The Monday disputations were, so to speak, par for the course.

To wit: How dare I play golf when she had to get up before dawn and travel an hour before breakfast, back into the eastern KY boondocks to continue teaching a bunch of farmer’s children? How dare I claim I needed rest when she had worked as hard on the weekend as I had, and maybe harder—cooking covered-dish casseroles for the potluck, cleaning the little “weekend parsonage” while I “worked on my sermon,” (Philpot’s Friendship Baptist Church provided a small frame house for the parade of student pastors who, over the years, had made the long trip from Louisville), not to mention playing piano for morning and evening services?

(As an aside, she never liked my preaching. Often told me I should have worked a little harder. Her father, also not a fan, once suggested I simply read some of Spurgeon’s sermons till I improved.)

Straight-faced, which is to say almost believing what I was selling, I would have reminded her that for serious young theologs and pastors, it was good and necessary for our overloaded brains and spent spirits to have some distraction. After all, I was in the business of pondering and re-presenting the “weighty things,” as my colleagues and I called our curriculum with a wink.

Ahem.

Still, those Mondays infected me: I got golf fever. It was my wife’s temperature that continued to spike, however. And she may have had valid points; in all honesty, though, her unrelenting disdain for everything “Tom” made it hard for me to care.

One night, early on, I made the mistake of trying to share that morning’s encounter with the Quarry Hole, a terrifying par-5 carved from the course’s granite foundation. With eyes as steely as they were the night when, excitedly, I tried to explain something I had learned that day (“You think I’m stupid, don’t you?”), she snapped that that, given our perpetual financial difficulties, I would have done better to take an extra shift at Sears where I worked part-time in the hardware department. I never divulged my telling HR never to schedule me for Monday hours.

Pissed, she was and remained. In the pluperfect tense. World without end, amen. Amen.

I do not know if any of my other Monday friends (there were a few more of us besides me, Bill and Mike), had similar “theological discussions” with their wives, but I would hate to think I was the only one who was so engaged by a wife so outraged.

Then again, it would have been unsurprising if I were the only whipping boy.

If, to put it euphemistically, golf was an “interest” we never shared, fact is that until recently, no one else in my family ever showed the least interest. With one exception. (Wait for it.) Rather than lament that reality, however, I have learned to enjoy playing mostly alone. Which may serve me as I pursue my goal of shooting my age. Indeed, I have a bit of a monastic streak in me that, obviously, extends to the links.

I gladly play with Bill and Mike, along with our old college Greek professor, Dr. Byrd, but we live hours away from each other and it is hard to make it happen. When we do get together, however, it is seminarius redux.

Back on the links, I was not very good. Nor did I get much better. Inexperience and happenstance plagued my every shot. “Open your clubface!” Bill screamed at me once on the tee box. “He played my ball!” he said another time, to Mike. I did, I admit, but thought—as the old joke goes—that I had hit my closed-faced drive so hard that it changed the ball’s brand from Titlist to MaxFli.

I remember how, upon my first invitation to join that little Crescent Hill coterie, I had to go back to Nashville, to retrieve my non-golfing dad’s clubs. Tommy Armours. Not the ones that would be worth a fortune today, but just a set, with laminated woods with neatly wound black thread covering the hosel, and forged irons. They had been a Christmas gift from a clueless (or evangelical) client. They went straight to the garage and remained there, idle, for decades. It’s a wonder the leather grips had not dry-rotted.

I remember, too, that on Sunday evening after I got back, I washed both the clubs and all the old golf balls dad had in his bag, most of which I lost in short order. AND, that some of the thread was coming undone on the driver.

I have never been able to floss the memory of my first “drive” on #1—how, when I flailed at the ball I hit the ground about six inches behind it. There was a “ka-chang” everyone heard, and I saw the thin aluminum sole plate, bearing the name of the legend, saucer its way down the fairway. The ball, meanwhile, horribly topped, barely dribbled off the tee.

I have always pictured that unraveling thread as a sad (but fitting) herald, following me into battle.

“One,” Bill said.

A dubious golfing career had begun, to which I would return in fits and starts over the next decades, all the while retaining a kind of jaundiced regard toward people who were a) more serious about golf than I, b) seemed to have an idea of what they were doing, and therefore, unsurprisingly, c) were better at it than I felt I ever could be.

Jealous, much? Yes, but not only.

I have often opined that Jesus’ Gethsemane benediction over his feckless disciples—“The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak”—serves not only as spiritual critique of most disciples, not least yours truly, but also a most appropriate characterization of my athletic inabilities. Now that I am an old man, I am not ashamed to acknowledge that at least a percentage my low-wattage disdain for my peers and their golfing enthusiasms was rooted in shame and resentment touching on all my lame attempts at sports greatness. Basketball? Softball? I was the cartoon character Calvin in right field without a clue, though, for basketball games, at least my Converse leather uppers looked good.

All of that, by the way, was before joint replacement surgeries and a stack of increasingly offset (and compressed) vertebrae that, every time I swing, seem to be giving themselves their own chiropractic adjustment.

Another reason playing alone seems to work best for me.

In any case, I kept playing at golf—and even more often after the divorce. Even with the extra practice I never ascended to real golf. Years later, I managed to get my handicap down to a twelve, which for some weekenders would be an enviable number, but it was on my “home course.” An imaginary number, in other words, without commutative properties. Translation: my twelve was not transferable to other courses.

As evidenced on the day I played once again with Mike and Bill, maybe 15 years after seminary. I do not remember the name of the course, only that, on #1 and determined to show them that I had improved, I led the way and gave it the old testosterone jerk, as Roy McAvoy described it…and … completely… whiffed.

I tried to act like it was a practice swing, and nobody said anything. Bill was covering his face with his hand. Mike looked down to check his laces.

“One,” Bill finally said.

Thankfully, I was by myself the time I was determined (again in the words of our favorite driving range pro) to let the big dog eat. I coiled, swung, whiffed, and all but screwed myself into the ground as I fell off the ball.

(Next: A new nine, a new state of mind)

Till, you know, I became one of them.

