I’ve been seeing a lot of these lately, on hats, tees, totes, water bottles. You can find these online but now you can find them in Walmart and local hardware stores, too. And of course, Hobby Lobby.

For some reason they’ve not been giving me comfort, but rather a sense of dis-ease, a twiddly feeling in my gut and a faint headache right behind the eyes that won’t go away. This doesn’t feel like a renewal of grace in our town. It feels more, I don’t know, kitschy. Self-congratulatory. Boasty. Like a high school team jersey. It could be the ubiquitous use of cowboy friendly fonts and subtly yee haw graphics, but probably not. I don’t like it in delicate feminine cursive either.

Like everyone, I have had my share of worries about where our country is and how so much is going absolutely wrong. I’ve had sleepless nights, anxiety that burns at the back of my throat, demanding a deep breath and a couple of Tums. Like everyone, I look for words of assurance from places I trust - scripture, writings of wise people like C.S. Lewis or G. K. Chesterton or Thomas Merton, podcasts and books from sociologists and mental health professionals who know far more than I do. Like everyone, I like the idea of having a phrase or quote that I can hang onto when things get alarming.

So why does this simple faith over fear quote bother me?

Well, as it turns out, it’s not actually a bible quote.

There’s no place in the bible where God or anyone else says have faith over fear. There are many places in which God assures his people that He is with them, that He’ll uphold them, that God has given us a spirit of power, love and self-control instead of fear, and that if you happen to see Jesus walking out on the water on your next fishing trip, you do not need to be afraid.

But no faith over fear. And it’s the over that gets me.

When you put something over something else, you hide it. When you wallpaper over the wall with a new print, the old print isn’t visible anymore. When you white out over what you scribbled, it’s not readable anymore. When you lay carpet over the floor, you can’t see the scuffed wood anymore. When you toss a shawl over your shoulders they're covered.

But it’s all still there. The old print, the scribble, the scuffed wood, the bare shoulders. It’s just got something over it. Hiding it. Making it look better.

And therein lies the problem.

When I spend time with people who have gained a certain amount of spiritual and emotional maturity, I find a consistent thread of logic in them. All of them have undergone some sort of fearful experience, whether a ruined relationship, a death in the family, a health scare, a loss in financial or social security, a dark night of the soul. And all of them, to a person, do not say they have gotten over their fear.

They say they have befriended it.

Some say they have welcomed it, others say they have given it a room of its own, still others say they have learned from it like a professor teaching a master class of humanity for a student body of one.

NONE of them got over it.

Getting over fear, it turns out, is a lie.

It’s a good one, though. By claiming faith over fear, the far right has codified the exclusion of rights once available for women, people of color and people on the financial margins. By claiming faith over fear, our military leaders have started a war we won’t win. By claiming faith over fear, vaccines to prevent polio, measles and other diseases aren’t being used, and lo and behold, we have polio and measles again.

By claiming faith over fear, you don’t really have to ever understand your fear at all. You can call it a holy struggle, your faithful internal war to conquer your spirit, and lo and behold, you are suddenly the conqueror. You are suddenly the one strong enough and faithful enough to bottle up your unexamined fears, rebuke them in the name of Jesus, pray your guts out at the next revival service and never have to admit what those fears actually are or how they got there.

Afraid of Muslims taking over the country? Afraid of Christian persecution? Afraid of drag queens and transwomen in the bathrooms? Afraid of socialists and woke agenda? Afraid of sex education and banned books in the schools? Afraid of black businesses in your neighborhood? Afraid of immigrants taking the jobs, the social security, the benefits that were supposed to go to you?

I want to ask my faith over fear relatives these questions, but frankly…. I’m afraid.

I’m afraid the answers will be that they’re afraid of Muslims, drag queens, trans people, immigrants and black entrepreneurs only because they’ve been taught a racism that they can’t see in themselves nor have any desire to explore or refute. I’m afraid that they won’t understand that the people being bombed in Gaza or the detainees of ICE are Christians being persecuted by the very political and religious leaders they admire. I’m afraid they really do believe deep down that the human weaknesses that make us vulnerable to fear are somehow evil, dirty, sinful, base and unworthy. I’m afraid they might actually be ashamed of being human and disdainful of anyone else who is too.

Mostly, I’m really afraid they won’t care about any of this. Fu^% your feelings is the secular version of faith over fear which, for a lot of people, means exactly the same thing.

Maybe, if I give them the benefit of the doubt, they really don’t know. Maybe, like my niece back in the 1990s in her goth phase and wearing her crucifix upside down because it looked cool, they don’t know this can signal something completely different than they think it does. Maybe they don’t want to fu#* my feelings, or anyone else’s. Maybe they’d be genuinely shocked that this phrase feels like shoving a square peg into a hole that should never have been drilled in the first place.

Maybe. That’s part of my fear, I guess.

I can’t overcome that fear, and honestly, I don’t want to. I’d rather unpack it, see what it really is once it’s unfolded and laid out in the light of day.

Faith-over-fear is a beautiful lie that admonishes us to fight instead of learn, excommunicate instead of welcome, strive instead of wonder and conquer instead of surrender. If all I have to do with my fear is push it aside into a box or, in the religious term so popular, give it to Jesus then I never actually have to face it, understand it, or redefine what brought it to me in the first place. I can just whisk it away into a dark corner until it comes out in my words of casual cruelty or happy ignorance. And best of all, I can even keep it. I don’t ever really have to let it go, because it becomes a badge of honor to tell everyone how great my faith is at keeping watch over it. I may say I’m fragile like everyone else at the exact same moment I can attest that I am more faithful, stronger of will and more like Jesus than you are. I have fear. But I have FAITH.

Just look at my tee.

I want to see a tee that says, Faith With Fear or Faith Without Fury If there has to be a tee with “faith” and “over” in the same phrase, maybe Faith Over Certainty.

It would be a start.

I wish I could say the easy stuff. That my faith has made me fearless. But the only people I have ever met who seem to be truly fearless aren’t fearless at all. They have watched Someone other than themselves take their fear, surgically carve out the lessons, reframe the narrative and gently allow the chaff to float away in its own good time. These folks have done their part in this, too, mostly just by hanging on and not actually dying while the whole operation took place. They have let God pull them apart, turn them inside out, pummel them, bend them, snap off the hard edges and make them softer and more resilient instead of stronger and more powerful. They eliminated their belief that they have any power over anything. Not because of their faith but because of their experience of pain and loss. They have joined the unwashed masses of the rest of us. Therein lies their courage - they are still able to be afraid without being afraid of being afraid. It isn’t their number one issue anymore, because there are always much bigger fish to fry than their personal anxiety.

I don’t think being fearless is actually a sustainable thing. But I do think it’s sustainable to be afraid while recognizing someone else’s bigger fearfulness needs your help, so you try to muddle through it together. I’m afraid, but not as afraid as the girl just picked up by ICE. I’m afraid, but not as afraid as the man with the effeminate walk who also happens to be an Army chaplain. I’m afraid, but not as afraid as the father in Gaza who doesn’t yet know where his little boy is after the latest bombing. I’m afraid, but not as afraid as the Muslim mother whose daughters get dirty looks in the aisles at the Covington Costco.

I don’t want my fear to blind me to the connections to be made when we are all fearfully, wonderfully human.

I’m afraid, but I don’t want to be so busy faithing over my fear that I don’t have bandwidth for those other struggling people. I want to be afraid in proportion to my circumstances, and more generous with others’ fears than my own.

But that won’t fit on a tee.

I’ve been thinking about beer lately. Not just because it’s the tail end of a PNW summer, and not just because this particular label is one of my husband’s faves, and not just because the word Bodhizafa is a cross-cultural name meaning “victory of enlightenment” or “enlightened success,” combining Buddhist and Arabic linguistic elements, (but of all these reasons, this one probably delights me the most.)

I’ve been thinking about beer because of the cans.

There are basically two or three kinds of wine bottles out there, unless you go for magnums or Melchizedeks, which are gigantic four-foot-tall bottles for VERY special occasions or VERY thirsty people. There are all sorts of interesting labels, of course, but by and by, a bottle of wine is best full, or, if empty, repurposed into a groovy mid-century votive candle or home decor doodad by someone with too much time on their hands.

But I know of places with rows upon rows of beer cans, and often beer bottle tops, lined up like cylindrical modern art, every color and image you could think of. And some of them are collectible.

There’s a guy who has 28,000 of them. He made the news.

A beer can might have a polar bear on it, or a dragon, a skull and crossbones, a bulldog, coat of arms, grizzly, any number of breeds of dogs and cats, eagles, sharks, clouds, semi-naked women, gods, stars and planets, harps, trumpets, crowns, and for the very literal minded consumer, glasses of beer.

People take these cans very seriously, as well as the contents. There are fierce loyalties to long-standing brands and fiercer loyalties to indie breweries. There are beer brewing contests, beer drinking contests and beer pongs throughout the known universe.

Ever since some enterprising Neolithic came up with the idea around 5,000 years ago, beer has been a THING.

And not just a thing, but a salt-of-the-earth, brew-of-the-common-man thing.

Yes, there are beer snobs just as there are wine snobs or whisky snobs or any other kind of snob. But when you think of beer, you tend to think of the average Joe and his family, maybe a truck or a blue-collar job, or a couple kids and an uncle who shows up a couple times a year and drinks you out of your Schlitz stash. Beer, by and large, is accessible.

Mostly, beer is the beverage of the average.

Beer also makes an excellent contemplative study. Of course, you knew I’d eventually get there.

The infinite variety of cans and imagery tickles my sense of humanity’s celebration of creativity and joy. Someone invents a tasty brew - what shall we call it? Tasty brew? Nice buzz? NO. Let’s call it Dragon’s Spit, Moose Drool, The End of Times, or perhaps Raiiiiiiiineeeeeeeeeeer- Beeeeeeeeeerrrr…. (If you know the reference of that last one, congratulations, you are old.)

Like all of us, beer cans are both tribal and unique. They are recognizable, familiar, full of something we all hope is palatable, and often cause for joy. Their contents can be appreciated, spoiled, rebuffed or abused. Sometimes if they are left abandoned in the cold for too long, they explode. They are all mostly the same relative shape, but there are varieties of size and occasionally metal alloys. They are crushed easily. They are often very much appreciated until after they are used up, then cast aside and forgotten. They can be made new again by a very painful process of being thrown out, melted down to their basic components, pressed by unbearable stresses into new shapes and filled up again with the brew of life. They can be lost for years, forgotten. If those forgotten ones are lucky, someone finds them and recognizes that the years they have endured have made them even more valuable than they were when they first started out, precisely because of the time they have spent in the dark. They are put out as jewels to be appreciated as never before.

And like all of us, beer cans all have one thing in common - beer.

Don’t be a smarty pants. I am not saying we all have beer in common. Although considering it’s been around for more than 5000 years, perhaps we do.

I am saying we all have humanity in common. And not just humanity - humanity that was carefully created just so, nourishes, quenches thirst, provides pleasure and cause for companionship, looks nice when held up to the light, makes everything a little bit better when it is poured out and shared. Kinda like a good brewski.

In my Christian tradition, there is a passage that says we are all earthen vessels. In the bible, 2 Corinthians 4:7, Paul writes, “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.” It means that each of us carried the beauty of God within us, also recognizing our human frailty. We get broken. We are cautioned to not think of ourselves as something to get too excited about.

In most of this, I agree. But I do wish there were beer cans in the time of Paul because I see one small omission here that can cause hurt and confusion.

We don’t all look the same. We may be earthen vessels, but we have different labels, different shapes, different sizes of being. We have a joyful variety that doesn’t show up when the metaphor makes us all kinda brown, round, crackly and frumpy.

When people of faith lean into that “earthen vessels” metaphor, they sometimes use it for bolstering up a false modesty (“Oh, me? No, I’m not special at all!”) and the weird thing about false modesty is that it can’t help but generate a very real sense of envy, self-righteousness, judgment and resentment. There’s a reason Dana Carvey’s Church Lady is a perennial favorite. She gets very close to the bone.

There’s also the opposite viewpoint, too - that what we are in ourselves is everything. Our image, our job, our connections, our wealth, our social media presence, our externals become so all-encompassing we forget that there’s anything more inside us. Often, we’re afraid to look in there, just in case it’s not what the label says it is. That’s an easier thing to get wrapped around the axle over, too. Don’t be vain but are you using this new cream to get rid of those wrinkles yet? Don’t aspire towards wealth but if you are having money issues you are irresponsible. Don’t be too educated, that just makes you a know-it-all, but don’t let yourself be fooled. Don’t get too close, but don’t be distant. Care, but not too much. Don’t make us uncomfortable.

So, back to beer cans. OBVIOUSLY a can that says “Moose Drool” on it does not actually contain moose drool. Just because there’s a polar bear on the label doesn’t mean this came from the arctic. We get it - there is joy and creativity in the image, but the proof is in the popping of the seal and the gulp.

We allow for variation on the label. We have preferences, sure, but we don’t generally throw someone out of the party if he’s drinking Rainier while we’re drinking Georgetown. For all the hoopla between lagers and ales and bitters and malts and pilsners, and yes there can be hoopla, beer is basically beer.

We recognize preferences and differences, but we also recognize the basic similarity. That’s called embracing complexity. That’s holding two things true at the same time. And we do it all the time without a single thought every time we belly up to the bar.

So.

If we do this with beer cans, is it possible to stretch the analogy? Can we do this with each other?

It’s a simple idea, and you might think it facile. But there are examples like this all around us every day. Little illustrations of bigger truths. We each are crazy, unique, individual containers of a bigger humanity worth far more than our exteriors but made even more delightful by them anyway. I personally like Blue Moon, but I love the label for Death By Blueberry because, dang, that sounds both adorable and metal.

And we are actually collectible. We actually look great together side by side. The contrast is delightful. The worth of us doesn’t go away with age.

And the contents are always worth the opening up.

Lift a can, take a sip, and enjoy the metaphor. May it bring you both refreshment and a little encouragement for these last days of summer.

Love you guys - peace.

Let’s start with the basics. The wood wide web was first identified in 1997 by Canadian forest ecologist and Ph.D. student Suzanne Simard during her Ph.D. research. She discovered that mature trees were actively sending carbon and nutrients to younger or stressed trees in the forest through teeny fungal threads underground called mycelium. The threads extend a tree’s root system far beyond its normal reach and penetrate into small soil pores to access water and nutrients that would otherwise be unavailable to the tree. One tree’s happy mycelium buddies gradually connect up with other trees’ happy mycelium buddies, creating a vast underground network, called a mycorrhizal network. In this arrangement, trees get nutrients like phosphorous and nitrogen while giving the mycelium their carbon and sugars produced through photosynthesis.

Some networks look like protective spongy sheaths around the outside of tree roots; others penetrate the roots themselves and exchange resources, including chemical and electrical signals that give the trees the ability to protect one another from infestations, notify one another if there’s a fire nearby, or share sugars from one tree to another if one tree is in full sun and the other in shade and feeling a bit peckish.

There’s one mycorrhizal network like this in Oregon called the “humongous fungus” which spreads out roughly four miles. It’s estimated to be over 2500 years old and going strong. It’s so integrated that at this point botanists are referring to it as a single organism. One big old ‘shroom taking up a lot of room. You can learn more about it here.

“Thank you, Karen, for this odd and interesting journey into the mysteries of mushroom life. But… why are you telling me this?”

Excellent question.

You may have already thought of an answer.

If you put your head above ground on any day of the week you may find yourself facing raging fires due to climate change, genocides, hostile takeovers of our government by our government, the exploitation of natural resources, nations at war, people’s minds rotted by social media, rampant racism, dismantled checks and balances, a rise in anxiety and other mental disorders, road rage, pollution, species extinctions, whitewashing of history, revoked rights, blatant cronyism, gross systemic injustices, polarization of our society or maybe just a cold sore forming on your lip.

Facing any and all of that makes me want to quietly crawl off to a dark corner and give up. You, too?

But consider this. What is small enough to sneak into the tiniest cracks for nourishment, big enough to take up 68.3 quadrillion MILES of ground, robust enough to survive thousands of years of fire, earthquake, flood, drought and climate change, delicate enough to weave in and out of microscopic connections without missing a beat, powerful enough to mold and sustain entire ecosystems and tenacious enough to do all of this unnoticed for what we now know has been millions of years?

Yep.

A single thread of mycelium doesn’t look like much. But it’s part of 68.3 quadrillion miles of our planet and it’s in every ecosystem on the earth. It’s the most important and adaptive network of our world and without it there would be no forests, no grasslands, no wetlands, no deserts and no wildlife. The invisible microscopic threads woven under our feet are what keep us all alive.

We are all tiny threads, too. I write and make music and listen to people. Maybe you knit. She drops off groceries for her friend. He mows the neighbor’s lawn. They organize rallies. Those two teach preschool. This one is an independent journalist. That one supports the journalist with a subscription. She’s deconstructing her faith. He’s questioning what he’s reading. They’re considering every sentence in their ballot guide. She prays for folks without judging them. He’s thinking he might run for city council. She is, too. Those three have organized a community garden. He’s enrolled in a community college history class. I’m reading Toni Morrison again. You’re looking at W. E. B. Du Bois. That mom just introduced her kids to Jane Goodall and Jacques Cousteau. Somebody has begun exploring a study of world religions. Somebody else is organic farming and shopping local. All those folks over there are organizing a peaceful protest. Somebody is in charge of bringing bottled water.

