an overly illuminated page. It was a page full of script with tiny figures sporadically spaced, so small it was hard to determine which animal was even being depicted.

I appreciate the ancient book hundreds of years old but there are easier ways to marvel at it - like on the bookmarks and calendars available for purchase. I saw the Holy Grail of the Celtic World and was grateful to have had the opportunity but it was a complete anti-climax for me.

TRINITY COLLEGE

Much more impressive to me was trudging upstairs to see the Long Room, Trinity College’s library. All of the books are in the process of being removed for restoration and for a “state-of-the-art” fire suppression system to be installed. This half empty/half full look of the library was totally engaging.

Libraries are special places for me and this one was extraordinarily special! An added attraction was a giant Gaia globe suspended in the magnificent room. We saw one like it (or maybe it was this one) in Durham Cathedral several years ago. The soaring ceilings, wooden floors, rolling ladders, carefully marked volumes still remaining on the shelves made for a room in motion, suspended in time and ready for the future!

CITY TOUR

The riding city tour provided many opportunities for photos of people living their lives, old buildings and shops, rivers and colorful doors throughout the city center.

ST PATRICK’S

St Patrick’s cathedral (Anglican) was gloriously ornate and interwoven with Celtic symbolism as well as heraldic touches. Even the floor tiles were raucously beautiful!

An extra added attraction of the day - a complete bit of serendipity - was our Dublin guide for the tour - a woman named Melissa who was from Texas and who had moved to Ireland with her husband to become Irish citizens seventeen years ago because his grandmother was Irish. Beth asked where in Texas she was from and it turned out to be the same town where Beth grew up - little old Lyford in the Rio Grande Valley, population 1550.

Lots of walking today, lots of gazing and taking in of history, lots of listening and lots of appreciating - tomorrow we head to Belfast!

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Today we shopped and slept some more (jetlag is a fearsome thing as we get older) and we are grateful to have come three days ahead of the start of our first tour led by Tauck. We met the other 20 or so fellow travelers tonight and we appear to be a truly jolly bunch of Americans / including another couple from Atlanta.

Before our welcome dinner led by our tour director, Noelle, Beth and I visited the National Gallery of Ireland. Their claim to fame is their holding not only of several Rembrandts and a Vermeer but the intriguing and long-lost painting by Caravaggio - “The Taking of Christ” discovered hanging not that long ago in the dining room of a Jesuit House in Dublin.

At Canterbury Court where we live, every month we hear a lecture by Dr John Tilford from Oglethorpe University. I can’t wait to tell him about the Caravaggio though it is likely that he can tell me the entire saga of the painting!

Another esteemed painting at the Gallery - or paintings - is Murillo’s series of six about the Parable of the Prodigal Son. I was taken by the first one - when the younger son takes his money and leaves home. The painting is wonderful but the details are brilliant. The sad father, the older son looking on with mixed emotions, the younger son hefting his bag of coins and the mysterious woman on the left. Who is she?

In a smaller gallery like this one you can notice details somehow and take your time in a way that a big museum just hurries you along somehow.

There was a Vermeer with two ladies working serenely in their writing room.

There was a Passeri of a group feasting including the woman in the stunning blue dress. .

And a Rembrandt I had never seen of the Holy Family camping on their way to Egypt.

Maybe you are wondering what this art tour had to do with our trip to Ireland. It was what we did with an oasis of time today before the grand tour actually begins.

Tomorrow a look at the actual Book of Kells at Trinity College. And Saturday we head for Belfast where Titanic was built..

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Callan, the ancestral home of the American Candlers, is a village today of two thousand people outside of Kilkenny, an hour and a half from Dublin. The 16th century parish Anglican Church, St Mary’s, now in ruins, was likely where Daniel Candler was christened around 1705 before he grew up and was exiled to America in 1735 with the love of his life, an Irish-Catholic girl named Hannah. Their son William was a Colonel in the Revolutionary Army of George Washington. Hannah herself lived to age 100.

We went to Callan today and saw the church, all that’s left of the Candler family there. Two little Candler girls, Jane and Anne, are buried in the churchyard but I could not find their faded tombstones.

The church belongs to Ireland’s historic properties department now and is across the street from a pub and a barber shop. An old man sat on a bench and smoked a cigarette next door to the church gate. Down the street is where the Candler residence, “a grand home” once stood according to a sketch of the town from 1700 which we consulted to find St Mary’s Church. I wondered what the locals think about the gray stone ruins of a church surrounded by new construction, chips shops, stone masons, salvage yards, false teeth emporiums and two funeral homes nearly side by side.

Our driver, an intrepid traveler himself named Peter, from Elegant Irish Tours, went to buy coffee as we slowly walked the grounds of the churchyard. You can’t go into the church ruins themselves, but we stopped frequently to admire the stones and peer through the gates into the nave open to the sky. There was a breeze and I could imagine the Candlers in their pew of a Sunday.

There’s something about old churchyards that has always drawn me but never more so than the kind to which I have a direct three-hundred year old link.