I am not talking about The Rev. Dr. Folks who play a time or two a week. That’s pretty good exercise, at least if you walk.

No, I am talking about the mainline divines who, first thing upon waking, check the weather, either praise Brother Sun or curse Brother Rain, and organize accordingly.

Forlorn, should the rain postpone their round, primarily for fear that muscle memory will forsake them as easily as actual recall (I’ll lose my groove! I’ll forget how to address and swing the 5-wood!)—having to cancel scoops out what amounts to their purpose for the day, leaving a damp, smelly rind in its place. And a bitter taste.

Most days, however, they are pumped. They load their cooler bag with waters and beers, pack a cigar or two (if they are like me) and head to the course… where, if they have not set an actual tee time, they wait for an opening to sneak in between carts-full of “recreational golfers,” as they are called, who are there mostly for the fellowship.

The time is not wasted, however. In the interim—for me, yesterday, it was 2.5 hours before there was enough gap for a walker—they hit buckets of balls, putt (but not enough) walk the Par 3 a time or two if the course has one (mine does), and visualize the round to come. They ponder the good shots and try to brain-floss the muffs that either made or broke yesterday’s round. The latter recollection might, if they are unlike me—meaning, less stubborn—prompt them to schedule, say, a putting lesson or two. Floss that. And eventually, they walk nine or get a cart for eighteen and…get after it, most often alone.

Just them and the game.

Meaning: it’s not for exercise. It’s not for fellowship.

It’s personal. It’s an obsession. Or something like it. And will remain so till my back or hips or knees or shoulders refuse, or Bagger Vance appears on the ridge.

Yeah, I am now one of those guys.

Which is not to say I do nothing other than golf. I write, for instance. Every day. Practice makes presentable…sometimes. I paint. I cook. I play my bass. I trim my bonsai tree. I have coffee with friends or meet folk for dinner. I transport my grandchildren.

But I am golfing. A lot. Almost daily. Which has consequences. Just this morning I realized that, by all appearances, my poor bonsai seems to have attacked by aphids or spider mites. I should have noticed before now, but, I confess, I have been laser-focused on the little white (or orange, or, sometimes, yellow) ball and did not see the little bugs. Now that I have, I am practicing emergency triage: trimming dry leaves, removing microscopic webbing, ordering Neem oil… I hope my remediations are not too little too late. I’d hate for the sins of the gardener to be visited on the head of the tree. As it were.

Where was I? Oh, yes! The point remains that, oblivious as I can be, I am not “all golf and no play.” It’s just that I now have a goal for my game, and some days I feel it is not unrealistic—to shoot my age before I die.

Which, in truth, may be a ridiculous aspiration; but ultimately unattainable goals are not necessarily a bad thing as motivations go, and especially when one is recovering from trauma. As I have been.

Six months ago I suffered but the latest in a grim series of traumas that have plagued me through the decades. I was, for a few days, in deep rough, as it were. Which is to say, crazy. Insane. Hysterical. Begging to die. That I came through that Dark Night of the Soul at all is no less miraculous than Tiger’s chip on sixteen; that I awakened with a desire to again play golf was fitting complement. The goal of shooting my age formed gradually through subsequent weeks.

Before that, I was not even so regular to the course as my life-long friends, Bill and Mike. They are a round or two a week, or five rounds a month kind of guys. They play with friends, with relatives… and sometimes alone, I guess, which for them may be anomalous as sharing a cart or round is for me.

Thing is, though, they have never really stopped playing for as long as I have known them. I am just now back from a hiatus of about 25 years. Not kidding.

They were playing before we ever got to seminary—in college and high school, too, I guess, though I never asked them about it. I had played…maybe twice in my teen years, with my next-door-neighbor, Jeff, and once with so little golfing etiquette the pro chased us down, gave our greens fees back and told us (not gently) to skedaddle.

But Mike, Bill and I were Belmont alumni, all of us with our eyes on doctoral degrees, and we wound up spending considerable time together. They gradually convinced me to join their regular Monday group, most often at a nearby course called Crescent Hill.

Seminary classes did not meet on Mondays. The idea was that “serious” young theologs like us needed a day of rest. After all, we, ahem, had spent the week working full days and through sleepless nights reading and writing, thinking and arguing, wrestling with a curriculum (as Jacob wrestled the angel) designed to help us master divinity. And no, not the confection, though that would have made more sense. If that weren’t enough to warrant a Sabbath, on Fridays, we would scatter to the winds and land God only knew where, there to spend the weekend preaching and teaching Sunday morning and night at St. John by the Gas Station.

It was an exhausting regimen, to be sure, and we really did need a moment of re-creation. Or distraction.

So, Crescent Hill. Or, if we were feeling feisty, Seneca. To play 18 or even 27.

Which, to use the formal theological terminology I was learning in class, pissed-off my then-wife.

(Next time: Who is that man with the disintegrating clubs?)

The classic list, by Christopher Booker, lists seven basic plots: Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest, Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy, and Rebirth. No matter its narrative ribs, however, the basic matter in any story is the protagonist—the main, action-bearing character—and how his/her crisis will be resolved. S/he will go through three basic “reels” or movements, until the climax and “happily ever after” reset (preparing the reader/movie watcher for the sequel).

What, for example, will happen to Harry after he finally comes face-to-face with Voldemort? What happens to Hermione and Ron is not unimportant, but only derivatively. In fact, what makes a good novel good is the way a skilled novelist can make secondary characters (and even extras) and their plots intersect and interweave with the actions and concerns of the protagonist’s. The result is that while, for example, The Deathly Hallows seems extremely complicated, it is pretty basic stuff and recognizable—and in that way not dissimilar from many other tales having to do with “overcoming the monster.”

Where fiction and non-fiction overlap is that we all of us experience our lives narratively; that is, as a story in which we see ourselves as the protagonist and the overriding question, “how will the mystery of my life be resolved” https://www.jstor.org/stable/1461066. We are all the stars of our own story.

More than fifty years ago, Steven Crites suggested that a) our sense of the flow of time, beginning to end, b) our collection and valuations of some events and episodes in our lives (and also our disregard for others) help us interpret our lives to ourselves, and c) the particular cultural location of what and why we remember what we reach for its consequential as well as sequential importance (if we know and are not imposing it) –those things keep and tell our stories.