Evil does its best work when it makes each one of us feel powerless and alone. There’s nothing the adversary loves more to hear than your sigh of, “I give up.”

As I write these posts, I am also finding so many people, so many threads, all available and ready to connect. Individually they may not know quite what to do or how to begin, but we have an example that humbly and powerfully reminds us that it doesn’t take a big action to change the world, but millions upon millions of coordinated little ones.

I’m so grateful to the angry writer who will not stop talking about systemic racism. I’m grateful, too, for the priest who keeps posting mini-sermons that gently but constantly push back against the shouts of Christian nationalists. Grateful too for the midnight journalists, the historians, the teachers, the veterans, the farmers, the advocates, the admins, the organizers, the moms and dads, the young impassioned high schoolers and the older women and men who are finding a new voice because of lives well lived and wisdom they are brave enough to share.

I’m grateful to all the hundreds of people in the network that I am privileged to know and the millions I don’t.

If you love this country and want to still be here when the fire gets hotter and the floods get deeper, you have a network right here. We all do. It’s not a mycorrhizal network, but it looks and acts like one. Each thread connected for a purpose, nourishing and being nourished like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Because it is.

Look around. In your neighborhood, your family, your group of friends, your church, your workplace, your hangout. Dig just a little. Find someone else’s thread and follow it to the next connection. Add your own. Nourish each other. Then go find some more. Add them. Do it again. We’re not that hard to find. We’re everywhere. Nobody will call us a humongous fungus, but we’re building the human version of it right now. Maybe we’re the humongous love-gus. Whatever you want to call it, it’s healthy, it’s growing, it’s essential and unstoppable. Want to make change happen? It’s already in the works, you just have to plug in.

By the way, want to see a map of the earth’s mycorrhizal network? Here ya go. It’s much older than our network so it’s had plenty of time to stretch way out. But I don’t think it will take long for ours to grow too. We have the threads. We have the resources. And I honestly believe it’s inevitable, which is why the powers that be are working so frantically to keep us apart and divided. They are terrified because they KNOW it’s inevitable. (You do, too.)

Besides.

It’s already begun.

This is Jimothy. If you haven’t seen him yet, he’s become the darling of Ballard and the new mascot for Seattle. He’s a wild raccoon with short spine syndrome which makes him unusually rounded and stubby, and happily quite healthy. In other words, pretty much adorable.

And as you can see, he’s become something of an internet sensation.

The local mural artist known simply as Henry painted this, auctioned it off and raised $6,543.21 for a local food bank.

Jimothy also now graces a beer can.

And he’s now an official character in the online game Dungeons and Dragons.

What the heck is UP with this????

Most people would probably chock this up to a flash-in-the-internet-pan moment right up there with the ice bucket challenge of 2014, the Gangham Style video of 2012 or Tillman the Skateboarding Bulldog of 2007. They’re not wrong.

In the grand scheme of things, Jimothy, the ice bucket, Psy the Gangham dude or Tillman aren’t going to change the world on their own. They are trivial moments of silliness or appreciation for the weird or innocent.

But in that very triviality lies a much deeper fundamental need that we must recognize and build upon, especially now.

Jimothy is misshapen and in his very strangeness, he is a touchstone for our need to open our hearts to the misshapen strangeness in our own lives. He is weird, and all of us are too. He is a fuzzy, goofy, feral and easy entry into the practice of acceptance and empathy. Few people will be angry with you for appreciating the strangeness of one raccoon; a lot more will be angry with you for appreciating the wonder that is the spectrum of autistic experience, the astonishing variation in gender across species and cultures, the ravishing opulence of humanity in all races, the dazzling intelligence of the natural world, the beauty of human bodies old, young, in every shape and size.

Appreciate Jimothy and people smile and nod or shake their heads. Appreciate anything more lasting or inclusive and you are most certainly woke and an enemy of the state.

The ice bucket challenge was simple - film yourself dumping ice water on your head, challenge a friend to do the same, and say it’s for awareness of ALS, MS, or a number of any worthy charities. People laughed. People ponied up money and a lot of good came out of it.

But the ice bucket challenge was really about pain. Voluntary suffering. Weakness, laid out and posted online. (So many nipples!) Are you willing to endure personal pain for the benefit of someone else? To gasp with shock? To look ridiculous? Are you willing to encourage your friends to do the same?

Ask anyone who is now boycotting a business to draw attention to unfair practices, or standing on the street corner with others in the hot sun, waving their posters in support of USAID or universal health care or the end of the assault on Gaza or the abolishment of ICE. They do not have the same response from the world as the nipply ice bucket folks did in 2014. But the intent was the same - what are we willing to suffer for the good of someone else?

Psy of Gangham Style was chubby, not terribly coordinated, and stunningly joyful hopping up and down on his imaginary stick horsie. A grown man celebrating the ridiculousness of his own appearance, gaining more than a billion views. What does this say about his masculinity? His power? His authority? His self respect?

The government and so many of our churches are reinforcing the militant, violent, overpowering posture of masculinity and calling it godly. Advocating for testosterone shots for the military. Men removing women’s voting rights. Pastors calling for submission and silence from the women of their churches. Incels continually hating women even as they crave them.

What if men could be comfortable being self-deprecating? Aware of their dad bods and their receding hairlines? Easy with laughter and tender with children? Unconcerned with being alpha? Not defensive? Not wearing tee shirts that objectify women or glorify violence in the name of a good joke?

Now, let’s look at Tillman. It’s pretty adorable to watch a potato-shaped canine enthusiastically throw himself onto a skateboard and fly his tongue like a banner in the breeze of his own mad trajectory. It’s lovely to see the shared enjoyment of speed, capability and energy that this dog has with millions of human skateboarders. But there’s more. What’s really happening here?

Connection. Reflection. And yes, a goofy appreciation of the natural world. What if the joy of watching a skateboarding bulldog opens the heart to the simple joy of watching birds in flight, or the bounce of a squirrel in a cedar branch, or the amazing transformation of a seed into a bed of flowers? Recognizing that a deer in mid leap just might be as joyful as a boy on a bike. That a crow might enjoy play and friendship like a child. That sparrows recognize one another, and dolphins have individual names. What if we did less economic resourcing of nature and more companioning, nurturing and respecting it?

Tell someone about Tillman and you get a chuckle. Tell someone that trees actually do communicate and nurture their saplings through fungal networks, airborne chemicals and electrical impulses and you get quite a different response.

It’s a lot about how we respond, what our responsibility might be, and the difference between the two. To go deeper makes us squirm and that’s not a bad thing.

Jimothy, the ice bucket, Psy the Gangham dude and Tillman are kindergarten lessons on empathy, openness, appreciation, inclusion, generosity, kindness and joy.

*Squirm*

Some people definitely need a kindergarten refresher. Maybe we all do. Probably.

My curiosity moves me to think about this a lot. And yes, to squirm too.

People are drawn to Jimothy and the rest because they provide temporary relief and a pause button from the chaos and grief. But there can be so much more if we let it come to the surface.

If Jimothy makes us root for the underdog - or underraccoon - who else could we be rooting for? Who else is beyond the regular mold, who else is strange to others, unlike the rest of us, unappreciated for the variety they bring into this world? Who else needs to be celebrated and protected? How wide can we stretch our vision to include those we have ignored or thrust into the shadows? And how brave can we be to openly celebrate and protect them? These are rhetorical questions. We KNOW who they are.

What if we stopped chasing away or ignoring the unfamiliar and started embracing it instead? How brave would we have to be to begin?

And what if the ice bucket challenge idea moved us to other sacrifices? Less consumption, more donating, less acquisition, more sharing, less stockpiling, more food-banking? What don’t I need anymore? What won’t I need soon enough? What do I need but someone else needs it more? What action can each of us take right now to positively show willing sacrifice and voluntary loss for the good of someone we might never meet?

What if Gangham Style moved us to deconstruct identity, to move away from the fragile and brittle foundations of masculine power, feminine submission, Christian legalization and gatekeeping? What if a Christian church welcomed its Muslim neighbors for a Sunday brunch? What if religious leaders told each other, “Yeah, I don’t actually understand it, either.” What if a strong man told his social media followers how to treat others with tenderness instead of domination? What if the thought of an America no longer dependent on whiteness as its fundamental identity wasn’t something that made so many people angry and afraid?

And lastly, what if we learned from the trees as part of a normalized elementary school curriculum that included respect for and curiosity of intelligences not our own?

If I told folks I like the ideas of Jimothy, the ice bucket challenge, Psy and Tillman you’d probably think I’m a bit silly and cute. (I am.)

If I told folks I like the ideas of challenging our current capitalistic system; exploring the dismantlement of our collective impulse for more stuff and less communal responsibility; looking for a gross national happiness measurement for our country over a gross national product one; rethinking and jettisoning worn out biases on gender, race, religion and economic status; and setting aside our mainstream view of humanity as the top of the evolutionary tree of life - well, they might call me all sorts of names, many of them not too complimentary.

The threads connect anyway. Sorry, folks, they do.

So, the big questions become this - what do we each learn from Jimothy, Psy, Tillman and the rest? How deep are we each willing to explore and move ourselves from the easy answers to the harder ones? Have we lost our connection to one another? To nature? To wonder? To the sacred? To joy? How do we get them back? How do we share them? These are questions to ask every day, because every day brings a new opportunity to grow.

I know. BUT…

There will always be those who throw rocks at misshapen animals, scoff at pet tricks, mock the silly, shout for power over mercy and call empathy “toxic virtue signaling.” There will always be those afraid to learn, to grow, to transform, to open up. It’s sad but true. They are broken and awful and hopefully, not all are beyond help. But some might be. We have to admit that.

And.

There is always a Jimothy out there somewhere to remind us of better options. Always a bulldog skating us closer to a better goal, a more challenging drop, greater success of the measurement of a whole heart. And yes, in the grand scheme of things, Jimothy, the ice bucket, Psy the Gangham dude or Tillman aren’t going to change the world on their own.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t do it for them. One day, one person at a time.

Support. Celebrate. Marvel. Appreciate. Wonder. Learn. Stretch. Honor. Include. Respect. Embrace. A little, a lot. There are as many ways to do it as there are seconds in the year. Probably more.

Bring joy.

Jimothy believes in you.

Back in the 1990s I worked at a Southern Californian performing arts center with a very affluent set of board members. Very. Affluent. One board member had millions of dollars worth of collectible cars he never drove. Another board member gave his loving wife a Four Seasons hotel and carte blanche to hire decorators to redesign the entire interior, including the conference center, lobby and individual rooms as she pleased. For her birthday.

He was actually a nice man. She was nice, too. He had started out middle class and was exceptionally savvy with real estate investments. She had been a flight attendant who met and married the love of her life. I grew fond of both of them. Sometimes she’d let me ride shotgun in her Jaguar (another birthday gift) as we drove through the Del Taco in Costa Mesa for 99 cent quesadillas. She was slumming. I was just getting lunch. All in all, they were kind to me and generally decent folk. An exception to the rule of so many others who were donors or members of some sort and also mostly collosal jerks.

Anyway.

One day she showed up in a new Mercedes. I asked her what had happened to the Jaguar, which she’d only had a few months and had been quite proud of.

She explained that a piece of the trim on the passenger door had come loose and would make a snapping sound if she drove above 45 mph. It sounded like a gunshot. She knew it was just the trim snapping but it unnerved her so much that she stopped driving the car, and when she told her husband why she had stopped, he got her a new Mercedes instead.

The snap of a loose piece of plastic made her afraid. Too afraid to drive. I can't imagine how scary it was for her to think of herself as a target for road rage everywhere she went. Ducking imaginary bullets. I dunno. Maybe she felt like people would resent her driving a Jag. Maybe they did. Thank God she never rode in the various used cars I had over the years, all of which made pops, groans, screeches and growling noises at one time or another. Nobody resented my ride. Nobody was going to shoot me for spite. Jealousy would have been ridiculous.

These were nice people, decent, kind. But rich. Very rich. And that made them afraid of things I didn't have to be.

Growing up in SoCal in the 70s, I drove through plenty of sketchy parts of towns far and wide, at all hours, in crappy cars that not infrequently left me at the side of the road. Once I was actually protected from “possible dangerous people” by a local chapter of Hells Angels when it was late at night in a not great part of Cerritos and my transmission had died. Another time a gang let me go when I found myself in the middle of a fight between rivals in cars at a red light and they were beating a guy on the hood of my car. But those are other stories for another time.

Anyway.

These very nice, very rich people lived with a combination of insulation and fear that I never experienced for myself because the world they lived in was light years from mine.

Which leads me to this thought:

What fears do the NOT nice rich people have? The ones who made enemies? The ones making the news?

Billionaire Peter Thiel of Palantir moved his entire family out of the country and is publicly fearful of The End Times. Two days ago, VP Vance had Secret Service following an Instagrammer who posts cat videos and makes occasional snarky remarks about him. She was going to attend a public meeting he was speaking at and they wouldn't let her in. Apparently he felt threatened. Now there's a lawsuit. God knows how many politicians are too afraid right now to say that Mitch McConnell is probably NOT having 20 minute conversations with them today and won't tomorrow either. These affluent, influential, powerful people are scared of so many things. Scared of being assassinated. Kidnapped. Blackmailed. Doxxed. Caught in a lie. Telling the truth. Being recognized. Being not recognized. Photographed. Publicly shamed. Sued. Voted out. Seen in shorts. Seen with their spouses. Seen without their spouses. Scared of the stock market. Crypto. Missed chances for investments. Missed chances for political power. Scared of poor people. Immigrants. Muslims. Labor unions. Other richer people. Tiktokkers. Instagrammers. Facebook posts. Bluesky. People of color. People they know. People they don't.

I'm guessing they live like this most of the time.

I have my fears too, of course. Everyone does. I still cringe when my husband brakes a little later at a red light than I would. I don't like stairs. Or heights. Or avocados. But I've noticed that as I get older and realize how beautifully unremarkable I am in this world I am also generally feeling less afraid, yes, even in these horrible times. Less afraid of being corrected, less afraid of being a dork, clumsily learning something new. Less afraid of being unimportant. Less afraid of quiet. Less afraid of getting older, being curious instead of certain. Less afraid, despite the looming feeling of doom in our country. It doesn't make sense but I am calmer than I've been before. Why is that?

I think it's because I know I don't have to second guess who loves me and who doesn't. My individual mistakes won't destroy the planet, although I'm still responsible to be responsible and decent. I'm not in a position to be particularly essential on the global stage. I'm not going to ruin the decor of a major hotel chain with a questionable color choice. I don't have to worry that my influence is waning or my power is being usurped or my ill advised choices of misspent youth will be used against me someday. Not having the resources for truly making a financial or social train wreck of my life has been a boon. To do many regrettable things you need a lot of money or power. So those who have it are in one of two camps - those who did the regrettable things, or those who didn't but could still be suspected of having done them just because they had the wherewithal to do so.

In either case, not an enviable position.

As much as I despise what our president does, as much as I mourn the wake of chaos and misery he and his cronies are leaving that we'll have to deal with, I pity him too. Of all the people who live with the fears of the rich and powerful, I wonder if he hasn't even more to fear in his life from all he has done to make his life what it is and from the sad and poisoned lessons he learned about what his life was supposed to be. It's not joy that keeps him posting all night. It's not peace. It's fear.

It doesn't change my feelings of what is just and unjust in this administration. It doesn't make me any less angry about the colossal mess of it all. I don't excuse any of it.

But it gives me something to think about.

What does it mean to move through the world knowing that the most powerfully awful people in it are probably more afraid day after day than I have ever been? How does that change how I respond to them and those who support them? How do I balance my emotions when I realize the most aggressive, most violent perpetrators are as terrified as they are terrible? When I see that the fear mongers are white knuckled in panic behind their closed doors? When I know they have bunkers to hide in even as they wage war against the least powerful? When they say that empathy is toxic and the country can't afford a “suicidal compassion?” How terrified do you have to be to be threatened by compassion?

It makes me rethink the biblical adage, “Be not afraid.” I have always thought of that as a comfort, an assurance, a word of hope.

But maybe it's also a directive?

Fear makes people do terrible things. So does power. So does money. Put all three together and you have a recipe for disaster.

I don't have a lot of power or money to make me do terrible things. But like every human being, I can be afraid. And I can use that fear to be a collosal jerk, even without a ton of money.

So maybe, just maybe, I can sit with what it looks like for me to not be afraid, as often as I can. To resist the leap to panic. To step back from the edge of dread. To intentionally choose the five minutes of deep breathing and prayer before I allow myself to freak out. To not be afraid of being afraid.

I will not excel at this by willpower or grit.

I am not particularly brave.

But neither were the shepherds on Christmas night, or the Old Testament prophets or the disciples or a whole lot of other bible folks. And look how it turned out for them. Most of them. (Still don't want to be Job.)