I am glad I could go. I would love to have seen where Hannah came from near Callan, my absolutely genetic Irish 8th great-grandmother largely lost now to time. She was not the aristocrat her husband was, far from it, but it was said that she was brave and educated her children and loved her Daniel, enough to cross the sea with him and their babies, never looking back and becoming part of the fabric of America. She is buried in Virginia, as is Daniel.

Their children - pioneers like their parents - made their way to Georgia and we have been rooted there now for more than 250 years! Callan is where their story began and I am grateful to have made it part of my journey today.

From the story of a forbidden marriage between the fourth son of a wealthy Protestant landowner and the brave Irish Catholic woman who defied her family and her religion to follow her heart, comes a strand of my story that continues into the 21st century. There’s drama for sure but there is also love and hope and the fortitude to live life as fully as possible.

Courage comes in many colors and my story includes this story of Daniel and Hannah and their ties to a village called Callan near the small city of Kilkenny just a bit south of Dublin.

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We are off to Ireland today – top of my bucket list. One ancestor by the name of Hannah eight generations back is the draw. She was Irish and married an Englishman and since that was ultra-taboo back in the early 1700’s they were cut out of his aristocratic father’s will and sent packing to America in 1735. His name was Daniel Candler and one of his grandsons (Samuel) invented Coca-Cola. I am a descendant of another of Daniel’s grandsons, Henry. His daughter, Martha Anne, was my great-great-grandmother.

We will have a private tour before the official Tauck tour and we will go to the village of Callan to see where our family’s Irish/English immigration to America began.

I will be posting highlights of our journey and look forward to experiencing a place I have always wanted to go one day. And that someday is here!

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This is my story, this is my song,
praising my Savior all the day long;
this is my story, this is my song,
praising my Savior all the day long.

When I first saw “Places in the Heart,” with Sally Field, Danny Glover, and John Malkovich and heard the opening credits played to “Blessed Assurance” I was in tears from the first frames of the movie. The themes of faith, grace and reconciliation are woven throughout the hymn and the story..

When I left the First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta in 1999 after ten years there a group of friends gathered with me in the sanctuary as I said goodbye to a place that held memories that ran the gamut from unbridled joy, to profound ministry, to confusion, anger and bitter disappointment. I sang “Blessed Assurance” in that vast and incredibly beautiful space with its Tiffany windows and rich dark wood and maroon carpeting remembering so many things.

Another hymn that has the same effect on me is “Jesus is Calling.”

Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling—
Calling for you and for me;
Patiently Jesus is waiting and watching—
Watching for you and for me!

Come home! come home!
Ye who are weary, come home!

I did not come from an evangelical family or even one that talked about Jesus very often. We were Presbyterians after all and Presbyterians are much bigger on God than Jesus (and certainly the Holy Spirit.) But when I first saw the movie “Trip to Bountiful” the opening credits were a slow-motion movie of a young mother and her young son running in slow motion through a field of bluebonnets with “Jesus is Calling” sung in the background and again, it made me cry and I am not even from Texas! The combination of hymns and movies, both beloved parts of Southern culture, is often quite affecting.

On the other hand, “On Golden Pond,” another favorite for its music, takes place in New England and the music is by Dave Grusin, a composer who also makes me cry no matter where the films take place! “The Electric Horseman,” “Tootsie,” “Three Days of the Condor,” “The Graduate,” and on TV, “St Elsewhere” – all Grusin creations.

Sometimes film scores are written to manipulate emotion which I find strikes a decidedly false note.

An example of manipulative music from television is medical drama. As much as I like “Chicago Med,” the composer, Atli Örvarsson, writes dark, constant and what many viewers describe as “cheesy” background music. Very dramatic, very sad. And I agree. On the flip side is “The Pitt” which has no musical soundtrack at all. Much more realistic and for me it does not make the drama any less real. I fully experience the sadness and the moments of droll humor that the characters are going through without being guided as to how I should feel.

Many films have theme music that is written for the film or is chosen as a piece which perfectly sets the stage for the story. An example is “Ordinary People” where Marvin Hamlisch chose “Pachelbel’s Canon” as the opening theme. Sung by a high school chorus during the opening credits, the song ends with a closeup of Conrad Jarrett, a baritone who is the star of the movie and a member of the choir. He looks bruised and sad after a melancholy piece of music which is totally in keeping with who he is at the start of the movie.

An example of a movie whose music is from beginning to end written to enhance the story is “Out of Africa” with score by John Barry. Majestic and sweeping are descriptions of both the movie and the vast African plains of Kenya. The depth of feeling of the characters as they navigate the colonial years in Africa are perfectly in tune with the story, the music and the locale.

You’d have to ask someone who did not grow up with Sunday mornings in church – no matter which brand – or Sunday evening services or Wednesday nights or revivals in the summer - if they feel the same swelling of emotion when they hear hymns played to great effect in movie scores.