Correspondingly, our desire to plot our lives with a view to purpose and meanings can lead us to plot the lives of others in similar ways—“imposing” a secondary plot on them though they are their own protagonists and therefore read our lives similarly, as secondary characters to them. If we are all of us lucky, and gain humility, we will be concerned to have clear apprehension or comprehension of their discreet experiences. We would hope that all of us can get beyond seeing “the other” as accidence, their arc as sublots to our lives or them as in service to us.

If we are all of us lucky, and work to get over ourselves, we can in humility find that we are in this together, all of us living-out the same story if in different terms. If we do not obtain humility, or wisdom, however, the ways we read or tell the story of the other/s can occasion all sorts of cruel mischief.

How do we understand, say, Indigenous Americans? Who indeed, are as American as the children of immigrants, but with a vastly different experience and, derivatively, narrative identity. The rich and the poor, likewise. White and black, LGBTQI+ and straight, male and female, Muslim, Christian, Jew and “other”… The stories within the Story are different, and if we are not all of us very careful, we will pigeonhole others according to our story of them, which is not their story at all but a tale of our own pre-judgments. If we are categorized—selectively and narrowly—by others, it can make it really hard to have helpful conversation around the campfire.

Do we see each other? We have to, if we are ever going to hear each other.

A pedestrian example: I am in regular conversation with individuals whose perspectives are far different than mine, which is surprising, in a way, given the fact that we have obvious commonalities: age, cultural context, and what might pass for analogous spiritual heritage and commitment. These matters could or should grant us to see the world in similar ways, but in actuality prove jarring in their contradictions. Shorthand for disjuncts are colors: red and blue. Specific questions—who is my neighbor, how do I regard my enemy, what it means to give our cloaks as well as our coats if…whoever… should ask—reveal divides so wide that we each cannot see how the other of us thinks or says. Sadly, we tend to get aggravated with each other before we can comprehend why we see so differently or how we might come to some agreements.

I wonder if the reason for that, I think, is at least partly our familiarity with books and movies and even comics, which make it easy for us to make quick judgement as to who is the antagonist to our protagonist, and to assume that most everything they say and believe, what they think and do, is oppositional. In sum, like most everyone else in this era we’ve well-learned to read life and narrate “reality” the way I used to write book reviews for Mrs. Williams, my eleventh-grade English teacher: short on specifics due to lack of actual engagement or due consideration, and lots of BS filler.

Like our little coffee klatch, the evening “news” has all the depth an insight of a high school-quality “book review”—where rich and complex lives and experiences are reduced to one or two or a few things, and somewhat sensationalized, as if those matters were the entire interpretive grid for individuals and groups. The implicit (and sometimes explicit) truth is that we are too-readily inclined is to judge everyone else’s experience/story by our experience/story. If that kind of narration satisfies our own reductionist needs (and desire to “manage” interactions), it easily strikes the match for the many of cultural wildfires now consuming us.

The earth imitating life.

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When it comes to non-fiction, I turn to Anne Lamott who says that all prayer comes down to Help! Thanks! Wow! (She didn’t mention, Sorry!, but should have).

I would go further and suggest that all non-fiction falls into those very same categories, and especially in the case of spiritual memoir—they being the four ways that the “reels” of our lives appear onscreen.

Somewhat more darkly, at least to my (concurring) ears and eyes, is Dorothy Day’s observation that “We write what we suffer.” For Day, that meant that writing itself is a form of prayer, in that both writing and prayer, whether spontaneous or plotted, are essentially other-directed autobiography.

Also, in both, thinning thick stories is not only disingenuous but incriminating.

Dr. Charles V. Gerkin, the other faculty member of my Emory doctoral committee, used to say that “reductionism”—the tendency we all have to flatten stories, to paint in blacks, whites and grays (as when we say, “it’s perfectly obvious,” when nothing is ever perfectly obvious), our eagerness to assign simple interpretations to deep realities—is the reason for so many unjust judgments, so many misunderstandings, so much conflict and so little compassion, forgiveness or reconciliation.

One form of such reductionism is defining, and thereby confining, “others” within our sense of their story. The various narrative arcs, which as best understood as description and not prescription, should help us understand each other at the individual, tribal and cultural level. Often, however, if the template we choose to frame and narrate our experience (for the purpose of a certain resolution) it at odds with the “others,’” we have two choices: spurn or learn.

Sadly, we seem not to be in a learning frame of mind, this when all our plotlines could lead us to forging a new path. Or Rebirth. Or Resurrection. Or table open for all God’s children, all of whom have a story to tell.

One of the reason I write is that it keeps me coming back to the Table, where not only I but many others have also been invited. As I accept the gracious summons, I know that I am expected to examine myself and see whether, a) I really love Jesus, b) earnestly repent of my sin and c)…which is the real kicker… whether I actually seek to live in peace with others…

I mean, yes, no, maybe.

Which is why, every time, I have to confess that my story features a failure to love God with my whole heart; that I am part of a disobedient church (one I led for forty years); that I have not done God’s will, but instead have broken God’s law and rebelled against God’s love; that I have not loved my neighbors, evidenced most preeminently in my demonstrable determination to excuse my deafness to the cries of the needy.

But I want to. To hear the cry of the needy. And to do the will of God. And love Jesus the way Jesus loves me. At least I want to want to do all that. Which I can only do by working hard at not being a reductionist, and by pondering (and telling in my own idiom) the remarkable and various incarnations of God’s Story, who is the original Teller, Keeper and Redeemer of Tales… the Universal we see adumbrated, and not at all vaguely, in the particular life of Jesus.

After all, “There is nothing new under the sun,” as The Preacher says (Ecclesiastes 1:9), meaning that whatever one is putting on paper (or into the ether) has already been said, one way or the other.

The Preacher also says, “There is no end to the making of many books” (Ecclesiastes 12:12) meaning that, redundantly, people are willing to say again and again what other people have already said—as he himself has just finished doing! By compiling and composing he has only amplified the wearying paradox: more books, no novelty, and even in the hard sciences.