Fear can be a terrible thing. I'm not going to get all evangelical and rebuke it, since for me that's about as useful as trying to not think about pink elephants. But when it shows up next time I might just give myself a moment to sit with it like a freaked out puppy and calm it down a notch with a cookie and a belly rub. It's terrible, but so is farting when you laugh and I have learned to live with that possibility too.

If each of us considers how we each might live a little less afraid in our own day to day, wouldn't that be a good start?

It's worth thinking about. It can't hurt. It might help. Especially when it comes to us being able to help others who are truly at risk and need us to care. To be compassionate without fearing the cost could be a very good life skill to practice for the future. Starting now. Even if it feels scary.

Be not afraid.

If you can.

Sometimes.

Anyway.

I’m listening to Max Richter’s music from the “Hamnet” film, an exploration of the profundity of grief and its ability to crack us open until we are so much more vulnerable and human than we thought possible, much less ever wished to be. It’s sad music, and it seems to fit the bill for where my spirit is today.

I am looking for grace and hope in these weeks as we approach the 250th anniversary of this country. I am not finding it in the news, or the national fair, or the buntings, flags, tee shirts, baseball hats, picnic items or the multitudes of red, white and blue items absolutely everywhere this week. I’m not in a place to shoot off fireworks and sing “God bless the USA.” I used to kind of like that song, back in the 80s but not anymore. It’s been co-opted for cruelty.

I am depressed about the upcoming anniversary, along with a lot of other people. But I still want to find something to honor, to celebrate, to cherish. It’s honest to grieve the mess that is our leadership now, to lament over the shattering of our global reputation and the dishonoring of our history. But it’s also important to leave room for joy as well. Always leave room for that.

When I stumbled across this picture of the whooping crane and the celebration of its recovery from 15 individuals to 500 over the course of eighty-eight years, it spoke to me of that joy.

Eighty-eight years is a friggin’ long time; a significant population of us never reach that milestone. 500 cranes in the entire world is still a very much endangered species. We’d have many more numbers to go before they could be called critically endangered or simply threatened, much less viable on their own without intervention and continual protections. Eighty-eight years to get 485 more cranes seems like a long time for very little return on investment. That’s five and a half cranes every year. For the entire planet. For eighty-eight years.

To celebrate that whooping cranes have reached a worldwide population of 500 is a lot like pointing out a silver lining in a distant cloud on the far horizon as a hurricane rips your house off the foundation. For many reasons, it might not be worth pointing out in that particular moment.

Except it is.

Whooping cranes are still here, unlike passenger pigeons, ivory billed woodpeckers, golden toads, pinta tortoises, Chinese paddlefish, bridled white-eyes, Guam reed warblers, and thousands of others lost to us forever. Despite the odds, these graceful cranes are still part of our planet. We lost the others, but not these. Not yet. Their very fragility is part of their beauty to me.

We’ve lost a lot, no question. We’re losing something every day. Rights, laws, global respect, family ties, natural resources, simple peace. Sometimes the losses are so painful and obvious, loud and viciously unending, that I feel like falling over and calling it quits.

In 1987, there were no more wild California condors. All gone. Shot as pests, poisoned, hunted for sport. Most people thought they were ugly, if they thought about them at all. The only ones still alive were in zoos. They had to be kept captive in a carefully controlled breeding program to just keep them here on the planet. Someone did exactly that. Now, approximately 250 of them fly free, carefully monitored, but free. They might go extinct anyway someday. But not today.

To me, it feels like our democracy is a critically endangered species. So seem empathy, open-mindedness, critical thinking, patience, spiritual maturity, curiosity, humility and selfless thought for the greater good. All under attack, all ridiculed as unimportant, disposable, not worth the effort to resurrect. All found in the wild in just little handfuls, hardly any at all.

Fifteen whooping cranes in 1938.

A handful of ideas that you know still have integrity.

They deserve conservation.

Not the kind of conservation that says, “Less for you, more for me” or “There’s not enough to go around” or “Only for the ones that are loudest, most popular, or most powerful.” That’s a conservation borne of fear mixed with ignorant entitlement. That’s the Fox News bastardization of the word. “Our way, our beliefs, our benefits, not yours.”

The conservative rhetoric of the far right reminds me of DDT that everyone used back in the 1960s. It was everywhere, a common bug killer. We had it in every garage, under every sink. It almost deprived us all of bald eagles, red tail hawks and thousands of other species. It took a while to find out how awful it was for all of us. I remember the smell of it. Kind of sweet, actually. No big deal, just a handy dandy half gallon of liquid that could kill whatever you wanted in roughly 24 hours.

Cynical conservatism is the ubiquitous DDT poison of our time. It kills the hope of young idealists before they ever come out of their shells, fledglings whose flights are crushed from possibility before they even know there is a broader sky. It’s everywhere, we spread it like weedkiller, not fully realizing it doesn’t make a distinction between the flowers and the weeds. It kills everything. I know what it smells like, too. It smells like pride.

The whooping crane matters to me. I know there are millions of people who couldn’t care less. That’s their issue. Condors matter to me, too. Even if I never get to see one. So does kindness, hope, justice, curiosity over condemnation, a commitment to truth when it’s not convenient, and patient calmness when those who rail against us want us to lose ourselves in helpless rage. I know for many people I’m just a softie, an idealist insisting on an impractical way of moving through the world today. I’m foolish, unimportant, behind the curve. I’m at the curb. I’m an old lady talking snowflake stuff without any relevance to our hotly contested ideological battlefields. I’m a Jesus freak and an old hippie and I hug trees and feed squirrels. Who needs any of that worn out old stuff now? Why bother saying it yet again?

Conservation matters.

Lots of people have given up on a true democracy, on critical thinking, on holding hearts open to include people whose lives are different, whose needs are greater, whose value has been ignored to the point of irrelevance. They want simple answers, good guys (them) and bad guys (everyone else). They want certainty that doesn’t require any sacrifice on their part. They want someone else to bend. They want to feel like winners, so there must be losers. Lots of people will proudly go down with the MAGA ship and carry their entire families with them, shouting all the way down how they finally owned the libs. Lots of people won’t care about the loss of relationships, of truth, of what we have always tried to be, even as they whitewash the mistakes that brought us here. To stop the nagging of conscience they’ll find a scapegoat. Possibly you. Lots of people think you are fragile for wanting something other than America first and a grand show of global power. Lots of people don’t want to have to care about the poor, the trans kids, the DACA recipients, the USAID that isn’t coming, the rest of the collateral damage. Lots of people didn’t care about whooping cranes in 1938 either.

But enough did.

If you care enough to grieve over what has happened to us as a nation, you are not mistaken and you are certainly not alone. If you are carrying wounded hope, especially when you don’t feel like it, you are in good company. If you are still painfully counting the ways in which small acts of kindness and words of encouragement can push against the overwhelming tides of indifference, you are part of the resistance. If you are still wondering if there’s any going back to relationship with those who disowned you for your choices, you are still very much alive to growth. Even if that going back isn’t possible. If you are insisting that objective facts still should matter, that people deserve to not be snatched off the streets, that political wrongdoing should be accounted for, that those of other colors, races, sexual and gender differences from yours should live in unmolested peace, nope — you are not alone. We have the cranes, the condors and one another.

All these things you still care about are like whooping cranes. So endangered, so ignored, yet so valuable, irreplaceable - and still, by the grace of God, not yet extinct.

Conservation works.

The conservation of hope, of softened hearts, of a commitment to equality; the conservation of our shared humanity as we deconstruct the racist exceptionalism we never fully realized we were mired in; the conservation of a willingness to admit wrong and to make amends, all this.

All this is true conservation worth the time and effort. It might take eighty-eight years. You might never see it to fruition. It still matters. Someone someday will look at the beautiful thing you worked to save, even if they never know you did that for them. Take a moment to look at the cranes again. Their beauty. Their wildness, their flaming throats, their golden eyes. Their dazzling uniqueness, still here because someone eighty-eight years ago took the time to do something foolishly hopeful.

Be comforted now by those who struggle along with you. It takes a ridiculous faith and a resilient heart to insist that the cranes mattered, and so does everything else that broadens our vision, cracks open our hearts, insists on beauty and makes the circle wider for everyone.

Whooping cranes matter, even for those who don’t think so. They just don’t know it. And we can’t wait for them to come to that knowledge. It’s ours for now to hold. Yours and mine.

We’ve seen the losses, but we also see this:

Not everything endangered goes extinct.

Conservation works.

Reflect on that, take courage and a slow, deep breath.

Peace.

Let me begin by admitting that on the Enneagram circle of one through nine, I come out as a five. If you’re unfamiliar with the Enneagram personality model, I suggest you take a peek at it here, although there are thousands of websites to explore it further. It’s even more complex and older than Myers Briggs, and in my humble opinion, much more helpful. But that’s just my opinion. I’ll leave it to you to formulate your own.

In short, as a five, I spend a lot of time thinking about things, standing off to the side, carefully observing. Fives are professional nerds. A five generally loves the library more than the gym. Fives take twice as much time as everyone else in the museum because they read all the placards. Fives present their anger in a slow boil, if ever, and their fears to very few. Fives are masters of the pregnant pause and the steady gaze. Fives tend to gravitate towards theology, philosophy and science. Spock was a five. Kirk definitely was not.

A five is someone who goes down a rabbit hole to learn something useless so thoroughly that they could write a dissertation on it. A five will choose a rabbit hole especially if the information is obscure, weird, and not of interest to anyone else. Knowledge is crack. Anything will do but something like the intersection of quantum physics and the teachings of the desert fathers of early Christianity is particularly yummy. Or the connection between Ghengis Khan and the invention of the refrigerator. Or finding out which animals have elliptical pupils, and which have round ones, why they do, and how the percentages of mammals to reptiles in this cross section compare.

Fives are a little strange that way. It’s how we feel connected and safe, nerding out all day long.

One of the things I really treasure as a five is the careful application of language. I rarely blurt. I try to be as accurate as I can, appreciating the multifaceted nature of words while also translating the stranger contents of my head into a syntax that connects me to normal brains. It’s quite a circus act, like the man who spins plates on long poles. It takes up a lot of my mind.

So, the daily atomic bombings of words, written and shouted that is our current state of affairs in this world can overwhelm me to the point of stunned inaction. Maybe you, too.

We’re seeing words being astoundingly abused, twisted beyond recognition. Lies by the millions have turned words such as integrity, honor and competence into monstrous shadows of their former meanings. Pundits, politicians, social media influencers, multibillionaires and their cronies have casually obliterated the lines between reality and fiction, truth and fantasy, more and more as the days go by. Meaning is irrelevant, as long as you sound captivating and don’t require a lot of processing to understand.

Don’t even get me started on Chat GPT.

I’ve been quieter lately, not because I’ve been in retreat, but because I’ve been seriously five-ing.

Here are a few five-ish observations I can share from this quiet time.

On Liars: Liars are extremely loud and repetitive. They operate on the concept that a lie told often enough and with enough volume will eventually be believed as true. The most terrifying adversary to a liar isn’t someone who will refute them, it’s someone who stops listening altogether. So, arguing the point with a liar is a lot less useful than resolutely leaning into the truth despite them. When the flood rises, they will insist that there are no boats and that’s not water around your ankles anyway, it’s sand.

On Fearmongers: Fearful people can’t abide the unknown, so fearmongers will stoke the fire of imagined terrors until a fearful population will insist on whatever falsity they need to believe right now, even as they watch it implode in real time. The most unsettling thing for a fearful person is being with someone who considers facts as they appear and adjusts behavior accordingly. So, arguing the point with a fearful person is equally useless, but for a much different reason. They know it’s a flood and a boat will save them but it’s impossible for them to get into one. Boats aren’t real to them.

On Haters: Haters need a villain. Most of the time, the villain is someone they don’t know and can’t verify as an actual threat. This makes the villain perfect to hate, since it requires no actual investment in understanding and gives enough distance to shoot off their ammunition. Haters blast holes in all the boats and then blame the boatbuilders when their own boat sinks.

On Words: Words are empty until you fill them with what is inside you. Liars will fill the words with lies; fearmongers will fill them with terror; haters will fill them with vitriol. Every word requires filling, like a glass, to either slake your thirst or drown you.

In the gospel of Luke, chapter 4, it says:

In the synagogue there was a man possessed by a demon, an impure spirit. He cried out at the top of his voice, “Go away! What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!”

“Be quiet!” Jesus said sternly. “Come out of him!” Then the demon threw the man down before them all and came out without injuring him.

There are commentaries about how Jesus expelled the demon and why he commanded it to be quiet. Some say it’s because Jesus wasn’t ready to reveal himself fully at that time, others say it’s because Jesus didn’t want to let the devil have a chance to terrify the crowd, still others say it’s because it was obscene for a devil to even address God.

I have another idea.

I wonder if Jesus didn’t command the devil to be quiet because the devil said, “I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” Perhaps Jesus knew that these truthful words spoken by a devil would be filled with the essence of that devil and therefore polluted.

Think about it. How many times have you heard someone use uplifting words to present their twisted version of it? Make America Great Again springs to mind. So does make our borders safe, preserve our history, respect our bountiful resources and I’m a proud patriot. Perhaps the worst ones of all are be a warrior for Jesus.

The devil’s knowledge of Jesus’ true identity would be filled with terror and rage. It would sound more like a scream than a shout of recognition. It would take those words of truth and glory and poison every syllable with evil. It would fill those sacred words with profanity. The devil could do no other.

How many times have you heard someone use the gospel or quote Jesus as a scream of rage or fear rather than a shout of joy? How many pastors have used the gospel to stoke xenophobia, racism, misogyny, even basic empathy? How many people scourge others with their words of piety?

How many people made woke be an insult?

Does it depress you?

Me too.

About those words…we can refill them. Reclaim the original spirit. Start again. It’s going to take time but it’s possible. And necessary.

Liars won’t speak truth, but we will. Fearful people won’t see what’s right in front of them, but we do. Angry people can’t help shooting off their mouths, but we can.

We can take words back and make them real again. Empathy without “toxic” in front of it is a great start. War without “just” in front of it is a lot harder to deal with. No doubt it will be a long and winding road. But what’s the alternative?

Yeah.

I’m still often overwhelmed.

But like you, I want to seek out and find the good happening around us as others speak truth, testify to what’s real, heal with their words, instead of wounding others. I want to join that group of people. I want to encourage them, and to let them encourage me. It’s hard to see around all the other crap out there, but it’s there, nonetheless. The ability to change this.

Courts are moving. Cronies are bailing. International courts are starting to hold multibillionaires accountable, even if America will not. Nobody’s quite forgotten the Epstein files, despite the obfuscations and stonewalling. The world is witnessing. Historians are speaking up, remembering. Networks are caving but independent journalists are not. Money is talking but there are others, many others, talking back. People are seeing what they would not see before. For some, the pain is what’s bringing them to earth. For others, it’s a renewed discovery of integrity they almost forgot they could live in.

For every lie shouted and reposted, there are millions of people in their homes quietly saying, “no.” Fearmongers are starting to find out that a dedicated and loving local community can outlast them. Look at Minneapolis. Angry Pete Hegseth’s and Pam Bondi’s are being refuted and held up to the light so we can see how truly deformed their worldview is. It’s an awful sight, but there it is for us to learn from. To change the narrative and turn another way. To see, remember and not repeat.

Trump is twisting like a fish on a hook, grotesquely caught in his own tangled lines, disintegrating in the flesh even as he posts pictures of himself as Jesus or a bodybuilder or a warrior. It’s painful to watch. I can’t imagine how painful it is to live. His poisonous words are killing him even as he raises another glass of them to his lips. The reflecting pool, the ballroom, the bailout, the banners and gilded statues, Epstein, Putin and now the war, all flooding back in a black wave around his feet. And as false, fearful and angry as he is, there’s no way he’s going anywhere near a boat. I wish I could feel sorry for him. Perhaps someday when I am more spiritually mature than I am now. That day is still very far down the road.

Meanwhile, I watch, very five-ishly. I ponder. I hope. I pray.

When I know I can fill my words with hope and empathy, I use them.

When devils say things like, “I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” I know what it means for them. Scrambling for a lie to cover it. Panic. Fury. White House prayer rallies. Laying hands and holding up bibles for the photographers. Press conferences. Lots of suits.

When I say it myself, “I know who you are—the Holy One of God.” it means something else entirely. Because Jesus isn’t about to drown in this mess. He’s the guy who stands with immigrants, survivors, marginalized, oppressed and impoverished people, having been all these things himself. I can say these words knowing that because he’s not giving up on us, there’s still truth, bravery and holy resistance that will not fall silent under the worst of these times. We’re still here, and He’s not done here. It is horrible. Scary. Overwhelming. Awful. Sometimes it feels like he’s sleeping in the boat during the storm, but we already know how that turned out last time. He’s definitely in the boat with us. About to do something remarkable. Again.

So, I take a deep breath and assert that my hope will rise and weather the tide.

Because when the floods come and the waves crash, that’s what solid, seaworthy boats do.

Wanna get in my boat?