The first documentary I produced, at age 27, was called “Lila.” It was about a wonderful 80-year-old psychiatrist in Atlanta who was one of the founders of art therapy and the night shelter movement in our city. Lila grew up in the ARP tradition, Associate Reformed Presbyterian, and for one of our scenes we gathered a group of Lila’s friends, all women in their late 70s and 80’s to sing some of the old ARP hymns. I recorded them as they sang and later in what can only be described as divine inspiration I almost accidentally juxtaposed one of those hymns over footage we shot one day in the rain at a small ARP churchyard in Due West, South Carolina where Lila’s parents and her husband were buried. From a distance, Lila walks slowly with a scarf over her head carrying a bouquet of flowers and the music to the scene was a hymn called “Under His Wings” written by Ira Sankey in the late 1800’s. We also used it as a guitar instrumental for the end credits.

1 Under the care of my God, the Almighty,
Safe in the secret place of the Most High!
He is my Refuge, the Lord is my Fortress,
Him I am trusting when trouble is nigh.

Refrain:
Under his wings, under His wings,
Safe in the refuge hide thee;
Trusting his truth and faithfulness,
No evil can betide thee

It was the perfect background for the scene – not manipulative but a hymn that described and underscored the feelings Lila experienced returning to the place where she grew up. The music spoke what Lila was feeling. It was a high point of the movie.

When composers of musical scores find that perfect pairing of music and story then viewers experience more than a surface layer of meaning. The words of the script are foundational as are the cinematographer’s skills in painting light and color to capture the essence of a setting and the editor’s skill at making sense of the shots from thousands of takes. But the composer and music editor have as big a part in our viewing experience as any other part of the crew. Filmmaking is a team sport, a collaboration where all the parts need to fit together to make a cohesive whole that brings us joy every time we sit back with our popcorn and expect to be dazzled, moved and inspired.

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Space Daily reports that “Grunge,” a digital online media publication, described one of the Filipino murders this way. “The substantial majority of the My Way Killings share a specific common structural feature: the murdered singer had been performing “My Way” at a public or semi-public karaoke establishment, had been singing…substantially off-key, and had been either mocked or challenged by another patron shortly before the fatal altercation.”

I daresay this phenomenon is not limited to the Philippines though I have no statistics to support my claim. I have never personally sung karaoke though I would be tempted to belt out a Karen Carpenter classic if I ever got the chance.

Most karaoke performers I have seen are pretty drunk when they sing. That is understandable. Why would you stand up in front of a group of mostly strangers when you are sober and attempt to sing like you do in the shower which is in no way like singing in public?

What songs are the ones that would cause people to throw tomatoes or pretzels when the opening phrases of the song reach their ears? Maybe not so awful to warrant pulling a gun!

How about Paul Anka’s “Having My Baby?”

Or “MacArthur Park” by Richard Harris (1968): A bizarre, over-the-top seven-minute symphonic pop track famous for its agonizing lyrics about a cake left out in the rain.

Or “The Christmas Shoes” about the kid in the checkout line at Walmart buying shoes for his soon to be deceased mother.

“Sir, I want to buy these shoes for my mama, please
It’s Christmas Eve and these shoes are just her size
Could you hurry, sir, daddy says there’s not much time
You see she’s been sick for quite a while
And I know these shoes would make her smile
And I want her to look beautiful if Mama meets Jesus tonight.”

Please.

My cousin Lloyd who was ten years older than me, had 45’s featuring

“Witch Doctor” by David Seville (1958): “Oo-ee-oo-ah-ah, ting-tang, walla-walla-bing-bang”.

“The Purple People Eater” by Sheb Wooley (1958). A massive novelty smash about a horn-wearing alien.

“Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” (Two, three , four, tell the people what she wore…)

I doubt many karaoke machines feature those and I wouldn’t sing any of them. Again, Karen Carpenter is more my speed.

So why would someone shoot someone for singing badly? One analyst concludes that the lyrics of “My Way” are particularly provocative – the song and the singer assert feelings of pride and arrogance, defiant self-reliance and refusal to acknowledge personal failure. Hmmm, I know of someone else whose theme song is “My Way.” Remember Trump at the end of his first term flying away from Washington with “My Way” blaring from the sound system on takeoff! Mercifully there are no reports of karaoke on board by Trump or anyone else.

Remember Andy Rooney from “60 Minutes” years ago who ended every show with a short essay about everyday life? I asked ChatGPT to write an Andy Rooney piece about Trump and “My Way” as a theme song. Andy died some years ago but I think he would appreciate it!

“Did you ever notice how politicians choose their theme songs? They pick these upbeat, energetic tunes meant to get you tapping your feet, while the candidate stands onstage smiling and waving like a mechanical doll. But Donald Trump doesn’t do that. No, he likes Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”

Now, I’ve looked at the lyrics to that song. It’s a song about an old man sitting in a chair, looking back at his life, and getting ready to die. “And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.” That’s how it starts! Why would a guy finishing a presidential term and defiantly disputing that it was even over for him want to remind everybody about the final curtain? You’d think a politician would want a song that says, “Hey, we’re just getting started! I’ll be back!”