Yes, there are breakthroughs—but researchers will have been pounding on the same doors for some time, and even “new” discoveries in the hard sciences were adumbrated long ago in cells, and the stars, and on the periodic table.

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No chance of novelty at all in what I write— essays, commentaries and books on scripture, Christian tradition, prayer, refracting them through my head and heart, my constructive and critical reasoning, and my experiences—good, bad and admixed?

So, why do I write? At all?

More to the point, why do I write what I write: and especially given my lack of readers?

To begin to answer that questions I could do worse than to tell you of John Baillie, the Scottish Divine, as well as the novelist Frederick Buechner, who wrote his slim volumes of memoir both as testimony to the ways he saw God working in some of the particularities of his life and, indirectly, as an invitation to others to do the same.

Through the years he had begun to notice…things… his own experience and how, over time, various moments and episodes began to cluster into what he could only call plot. From the start he was acutely aware of the possibility that the “meaning” he seemed to be discovering might be imposed onto those particular events by his story-making brain. “Who can know for sure,” he asked more than once as to what we see or believe or think or advance is true?

(Indeed, the first or last or abiding question for any memoirist or historiographer is whether the meaning they posit is uncovered or imposed.)

Further, what could be less interesting, he mused, than what it had been like for him to be him over the years?

But he hoped his willingness to interrogate his own experiences—if he did it “anything like right”—and to share the journey with whomever might be really interested or merely curious, might encourage others to do that same kind of personal examen—to see and to share what they were discovering as to what or Who might be active in the particularities and sequences of our own life and times.

Such God/Jesus/Spirit-interwoven stories ought to be true, even if they aren’t, but if they are can only be told in an individual’s real voice and not one they have borrowed for the occasion.

Buechner both inspires and challenges me to continue dig through the hard strata of my faith, my tradition, my thinking and my experiences, hoping to excavate, if only for myself, the ruins and the motherlodes of my life. I write so I can better know myself, by means of the seemingly mundane events that come to mind as powerfully important, and what I thought were huge moments that fade away. All of which makes writing, for me, a journey of self-discovery in the fullest and least narcissistic sense of that term. Sharing it, in turn, is a way for me to let others know me beyond and deeper than their glancing suppositions about me or my feckless attempts at self-burnishing.

In other words, when I write, I do not put my make-up on, but take it off, to let anyone with the stomach for it see my warts and wrinkles, my scars and baldness.

The result is both particular and, I believe, universal: what has happened to me is neither unique nor particularly noteworthy; but it is really me, as honestly as I can say, and for whomever might be really curious, merely interested—who might be long-acquainted with me or a complete stranger. What they read is my best self-awareness, rooted in hard-won insights from the intersection of my faith, tradition and life. I offer them as a gift, well-aware that the lilies from my rocky little acre may have been born to blush unseen and waste their sweetness on the desert air (Gray).

Which may be a mercy as some of what I have written is not sweet perfume at all.

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I rather doubt you have heard of John Baillie, I doubt you have heard of him. If you have, most likely it is on account of a little book he first published in 1936, A Diary of Private Prayer, which is now considered a devotional classic. Dr. Baillie was a professor at the New School, University of Edinburgh, a pastor and Moderator of the Church of Scotland, and advisor to the Scottish crown. His writing desk was also a prayer desk, making him an almost perfect example of the rabbinic maxim that an hour of study is like unto an hour of prayer.

Sadly, for me, when I visited the New School a decade ago, I found that apart from a single b/w picture of him on the back wall of a multi-media classroom, there is almost no remembrance of him. I did visit his grave, however, which was next to Thomas F. Torrance’s, and took time to read passages from his Diary.

I tell you all that as background to my favorite “Baillie” story: that he had been selected and scheduled to deliver, in the 1961-1962 academic year, the historic and prestigious Gifford Lectures. Chartered in 1888 and delivered at the four great universities of Scotland—Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen—the Gifford Lectures focus on what used to be called “natural theology,” meaning, what can be discerned or said of God apart from the “special revelation” of scripture, traditions, etc. The invitation, for whoever receives it, is considered the highest academic honor in Scotland, and there was great anticipation regarding Dr. Baillie’s series.

Sadly, he died 1960.

Astonishingly, in his desk were his already completed addresses which, ultimately, would be read in the appropriate venues and times by Torrance and other respectful colleagues, and later published as The Sense of the Presence of God.

Long before the lectures were due or would see the light of day, Baillie had both something to say and a sense of urgency—a burning in his bones—to state it for the record. I doubt that, writing those lectures, he imagined anyone other than his delivering them, or that they would not be read until after his death. Still, what he sensed must have been a kind of determination to think it through, line it out, put meat on the bones… and nothing new at all, really, just…reconfigured. In the same way that there is no new music, only the selfsame scales rearranged and modulated, there is likewise no new theology. What gets said in pulpit or publications is all of it a footnote to… someone who said the same things long ago, nor was it original with them.

Every “new” book is a variation on ancient themes, and every Gifford lecture—or Beecher Lecture, or Terry Lecture—is a rephrasing of previous divines’ estimations of a generation’s natural sense of God’s presence. Or lack of same.

It is John Baillie who reminds me that sometimes, what I write may or may not be “read” till after I die—if it is, even then—but if it ever is discovered, it will at that point remain true testimony to my own sense of God’s presence at this point in my life.

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My then-friend Russell started to tell me a joke. I stopped him: “You’ve told me this story,” I said. “Okay. I’ll tell it different this time.”

Not different-LY—as in a different medium or form, turning, say, the story into a dance or song. No, just different—different characters, different sequencing: same story but different, too.

There are no new jokes under the sun. Just new comedians and their reiterations and recasting of the classics.

There are no new recipes, either, just different versions of the same dishes. All culinary science is a footnote to Escoffier, as it were, with substitutions.

And even here, I realize I am just telling the same things you have already been told before—and more than once already in this—but different.