When I was a kid growing up in California, I heard many stories of our extended family in Pittsburgh; aunts, uncles and grandparents occasionally getting along together, but mostly arguing and doing inconsiderate things to one another. My mother had been deeply emotionally wounded by her siblings and parents, so most of the stories seemed to be tilted towards injustices and misunderstandings that never were recognized or apologized for. People calling each other unkind names. People taking things that weren’t theirs to take. People crap talking about each other behind their backs. People disappointing one another over and over again. Oblivious to the wake of pain they left behind them for the next generation and the one after that. Perhaps it did her good to tell these stories again and again but for me, it was a reminder that family wasn’t necessarily the safest place to be.

My father’s stories were much the same. His father was a tough, cigarette-smoking alcoholic whose own growing up, I suspect, was not filled with laughter and love. My dad’s father liked to swear, drink, and show everyone how tough he could be, even though he was short of height and slight of build. Or perhaps because of that. My brothers had experiences of being with him telling randy jokes or being just generally badass, but I didn’t. I knew him mostly as an old man who had done some unkind and unfair things in his life. A man who didn’t care at all about me, which was just as well. My father told me once that the saddest movie he had ever seen was one in which a young boy hid in a closet to escape the rage of his parents’ fighting. I realized in my older years that this wasn’t a movie, but my father’s own life experience of his tumultuous home which he remembered as a film because that was a less painful way to remember it. My father joined the Navy not just to fight in WWII but to escape what was his parents’ complicated way of being both loving and horrible to each other.

I recall a story told to me many times over about my paternal step-grandmother severing her relationship with her stepson, my uncle, over the cutting and sharing - or lack of sharing - of a watermelon on a hot summer afternoon. He didn’t extend a slice to her, apparently, and it soured the relationship for life. That’s it. That’s the story.

Even as a child, I thought this was strange. But everyone seemed to take it as a matter of course that this wound was severe enough to require a substantial apology that my uncle would never stoop to offer and that my step grandmother was too hardheaded to accept anyway. It just was what it was. They never reconciled. Probably because there was so much unspoken anger about other things in the relationship, like the fact that my grandfather had been spending time with her while his wife, my biological grandmother, was dying of cancer. There was a lot going on, never acknowledged or wrestled with. It wasn’t about fruit. The watermelon was just the last juicy straw.

The strangest thing about all this is that my parents instilled in me and my brothers the basic moral pillars of honesty, kindness, generosity and fairness. They taught us the golden rule, they expected us to be honorable people who didn’t cheat others or try to advance ourselves on the backs of people as we climbed our ladders to success. They encouraged us to communicate, to share, to trust. Well, sometimes.

My parents were kind.

But my parents were also the walking wounded, both of them.

My mother gave me the advice to never trust friends, because they will eventually leave or betray you. She taught me to be wary of the attention of suitors, that most men were selfish and unreliable. She told me I was special, and that people were likely to take advantage of that, but that it was also my responsibility to make others happy because I was so naturally good at that. She told me it was also my responsibility to protect myself from being taken advantage of in any way. She revealed that as a child she had genuinely believed her own mother to have been an actual angel, and then she told me story after story about how her mother had neglected her feelings, violated her boundaries and shamed her.

My father never drank, never swore and never smoked, unlike his father. He didn’t hit us, he rarely raised his voice, and he was as honest as the day is long. He was a good man. And he also lived by the maxim “Never expect anything from anyone and you’ll never be disappointed.” He lived carefully, not taking too many chances, not putting himself out there to be hurt.

Both my father and mother had internalized the belief that if bad things happened to you, it was probably your own fault.

I had loving, kind parents who did their absolute best to raise me and my brothers in a family of stability and integrity. They loved us.

But there were those watermelon stories. Those hiding in the closet memories. Grandparents, aunts and uncles from whom I was completely disengaged. An entire family tree that seemed warped with unforgiveness and unresolved trauma.

It took me many years to recognize the cognitive dissonance. You can live in a loving home right alongside the ghosts of cruelty and pain. You can be wrapped in love and fear at the very same time, so close you can’t really tell them apart.

Which brings me to today, I guess.

I read other Substack posts from people who rightfully rail against MAGA members who are defecting. They point out that these defectors weren’t bothered by the injustices of ICE or the dismantling of USAID or the corruption breaking down the Constitution in real time, or the sex trafficking that has gone unpunished. Some of these MAGA are leaving because it’s costing them more to fuel their gas tanks and buy their groceries. Some are leaving because their military sons and daughters are in the line of fire to be sent overseas. Some are leaving because they are losing healthcare benefits. In short, they are leaving because now the pain is palpably their own.

I get it. It’s maddening to watch people you love fall down a rabbit hole of lies. It’s crazy making to see them arguing for the very people in power who are destroying what we stand for. It’s deeply depressing to realize they don’t see the world in any way, shape or form like we do. To know they don’t understand how deeply embedded in racism, xenophobia and prejudice this entire nation operates. To feel disappointed in their apparent insensitivity to the greater good.

But if, and when they DO begin to see the collateral damage and consider stepping away from it, how do we let them? Do we thank them? Embrace them? Welcome them into the work of reintegration? Do we encourage them? Do we point out the ways we ourselves made it hard with our own self-righteousness or anger? Or do we point out every shameful thing they did? Do we tell them it’s too late? Do we retell the stories over and over again about how they disappointed us, bought into the cruelty, stood on the side of the oppressor? Do we cheer or sneer? Do we respond with our hearts or our minds or our rage or our hope?

Do we lose it over a slice of watermelon?

I don’t know.

It would have been wonderful if even half of the stories my parents told would have ended in, “But then they realized what they had done and they apologized and never did it again.” I longed for the story to end with, “But the mother and father found their little son crying in the closet and hugged him tight, saying they were sorry he had been so afraid.” How wonderful it would have been to hear, “Then they realized how silly it had been to be angry over a slice of watermelon, so they hugged and cried and laughed and laughed!”

I would have truly loved to hear, “Yeah, it was terrible, but I realize now what happened and I’m okay now. I can finally let it go.”

But that’s not what happened in the end.

So.

If the family members I love but am separated from were to speak out and say they were leaving MAGA, I would rejoice. I’d send balloons and flowers in congratulations. I’d cheer.

But it’s much more likely that they either won’t leave MAGA, too proud or afraid, or if they do, they’ll slip into a silence about it. It will be as though they never had gone there in the first place. The narrative will change. They will have always been for equality and justice. They will never have actually believed the president or anything he had said. They will go quiet and move on as if nothing had ever separated us in the first place.

Because in our family, if you made a mistake, if you were fooled, if you were afraid or taken in by the lies - well, that’s your fault.

If you’re disappointed, well, that’s your fault, too.

I wonder if a lot of families live with this, and that’s why it’s so impossible to rewrite the ending of the story. Good families, contributing members to society, church goers, charity-givers, taxpayers, hardworking Joes one and all. All at fault. All afraid of judgement, spoken or not, that will go on for years and years and years.

All carrying the burden of unresolved grief. Of shame for being fallible, human and wrong.

It makes it very hard to reconnect. I also realize that reconnection takes both sides to do, and as my father taught me, disappointment comes in expectation.

I’m not even sure if my own response will be as open and kind as I would like. Maybe I’m all tangled in the web, too. Probably. I wrestle with it. I sigh a lot. It might be healthier to risk the disappointment, to hold the hand open, to consider my part in the mess, to apologize and sit quietly with the contradictions that cut with their sharp edges. But can I do that? Should I?

I might be very wrong. Maybe I’m wronger? Is that a thing? Wronger? Wrongest?

Omigod.

But I also would like to consider that looking at all the options at least leaves the door ajar, and watermelon slices available to either side.

Who doesn’t like watermelon?

Damn. It’s so hard to be human. Moreso now, it seems.

A deep breath, even if it is a sigh, is something. It’s better than a curse, although not yet a blessing.

Still, it gives the body a moment of stillness, of fullness, of possibility. Enough oxygen to take the next step.

There are stories we can never rewrite. History that can’t be rubbed out. Shouldn’t be.

Some stories have endings yet to be written, and in that, we might just still have a choice. A chance to change the narrative for ourselves and those who follow us. A new way of being family. Maybe. With enough watermelon to go around as we start over again.

Sigh.

Breathe deep.

Perhaps there is still time.

Maybe.

That’s all I got.

Peace.

Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde writes: The most effective response to resistance is not talking louder, but the patient work of building trust across differences.

This makes sense.

But we’re not doing it very well.

I see the news; I feel the chaos and hear the multiplicity of voices on both sides. I look both at clever memes and at deeply insightful analyses of the disintegration of our democratic systems. The ones I agree with I repost or restack; the others I shake my head at and move on. I give myself the leeway to occasionally repost something hilariously snarky, though I realize I probably should do better.

After all, those bozos deserve it. Right?

Right?

But then…that “building trust across differences” thing sits there on the page like a chocolate croissant that has been sitting in the bakery all afternoon. It’s flaky, buttery, potentially yummy but also potentially oily and stale. Could be delicious. Could be disappointing. Who knows?

Should I pick it up? Take a bite?

Sigh.

Let’s be clear - I understand that I am not going to have a conversation about human dignity with Pete Hegseth, nor is Kash Patel going to invite me to a confab at the local pub. Kristy Noem will never ask me about dog training tips, and Pam Bondi is oblivious that I exist. Honestly, all that is ok by me, I doubt I could have much effect on their world views anyway. As far as my influence in their lives, that ship has not already sailed because that ship was never built.

But the thing that nags me at night is my self-talk that I am nothing like them and would never stoop to the lows they have each in their own way chosen as a path forward.

What nags me is my self-assuring insistence that we are different.

Back in December, Jon bought an old 1974 trawler boat named “Bubba.” It is stored in a boathouse in the marina of the Tacoma Yacht Club. In order to keep the boat moored there, we had to join the club. I found this a bit intimidating and uncomfortable. I’ve not ever really belonged to any clubs at all, much yet a yacht club.

Yacht clubs are for captains of industry and their trophy wives. They are for people who have regular appointments with masseuses and personal shoppers. They go to hair salons, not the Great Clips where I go to see Charlie when I can resist the urge to cut my bangs myself. Yacht club members’ teeth are always white. They wear haute couture and expensive colognes and spend their summers cruising locally with their friends or taking first class flights to Corsica or Lake Como. They go to the symphony and likely know the conductor. They hobnob with CEOs and COOs and CFOs and a whole other Cs with other letters trailing opulently behind.

They are not like me.

I had a hard time when we went to our first Tacoma Yacht Club meeting to be introduced to the group as new members. I felt wiggly. Frumpy. Out of place. I wore too big of a smile to make up for it. We had a buffet dinner in one of the larger meeting rooms, and as we sat at our tables, servers in black serenely rotated throughout the room with glittering trays of wine glasses and hors d'oeuvres or swiftly removed our dirtied plates and cutlery.

I felt a bit embarrassed, and also, a bit superior. I had better values, didn’t I? Wasn’t I a better person for not having those expensive false eyelashes and perfect hair? I don’t buy into this affluence as a given. I have a realistically flabby body untouched by nips and tucks. I am approachable, if not occasionally downright scruffy. I have dog hair on my jeans most of the time. I have been in my lifetime categorized as the working poor. I’m a retired music teacher. I have gravitas. I make it a point to notice the nametags of the table servers and thank them by name. Therefore, aren’t I more grounded, more humble, more generous of spirit because I have worked in inner city schools, have unresolved cellulite and don’t spend money on Botox? Yay for me. Give it up for humble ol’ me. Everybody cheer.

But then I began to look more carefully around the room.

There was the older gentleman who, I later learned, buried his son just two weeks ago and this was his first day out in public since the funeral. There was the woman on chemo, recovering once again from cancer. There was the couple who sold their boat of twenty years and are now associate members (non-boat owners) because they are now too old and infirm to sail but don’t want to be forgotten by their club friends. There’s the grandma whose adult children moved to another state, so she only sees them and her grandkids once or twice every few years. Over there was the middle-aged man awkwardly eating his shrimp and not talking to anyone else at the table. That table across from me had two newly widowed women in their 80s, looking a little frail but fiercely brave. That younger woman over there just looked exhausted. There was the older woman recently arrived from Jamaica, hoping to make friends here as an associate member. And the man we bought our boat from has had to watch his wife be put into a medical coma to save her life, after already having been resuscitated twice before with CPR in the previous months. That’s why they are not boating anymore. She might die while they are in the water, too far from shore for an ambulance to arrive.

My heart softened, not because of a charitable thought or any nobility of mine. My heart softened because I was gently reminded that from my viewpoint on my little high horse, I could not see that there was no actual difference between me and them. They struggle to figure out their lives. They have good days and hard times. They hope to be safe, to be loved, to be worth the attention of others. They doubt. They worry and they laugh. They pee and poo and cry and sigh.

I had to dismount.

It’s much easier for me to consider that I have things in common with a gang member or a prostitute. The quote attributed to St. Francis, “There but for the grace of God go I” works very well for fostering an empathy for those less fortunate. It feels compassionate and Christian-ey. From my vantage point of middle-class privilege, I can look down and say the same, “There but for the grace of God...” But it’s the looking down that is the sweet poison which goes down like honey. Looking up isn’t any better for you and is even more likely to foster shame or resentment.

It’s the looking anywhere but straight across that warps my vision.

I found myself watching the shrimp eating man and recognizing my own awkwardness. The man who had buried his son touched my heart with his vulnerable, searching gaze. The boisterous laugh of the Jamaican woman made me want to giggle with her. The server juggling her wineglass tray got my furtive admiration.

So, I must come to the uncomfortable conclusion that if I am no different than the gang member or the yacht club member, there is a likelihood that given the upbringing and childhood lessons that Pam Bondi received, I might resemble her too. The brokenness of Pete Hegseth’s understanding of humanity and patriotism did not just develop in the ether. He was taught that, encouraged to believe it and was steeped in the kind of shame and self-deception that would make it his default operating system. Who would I be, if immersed in the same sea? Kash Patel drinks for tenuous acceptance and for temporary escape. I am watching it destroy him in real time. I like a good gin and tonic too. What would I be doing if I had to live his life? Maybe I would be a better person. Maybe not.

I am like Schrodinger’s Cat in its box, except instead of being both alive and dead I am both a saint and a monster. Like all of us. It depends on when and how you open the box.

It doesn’t mean that I will just accept immoral actions and words from those in power, any more than I would accept them from those on the margins of power. I’m not willing to make excuses for things like the murder of Renee Good or the bombing of an Iranian elementary school. I’m not letting Trump off the hook for the responsibility of his often-heinous actions. But it does allow me to sit with the paradox that my personal railing against darkness might take up so much of my emotional bandwidth that I’m too tired to look for possible solutions, for light. Excuses do nothing, but understanding someone’s reasons means something just might be changeable, or preventable. And it makes me have to hold as truth that everyone, yes even them, is beloved of God and worthy of my kindness.

I can’t change whatever happened to make Kristi Noem who she is. I can’t turn back the wheels of time to unmake Melania’s obvious tormented and tormenting life. But I can change the way I might react to a Kristi-in-the-making who is still reachable by kindness and careful attention. I can have a quiet conversation with someone about the goodness of the human spirit and perhaps encourage them to access that goodness that I see within them rather than reaching for postures of power or FAFO. I can hear in that old MAGA-furious man that what enrages him is his fear of being overlooked, underappreciated, and left behind.

Once while stopped at a red light, I noticed a turbaned man walking a Jack Russell terrier on the sidewalk. I adore dogs. I was staring, I suppose. The man saw me staring and looked at me with a frown. So, I rolled down the passenger side window and shouted, “Your dog is the sweetest thing I’ve seen all day!”

The blindingly bright grin that came over that man’s face told me everything I needed to know in the moment. How often he gets stared at, honked at, perhaps sworn at, or avoided by pedestrians crossing to the other side of the street. How much less often he gets seen as the proud owner of an adorable dog.

“Thank you! Goodbye!” he shouted as the light turned green.

“Goodbye!” I shouted back.

This, this is how I want to see others every day that I possibly can. With mutual joy. With clarity that makes us look at each other with delight. With hope. With empathy. For every person who looks and acts like me and every person who does not. Because we are, at our deepest core, truly very much the same. And I’d like to think that once in a while they see me that way, too. This I think is the main way we can move forward out of the dark.

Perhaps in that realization, I might paraphrase St. Francis and change the wording slightly. I don’t think he would mind. It helps me to navigate the streets if I remember this from time to time. Maybe it might help you too.

“There, in the grace of God, go I.”

I did something today I did not think I would do. I said “yes” to a generosity I didn’t ask for, didn’t expect, and didn’t feel quite worthy of.

Three people have offered to pay for my little ruminations here, and for a while, I sat with that and didn’t do anything. It felt like too much of a gift. It felt weird. It made me uncomfortable. As my go-to phrase for new ideas in my life, “You people are freaking me out!”

And slowly, slowly I realized (because I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer) that I was letting my insecurity and pride dictate the generosity of others. I was gatekeeping, and not really for the right reasons.

If someone I was walking with decided to give some money to a homeless person, I wouldn’t bat an eye. It would not be my right to decide how another person can respond with kindness. If someone wanted to pet my dog, I would probably let them, because I could see whether or not they would take joy from it, and whether or not Chester could, too. If someone volunteers at my church, it would be silly of me to jump in and tell them they didn’t need to, or that it was too generous of them. If someone compliments my friend as we walk by, it makes me smile. If I see someone in the grocery parking lot help an older person to put their groceries in the car, I don’t interfere. In fact, I celebrate it. It makes my day.