“And then there’s the whole idea of doing it “my way.” It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Rugged. Independent. A real American ideal. But have you ever actually tried living with someone who insists on doing everything their way? It’s exhausting. If you’re building a house, or running a grocery store, or, heaven forbid, governing a country, you usually have to do it our way. Or at least the way the guy with the blueprints wrote it down. If the plumber decides to put the toilet in the living room just because he wants to do it his way, you’ve got a problem. I suppose it makes sense for him, though. The song goes on to say “Regrets, I’ve had a few but then again too few to mention.” He’s never had a regret in his life. Only losers have regrets. “I chewed it up and spit it out,” says the song. Really? That’s what two-year- olds do.

But I guess that’s the point. It’s a song for people who don’t care if they make a mess, as long as they get credit for the cleanup. I just wonder if, when he’s listening to that big brass band play those final chords, he ever stops to think about the guy who wrote the lyrics. It wasn’t Sinatra, you know. It was Paul Anka. And Paul Anka is Canadian!”

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^12-14 Then he turned to the host who had invited him,. “The next time you put on a dinner, don’t just invite your friends and family and rich neighbors, the kind of people who will return the favor. Invite some people who never get invited out, the misfits from the wrong side of the tracks. You’ll be—and experience—a blessing. They won’t be able to return the favor, but the favor will be returned—oh, how it will be returned!—at the resurrection of God’s people.”

¹⁵ That triggered a response from one of the guests: “How fortunate the one who gets to eat dinner in God’s kingdom!”

^16-17 Jesus followed up. “Yes. For there was once a man who threw a great dinner party and invited many. When it was time for dinner, he sent out his servant to the invited guests, saying, ‘Come on in; the food’s on the table.’

¹⁸ “Then they all began to beg off, one after another making excuses. The first said, ‘I bought a piece of property and need to look it over. Send my regrets.’

¹⁹ “Another said, ‘I just bought five teams of oxen, and I really need to check them out. Send my regrets.’

²⁰ “And yet another said, ‘I just got married and need to get home to my wife.’

²¹ “The servant went back and told the master what had happened. He was outraged and told the servant, ‘Quickly, get out into the city streets and alleys. Collect all who look like they need a square meal, all the misfits and homeless and down-and-out you can lay your hands on and bring them here.’

²² “The servant reported back, ‘Master, I did what you commanded—and there’s still room.’

^23-24 “The master said, ‘Then go to the country roads. Whoever you find, drag them in. I want my house full! Let me tell you, not one of those originally invited is going to get so much as a bite at my dinner party.’” Luke 14:12-24 (The Message)

In the Parable of the Dinner Party, Jesus tells the story of a man who prepared a lavish feast and sent out invitations, only for the invited guests to reject it with flimsy excuses. The host then opens the banquet to the marginalized and outsiders. The parable signifies how God generously invites everyone to His kingdom, but rejecting the invitation carries eternal consequences.

It’s just like Jesus to tell this story while he himself is sitting at a dinner table as an invited guest. But he waits to tell the story until one of the privileged guests says how wonderful it is to be able to sit at the banquet table of God!

Jesus has something to say about that! Many are invited but most beg off. God wants a full table of guests – and it is less important who the guests are than that they come willingly and are grateful for the opportunity. God does not care if they deserve the invitation; only that they accept it. The very meaning of grace.

Pope Leo once again embodies the gospel – he practices what he has preached for decades. On a Saturday in mid-July, Pope Leo had lunch with 200 poor people in the pontifical gardens of Castel Gandolfo, the summer home of the pope away from the heat of the Roman summer.

He threw this same lunch last year – “Lunch with the Pope.” Each year a different diocese will be invited to bring together poor people, refugees, migrants and other experiencing difficulties offering them a day immersed in the beauty of creation and an opportunity to meet the Pope.

The Vatican says that “the initiative is another step in Pope Leo’s outreach to those living on the social peripheries, noting that the encounter reaffirms the Church’s vocation to be present wherever human dignity calls for ‘listening, closeness and hope.’…when the Church places the most vulnerable people at the center, it makes the Gospel visible and bears witness that no one is on the margins of God’s heart.”

I wonder what Jesus would say about Trump’s ballroom and whether it would it ever be used for a gathering of 1000 people on the margins\- the President populating the head table with a Haitian plumber, a Nicaraguan truck driver, a Syrian mother, a mentally ill grandmother from the Bronx, a Palestinian teenager saving to go to college, a homeless woman with no refuge from an abusive husband.

At least the Pope is ahead of the game and his actions speak in accordance with his words!

Collect all who look like they need a square meal, all the misfits and homeless and down-and-out you can lay your hands on, and bring them here, says the host of the Dinner Party. The others are no longer invited!

A dinner party is a place of joy and welcome, a place to meet new friends and to connect with old friends, a gathering set in a garden of beauty, a feast of promise, a banquet of the finest that the host has to offer. “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest “– and a feast with God as the gracious host.