In aum, if I am interrogating myself as thoroughly and honestly as I can even when it does not “read” as if I am doing examen at all, it is only a particular of the universal, different but the same as any other spiritual memoir. My prayers are the same as Dr. Baillie’s, just much cruder and artless. Poor imitations, as my poetry is Dr. Seuss to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Unsophisticated as my memoirs and essays are, it’s all the same story—just different than what my elders and betters have written.

So, why bother? If it has already been done?

That question was the genesis of this essay, and the preceding it. To rephrase: where does the urge to reconsider and rephrase familiar materials come from?

Perhaps the deepest answer is adumbrated by Elie Wiesel, who in a profound, if somewhat enigmatic phrase, states that God made man (sic) because he loves stories.

And did he mean because God loves stories? That God loves the fact that be created us as story-making and story-telling creatures, who interpret their lives as stories (because they are) and chronicle those stories with a beginning, and end, and a heart? That, if you scratch the surface of the most forbidding of lectures or essays, or look behind the curtain of most fiction and humor, you find “once upon a time?”

Or did Wiesel mean that God made us because we love stories? And we do, because Creation is itself a story, the mud from whence we were fashioned. We experience our lives as a kind of story whose context is the world and its history, and we tell our stories to ourselves and others as explanation (or rationalization) or illustration, as wisdom or warning.

But is the meaning discovered or imposed?

The latter is the case, too often, when we are telling others’ stories—whether to ourselves or to them. With a few random and cobbled-together “facts” which we and extrapolate to the level of assumption, we offer caricature instead of perspicacity, propaganda rather than nuance, that to justify our prejudices and animosities.

The “stories of us” may well be told stories in similarly reductive ways and for similarly prejudicial purposes: to help advance a justifying narrative for this and the next generations.

In irresponsible or dishonest hands, the reductionist stories we tell of ourselves or others, and the analogous tories they tell of themselves and us, may be but stones to sharpen the edges of individual or tribal bitterness—or poisons for the spear-tips of ethnic or political enmity.

This, when it may be that God intended our various stories in all their particularity to be the lingua franca and invitation for us to gather together for a great time around the campfire.

If so, reductionism itself—whose first iteration was in the Garden—may be the original and, we might fear, unforgivable, sin.

I bristled, and reminded her that adumbrate is a perfectly good and rich word, and not that obscure, thank you very much, at least not to me, at least not since I first stubbed my eyes on it years before, courtesy the scrawled “approval” of Dr. Ted Hackett, my committee chair, on the cover page of my dissertation proposal.

I was, frankly, unsurprised by his academic blessing. After all, we had discussed the matter over the course of several semesters; I had already written at least two lengthy papers on the subject; the formal proposal was, well, a formality.

My basic thesis was this: that, as surely as baptism, the Eucharist (or Lord’s Supper, or Holy Communion) is a universalizing sacrament of the particular. That, as a re-presenta-tion of Jesus’ unique self-giving love under the specific but ordinary signs of bread and wine offered to each and all, the Table reiterated the unmerited grace and claim of the Font. As such, the Table was and remains an abiding locus and gesture of both pastoral care and challenge for individuals and congregations (and Traditions), routinely conveying at once forgiveness for infidelities in the past, sustenance for faithfulness in the present and recommissioning and purpose for the future. In sum, the Meal is the church’s unique way of gathering-up the life-stories of the baptized into the on-going Story of God’s redemption of the world—and by doing so, ever serves as an invitation to the unbaptized to pitch their tent among us. In that idiom, I wrote, I was going to tie Jesus’ radical hospitality at the Table to, for lack of a better term, evangelism, conveying what it signifies.

I was (and remain) pretty proud of the idea. It had developed, organically, at the intersection of my pastoral context and academic pursuits. I felt the “final” outline was a fitting conclusion to my program, as well as a tidy evangelical understanding of the sacraments.

But, of course, it was not “final” at all, even in the short-term.

Dr. Hackett, a very formal Episcopal priest, suggested as much even as he gave me the go-ahead to proceed—noting that I had adumbrated my thesis well.

Say, that again, please, Ted?

Turns out, what I assumed to be his “all clear” came with a not so subtle caveat for, when I checked the dictionary, I found this:

“adumbrate, ˈa-dəm-ˌbrāt, v., trans., from the Latin adumbrates, to foreshadow vaguely or intimate.”

I would soon discover my supervisor had chosen the word carefully, and precisely on account of its lexical fulness: Yes, I had adequately foreshadowed what I was planning to do; and, what I had proposed (for years?) was still vague.

Burn.

He was right, of course, nor did my best articulations clarify my thesis entirely. It could be argued, in fact, that I have never quit revising my dissertation—that most everything I have written since in all its forms (including manuscripts for preaching and teaching), is an attempt to clarify, to make less vague, that one phenomenological idea: how the universal is particularized in the sacraments, much as God was in Christ; and how that particularity universalizes our lives in turn.

In any case, that’s when adumbrate entered my working and writing vocabulary, and, as I told my editor, I was determined to use it whether she liked it or not.

Now, I am not saying I actually opened the Miriam-Webster on her desk (this was a good long while ago), but I might have.

Neener, neener, neener!

“The word might not be that obscure,” she retorted, “but you are an obscurantist: showing off with a word like adumbrate when “sketch-out” or “suggest” would do perfectly well, and perhaps more effectively: not only underwriting your meaning, so to speak, but more readily ensuring your reader’s understanding.”

“Nice puns,” I said. “So, you are saying I need to use words that are a little less recondite?”

“No,” she replied. “I am saying you need to use words that are a lot less pompous, less bombastic and pontificatorial.”

(I was stunned, not knowing if “pontificatorial” was in the Scrabble dictionary; but I was impressed nonetheless, not least because one of my Bible study regulars used to accuse me, regularly, of pontificating.)

“Nice one,” I said, but continued to resist her counsel to de-fog my articulations, emboldened as I was by the “outside reader” of my dissertation who was intimately aware of my ministry setting and deemed my view of the sacraments and their work, perspicacious. Rather snootily, I said, “Surely you remember how Faulkner said that ‘Hemingway never used a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary’”?