And yet, if someone wants to do an unexpected kindness for me, especially here, I get wiggly, angsty, and uncomfortable. OOOOOOO. Eeek.

This discomfort with generosity is all over our country right now. It shows itself up in primarily three ways:

1. 1. If you are being generous to me, you must have an ulterior motive.

2. 2. If you are being generous to someone else, you are being played.

3. 3. If you want me to be generous with you for someone else, you are stupid, or you have an ulterior motive, and you and I are both being played.

And then there’s the one I am feeling right now:

1. 4. If you are being generous to me, you must not yet realize I don’t deserve it.

It’s easy to shake my head at the first three and identify them as selfish and jaded people who are probably serious Trumpers and no doubt are not much fun at parties. But the more I think about it, the more I sit with number four and wonder if it’s not somehow connected deeply to the other three.

When I listen to the complaints of those who are indignant at policies that help immigrants, or bristle at prison reforms, or suggest that welfare recipients are buying jaguars and wagyu beef, I hear more than just anger. I hear resentment.

Resentment has two little children that grow up and make themselves at home in the human heart. The first child is the one that says, “I’ve been cheated.” That’s bad enough, and most complaining people are likely to give that one the biggest voice in the room.

But the second child whispers, “Because I didn’t deserve to be treated fairly.”

No matter how they deny it, I have seen over and over again that those who have the children of resentment in their hearts always have two children. Never just the one.

And the one who whispers does it because that child lives closest to the heart. Entwined in it. So much so that it feels like it IS the heart.

Perhaps it is.

And it’s also the one so painful that nobody wants to hear it said aloud. So, child number one gets all the airwaves.

To be true, both children are born of a lie.

But it doesn’t make them any less powerful at slowly, painfully eating away at the heart of their own home.

So.

I may not be hearing the voice of the first child, since the world has been in so many ways, so much gentler and kinder to me than millions of others. I’ve been cheated, sure, but not a lot. Not enough to carry it around all day like a backpack of rocks.

But damn it, the second child lives and whispers.

The only way around this, I find, is to practice a sort of reverse empathy. I have been lucky to be around people who have encouraged generosity, kindness, gentleness. I love it when I see it in action for others. I must, to be fair and empathetic, allow myself to feel the same joy when it turns in my direction. So that the child of “non deserving” doesn’t get to dictate to me what is not true, and more so, puts walls up for what others are allowed to do for me. If I don’t have the right to stop generosity going out (and I don’t) I don’t have the right to stop it coming in. I risk falling on a very dangerous, sharp, death-wielding weapon.

That child of my heart, the second-born child of “non deserving” has a wicked weapon - pride.

Pride is deadly.

Pride shows up when a person who needs to be in assisted living will not leave their two-story home. It shows up when a man will not let his family know he is afraid, and so he leaves. Or hits. Pride makes a man sneer at someone down and out because nobody helped him in his time of need, he hardened, and now he’d rather die than accept or give charity. Pride makes a woman refuse to accept her wrinkles, her cellulite, her thinning lips, because it’s the only way she knows she can still be valued or loved. Pride says “I don’t need you” in ways that sound kind, but they’re not.

“Oh, that’s ok.”

“Never mind.”

“Oh you shouldn’t have.”

“No, no, no, I insist.”

With a swift sword or a soft smothering pillow, pride can kill you, if you’re not careful.

It may kill others, too.

So, a long way around the block to come to terms with the uncomfortable beauty of circular generosity and grace.

If we ask it for others, we must accept it, too.

If we accept it for ourselves, we must give it to others.

The circle must continue, or it stalls. Even when the stall looks like humility or just a good ol’ fashioned, “Oh shucks, you shouldn’t have.”

Thank you for reminding me that acceptance is part of the process of loving. All of us must be free to give love, pass it along, accept it, hold it close, and start the process all over again. If we stop the flow anywhere along the line, we all suffer in small ways or large.

I’ve opened up the paid subscription option. Maybe this will encourage me to start putting out more videos and other creative things I’ve been fiddling with. It’s another step in the ongoing process of putting myself out there for the joy of it, the community of it, and the challenge we give one another to be more human, more real, and more loving in this crazy world.

Love is love is love is love.

Thank you for loving me, just because you do.

May I do the same for all of you.

Peace.

Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my own; God sent me. Why don’t you understand me? Because you can’t hear what I say. You have sided with the devil, and you want to carry out his desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. So, when I tell the truth, you do not believe me! Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, why don’t you believe me? Whoever belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.” John 8:42-47

By now, everyone not living under a rock knows that Trump is posting on Truth Social all sorts of nasty stuff about the pope for what the pope said. The pope, in return, is refusing to engage in argument, instead going to Africa and representing the best of outreach, love, understanding and grace.

Take note. There is power in this.

Pope Leo XIV on Thursday declared that “The world is being ravaged by a handful of tyrants, yet it is held together by a multitude of supportive brothers and sisters. The masters of war pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy,” the pope said, “yet often a lifetime is not enough to rebuild.”

Again, take note. He’s not sugarcoating the damage but he’s also asserting that there are supportive brothers and sisters (us, folks) who are holding the world together. Even after the damage, even if it lasts a lifetime.

Because we’re called to. Because we can.

It’s a road map for engagement with your own detractors. How to stand firm when the world feels like a room full of pissed off rattlesnakes. Take note, folks.

So far, my tiny group of readers pretty much agree with me, and I have yet to have significant detractors telling me that I am evil or misguided or naive or stupid. And that’s ok. I guess they will come in time. If not, that’s ok too. I think of myself as a house sparrow in the kingdom, and house sparrows don’t usually get much attention. Nobody is going to heave a grenade at a common house sparrow. In the grand scheme there are eagles who make much easier targets and give bigger bragging rights.

But you no doubt, have friends, relatives, spouses, significant others who think that the pope is out of his lane, or that talking about this is not helpful or that perhaps you are evil or misguided or naive or stupid for wanting something other than the Trumposphere to represent your faith in this world. YOU are in a battlefield of your own with your own detractors. You, in your eagley beauty, have to deal with the slings and arrows of the world much more than I do.

When they get all up in your face, we all, eagles and sparrows alike, have a boots-on-the-ground example to follow, when the gospel of Jesus feels, for the moment, too abstract, too archaic or too far away. Kudos to you, Pope Leo. That’s what a good leader does, I believe. Set an example to follow. So here it is.

Pope Leo XIV is not engaging Trump in argument. There’s no tit for tat here. He’s doing something far more dangerous and irritating.

He’s just reiterating the gospel.

He’s just speaking truth.

He’s ignoring the bait in favor of better and meatier words. More important ones.

He’s moving on.

And that’s way more than enough to unsettle a narcissist.

Rev. Allison Burns-Lagreca writes:

What began as Trump’s expectation of papal approval, rooted in his assumption that all authority figures would eventually bend to his will, has devolved into a public campaign of devaluation, manipulation, and coercion. The Pope’s consistent refusal to serve Trump’s narrative, his moral witness on behalf of migrants, the poor, and the vulnerable, and his unwillingness to be instrumentalized for American political purposes have triggered a textbook case of narcissistic collapse that is unfolding in real time before a global audience.

I highly recommend you read her very long but insightful post about this here…

But for those of you who want a shorter version, it’s simply this:

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin (Daniel 5:25)

Huh?

Back in the days of the Old Testament, Belshazzar, coregent of Babylon, was a huuuuuuge deal. He had unlimited power, a huge batch of slaves to do his bidding, and the power to do whatever he liked without answering to anyone. And cronies. So many cronies. Much like Trump. Yes, history repeats itself.

One evening when old Belshazzar was having his own Mar-A-Lago party, it is said a disembodied hand appeared in his party house and wrote on the wall, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin.” After they all got done freaking out and decided it wasn’t a wine-induced hallucination, they tried to figure out what it meant. Nobody knew, even the smartest Babylonians around, so finally Belshazzar got his old Hebrew slave Daniel, well in his eighties, to come up and see if he could translate it, which Daniel conveniently could. Belshazzar offered Daniel some serious money and power for the effort, much like Trump giving the Door Dash woman her $100 tip for his order of Big Macs and fries, but Daniel said, “Keep your crap, I don’t need anything from you. I’m old, been a slave for decades, gonna die any day now, what are YOU giving me at this point? I’ll translate it for myself, thank you very much. But I can tell you now, King B, you are not going to like this.”

Here is what it meant:

“Measured, Measured, weighed and found wanting.”

Daniel told ol B-boy that God measured Belshazzar, weighed all his accomplishments and importance, and decided, “Meh.”

It was times-up for ol B-boy, the last shindig, the last rodeo. Belshazzar’s kingdom was sacked that very night, and he himself was killed in the raid. Rotten way to end a party. New management took over. People cleaned up the mess and moved on. Belshazzar became irrelevant. In one night, the mightiest ruler of the mightiest kingdom of its day became a nothing, a cipher in the annals of history. A blip.

Nothing irritates a self-important, coddled narcissist more than being thought of as a blip.

Pope Leo hasn’t said anything except the obvious, that the poor should be cared for, that war is wrong, that politics doesn’t give anyone a get-out-of-jail-free card, that the earth and all who live in it are worthy of grace, and that truth and love don’t change sides when it’s convenient. Just your basic gospel truth. He hasn’t engaged in argument or rebuttal of any of Trump’s posts on Truth Social. Why?

Because it’s not worth his time.

In other words, Trump’s authority is measured, weighed and found wanting.

Trump’s a blip.

A nasty, evil, son-of-a-bitch blip, but a blip nonetheless.

No matter who he cajoles, or how he lies, or what new chaos he creates, Trump can’t change the truth. He can’t demand loyalty from Leo. He can’t twist what is fundamentally true, and he can’t make it suit his purpose. He can’t rewrite the gospel, even if he has a whole group of followers reading the bible on broadcast from DC for his own edification. Trump is doomed to a narcissistic collapse, just like Belshazzar. He is going down. From his own decisions. It’s inevitable.

And he KNOWS.

Again, Rev. Allison Burns-Lagreca writes:

“At its core, narcissistic collapse happens when: The illusion of superiority is pierced by undeniable reality; External validation dries up or shifts to criticism; A figure appears who cannot be controlled, manipulated, or dominated.”

So there it is.

No doubt, it’s going to get really awful. Trump is going to go ballistic. He’ll go down screaming like a child. So will his followers. It will be noisy and disgusting and depressing and probably very profane. But, and it’s a big “but” - it doesn’t change truth. It won’t be forever. It won’t win.

It can’t.

A sane, calm, grounded response of grace and truth is absolutely devastating to evil.

It’s the equivalent of a disembodied hand, writing on a wall.

It’s so counterintuitive, it’s almost magical.

This is our power. This is our weapon and our stronghold.

Truth. Spoken calmly, hand in hand with love.

Whoever belongs to God hears what God says.

And repeats it. Verbatim.

That’s it.

Trump and his followers will be cruel, angry, false, hateful, threatening, furious, wild.

But it’s because they simply can’t face what is loving, lasting and true.

Truth is light, and it exposes everything sooner or later. Epstein files. Inside trading. Tax evasion. Sexual predation. Shady deals. Unpaid contracts. All of it. Because the more truth is attacked, the more they try to spin it and hide it and deny it, the brighter it is and the more it eventually reveals. You can throw everything of Hell at it and it just shrugs. It outlasted Belshazzar and it will outlast Trump too. It’s eternal. It’s married to love, and the combo is unstoppable. Truth and Love. You can’t beat it, and you can’t kill it. It just rises up again.

And it’s exactly what YOU are capable of holding in your heart.

So don’t worry about having a great argument or three talking points and a slide presentation. You won’t need it.

You are, literally, a hand, writing on a wall. All of us are.

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin, we write.

Truth and love will prevail. Lean into them both. Accept nothing else as your heart’s response to the mayhem. Stay the course and trust the journey. Carefully let your hand write the cursive on the wall. Take your time and write it clear.

You are measured, weighed and found wanting, Mr. President.

And so, we will move on.

Hold fast to this, folks. It’s our superpower.

Peace.

Where to begin?

Well at least Iran is still on the planet today. TACO once again.

Still, the tsunami of nastiness roars ever on.

The morning thoughts usually run like this:

1. What’s happening today? Holy crap.

2. Anything I can do about it? Hmmm.

3. Do I have enough Tums? (I’ve been gnoshing them quite a lot lately.)

For about a week now, I’ve been seriously digging around like a badger, reading, listening, praying, thinking, searching for the right way to continue to respond to the ongoing blast of evil rhetoric. More than my usual rabbit hole excursions. This is archeology. Also, blatant internet surfing. It’s mostly because, despite evidence to the contrary, I do have a temper and can let fly with words that are, let’s just say, unworthy of repeating if I am pushed too far. And lately, every day of the news is a push too far. I feel, as they say, my temperature rising. I need a little extra support. I’m guessing you do, too.

Reading other writers on social media who use the pejorative language of name calling and profanity makes me feel righteously ferocious as I yell, “Hell YEAH” and “No shit!” while gobbling it up greedily like chocolate. But let’s face it, that’s just a knee jerk reaction that I let myself have only once in a while. It’s not the playbook I want to live by. It’s just an emotional outburst that feels good but doesn’t inspire me to do any better. So, I glance at them, I have my guilty pleasure and I move on. It’s too tempting to stay there in the outrage and I can’t afford that.

This is why I lean so heavily on the gospel, and the words and actions of better folk than myself - because if I am honest, what I want to do most of the time is yell, argue, or fantasize doing some amazing kung-fu high kick to some GOP goofball that they didn’t see coming. Sometimes I imagine the president’s head is a soccer ball and I’m the best kicker in FIFA. GOOOOOOOOOALLLLLLL! Oooo, that did feel good.

As I search, I do find (from time to time) people who respond in ways I admire and hope to emulate. It helps. I hope it helps you, too. Here’s a short list of the more recent ones I have found.

In no particular order:

If your faith has a cross at the center, then at the center of your faith is politics—not partisanship, as we experience it, but a sober appreciation for the ways human beings use and abuse collective power. To downplay the politics of the cross is to gloss over the fact that those in charge of the Roman Empire in Jerusalem perceived Jesus as enough of a threat to crucify him, a form of execution reserved for insurrectionists and escaped slaves. Thus, the way of the cross is not only concerned about what lies beyond this world, but God’s vision for this world. It is not an individual path alone, for our personal salvation. It is a collective journey, one that engages us in faithfulness to that vision of justice, mercy, and love that God has instilled in our hearts. The cross is a reminder of the price we must pay. — Bishop Mariann Budde

The testimony of Scripture really couldn't be any clearer: God does not stand on the side of those who believe that annihilation is a moral good, or that wielding power to oppress other people is somehow holy. God is always on the side of the oppressed. God is always in opposition to strong men who believe in the power of violence to somehow create peace and stability. — Brandan Robertson

This is not a time to attack Trump’s war because it costs too much money or to attack it because it’s bad for energy markets or raises the price of groceries. I mean, it does do all of that. All of that is true. But we’re way past that point now. We’re at the point where you need to unambiguously condemn the immorality and criminality of what’s going on. No mincing of words. — Paul Krugman

One of the quieter gifts of liturgical tradition is the way common prayer functions when you have nothing left to generate on your own. When you’re too wrung out to come up with original spiritual thoughts, you can borrow someone else’s. The Psalms especially. Psalm 46 has been close to me lately. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea.” That was written by someone who also believed the world was coming apart at the seams. It has been prayed through plagues and wars and famines and the rise and fall of empires. It arrived on the other side of all of it still intact.— Beau Stringer

We are not allowed to take up the sword ever again. We are not allowed to kill, to use violence to defend our Lord or anyone. If there ever was a time when we could kill or were justified in the use of violence or war, it was then, in Gethsemane, to protect our guy, to defend our Lord Jesus, but he says, “No, that is not our way. That is not my way. Put away your sword, your guns, your violence, your bombs, your nuclear weapons. We are people of the cross, people of nonviolence, people who resist systemic injustice through steadfast, organized nonviolent movements.” — John Dear

I say this as a Christian priest & theologian: Jesus came to give us life and life to the fullest. And any Christianity that threatens to commit genocide by destroying an entire civilization needs to be ripped up, shredded and incinerated. Burn it so that from its ashes, a more ancient, love-oriented, Jesus-centered Christianity that looks, tastes and smells more like Jesus may rise. — Joash P Thomas

Make no mistake, there are literally millions of people out there who, like you and me, want to follow God in paths of justice and mercy, even if they don’t say it just like that. Millions.

There are so many of us who still care, who still struggle and who are still willing to suffer through the chaos to witness into being something new, something better, something worthy of the word Christian. We’re everywhere. You deserve to have a few at your back, even if it’s just on Substack.

I encourage you to seek them out. You will find them, and you will find Jesus smack dab in the middle, holding us together. And together, we are still, and always, the family of God.

Sigh. Take a deep breath.

And maybe a Tums.

Peace.

Last Sunday I attended the memorial of my son-in-law’s father, who had a completely unexpected and unfair sudden death due to a weird medical incident nobody could possibly have seen coming. My son-in-law is not yet forty and has already lost both his parents in the last 24 months. This is sad and confusing to me. I wish I could comfort him more, give him some word of wisdom. But I know better than to try to explain why; that’s a bigger answer than my little mind can wrap around.