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So today I opened the Bible at random and my finger came down on Psalm 119:45.

“I shall walk at liberty for I have sought your precepts.”

Some other translations added some texture and context to the basics of the verse:

I will walk about in freedom,
for I have sought out your precepts (New International Version)

And I will walk freely in a wide place (Orthodox Jewish Bible)

“They that simply walk after God’s word, have no nets to entangle them, whereas they that do contrary, are ever in nets and snares.” (footnote to the 1599 Geneva Bible – of all things)

Nets and snares…

Like constantly seeking wisdom and guidance from your phone.

Mr. Google tells us that “the Hebrew word translated as “liberty” or “freedom” in Psalm 119:45 is רָחָב (pronounced ra-chab or rāḥāḇ) and literally translating to “wide”, “broad”, or “roomy space”. In this context, it carries the imagery of moving from a cramped, restrictive, or confining place into a wide-open area.”

In Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian flees the doomed City of Destruction to stride through the wide world on a quest to reach the Celestial City. He walks at liberty in a wide, broad, and roomy space, bound for the promised land, to quote a 18^th century hymn by William Stennett.

“On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand,
And cast a wishful eye,
To Canaan’s fair and happy land,
Where my possessions lie.
I am bound for the promised land,
O who will come and go with me?”

Undoubtedly we live in what looks today like the doomed City of Destruction but it can be redeemed. And the Celestial City can be reached – it is right outside our door as well as through the veil that we will ultimately cross through. God’s creation is there, every day and every step of the way for us to relish. It is the wide, broad and roomy place where we can walk at liberty when we are smart enough to follow God’s precepts. We all know that queasy feeling in the pit of the stomach when we tell even a little white lie, or prevaricate, or deceive someone, or hedge, or avoid someone or something, or commit sins by omission. As children we have to learn by experience to recognize that sick feeling and hopefully avoid it the next time. It’s called conscience. God’s instructions guide our behavior and protect us and help us maintain a right relationship with God and other human beings and all of creation. There is freedom there, freedom to walk at liberty in wide open spaces.

Freedom does not mean no rules, no guidelines, no restrictions –Dylan Thomas described it in his poem “Fern Hill” - “Time held me green and dying though I sang in my chains like the sea.”

Or as another poem puts it that I found in looking for examples of the feeling of Psalm 119:45, a contemporary and very modern take despite its meter and rhyme:

The Wide Place

“A narrow path, the world declares,
Is built of heavy bars and snares.
Yet when I seek Your holy way,
The shadows lift, the skies turn gray
To vistas bright, untamed, and free—
A spacious field You give to me.
No heavy yoke, no iron wall,
But room to rise, to stand, to fall
Into the grace that bids me roam
The boundless meadows of Your home.”

Three poems appeared in answer to my query including the poem I chose to quote. I asked who wrote the three poems that had been provided. I wanted to credit the poet. The answer came back “I wrote them for you”. Astoninshgly, all three poems had been generated by Mr. A.I. Now A.I. has a pronoun, a self, if you will! Felt like HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Even the world of artificial intelligence can craft a response to a seemingly random bit of sought-after advice from God. Even the Bible attributes feelings to inanimate objects. “While the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy.” Job 38:7. Stick to God’s precepts and experience a broad and happy way to walk at liberty whenever you face the world we know today. Nothing is beyond the mind and heart of God and nothing brings us closer to God than when we follow his precepts and rejoice in creation - all of creation including the world of A.I which we cannot see but which we can hear and read. Walking at liberty, striding freely through the world is life at its best, a boundless meadow of joy!

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Bits and pieces, pious sweet talk to dupe innocents. From the Apostle Paul comes today’s lectionary lesson warning us about anyone using gospel teachings to make trouble. As reported by Brian Kaylor in his Substack “A Public Witness”. President Trump on the mall on the 4th of July speechified like this as a blatant illustration of Paul’s verses in Romans:

“God bless the immortal patriots of 1776, and long live the cause of independence. May it reign forever and ever and ever. [I think Handel’s “Messiah” and the Isaiah passage upon which it is based says “And He shall reign forever and ever.]

”We will always be on top,” Trump declared. “For 250 years, the United States of America has been the hope, the promise, the light, and the glory among all of the nations of the world.”

Hope of the world? Not according to Matthew 12:21, where it’s the name of Jesus.

Light of the world? Not according to Matthew 5:14, where it’s Jesus’s followers who reflect Jesus (who in John 1:9 is called “the true light” that came into the world).

Glory among the nations? Not according to Psalm 96:3, where the psalmist declares God’s “glory among the nations.” - Brian Kaylor

Rewind to 1984 when the singer Sade warned us against Smooth Operators. The President is not the only one to usurp profound words for blasphemous purposes. Smooth operators rely on charm to worm their way into the lives of the unsuspecting who do not have the political savvy to ward it off. But we can’t short-change the majority of Americans who have common sense and they know when they are being snowed.