“You’re not Faulkner,” she said flatly. “And do you remember Hemingway’s retort? That ‘poor Faulker thought big words equaled big meaning.’”

When I tell that story, most people conclude: “game, set and match” to Anne.

(I miss you, Anne, and I am sorry you are sick.)

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In truth, I am pretty clear my writing is overblown—convoluted, dense, eccentric. I press metaphors the way the Salem tribunals pressed Giles Corey. To death.

My writing has more puns, ambiguities and strained descriptions than Edsels had chrome—an apt reference for those who remember Ford’s experiment in market-driven design, in that, like an Edsel, a) my essays are big, bulky ponderous vehicles for laborious symbolisms, and b) inarguable failures.

So, yeah. I know.

It’s just that sometimes I have worked so hard on the way I have said what I said that my allegiances are mixed—both to its form and its purpose. It grieves me when a good chapter, or paragraph or sentence—or even a really good word like adumbrate or perspicacious—ends up on the floor, when what lies there may signify hours and hours of hard work.

Not kidding. Hours. On a given word. Sometimes. And days on as much as a paragraph. Weeks on an essay.

How so? Contrary to conventional thinking, real writing—as opposed to typing—is a time-intensive, laborious endeavor. Nor is it fun, not precisely. It can be extremely satisfying—embarrassingly, scatalogical images come to mind—but the process is a commensurate strain, as it were, in any case.

I am thankful (and relieved) when what emerges proves worth the discomfort, but that result is neither guaranteed nor transferrable.

A fellow I once met said it was fun having written, but that writing itself was anything but. Yep.

Which is why I regularly repeat, most often to myself, Thomas Mann’s counter-intuitive observation that an author is one for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. If most people can dash off an email or note without necessarily caring how it might look or sound, or whether the vocabulary is very precise, an author is painfully concerned about all those things (nor would a real writer cede creative or editorial control to AI programming; it’s hard enough having an editor).

It is the burden of the grunt work, however, that makes the elusive pay-off so sweet. As Annie Dillard puts it, “(at) its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then—and only then—it is handed to you.”

And the very reason why you don’t want to hand it to anyone else. But you have to.

I remember my infant son’s first serious ear surgery. His mother and I took turns holding him tightly while the nurses gave him “monkey perfume,” the relaxing gas that would prepare him for the real anesthetic. I tried in vain to get a whiff of it myself. When the moment came to hand his limp little body to the lady who had come for him, I was a mess. All I could say was, “Please take good care of him. Treat him as if he is yours.” Even now, I am not sure if I was pleading with or God.

Not to be mawkish, but that is kind of what it feels like when, with fear and trembling, you send your stuff to an editor, or post it where readers can react. It is not the most helpless feeling in the world, but it is in the same precincts. And if I had access to monkey perfume I would take a long draw. Every time.

I mean, what if they don’t take care of your baby? What if they don’t love it? What if what you are persuaded has been handed you by grace (after heart-, back- and brain-breaking work) is, to their way of reading, less than amazing, wonderful, beautiful, compelling, perfect, mesmerizing…

Which they most often do—I have so many rejection letters. And with every one, every time, my bones were crushed, as what had been rejected was not just my idea, of course, but me.

And even in the relatively few instances where my offering was accepted, it was never accepted in the form I sent it, and the next steps would approximate the butchering of meat.

You have seen those pictures of cows? The so-called “butcher’s guides”?

Editors are eager to mark the spots where I need to trim. Or cut. Or slash. When applied by strangers, the process can feel brutal. Merciless. Cold and somewhat bloody—leaving a skinned split carcass where a living thing used to be.

Thankfully, I have a couple of life-long friends who are more than willing to help me prep my stuff before I hand-over another of my babies to Magda Goebbels.

Both are writers. Both are editors. Both are better at both tasks than I, but patient with me (for the most part). And they proceed from the assumption that (at least some of) what I am trying to say has worth—and that how I say it can be interesting and compelling, if it doesn’t feature too much chrome.

They are most often gentle, if not always, which still gets on my last nerve: Tom, the runway is too long. You have buried the lead. Nobody knows who Karen Silkwood is. Your mind is like Velcro—you retain so many little pieces of unrelated lint! But your readers need you to keep is simple. Do you really think they have time to read—much less reread… all…that… stuff?

Afterwards, I can feel as carved-up as the next edition of my essay, but when I scab-over I almost always conclude they were right. After all, they are my readers, too.

Which is not to say I never hold firm for the sake of my quirk. I mean, my mind is like Velcro, and if my essays are authentic to me and to the way I think and say things, then sometimes I have to insist on writing things my way. When I do, however, I know there will be a price to pay. Crickets. Bad reviews. Less readers than the few I already have. Or had.

I mean, if my parents never bothered to read my stuff, why would I expect strangers to?

Of the readers I may have had early on, more than a few of them forsook me and fled because, in a phrase, they were hooked by my phonics: they hated the words my editor hated, not to mention my occasionally scatalogical vocabulary.

Even my good friend, an English major in college—when I gave him a copy of my first real book, sure that he, at least would be impressed—impressed—by my legerdemain Instead he deemed it glacial.

Ouch.

(The only redeeming feature of that story is that I really liked the word, glacial, and found a couple of additional synonyms that have in the years since served me well: phlegmatic, molassic, gelid).

So, yeah, I guess I kind of understand some of why my books have failed to sell many copies, even apart from the fact that my preferred subjects—prayer, scripture, Jesus—are not on everyone’s Kindle profile.

What I guess I don’t quite understand at times is why those who do still read my stuff, do still read my stuff.

Begging a deeper question yet, and one I really can’t answer: Why do I still write? Hubris? Perhaps only that. Or is there something more?

In fact, why does anyone write? Whence the compulsion, for anyone who takes up the pen or opens the laptop? What are they trying, well, to adumbrate?

Next time: More ado about something.

Kind of like a chihuahua’s sneeze.

Which means, of course, that I am about to die of pneumonia. I mean, I am prone to that nasty, and was hospitalized for it a couple of summers ago in the Hospital Transylvania—not the actual one in the NC mountains, which has had its own share of problems; but one here whose receptionist, doctors and nurses seemed to have reported-in after their shift in the cartoon).