The memorial he created for his dad was a bittersweet mix of tearful remembrances and people dancing to a 70s rock band. Adults clustered at tables, talking, getting each other plates and beverages in small plastic cups. There was barbeque, lots of conversation, kids running around, grown men weeping, and lots of Coors Light. Beautiful, painful words of loss and love spoken into a Shure 58 microphone that caught most, if not all the words. Like most memorials, it was a bit of a tsunami of grief and desserts. Like most wakes, it was laughing into tears into laughing into tears again.

My two granddaughters, aged almost-five and almost-three, were a joyous part of the reckless melee of children sprinting from table to table, wildly throwing themselves into embraces, taste-testing other people’s dinner plates, carefully filling cups with bottled water until overflowing, running off, falling over and generally living out loud without any understanding of what was actually happening around them.

And like all children in complicated environments, each eventually became utterly overwhelmed, melting down into a weeping rage.

I had the privilege of taking each one in their turn to the coat room, the only place available with a soft little sofa, where the sounds and sights of the sad celebration could be just a bit removed. Each girl had spun out of control, furious, yelling, crying, so very angry that I had taken them to this soft place to calm down. In turn, I held each one on my lap while they writhed and hit at me with their tiny fists. They rode their waves of fury, doing their level best to show me in no uncertain terms that they did not want comforting, did not want understanding, certainly did not want kindness or affection. They wanted to scream and cry. So they did.

I recognized that they needed this quiet, calm and a safe place to ride out the confusing avalanche of emotions in their small bodies. I knew that they did not appreciate what I was doing and they each resented it fully. They each, in their own way, in their own time, eventually calmed down. Thank God.

The older one, almost-five, was a bit concerned afterwards. Wide-eyed, she looked a bit ashamed, wondering if I would punish her for her outburst, for saying “NO, NO, NO!” at Grandma so many times. She slid off my lap and hid behind the little sofa, crouching down, not looking at me. When her daddy entered the room, I think she expected me to tell him what a bad girl she had been. I told him instead how glad I was that she was learning how to calm down when she is angry, and how she was doing so much better now. Once she realized she wasn’t going to be reprimanded, she stepped out from behind the sofa and almost immediately flew out to play again. She didn’t thank me. I didn’t expect or need her to.

The younger one, not yet entirely familiar with the human burden of shame, exhausted her tears, resolutely reached her arms out for her auntie Nay-Nay who had entered the coat room, and Nay-Nay took her, smiling, out to the party again. I had instantly ceased to exist and so had her pain.

Neither of the girls will remember this.

But hopefully, deep in their bones, they will remember that their anger wasn’t held against them. That they were, and are, safe. Hopefully, they will grow up to be people who can experience all the emotions of life fully, knowing they are loved.

Life is hard and bittersweet, and I don’t understand it most of the time. Like my granddaughters, it’s not just easy to be overwhelmed by it, it’s inevitable. One by one, each of us at some time or other dissolves into our version of weeping rage. The entire arc of humanity does this too. Over and over again.

Does it ever stop?

Is there a way to fix this?

For all my life, from the very beginning, I was taught there was an answer for this.

I was taught that Jesus died on the cross to pay the price for humanity’s sinfulness. That if we hadn’t broken away from God, this might not have had to happen. That it was absolutely necessary and would have happened even if I personally was the only one who had sinned, and everyone else was holy. It was my sin that nailed him up there. It was God’s justice that demanded it. Jesus died for you and died for me. Paid the price to satisfy the wrath of God. It was my duty to accept this and talk about it as much as possible.

This knowledge gave me both a squirming comfort and a deeply profound sense of shame. At some level I know this to be true. Sin nailed him up there. And I have a place in the story. And I’m supposed to do…something?

But slowly, slowly, something else is being remembered in my bones. Something not taught to me in church. Something older. Something familiar. Something less about doing and believing and more about accepting. Sitting with.

It resonated just a little bit last Sunday. How God sits with sin.

Sitting with my naughty granddaughters, I did not stop either of them from batting at me with their tiny fists. I held them in a safe place while they raged at me, furious that I wasn’t letting them run crying through the crowd. So very angry that I was waiting them out. They were being “bad” - at least as a toddler understands badness.

I felt sorry for them in the moment. I did not feel angry or disappointed in them. My patience wasn’t even being tested, although I suppose if I dealt with this every day, it might get old. But anyway. I had the bandwidth.

Besides, it didn’t really hurt. Their blows felt like butterflies. But if they had hurt me, I would still have done what I did to help them. I would be willing to absorb their outburst. To protect them from hurting themselves, I’d do that. Even if they didn’t understand. Even if they resented it. I think that’s what parents and grandparents generally try to do. Especially, God help us all, in the teen years.

Sometimes it even works.

And today is Good Friday.

So what does that all mean today, at 12:24pm, more than two thousand years after the fact? It’s hard to explain but I’ll try.

Something has been stirring deeper in me these days, the idea that maybe the crucifixion of Jesus wasn’t about satisfying the wrath of an angry Father. Maybe it was instead, a willingness to witness and then absorb the outburst of the world, to hold it in a safe place and allow it to rage fully without causing the death of those who caused it. Taking the time to show that no matter how long it takes, no matter how painful it gets, God is willing to wait us out, willing to accept our fury until we are exhausted enough to calm down and accept the love that is so quietly and eternally offered. Absorbing sin and pain, not just making someone suffer more to justify it or erase it.

To me, the most astonishing thing about the crucifixion isn’t that God came up with the idea, as much as that he found a way through the fabric of humanity, through the humanity of one particular man in one particular time and place, to carry it through to completion. It’s too abstract an idea to imagine God the Father forgiving us no matter what we do. That’s an idea I can take for granted or ignore, depending on how stupid I am on any given afternoon. It’s much less abstract to imagine a thirty-three year old Jewish man with brown eyes and work-rough hands agreeing to hold not only the grace of eternity but also the profanity of millennia of human hate - all in one place, all in one horrendous moment of pain. On a bet that against the odds, it just might work. It’s completely reckless. No reasonable human would have agreed. It makes no sense.

But, boy, does it make sense to me when Jesus cried out, “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani!? God, why have you abandoned me?!”

It’s the cry we all make when the pain is so bad we can’t hear anything else but our own suffering, not even the voice of God. When we’ve done all the right things and it’s still a complete bloody mess. God, where are you when my mother is dying? When my country is falling apart? When I’m lost inside me? When I’m completely wrong about it all? When it feels like death everywhere? Why did you leave me?

It’s the normal, everyday sound of humanity. That makes sense, given the state of the world.

It makes a lot less sense to me when he said, “It is finished.”

That sounds more like the voice of God. Like the voice of calm. Like peace moving through the soul of the world, even when we don’t see it. Even when we don’t understand it. Even when we resent it. Even when I resent it. Even when to me, absolutely nothing is finished or right or fair and I’m just pissed.

Just like my little granddaughters.

If we are to believe the words of Jesus, we hold both the voice of humanity and the voice of God within each of our hearts, often by a thread. It’s not about my teeny thread of life alone. It’s about mine, and yours and everyone else’s too. Every tapestry starts with one thread. Jesus was the first thread of the tapestry that weaves the Divine to the Human. We are each a thread, too, part of the larger fabric that will eventually be revealed. Jesus was the first thread, but the tapestry needs each one of us to be complete. It’s a masterpiece in the making, weaving together Him and me and you and them and us, while we can each only see a fraction of the back side and from our viewpoint it’s kind of a knotted-up mess.

There are two mentions in the passion story of woven fabrics. The first is when the soldiers do not tear Jesus’ robe, since it was woven in one piece from top to bottom. The second is the tearing of the curtain of the Jewish temple at the very moment of Jesus’ death. The woven fabric that protected the sanctuary of the temple, woven by priests, was torn away. The fabric that was a part of the daily wear of the Christ, woven for the shoulders of God, was not.

What if Jesus’ crucifixion was a lot less “payment due” and more a “me, too”? A weaving, not a rending? A fabric woven to include our pain and make something of it to matter in the end?

Would that make it less holy, less a moment of salvation? Maybe not.

Maybe there are more threads to this narrative than we know.

Every year when Good Friday comes around, I contemplate and wonder what I’m supposed to learn this time. Often, to be honest, I don’t wonder all that long or think about it all that much. For years I was too busy helping craft worship services and masses so other folks could contemplate it. I was in full-bore Martha mode. Now I’m trying Mary’s sit-at-the-feet mode and it still feels uncomfortable. The string lies at my feet and I just sit there.

I have no idea what to make of it all, really.

Except that, if God wants to hold me in a safe place to experience the pain of living, if he wants me to know that there’s room for that, it gives me a smidgen of courage to actually feel it. And to be more fully with others when they feel it too. If he wants to weave us together, who am I to beg out of the pattern?

There’s a lot of pain right now, out there and close by. Woven into the fabric of being, and somehow, holdable. I’m learning how to hold out my hands. Learning how my thread connects to another. Maybe to yours.

Today, I wish you peace in your heart. And if no peace is there today, I wish for you a spiritual coat room with a soft sofa, where you can wail and shout and rage, without the fear of shame or punishment. And Someone with you, to hold you, to accept it all, until you are ready to go back out into the wild world again. Someone who can hold the threads for you, as they are beautifully and sometimes painfully woven.

That’s all I’ve got. A thread.

Love you.

“In Hegseth’s 2020 book American Crusade, he wrote that the phrase Deus Vult (God wills it) called ‘followers of Christ to take up the sword in defense of their faith, their families, and their freedom.’ Hegseth then ended the book with that cry: ‘See you on the battlefield. Together, with God’s help, we will save America. Deus vult!’ It turns out, he doesn’t just read the Bible like a Crusader; he actually has a Crusader Bible with the cover essentially made in his own image.”

Oh Pete. How badly can you have missed the point?

I remember having a text conversation with a relative of mine during the height of Black Lives Matter. She was upset that I had fallen into the Left’s dangerous rhetoric, disappointed that I didn’t ascribe to the same interpretation of these times as she does, which is that the church is under attack and we are in a spiritual battle to the death. She was confused by my acceptance of people she genuinely believes to be influenced by Satan because they are Muslim, or gay, or trans or Buddhist or atheist or Shinto or Democrats or Dungeons and Dragons players or vegans or a myriad of other pretty normal human ways to be.

She wrote, “How can I raise my boys to be righteous men in these terrible times?”

And I don’t think it helped her much when my response was, “Wouldn’t it be better to try to raise them to grow up to be kind men who know how to love?”

It’s so easy to look back over history and see the pattern. I don’t think there’s anyone alive who thinks the Inquisition was a high point of Christian history. Likewise, the systemic genocide of indigenous American people in the name of Jesus in the 15th century. I’d be hard put to find a mainstream Christian who thinks the Nazis had a good idea with their Christian nationalistic murder spree of millions of Jews, disabled and gay people. Christianity with an agenda of conquest is a bad idea.

But it’s still too easy to find a tee shirt in a Christian bookstore that looks like this:

I found this online in less than 10 seconds.

People who so desperately want to prove themselves as crusaders, warriors, faithful servants ready to exile, maim and kill whomever God tells them they should.

I’d rather see a tee shirt that says, “Jesus commanded Peter, ‘Put your sword away!’”

But what kind of cool, macho graphic could someone make with that?

Walmart probably could not sell a lot of those in the sporting goods section next to the automatic rifles and camo gear. Much too woke. Much too scripture-passages-we-prefer-to-ignore.

Pete Hegseth and his bible quotes at the end of war briefings is just another chapter in the Christian history books of people whipping out their swords to chop off the servant’s ear in their version of the garden of Gethsemane. Another variation of joyfully torturing heretics for Christ, loyally imprisoning sinners for Jesus, righteously cleansing the land of anything and anyone they don’t understand, won’t make room for or can’t steal from without violence. Another season of knights kneeling at the foot of the cross with their bloodied swords, so humbly proud of their sacrifice of other people’s lives. In the name of Jesus, they shout FOFO. And print millions of tees so their kids will grow up to do exactly the same.

You’d think we’d have learned by now.

I wonder what Pete Hegseth would say about these scriptures:

Hosea 6:6 - God said, “I don’t want your sacrifices—I want your love; I don’t want your offerings—I want you to know me.”

Matthew 9:11 - Jesus said, “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.”

Isaiah 1:15 - From now on, when you pray with your hands stretched out to heaven, I won’t look or listen. Even though you make many prayers, I will not hear, for your hands are those of murderers; they are covered with the blood of your innocent victims.

Isaiah 2:4 - They will beat their swords into plowshares… Nation will not take up sword against nation.

1 Peter 3:9 - Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing.

The thing is it is so much more emotionally satisfying to be a self-declared warrior. So much sweeter an ego stroke to pray publicly and with lots of weapons for the sake of your version of your god. And it’s positively orgasmic to think of yourself as the innocent, oppressed Christian faithful servant, because then literally everyone else you disagree with is your oppressor. Which feels wonderful when you’re the one oppressing everyone else. Guilt be gone! You have given yourself permission to crap on the rest of the world in the name of your god. Not the real-deal God, not the one pointing to the log in your eye, just the cruel one you cobbled together for yourself. It’s so easy. You can go anywhere and everywhere, spreading your personal religion to every town and every person you absorb. It’s like eating Fritos - you won’t stop at just one. Pete loves Fritos, I’ve heard.

Poor Pete H has no idea what to do with a God who requires honest willingness to sit with our own total bullshit in the clear, unvarnished light of truth. A God who requires us to die to self, to let all that ego and self-importance become not just unimportant but hilariously, forever irrelevant. Not to drop to our knees like Crusaders, emblazoned on a tee shirt as a noble suffering servant - but to drop everything - even the desire to be seen as surrendering ourselves at all. Pete has no idea that Jesus calls us to step aside from the spotlight and let the light go ahead of us, so that we can follow, knowing full well we are still standing in the dark. Pete keeps looking for the photo op, the spotlight, the sound bite, the headline.

Even as he turns himself into a meme.

This whole crusade of Christianity coming from the government is nothing new. It’s just modernized now, with social media and algo rhythms. But we’ve heard it before. The KKK spouted it well. So did Joseph McCarthy. The Southern Baptists did a great job of it during the Civil War. Don’t forget Anita Bryant. John Wayne, too. What it really comes from is the very human desire to be exclusively deserving, exclusively powerful and exclusively right.

Thing is, none of us are. And that’s the point that is whizzing over Pete’s head. Whoosh.

Pete and his friends want to make America great again. But America has to let go of its whole identity as the greatest country in the world. It never was. Unquestioning patriotism must die, not so that the country is abandoned, but so that it can heal. Heal from the inflated, poisonous vision of its superiority, its sole faithfulness to God, its whitewashed history of victory after victory after victory. America has to let go of every lie it has told, especially the white ones. It’s the only way anything good of it can survive.

And each of us has to let go of whatever it is that keeps us from looking inside ourselves with an honest gaze. We’re not off the hook, either. Each of us must let go of whatever makes us feel righteously oppressed and pissed off. Each of us must see that there’s someone else more victimized than us, and we’ve probably just watched ICE pick them up. It’s the only way we can open our eyes for once to see those who are truly oppressed, those much too exhausted from it to even feel much of anything anymore. Those dying from our supposed Christian works.

We have work to do. Gospel work. Different from what Pete and his buddies are talking about.

It’s not going to happen when we put our hands on the bible and swear to see each other on the battlefield. Because the real battlefield isn’t one we can share with anyone else except God.

The real battlefield is each of our own secret hearts, waking up, confused, blinking, frightened, wondering how we could have lived so long and so comfortably with the baked-in brokenness of all our systems of governance and society. Wanting, mostly, to comfortably go back to sleep. Knowing there’s work to do, systems to break apart, comforts to abandon, power to relinquish.

There’s no doing the work of God when your hands are full of your own stuff.

G.K Chesterton said it very well: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

America has never been a Christian nation. There is no such thing in this world. And the best thing that could happen would be if we just admitted it. Say it with me. America failed. Just like so many other nations. We are not unique. We are just human like everyone else. Get us off the podium. Turn off the spotlights.

Let it go, already.

Christianity only lives in human hearts unbound by nation, race or tribe. It lives in hearts, not countries. One heart at a time. One breath at a time. It’s not to be found on a podium or printed on a tee.

For those willing to throw out the old tees and take one small step into the unknown, the experiment of living in Christ is a daily listening, not proclaiming. Not fighting. Not rallying the troops. Letting go. Stepping back. Learning to be powerless. Letting God truly take the lead, without the swords.

Perhaps, at the end of all this, we might see a glimmer of truth, but it must come at the death of Pete Hegseth’s nation and angry god. The banners must fall. They absolutely must.

That’s a Deus Vult Pete is not ready for.

Are we?

I have found the writings of the 14th century Persian poet Hafiz and have fallen in love. Not because I resonate or agree with everything he writes, but because of his relentless hope and his rock-solid belief that God has blessed what he writes and therefore all of it is valuable to someone, somewhere, somehow. He calls himself the flute of God and says that every poem he writes is a melody from heaven. Pretty bold, right?