“A license to love, insurance to hold
Melts all your memories and change into gold
His eyes are like angels but his heart is cold

No need to ask
He’s a smooth operator
Smooth operator
Smooth operator
Smooth operator…”. 1984 Sade

Basically, a smooth operator is defined as a highly charming, persuasive individual who navigates social situations with charisma and seduction despite the truth or lies which are the currency of the operator’s circle of influence.

History’s ultimate smooth operators are figures who “navigated extreme turbulence, charmed rivals, and manipulated power so deftly that they thrived under multiple, conflicting regimes".” As a smooth operator par excellence Trump “expertly rewrites the traditional rules of corporate and political survival, turning personal controversies, financial shifts, and media scrutiny into personal leverage and financial gain.” (MSNow). His “smoothness” lies in his “uncanny ability to control public narratives, establish absolute loyalty, and treat massive institutions like private real estate portfolios.” (New York Center for Foreign Policy)

Tom Wellborn on Politimix says Trump uses six tools to extract loyalty and to control people with a smoothness that is bordering on incredible. “Loyalty is manufactured by a documented operational system of ridicule, litigation, financial coercion, criminal investigatoion and personal threat.” The system works for its cool overt uncomplicated unsophisticated smoothness.

1. He ridicules with cute nicknames establishing that he has the power to define who a person is.

2. He threatens to “primary” people thereby causing their fear to escalate. He does destroy people indirectly - smoothly.

3. He sues you - more than 4,000 times so far. The point is not winning; it is the filing of the suit. Smooth because this tool can be strung out ad nauseum and cause you to spend untold amounts of money on lawyers. Smooth because court is low-key and calm.

4. Issues executive orders with bold and flashy but smooth Sharpie signatures. These threats though empty are smooth and camera-ready

5. Starts a Department of Justice investigation of you. Smooth action because it is mostly under the radar and people lose interest.

6. Calls you personally on the phone - perhaps the most insidious - full-voiced anger, threats and cajoling - smooth because nobody hears it or is bold enough to reveal the content.

‘It is not complicated; it is not sophisticated and it operates openly in front of microphones and cameras for the entirety of his career,’ says Wellborn. “It works because people with the power to stop it have decided it is cheaper to pay.” Smooth.

Give these people a wide berth, says the Apostle Paul. But that’s not easy to do when the smooth operator is running the country. His sweet talk is not exactly sophisticated but neither is it benign. People are taken in by the pious talk. The words are vaguely familiar and sound strong and melodic – they should - they were written ages ago and have stood the test of time as powerful and elegant Biblical language. In the mouths of smooth operators though they become like resounding gongs or clanging cymbals (I Cor 13:1.) Paul also told us, “If I speak in the tongues^[ of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. ² If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”

And there is no love coming from the mouths of these smooth operators. It is all charm and promise, threat and favor, future glory but only present smoke and mirrors, like cotton candy in the rain.

“Keep a sharp eye out for those who take bits and pieces of the teaching that you learned and then use them to make trouble.”

Beware smooth operators who twist the words of truth.

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The bar is not some idealized long table of friends and candles. It is one meal, with one other person, where you are both actually there.”

There is nothing wrong with long tables of friends with candles – I have been to dinners set at many of them. But there is also significant benefit to sitting down with even one person rather than eating alone. One of the best parts of where we live is that in the dining room we sit at a 4-top table and invariably someone will come up and ask if they can sit with us. Sometimes it is one person; sometimes it is two. Sometimes we know the one who asks; often we do not and it gives us a chance to get to know more people.

Sometimes it is hard to just march up and ask a stranger if you can eat with them but we are all one big happy family here! The first night we moved to Canterbury Court we were invited to dinner by two ladies on the Hospitality Committee and it was very helpful not to have to walk into a new room with all new people – alone.

It reminds me of the day we drove Elizabeth to boarding school in Florida, unpacked all her things, helped her set up the bed and the desk and then it was time for us to drive home to Georgia. She would have to brave the dining room alone if she intended to eat dinner. Maybe I was projecting but I would have been so scared to walk in alone. Maybe Elizabeth was not scared at all – she has an entirely different personality – but you have to eat, so she had to do it – just like everybody else at a new school, or college, or the Army or the employee dining room at your first job.

As life goes on though, it is not as hard to face a crowd of new people. But it is always easier if you know somebody. Even one person.

Shared meals can happen anywhere in the world. In November 1976, Thanksgiving week, on my very first trip abroad, my business colleague, Fran, and I were in Geneva Switzerland on our way to Africa to take pictures for a media production for the PCUS – the Southern Presbyterian Church where we both worked in the media department called TRAV – TV Radio and Audio Visuals. The World Council of Churches was based in Geneva and we were scheduled to interview one of the officials there before flying on to Kinshasa, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo.)