With my second shallow hack I was transported to the saloon in Big Whiskey, WY, where Little Bill Dagget (Gene Hackman), the cruel gunslinger Sheriff, lies mortally wounded after a chaotic shootout with Will Munny (Clint Eastwood). Most everybody else is either dead or has cleared-out, and Munny stands over Little Bill meaning to avenge his friend, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), whom Little Bill had mercilessly whipped to death. As Munny stares down the barrels, hatred narrowing his eyes, Little Bill says to him, “I don’t deserve this…to die like this. I was building a house!”

“’Deserve’s’ got nothing to do with it,” Munny says.

Let all the people say, Amen.

Truly enough, “deserve” has little to do with anything. At least, near as we can tell. Or opine.

So, why that scene? And why did it come immediately to mind when I woke up with a tight chest and a cough?

Because I, too, am building a house.

More accurately, renovating a small haybarn into, wait for it, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it would sort of fit the plot of my life if, before I actually move-in, I…you know… died. What can go wrong for me often does, and it is something of a trope among my friends and family.

In any case, if I do, people will surmise that I must have had a hunch it was going to happen.

Exhibit One: In hopes of sparing my children such grim work after I am gone, for a few weeks now I have been “prearranging,” first by searching for the best local rates for “direct cremation,” all the while wondering what indirect cremation might entail. Happily, I found a place offering “free cremations” and called the number and when the guy said it was incumbent on my donating my body to science, I was prepared to do that. The more we talked about me and my various ailments, however, it became apparent he was not prepared to do that. At least that is the sense I got. He referred me back to an inexpensive place near where I live. Not kidding.

Exhibit Two: I have found the urn I am going to order for my cuisinarted bones (after my flesh has passed through fire and my artificial joints removed). I will be buried near the cabin, where Bruiser and several other dogs are already interred. AND, I have already had the talk with the kids—that, though I am a retired UM pastor and believe with all my heart, I prefer that they not have a church service where people will be forced to tell sanitized stories and praise me in words I don’t deserve; instead, I hope they will schedule a cookout and people will bring their guitars and sing good songs and tell good stories. That seems more fitting.

Exhibit Three, and most telling: I have finished a sermon that is not to be preached until October 11. This, from a guy who is never finished with a sermon even after I preach it. I noodle it right up until I stand up, then go back to the office and revise it in terms of what I should have said (or shouldn’t have), retype it to include what I will do the next time I preach it (even though I do not preach old sermons)…

Over the course of the last week or so, however, which is to say after having received an invitation to preach “Homecoming” at a church I served for five years (but over three decades ago), I was possessed of the whole idea—the place, the church, my time there. I was consumed. Began churning-out an essay of “highlights” and “lowlights” that will soon appear here. And after than spadework, I spent hours and hours writing through at least four drafts of four possible preachments, until almost by “accident” I arrived at the intersection of classic singer-songwriter oldies, St. Paul’s final counsel to his first church, esoteric sounding theology (which is really powerfully encouraging), my own memories of serving that congregation… all of it leading to some life application and, dare I say it, affirmation and hope.

Yesterday…yesterday… after more than a week of o/c, I added one last phrase, corrected what I think is the last typo, and set it aside till nearer the time I would take it up again, review and preach it. “Yeah, this is it,” I said to myself.

Yesterday.

Then, this morning I woke up with upper respiratory distress. Hmmm.

“Is this it?” I wondered.

Now, I had imagined that I’d just been enthused by the invitation (I rarely get called-back to preach in the places I have served), inspired by my excavations and discoveries, and “stuck,” which I often get when I have an idea for a sermon or essay.

Only, now, I am thinking there must be another explanation: that the Spirit goaded me to write the thing in advance, knowing I would die before I got to preach it, but done so that somebody would be able to read it to stunned and weeping congregation… OR, wait, wait, I know, so I can video myself reading through it, so that the pastor can play it on the screen, and it will be like I am speaking to them from the beyond…

Kind of like John Baillie did, at least as I remember the story, he being my hero and mentor in prayer, whose study-desk (he was quite a scholar) was also a praying-desk, an altar of sorts. The rabbis, who say famously that an hour of study is the same as an hour of prayer, would approve. Anyway, when Baillie died in 1960, he had been scheduled to present the Gifford Lectures the following academic year. The completed lectures were found in his desk, which were subsequently delivered by theologians Thomas F. Torrance and John McIintyre (they didn’t have computer video recording back then).

Something like that.

Exhibit Four: I played golf most everyday last week. A couple of years ago, a buddy of mine, whom I followed at one of my appointments, played golf and two weeks later died… of pneumonia. He was only a bit older than me and in far better shape. God rest his soul and comfort his wife and daughters. It remains such a shocking reality.

Exhibit Five: THIS ARTICLE.

Okay, so I could be overreacting a little. I often remind myself of a house hippo—meaning an English Bulldog—when I survey my face and shape, my disposition and energy level. And perhaps I am like the one big fellow I saw recently on Facebook, lying on his side, his overlong tongue halfway out over his underbite, barely moving his eyes as a voiceover says, gloomily, “My food bowl is only half-empty. Clearly, I will soon die of starvation. My hoomans have not refilled it, and I have no strength or will to get up and eat what is left…”

I’m hip.

So… Baillie or the Bulldog? I am feeling them both this morning.

As I am feeling both Little Bill and the Schofield kid.

In Unforgiven, there is another conversation I remembered this morning, when a brash young man who has presented himself as a hardened killer—and recruited Will and Ned to kill some cowboys who had knifed the face of a prostitute in Big Whiskey and collect a bounty posted by her peers—actually shoots one of them in an outhouse. Horrified, he says to Will,

“It don’t seem real... how he ain’t gonna never breathe again, ever... how he’s dead. And the other one too. All on account of pulling a trigger.”

Will says, “It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.”

“Yeah, well, I guess they had it coming.”

“We all got it coming, kid.”