You might call this an inflated ego, but I think of it as the unfiltered confidence of a well-loved child. Mostly because for every word he writes about how great he personally is, he writes a bazillion more about God, love, truth, joy and what really matters in the world. He’s all over joy and truth like a dog over a new squeaky toy, never puts it down.

Here’s a sample:

LOVE creates connection with what LOVE loves. Why wouldn’t it do that, knowing the importance of harmony? The calm heart is vast and lasting. Bring yourself into the presence of God, for there is a rich inheritance waiting for you. Hold hands with the loving people in your life, if a living saint’s warmth is out of reach. Like a special day when you naturally feel uplifted by “something” in the air, Truth is the same “something,” uplifting others. Hold truth gently aloft. Hold it up, always.

In these days of utter ridiculousness of hate and ignorance and every sort of evil, this quote from some old Iranian dude from seven centuries ago can feel facile and shallow, if not outright stupid. I can almost imagine the “papyrus font” of this on a plaque with a background of a seagull hovering over a blue-calm sea. Ew. How can any intelligent human possibly walk around believing the day is special, the air is uplifting, and truth is anywhere to be found — these days?

And then I think, “How can one not?”

The insidious aspect of evil is that once you see it somewhere you begin to hunt for it everywhere. It compounds on itself, calling you from dark alleys, bleak street corners, the dark space in your closet. It haunts your dreams and your social media feed. It screams at you from your car streaming service, podcasts and newspaper (if you still get one.) It hooks you in and makes you wear blinders so you can’t see anything other than what it shows you. It whispers, “Come and find me.” It seems to create a whole new reality you are forced to live in.

But here’s the thing - evil can’t invent or create anything on its own. It only co-opts and corrupts other original creations for its own ends. Our beautiful, nervous, sensitive bodies were made for engaging with the world with all our senses, and evil uses that sensitivity for torment. Our minds are creative and brilliant in inventing all sorts of miraculous things, and evil turns our creativity to the making of weapons and lies. Our desire to belong to one another gets soured into tribalism and nationalism. Our ability to contemplate our very existence, to be self-aware, is a profound gift to allow us a wide avenue for growth and transformation, and evil uses it to make us neurotic and insecure.

Face it. Evil sucks.

If I look at all the things that torment my thoughts these days, they feel compounded - evil upon evil great and small. In my quite reasonable fear, I nevertheless blind myself to the layers upon layers of sacred blessedness that is building up every day, one small moment at a time. And even as I doubt the worth of those thin layers, I know, I know that this doubt is precisely the same voice that whispers from the dark alleys and the hopeless avenues. The dark is dark indeed but it’s not the only color out there, even as I doubt this to be true. I doubt the importance of the light against so much darkness. I doubt the power of truth. I roll around despairing in the dark, wanting to think anything other than thoughts of despair.

Even as I know deep down that this doubt that I hug to my chest for God-only-knows-what-reason is a big fat honkin’ lie.

Welcome to Negativity Bias.

A moment for biology.

Lights, please? Ok.

Our brains are hard-wired to remember the experience of fear, sadness or pain more vividly than confidence, safety or pleasure because of an old survival mechanism called negativity bias. It taps directly into the “lizard brain” amygdala, releasing stress hormones like cortisol, meant to seal the memory of fear or pain in with extra emotional intensity. To protect us. “Ouch! Remember this!” it says. That’s useful when you’re in the jungle and you are scared out of your wits by the roar of a tiger or the snake that just fanged your ankle, but it’s not helpful now when the latest Truth Social tweet sets your amygdala cranking away, making you want to vomit. Anything that feels scary, violent or dangerous is going to burrow itself right down into that old amygdala of yours where it lives forever like that snake bite. The memory of a field of flowers or a perfect hike on a perfect day or the kind words of a stranger aren’t going to trigger your fight or flight, so they’re easier to forget. Your amygdala says, “Meh.”

They don’t seem to matter as much, but oh, they do. They do.

Negativity Bias has had its day. Now it’s time to rewire a little.

Not to get rid of the ol’ NB completely. If you are crossing the street and a souped-up car comes whipping around the corner, it’s good to remember that some drivers are jerks who ignore the traffic signals. But not every driver is a jerk. It’s good to know that some people are safer to trust with your social security number than others are. It’s probably good to not give that Nigerian prince your bank account number “so he can share his wealth with you.” Equally good to not click on that link that says nice young single Korean women want to meet you for free right now. It’s perfectly ok to learn from our painful mistakes. Caution can be helpful.

But when my first thought of the day is to check the news for the latest crisis, and my last action before sleep is to do that all over again, I might be just cruising around in my negative bias, like a hamster in a rollie ball who gets the freedom to roll it all over the house but never gets the freedom of leaving the ball itself. It can go everywhere, and nowhere at the same time. I get that junkie fix of adrenaline and my amygdala goes bonkers. I eat chocolate and get unhappily fat. What’s the point?

Yeah, Karen - what’s your point?

My point is this. Hafiz wrote about the good and the sacred in his life, and it didn’t change the politics of his day. It never deposed an evil ruler. It didn’t change the world. Your gas and groceries are not going to be cheaper if you quote Hafiz at Fred Meyer. Most people don’t know who he is and don’t care. If you tell someone right now that you are reading the words of an Islamic Iranian, they may smack you. They might hate him sight unseen, words unread. Maybe for a bazillion people, Hafiz doesn’t matter at all and never, ever will. But the fact is, his words are still here to read, and they still point to the good, the holy, the beautiful. That counts for something. It’s a small refutation of evil. One that’s obscure and over 700 years old but still.

No matter how evil might raise its head and say “Bleah!” in your face, it can’t create anything new. It has to steal from something lovely and corrupt it.

But you, yes, you, have the ability to create something new. You are a Hafiz of a sort. You have the innate ability to create something lovely every day if you want. You have within you a wellspring of goodness. If evil corrupts one lovely thing, you can make a hundred more. Maybe they’ll be forgotten. Maybe they’ll be remembered forever. Either way, they matter.

Think I’m wrong?

That kind gesture you did at the grocery store, or at the library, or that generous online response you made to someone’s post - that’s a lovely thing. That’s a new thing that hasn’t happened yet in our lifetimes until you just did it. You bring it into being. It might not change the world. It’s what you might call no big deal. But it will give a gentle nudge for NB to move aside for a bit. And it’s one lovely thing that maybe is too small for evil to corrupt today. Keep going. Keep creating. Keep bringing forth the lovely and the true. Keep loving and let the big LOVE find you. It will.

That thing you read today, that person you smiled at, that true uplifting quote someone said, the happiness you shared briefly with someone, the clipping you passed along because you knew it would give a laugh, it all counts. All of it. It all layers up, like snow. Anyone who lives in an area with snowfall knows snow is needed even more than rainfall because of the time it takes to layer up and slowly melt, time that lets the water work its way down into the water table, doesn’t all flood away at once to the sea, keeps the vegetation moist enough to maybe, just maybe, still be green and alive and more resilient during fire season. If there’s no snow, no layers, there’s trouble ahead.

Anyone living in these days feels, if not knows, that we need that layering of the good, the sacred and the true, just like snow. We need it to survive the fires, to be resilient, to stay fresh and green. Layers that stay and aren’t flood-washed away. Layers thin and thick, small and large. Every layer.

These are the tiny, essential things that the amygdala will never stash away, yet are the very things we need from each other to keep going.

Go ahead, protest. Call your political leaders. Repost those Heather Cox Richardson articles. Educate yourself about systemic injustice and learn how to dismantle it. Have a good cry. Rage. Refute the lies. Feel the anger and the fear and do something loving and brave about it.

Then...

Kiss your partner every day. Prune your rosebushes. Compliment a stranger on their clothes, their shoes, their smile. See if you remember how to skip. Take a moment to listen to a child rattle on about something you don’t really care about, but boy, they sure do. Listen generously to a friend, without offering easy solutions. Drop off that extra bag of groceries at the food bank. Even if you only do it once. Accept a gracious word. When you are tempted to yell in frustration, sing along with a rock ballad instead. Sing it loud. Three times, if you need to. Dance in your car at red lights and don’t care if someone in the car next to you is watching. Better yet, invite them to dance, too. Smile too much. Insist upon keeping your heart open even when others tell you that this is a stupid thing to do. Appreciate the wonder of a really ripe strawberry. Give $20 to a charity you usually ignore. Say hi to people as you pass. Make eye contact. Love your family relentlessly. Practice accepting love. Assume the best of others first. Tell yourself it matters.

Because it does. It absolutely does.

Can you imagine for a moment what the world would be like without these tiny, unimportant, non-amygdala-worthy gifts? Horrible, right? Unbearable.

So don’t bear the loss of them. You don’t have to. None of us do.

Carry them with you, these tiny treasures that all point to love, connection, harmony, truth. Make them up as you go along. Invent joy. Love LOVE.

Hafiz, I think, was on to something.

LOVE creates connection with what LOVE loves. Why wouldn’t it do that, knowing the importance of harmony? The calm heart is vast and lasting. Bring yourself into the presence of God, for there is a rich inheritance waiting for you. Hold hands with the loving people in your life, if a living saint’s warmth is out of reach. Like a special day when you naturally feel uplifted by “something” in the air, Truth is the same “something,” uplifting others. Hold truth gently and hold it always.

You’ve got a rich inheritance at your disposal, available 24-7, in mostly tiny hand-sized bundles, this God-sized treasury of love in every color, shape and size. A continual renewable resource of the very truth we need right now. In your hands. Ready to be held aloft for all to see.

What you do and who you are is always much more valuable, needed, precious, and essential than you can possibly understand. Perhaps you, too, are a flute upon which the Divine breath plays a sacred melody. Who knows?

Meanwhile, believe me when I say you’ve got this.

Yes, you do. Yeup.

Get busy.

Go.

Love.

I haven’t written much lately, and I’m not sure whether or not to apologize or say, “You’re welcome.”

Don’t get me wrong, I am not pretending to any level of humility so that you can reassure me of my writing prowess or worth. I’m not fishing for compliments. I’m just realizing how, sometimes, words are not necessary, at least not as much as some other response. A response more about walking the talk.

Like this guy.

There is a fine line between bravery and ridiculousness, and it’s blurry to boot. But this milkman seems to be walking on that wobbly line with a complex level of authenticity I envy.

These past few weeks I find myself wandering into silence. Doing dishes, folding laundry, vacuuming up the unending supply of dog-given furballs, things that I normally like to do with a podcast or music for company, I have been doing without both. Running errands in the car, I always have the radio or music on, but lately, I’ve been listening more to the stuff that’s not on the radio and is more to be found in the heart. Turning the volume down on everything, I guess. But not for the purpose of escape. Something else, something different is asking for my attention. Something that needs this quiet for me to hear. Something that will speak but never compete with the noise I usually live with.

Lately I find myself in tears without understanding why. I’m not sad. I’m not nostalgic. I’m not in despair. Despite all the chaos in our world and in the country, I am safe and warm. I am loved. I laugh easily. I have what I need without the immediate fear of it being taken away. Sometimes that feels so good and so undeserved that I cry a bit, embarrassed by joy. I get teary eyed at little children walking down the street with their moms and their dogs. I tear up at the trash piled by the freeway entrance. I swallow a lump when I drive past yet another road killed raccoon. I also cry a bit now when I hear the news, which used to fuel me with anger. I cast about, wondering where that anger went, and if losing track of it has somehow made me weaker, less effective or more numbed or somehow, less…something.

But then I started reading Richard Rohr’s The Tears of Things again for the second time and it started to click. Anger feels like power, but it builds up all sorts of walls and dead ends to keep me from moving forward. Tears, as long as I have a Kleenex handy, have not generally ever really stopped me from doing the next right thing. At least after I blow my nose.

When I was fourteen, my dog died. I had her for ten years. She was my best childhood friend. That’s a rite of passage for many children, the loss of a beloved pet. For me, I knew she had cancer and I knew we should probably have mercifully put her down, but as it turned out, before we could do that for her, she had a massive seizure after chasing a cat out of the yard and died in my arms. I was furious.

Furious at my parents who had not wanted to end her life before that day. Furious at God who let an innocent animal get sick and die. Furious with myself for my powerlessness to save her. Furious at the cat, which I swore I would kill next time I saw it. Furious at life and death and all things visible and invisible. Furious at her, for dying.

So, when my father and I took the body of the dog to the vet for disposal (since neither of us fully realized we had the right to bury her in the yard) I said nothing. When we came home, I locked myself in the bedroom, saying only that I had homework to do. I don’t remember ever really speaking of it again. I suppose I must have at some point but it’s likely I said something dismissive like, “I’m fine” or “this happens” or some such stupid thing. I put my head down and soldiered on and held that anger in my heart like a shield for a very, very long time. Much too long a time.

I remember I had dreams for years after that, nightmares of having to kill that dog with my bare hands, as if I could ever have done such a thing. And when I had those dreams, I’d get angry all over again.

It took me decades to let that anger go. Decades.

When I finally did let it go, along with a lot of other angers and resentments I had built up, a massive shift occurred in me. When anger gradually shifted to grief, I began to think about the grief of the rest of my family. What grief had my parents dealt with, losing the dog, being unable to change the outcome and watching their daughter shut down in resentment? What grief had my brothers dealt with then that I was oblivious to? What compassion had I missed out on simply because I was too angry to receive it and too self-absorbed to give it? And how many years had I been blind to the anger and pain of others who were right there, but I missed it?

Hence the rethink, the recent silence and the unexpected tears lately.

The milkman in this photo doesn’t look angry. Nor resolute, nor powerful, nor brave. He looks nothing like a patriotic warrior. His eyes aren’t aflame. They look a bit sad. He seems, if anything, a bit embarrassed to have his picture taken at all. The world around him is completely destroyed and he’s delivering milk. He doesn’t even know yet if the house he’s delivering to is still standing. Maybe everyone died. No guarantees. He may be keeping calm and carrying on, but it’s not in fury or defiance, raising a hand with clenched fist. He’s just trying to keep his balance in the rubble. He’s getting ready for what might be waiting at the delivery address. He’s making it through another morning, doing what he does best. Delivering milk.

I think lately about Kristy Noem, the DHS secretary that Trump just canned this week. The woman who bragged about the guts it took to shoot her own young dog Cricket which she described as “untrainable” and “useless” as well as a “nasty” goat she shot on the same day, a goat she claimed chased her children. As if all dogs come easy to train. As if goats all over the world don’t chase and butt everything they can. It’s no wonder she got such public outcry. She later claimed that the two white people ICE shot in Minneapolis (let’s face it, the white victims got way more news time than the rest) were domestic terrorists who deserved what happened to them. She was angry that people didn’t see it the way she did. She fought back furiously against the media, against liberals, against those she saw as her enemies. She raged.

So did Pam Bondi. Democrats are trying to impeach her after her handling of the Epstein files. Her outrage was public and fiery. Her face is frozen in resentment. There’s a photo of her in court stonily refusing to turn around to look at the women who were there to testify against Epstein and to demand justice. The photo has been stoking rage on both sides. Rage, rage, rage.

But it occurs to me that maybe Pam Bondi refused to look at them not because of contempt, but because of a savage and unnamable fear. Perhaps if she looked at them, she might risk losing her righteous anger and the fragile strength it pretends to have. Perhaps she might feel, if only for a moment, sorrow. Perhaps a flare of recognition would dump a gallon of empathy on that fire. And then what?

Therein lies the lesson. Rage, anger, resentment, all the feelings of power and of isolation, they keep us feeling in control, even as we wildly spin out of it. Imagine for a moment if Kristi Noem had felt sorry that she could not successfully train Cricket. Maybe she might have felt compassion, maybe have chosen to adopt the dog to another family, one better suited to a wild pup. Perhaps if she had felt sorrow that she hadn’t protected her kids from a cranky goat by teaching them healthy boundaries with farm animals, she could have kept that goat for breeding and raised a whole new batch of goat kids for her children to learn to raise with respect. Maybe she’d have a reference point for future challenges, one that put kindness and creative problem-solving skills in her toolbox of life. Maybe if Pam Bondi wasn’t so defensive and angry, she would see that those victims and herself have a lot more in common than she realizes. That she is being used by powerful men just as they were. That the women standing behind her might be less of enemies and more sisters in arms. That they, and she, deserve to recognize and name their pain.

Yes, to let go of anger is to let go of control. Trading anger for grief is bravery and ridiculousness. It’s the suicide of the ego, and potentially painful. No, not potentially. Absolutely painful. Agonizing. Like surgery. Like death.

To begin the process of trading anger for grief requires time and quiet. Recuperative time. Maybe even some emotional PT. Time to feel, time to process, time to reframe and reflect. Quiet space to have room for the tears to come, for the weak feeling in arms and legs to move through, until you finally feel tired and spent but able to stand up as your own true self, perhaps for the first time.

This milkman looks tired. Sad, too. The “almost smile” he is wearing is as wrinkled as his coat and as wobbly as his balance. But he’s moving. He’s giving. He’s functioning. He’s got someone waiting for him and somewhere to go where it matters that he shows up. It matters, what he does. He matters.

He’s grieving.

He’s delivering milk.