Michael, an American, was a gracious interviewee and welcomed us into his office with coffee and Swiss pastries. We were 25 and 28 years old (probably his children’s ages) and after our interview he asked what we were doing for Thanksgiving. Eating at the hotel, we said. I had never been away from home on a major holiday and was feeling a little strange to be thousands of miles away. “Come to our place,” he said. “We are gathering all the Americans we can find,” he said with a smile. We accepted. On Thanksgiving Day, he and his wife welcomed us into their wonderful apartment in an old building in Geneva near the lake. There were ten or twelve other Americans there at loose ends on a very important American food holiday. There was lively discussion, candles on the table, wine glasses, warm décor and plenty of turkey and dressing with everything that goes with it. It was a wonderful afternoon that I remember clearly 50 years later.

That trip started out with a shared table in Geneva and that sharing continued for the next three weeks. We flew to Zaire and began an odyssey of travel to the most remote places I have ever traveled in all the fifty years since. After a couple of days in Kinshasa eating sparingly and modestly with missionaries and government officials we flew out into the jungle in a small prop plane to a mission hospital right out of a movie – a colonial compound in the jungle like “Out of Africa.”

We were so hungry after flying all day with nothing but trees below us and only toast and tea from breakfast in our stomachs that we ate everything the missionary doctors put on the table when we got to Bulape. We loved every minute of that shared meal – hearing about their work, talking, eating, eating, eating. That night when the generator shut off at 10, the darkness was absolute. I had never been so far from home. We could hear crickets (or whatever the African version was) and drums and singing and utter quiet eventually.

The next day we went to a chieftain’s house down a jungle path to take pictures. We sat in a tent cross-legged and though we had been told to be careful about unpeeled or raw food we could hardly refuse the hospitality which included a welcome drink of pineapple juice with salt water. We took deep breaths and drank it up. The camaraderie of sitting down with people who did not know us nor we them, made a big impression on me and gave hospitality new meaning to two 20-somethings far from home.

Back in Kinshasa we were invited to stay at the penthouse apartment of two Embassy officials who were friends of missionaries we had met since they were leaving the country for a week. After two weeks of meals that were made of one can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup split four ways served to us by a missionary couple in Kinshasa, in un-air-conditioned apartments and houses, we were told to raid the pantry in the embassy apartment. I remember there were smoked oysters which I had never had, and steaks in the freezer, a grand piano in front of a picture window. Fran and I were in awe – there was air-conditioning and an actual washer/dryer which we had not seen in days.

High up in that new building above the central market of Kinshasa, the dinner which we cooked ourselves while the clothes were tumbling in the dryer and which we shared in that safe building in the heart of the capital of Zaire is another memorable example of meal sharing with just one person.

Zaire was a scary place despite the friendly missionaries and people we met along the way and after two weeks of hoping to get a plane out of the country so we would be home for Christmas we were finally able to board a plane after running across the tarmac and hoping the plane would fly that day (after two previous attempts to leave only to be turned back to the hotel to wait until the next day and try again.)

In Paris the city was decorated for Christmas and we walked along the Seine – it was cold and there were Christmas trees for sale along the sidewalk near Notre Dame. My memory of that, my first time in Paris, was of gray and green. When we finally made it home to Atlanta, my mother ran across Hartsfield’s tarmac (you could do that in those days) and we went to her house for Christmas – another gathering of friends and family. I had lost 20 pounds on the trip but gained it back quickly with shared meals at Mama’s house and back in Atlanta.

To sit down with a friend, or friends, or family and share a meal is good for the soul as well as the body. The company feeds the sense of well-being which leads to a happiness that, science now tells us can be measured. Who would have thought that happiness was quantifiable – one meal at a time!

My favorite Disney movie - “Beauty and the Beast” says it best about food and good times with others.

“Come on and lift your glass
You've won your own free pass
To be our guest.
If you're stressed, it's fine dining we suggest,
Be our guest! Be our guest! Be our guest!!”

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- Taylor Swift

The lectionary gospel passage for today, the story of Judas and the return of the thirty pieces of silver is unique to the Gospel of Matthew. None of the other gospels (Mark, Luke, or John) mention this event. It is a dramatic and cold account of a money-making scheme gone terribly wrong in so many ways. And it has parallels with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein.

^14-16 One of the Twelve, the one named Judas Iscariot, went to the cabal of high priests and said, “What will you give me if I hand him over to you?” They settled on thirty pieces of silver and Judas began looking for just the right moment to hand Jesus over.

^1-2 In the first light of dawn, all the high priests and religious leaders met and put the finishing touches on their plot to kill Jesus. Then they tied him up and paraded him to Pilate, the governor.

^3-4 Judas, the one who betrayed him to the high priests, realized that Jesus was doomed. Overcome with remorse, he gave back the thirty silver coins to the high priests, saying, “I’ve sinned. I’ve betrayed an innocent man.”

They said, “What do we care? That’s your problem!”

⁵ Judas threw the silver coins into the Temple and left and went out and hanged himself.

^6-10 The high priests picked up the silver pieces, but then didn’t know what to do with them. “It wouldn’t be right to give this—a payment for murder!—as an offering in the Temple.” They decided to get rid of it by buying the “Potter’s Field” [where potters got their clay] and using it as a burial place for the homeless. That’s how the field got called “Murder Meadow,” a name that has stuck to this day.