Richard Rohr writes: All things have tears and all things deserve tears. The sympathy that wells up when we weep can be life changing, too, drawing us out of ourselves and into communion with those around us. We begin in a state of empathy with and for things and people and events, which just might be the opposite of judgmentalism. It is hard to be on the attack when you are weeping.

The milkman, I think, understands this. Anger and resentment bring weapons for the attack. Not very helpful after the blitz has already happened and you’re wading through the rubble. You’re likely to cut yourself on a blade or shoot yourself in the foot. Grief brings milk. In this day in which anger and rage are in more than enough supply, perhaps we need to think about the other things we need for the communal supply cupboard. Empathy. Silence. Tears. Kleenex. Kindness without reward. Listening. Looking around at the people behind us. Rehoming the unwanted dog. Hugs. Room to breathe. A shovel or two to clean up the mess. Milk.

I don’t know exactly what is unfolding in me in these moments of silence and of not writing. I don’t know what good this unfolding will do later on. But I do know what this is not.

This is not running away.

This is not numbing out or forgetting.

This is not giving up.

This is not resignation.

This is something very old, and new, too.

This is keeping calm and carrying on.

Shhh.

Listen to the milkman.

What is he saying to you?

There's a wonderful line in the song, “Defying Gravity” sung by the character Elphaba (The “Wicked” Witch) in the musical “Wicked.” It goes like this:

Too long I’ve been afraid of losing love I guess I’ve lost…Well, if that’s love, it comes at much too high a cost.

Every one has a different moment of realization. A flickery light bulb goes steady. A shoe clunks to the floor. An “ah-ha” moment hits and feels less like “eureka” and more like, “oh sh—.’

Everyone has their own frog simmering in its little pot for too long.

All of us, not just some, but all of us, have people very near us who we care about and who have, for whatever reason, still not yet moved out of the MAGA camp. Church buddies. Cousins. Neighbors. Childhood friends. Parents, or siblings. Spouses.

Jesus makes it clear, we’re to keep loving, keep forgiving, keep giving grace.

But I think maybe it's time we stop trying to hang on to love that we might have already lost.

It's a painful thing to consider that people who have been an important part of your life might not be capable of going on this leg if the journey with you. If we stay away from politics or religion, can't we just skate by?

Are you still hoping they can love you like they did before all this hit the fan? Am I? Yeah. Maybe I am.

That sucks.

I hate to say it, but there's a bigger question coming up right behind. That sucks, too. Don't look now but here it is:

Is their love coming at much too high a cost?

On Facebook I've been watching, first with hope, and now with horrified fascination, two adult children using a podcast sort of thing to try to talk their MAGA parents out of the fog. It started with what I think were good intentions for mutual understanding on both sides but it has deteriorated into swearing, personal attacks and so much denial. Hundreds of viewers have commented that the adult children are trying to maintain love and hope in a no-win situation. It has become painfully evident to just about everyone but the family that there is not enough love there to hold this family together now. If there ever was.

Jesus definitely said “no” to the Pharisees. He didn't change his “no” into a “yes,” even for Nicodemus. That old Pharisee had to hide out, creep around at night to choose which side to be on, but Jesus didn't waver. Day and night were all the same to him. No creeping. He knew his “no’s.”

Jesus said the truth and the palace guard hit him anyway. “If I said something wrong,” Jesus replied, “testify as to what is wrong. But if I spoke the truth, why did you strike me?” Jesus calling it like it is, without swearing and without backing down, hours before his death. Now that is grit, even if it's not American.

Right now, the palace guards are knocking down the doors, slapping the crap out of everyone while the Pharasees are busy rewriting the covenant.

And by the way, not for the first time.

If you're like me, white, middle class, a bit more mature than middle aged, you might have once been able to believe that America is the land of the free and the home of the brave. That's the luxury of fake nostalgia. You had it good. But if you're not like me, you've known for a long time that it is not like this at all.

The brave in America have rarely actually been free. The brave in America have rarely resembled me. The brave in America are under the gun yet again.

Now we all see the video. And now, people like me are in it too. The never-needed-to-be-brave-before-but-liked-the-idea people.

So there are lots of “no’s” that must be calmly and resolutely said by the rest of us still in our safety bubbles. Way more than we have said so far. “No’s” to be said out loud, peacefully, and often. Even from the pulpit. Or the zoom Bible study. Or in any polite company. It's way past time. The water all boiled out. The frog is dead.

So let's try some “no’s” together. I need the practice. Maybe you do too. Imagine that person standing in front of you. Maybe sit them down with a cup of tea. Got them in your head? Ok. Let's try it.

No, America is not living up to its constitution.

No, we are not making it great again.

No, whiteness is not in danger of extinction.

No, having a few black friends does not make me racist-proof. Not you either.

No, Trump is not a flawed leader chosen by God.

No, I'm not sorry for attending those protests.

No, I'm not going to stop.

No, you can't say that disrespectful thing you just said in my house. Not without me responding, respectfully but firmly as I can.

No, ICE is not getting rid of the bad guys.

No, please don't joke one more time about wokeness or make your passive aggressive racist comments and expect me to let them pass.

No, I can't respect your opinion on this.

And no, it doesn't mean I've stopped loving you.

But it means I can't prioritize your acceptance anymore.

If you decide I hate you, the answer is no.

If you want me to fear you, I have to say no.

Obey you? Uh, no.

If you want to convert me, that's a no, too.

If you are asking me to watch just one Erika Kirk video or listen to one Franklin Graham sermon, sorry. No.

Nope.

Uh-uh.

Nope-a-rooskie.

It takes practice. It takes humility. It takes patience. It takes courage. It takes the willingness to be rejected in real time, not just in some churchy, religious way. It takes being willing to be hurt without striking back.

It takes enough self awareness to know that you are no more wise nor virtuous than anyone else, even those people. Settle down. You're not a hero. You're not the right hand of God. Nobody is handing you an award, unless it's just a ribbon for participation. You're still mortal. You just happened to have not screwed this particular choice up on this particular day. God knows what you'll do tomorrow.

It takes feeling embarrassed, stupid, angry, vulnerable, occasionally hopeless and alone. It may cost you some relationships. Influence. Admission to after-work parties. It'll certainly cost you something.

We've been told.

‘For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?”

This is not unknown territory for Jesus. Hang tight. Stay calm. Are you practicing your deep breaths? Good. Practice your consonants and vowels. Start with small words, they are often the most powerful anyway.

Take a breath. Open your mouth a little. Say it with me. Ready?

No.

I'm seeing a lot of discussion lately about whether or not the stuff happening in our country and in the Middle East is pointing to The End Times. So I did some Googling today, wandering around in the Internet and man, you can really get tangled up around the axle in very short order. It's astounding how many people out there seem to know exactly what's going on and would love to inform you of their vast spiritual superiority if you just click and subscribe for a very modest sum.

Here are just a few of the many mainstream preachers who are preaching that we're in the End Times:

David Diga Hernandez (You Tube: What No One Is Telling You)

Jimmy Evans (You Tube, The Tipping Point Show)

David Jeremiah (TBN)

Greg Laurie (Harvest Crusades)

Franklin Graham (Billy Graham Evangelistic Association)

Craig Groeschel (You Tube, Life.Church)

There are lots, lots more. I'm sure they are honorable. Good intentions. Still, I am beginning to see a pattern in them all. Something sitting not quite right with me. Something they all say in one way or another along the lines of this:

“They don't want you to know what I'm about to tell you.”

“We/I can prove it to you. I know I'm right. The Bible confirms me.”

“We're on the right side of God.”

“You need to listen to me to be saved.”

“They are in league with Satan, and we need to rebuke them in truth with the mighty power of God.”

“Get ready. Join our church/ministry/program. Click here.”

See a pattern? I know. I’m a bit jaded. I do wonder how much money each of these preachers is worth and how many videos or TV programs they produce every year. I do wonder how difficult it is to balance your budget and your prayer life.

In Matthew 24, Jesus tells his disciples all sorts of terrifying things about the end times. Its true. He tells them the sun will stop shining, stars will fall out of the skies, nations will war against each other, people will be plucked up and disappeared into someplace else, the faithful will be persecuted, floods, famines, heads exploding the works. (Ok, maybe technically not exploding heads.) Jesus says he himself will return, coming out of the clouds with trumpet blast. He even tells them it will happen before that generation dies out. They asked, and boy, he laid it on them. Now he's freaked everyone out. Their eyes are bugging out of their heads. They're holding their breath. He tells them to be ready, and then he says,

“But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

Wanna sit with that for a moment?

Nobody knows.

Not even Jesus.

So why on God's fuzzy green earth would Jesus say it was happening so soon? What was he thinking? Or was that something a gospel writer just popped in there in a later edition?

Well dang.

Guess what? I don't know.

But I do know this.

The prophesy of fear is incredibly useful for asserting control. And declarations of prophetic certainty make for happily needy, dedicated followers. We've certainly seen that throughout history.

So, what's with the latest predictions? The warning signs? The best selling novel series? The beautiful suits and resplendent sanctuaries and polished wood podiums? The tsunami of prophecies?

Imagine the books, the videos, the programs, the conferences, the tee shirts and merch, the audio tapes, the streaming services, the great wheels of commerce turning and turning so that you remember to donate before you go out to build your bunker. That's a lot of righteous, God-fearing capitalism right there.

It's all so predictably….

Human.

Sure, I get it. We all want to know. We all want to be on the winning team. We want to be good Boy Scouts and be prepared.

We want somebody, (often it's a middle-aged or older white guy) to tell us we're the chosen, incredibly faithful, oh-so-important warriors for Truth, Justice and The American Way. We want to be the White Robe Society Of Jesus’ Most Favorite Disciples Ever. We want to be shiny.

But what if we're not?

What if we're just like every other generation of people throughout time who had to suffer through wars and injustice and pain and confusion and vulnerability and death and political stupid stuff and bad advice from leaders who they believes were supposed to know better?

Ah. THEN we have something to work with.

If we are truly just taking our turn throughout history, and not the fierce warriors and once-in-a-million-years martyrs we imagine ourselves to be, then this begins to happen:

We stop feeling singled out and start seeing how we are woven together in a fabric of messy, awful, beautiful humanity throughout time and space.

We get humble real quick.

We recognize patterns of systemic injustice and the inadvertent collaboration with it when good people “go along to get along.”

We start to question which side of history we're really on.

We spend less time shoring up our resources and more time figuring out how to spread them around.

We stop seeing Satan's followers in the faces of people we don't yet understand. We lose the jump scares.

We stop doom scrolling.

We replace isolation with connection.

We take ourselves so much less seriously.

We learn how to stumble around in faith instead of goose stepping in certainty, and we value possibilities more than easy answers.

We take our rightful place, not as leaders or saviors but as fellow beings just trying to do our part to make the world a bit better and more liveable. One of millions. And that's okay.

Let's face it, no pastor wants to end his fire and brimstone sermon of certainty with “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

So.

Here are my words of comfort for you, for what they are worth:

I don't know how any of this will turn out.

We certainly don't know what Jesus didn't know.

We just aren't privy to the greatest mystery of all.

But we are here. Together.

Whether the world ends next Tuesday or in another seven billion years, we each have our work to do now. Important, boring, essential, ordinary work. In truth, it probably would be the same work we'd be asked to do either way.

Pray.

Connect.

Learn.

Breathe.

Keep open.

Share.

Hope.

Show up.

Try.

My family is a pretty good one, all things considered. We mostly get along, some relationships closer than others. We don't scream at each other. Nobody has tried to put holes in anyone else. Nobody has been slammed against walls. Nobody's even been arrested, (although there are legitimately good reasons to be arrested as there are bad ones.)

But as a family we don't drop nearly enough F-bombs.

We were taught to say “please” and “thank you” and even “I love you” although that came much later in my life, at least from my father. Mom was better at it. We were taught to say, “I'm sorry.”

But a good F-bomb wasn't part of my vocabulary until my mid thirties.

The first time I heard it was at the Presbyterian church I worked at. Needless to say, I was a bit shocked and didn't know how to respond.

Nobody had taught me the appropriate response to this pungent two word statement:

“Forgive me.”

Fortunately my first experience with this bomb was not actually directed at me. I was just a bystander.

But when someone just flat out lays “Forgive me,” into the conversation when you don't expect it, it's definitely something that will give you pause. At least it did for me.

All my life, I said the Lord's Prayer and easily rattled off ‘forgive-us-our-tresspasses-as-we-forgive-those-who-tresspass-against-us” as though it were all one word, like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. But I had never heard one person say it in all seriousness to another person, not face to face, not in the real world.

“I'm sorry” fit the bill for all of us for as long as I can remember. It meant you recognized your error, or at least the affront of your non-error insensitivity timed, and it was hard enough to say when you didn't mean it as when you did. “I'm sorry,” meant you weren’t a monster and were likely to adhere to civilized behavior most of the time.

But when I heard one person right on front of me say to another right in front of me, "Forgive me,” I felt immediately embarrassed to be there. Like someone had their fly open or accidentally spat a little on someone with a too-juicy fricative. My cheeks got hot. It seemed too vulnerable, too deep, too much more relational than “I'm sorry.” Not to mention that it opened a door that “I'm sorry,” does not; the option for the other person to say “yes” or “no” and honestly, both answers are wicked hard to take. I remember the pause before the hoped-for answer lasted ten thousand years. I had been holding my breath.

And I was just standing nearby, getting a cup of church coffee.

To be forgiven by God can feel so easily abstract. It's like a class action suit, with a million plaintiffs, you don't remember what it's for, nobody knows anyone else and everyone eventually gets a check for a dollar and twelve cents. It's the enormous turning of the gears of justice or mercy, neither of which we think about most of the time. It's easy to overlook. Like sunshine in summer. Nice, easy to take for granted.

To be forgiven by another person, though, is to risk demolition right there in your face. There's no turning back from truly asking for forgiveness, no way to minimize the offense or walk away without needing a response. There's often no easy yes or no. The forgiveness doesn't happen without the consent of the other. It's open to whatever happens next. Disaster or redemption. Not your call, either.

The power of feeling “right” is completely thrown away as you admit the other's power in the moment to legitimately choose repair or refusal. Admission of guilt is part of the deal. There is no sugar coating and no take backs. It's beautiful and brutal.

That, I believe, is what lies at the heart of our nation's pain. The inability to drop this F-bomb.

There is so very much to ask forgiveness for. Much to be forgiven. Systems have been corrupt for generations, even some of the best ones. Some blue blooded families have had two hundred and fifty years worth of it. Others brought their own country’s pain with them, immigrants still deeply wounded by privations and injustice even as they sought to leave it behind. Everyone has had intergenerational pain, some as the traumatized and powerless oppressed, others who live with the pain of knowing their family includes the oppressors. Everyone has contributed to the collective pain, innocently it not. Everyone has need for healing and forgiveness.

I can't tell you how many people I know who recoil at this, because they've never been taught how to ask for forgiveness for their own sins, much less for the intergenerational ones from those who taught them exactly how to make them again for the next generation.

“I wasn't there,” they say. “I'm not responsible.”

But they always, always say it defensively. Because deep down we all know we're all in this together and nobody gets to say they're not affected somehow. We all were part of the mess. Still are. We all carry the weight of too much verbal abuse and not enough F-bombs.

Just look at this sentence for a moment and reflect on how it makes you feel:

“Will you forgive me?”

Harder to hear, or harder to say?

“Will you forgive me?” recognizes that relationship demands truth and vulnerability. Relationship can be broken by good intentions just as much as bad ones. Relationship means mutual accountability, and mutual accountability means letting go of the very convoluted mindset that lets people say, among other things, “I deserve my permitted concealed gun, it's my right to bear arms” at the exact same time they say, “He deserved to be killed at that protest because he had a permitted concealed gun.”

Relationship means you have to acknowledge that other guy is just as good as you, or you are just as bad, and both of you are really just trying to survive the jumble of today.

You can say, “I’m sorry for what's happened.” That's a good start. A really good one.

But “Forgive me,” takes it to a whole other level.

The first time I said “Please forgive me,’ I immediately burst into tears. Thank God the person I said it to accepted my request. I can't imagine how much more painful it would have been if they didn't.

Maybe that's why my parents didn't use it. Maybe they'd already experienced that rejection and didn't want any of us to experience that. Who knows?

But now I think we need to use it a lot more often, this F-word that is so powerful it can overcome the power of the other, much more popular F-word.

I'm going to ask for forgiveness more often now. I'm hoping to give it whenever I'm asked. I'm going to pray that this F-bomb has a resurgence in our world. I suspect all of us may be better off if we made it part of our vocabulary. If nothing else, our mutual astonishment at hearing it on the air might give us enough of a pause to breathe it in.

The president said once he's never asked for forgiveness because he's never needed to. My guess is that the truth is, it's too powerful a word for him to use. Too raw. Too brave. My guess is, it's just too frightening for him to ever have contemplated. My guess is, nobody ever said it to him either.

This F-word takes true courage.

I want that courage. I don't have as much of it as I want yet, and I think we're all going to need a lot more of that courage in the days ahead. We have a long road to walk. Together tripping over ourselves in the process.

May we say it.

May we hear it.

May we live into it.

The scariest F-word there is.

Forgive.