– Matthew 26:14-16 and 27:1-10 (The Message)

Stories “ripped from today’s headlines” show that people have learned nothing from history’s mistakes or flaws of the human heart. Jeffrey Epstein persuaded billionaires to hand over vast sums of leveraged funds with his lies and charm to generate enormous fees for himself with very little actual labor on his part or on the part of those same billionaires who had money to burn either to get rich quick or to have a little fun on an island populated with young girls.

Those same rich guys later disavowed all knowledge of Epstein, denying their part in Epstein’s scheme despite the evidence to the contrary and neither Epstein nor the rich guys showed any remorse for bad investments or fun in the sun with underage girls. They were all Judas and the high priests in today’s passage rolled into one.

Taylor Swift’s words that began this post are addressed to a bad boyfriend but they also apply to Judas and to the Epstein gang, too “ Did you have to ruin what was shiny? Now it’s all rusted… Did you think it all through? ”

The high priests gave a weak man thirty pieces of silver to do their bidding to further their scheme to trap an innocent man. Jeffrey Epstein took money from a lot of weak men so they could have a taste of what they craved in exchange for money which enriched him but not them. And the more money they gave him to buy silence and pleasure, the more beholden they were to Epstein’s scheme, his trap into which they willingly walked.

Who knows, perhaps in the dark of night the weak rich guys enticed by Jeffrey Epstein were and are sorry for what they did in the same way that Judas was but they were in too deep by the time they realized their folly. Princes and heads of state have suffered the consequences of that kind of bad decision-making and been forced to resign because of their greed and lust and proximity to Epstein. Epstein, however, continued to be enriched by the very guys he duped until he met his end - like Judas.

The high priests ensnared Judas with money and thereby ensured his compliance with their demand for betrayal of their enemy. Judas for whatever reason changed his mind about what he did and was “overcome by remorse” but it was too late for him and for Jesus. Maybe he thought the high priests once they had Jesus in their grasp would see at trial that he was innocent - and was sorry about his betrayal unlike the guys taken in by Epstein who were less than remorseful by all accounts. The ability to undo our bad decisions and angry deeds, to repent, to compensate, to get a “do-over”; to try to put things back the way they were; to try to make amends, are all human compulsions in the face of conscience and consequence but it often does not erase the act or the consequences no matter how heartfelt. And those who succumb to the enticement of power, luxury and favor find themselves bound and beholden with no way out.

In the end, Judas tried but failed in so many ways and decided there was no escape for him but to end it all. He did not wait for the forgiveness that Jesus would offer to the thieves on Calvary or that which Jesus offered to the soldiers who executed him or even perhaps what he would have offered Judas if given the chance. But that would have changed the whole story!

God’s forgiveness is a product of divine love; the degree of our infraction and the depth of our remorse are more than equaled by God’s grace and love. Romans 8:38-39 says that nothing - neither death, life, angels, demons, the present, the future, powers, height, depth, nor anything else in all creation - can separate believers from the love of God found in Christ. If only Judas had waited, but for what? His destiny was to play his part and betray Jesus the priests would not have let him off the hook under any circumstances so even though Judas realized Jesus was now doomed thanks to Judas’ own actions, he decided at the very least to try to give the money back and make himself feel better. Now he could claim that he did not benefit from his act of betrayal. But the priests were having none of it.

The high priests took the money back from Judas, of course, but they knew that they had to find a way to dispose of it in some other way than adding it to the treasury which would have violated the Law. So, their solution was to buy a field and use it to bury the homeless who were less than human to them anyway.

This is a sad story but it is not one of a kind. Judas and his blood money in exchange for betrayal of his teacher, a brilliant and innocent man, smack of rich guys accepting young female company in exchange for blood money of their own handed over to a predator who wanted money for nothing, for very little work. “Money for nothing and your chicks for free,” sang the band Dire Straits in 1985, an apt metaphor for the two parallel stories of easy acts of betrayal in exchange for very little work and what looks like great reward. The everyday workers in the song look around and see people making money for doing nothing but playing guitars and drums and then they get their chicks for free as a bonus - totally unearned.

“Now that ain’t workin’, that’s the way you do it
Lemme tell ya, them guys ain’t dumb
Maybe get a blister on your little finger
Maybe get a blister on your thumb

Now look at them yo-yos, that’s the way you do it
You play the guitar on the MTV
That ain’t workin’, that’s the way you do it
Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free.”

It’s not a perfect parallel – Judas greedy and evil, the high priests evil and protective of their power, Jeffrey Epstein evil and contemptuous of his stooges and underage girls, a bunch of powerful rich guys greedy and full of lust and a willingness to betray innocent girls, - but it is a sordid tale saturated with lack of conscience. Jesus and the young girls were sacrificed on the altar of unconscionable decisions.

To try to make amends is a valiant gesture but half-hearted regret and pallid morality to save your own skin don’t do your victims any good and are diluted remorse at best.

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