In fact, yes, we do. As the old Bible says, “It is appointed unto men once to die,” which I have long known meant me, too, “and then the judgment,” which used to scare me and, really, scarred me. I still have scars, but little fear. Somewhere along the line I realized that God will prove no less loving to me than how Jesus has commanded me to love others. In other words, I have learned, with the Psalmist, to number my days and, finally, think I have more nearly gained a heart of wisdom.

Meaning I know that this time may not be the time… in fact, I am reasonably sure this is not it, though we will see, won’t we?—but the time will come. I know I have it coming.

The doctor will deliver the news, or will not have time to when the big one hits.

The car will cross the middle lane and leave me in the ditch (have actually been there, done that; thank God for side impact panels).

Whatever it is—as my daddy said upon his terminal diagnosis, “Well, we all have to have something.” Something, sometime, will be aimed at my head, as it were. And in that moment, I may look up and say, “Not now! I’m building a house, or writing a novel, or painting a masterpiece. I am having such a good time with my children and grandchildren… I don’t deserve this, to die this way, not right now!”

In truth, I have worked hard and long and overcome more than any essay can chronicle to get to this point in my life; and while, yes, I’ve got it coming, I would like to think I deserve a minute to enjoy these moments.

But ‘deserve’s’ got nothing to do with it. Does it?

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PS Turned out, I had COVID. Am better now—which is to say, I am back on the golf course and still planning to preach Homecoming on October 11.

The fact that we say “I believe” together in congregational worship strikes a nice balance between the personal and the corporate, each qualifying the other. What is not so nice is that the typical translation of the first person singular present tense Latin root cred-, is thinner than it should be.

More than merely “I believe,” which one could say about very many things, credo means something more like “I give my heart to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit,” trusting that today… and tomorrow and every day after that we can become what Jesus has called us to be, and to do what Jesus has invited us to join him in doing.

That is our gospel, our doctrine; our doctrine redefined. Refreshed.

And, yes, sometimes our doctrines can seem formulaic—flat—uninteresting, and not only because we have said them so routinely, so matter-of-factly for so long. And because we are easily bored—and also because we each and all have a little Dan Brown in us (the DaVinci Code’s Dan Brown)u, who had nothing on everybody’s twin, Thomas (or Judas, for that matter)—you may not get too enthused about our doctrines.

You may find yourself dismissing them… and if you do you may have in your spiritual DNA not only Doubting Thomas and Dan Brown, but a chromosome or two of Walt Kowalski.

Do your remember him? He was the main character in the movie Gran Torino? It is among the most theologically significant movies I have ever seen, starring and directed by that premier American theologian, Clint Eastwood? In Gran Torino, Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a grizzled and embittered Korean War vet who had no use for the church, its gospel, or the priest who buried his wife, Fr. Janovich.

Eventually, Walt will sacrifice himself to free people he had long-thought were his enemies. But before he dies sacrificially, cruciform, in the street, he says to Fr. Janovich…

I think you’re an overeducated 27-year-old virgin who likes to hold the hands of superstitious old ladies and promise them everlasting life.

I’ve known so many people who, if not in those exact words, were settled in pretty much their own opinions that a bunch of overeducated, underemployed, otherwise useless prelates and priests sat around and just made some of this stuff up, our doctrines and ethical demands; just made it all up and mandated that the peasants must believe it… all of it… with the threat that if they didn’t… not to put too fine a point on it…there was a place prepared for them in the hereafter, at the Damnation Arms Apartments, so to speak

Which was precisely what my friend Raymond Hester said one Wednesday night in Bible study when, for some reason I can’t remember, I was at pains to explain an obscure doctrine—obscure to Protestants but a core conviction of Roman Catholics—what we might call a reverse-engineered doctrine: of the Immaculate Conception—

Which is not to be confused with the virginal conception of Jesus.

No, Mary in her conception was granted a unique gift of “preservative redemption,” shielding from the taint of original sin, so that Jesus, her only child, would also be shielded… Which makes a kind of sense if you follow Augustine in believing that the transmission of is biological… …

Raymond Hester held up his hand…

“Yes, Raymond.”

“Sounds to me like something a bunch of Catholic men made up in a back room.”

In fact, a lot of church doctrines can sound that way. And some of them not obscure at all. Which may be the very reason a couple of folk I knew in this very congregation, in their own ways, demurred. I’ll mention two.

One of them was the long-time Lay Leader and one of the more… intense… individuals I ever met. After the closing hymn, all of still standing to say the Apostles’ Creed, he would begin with the rest of the congregation “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ…”

Dead stop.

At that very point—even when I watched; especially when I watched—he rather ceremoniously clamped his mouth shut, signaling to me and anyone else who might be looking that he was not going to say the rest of it, because he did not believe the rest of it. Any of it.

Nor did our next Lay Leader—Mr. Wood. Ernie. Ernie and his predecessor agreed on almost nothing else, but they did agree on that. Now, Ernie said the Creed, all of it, but with his head down and his fingers crossed behind his back, or so I have imagined. With his fingers tightly crossed, in fact, and especially when we said that line about believing in the resurrection of the dead. He did not believe in the resurrection of the dead. He did not believe in souls, he said. Dead is dead, he said. (As an aside, the last line of his obituary, which he himself wrote, was, “Ernie’s dead. Enough said.”)

I didn’t agree with that, of course, and told him so: and that there was far more to be said about life and death and souls. But I might as well have been Fr. Janovich talking to Walt Kowalski.

But I am wondering if maybe you, too have crossed your fingers about all or part of what we say? Or clamped your mouth shut when it came time to say again those things that at most times, in most places, most Christians have believed.

I had nerve enough, once, to ask Ernie why, if that was the way he felt, why he came to church. Ever. At all. Or why he was willing to be our new Lay Leader after the other one had rather ceremoniously on account of the first major addition to the old church…

Mr. Wood said that he supported the church because it was the inheritor, and the guarantor, of the “great traditions”: music, texts, the intellectual history of the West… not for the doctrine, but for the history and traditions that have shaped Western culture.

And the music, especially—this church was crucial in the early days of the Chamber Music Festival. And the Festival supported our church.

On my first Sunday as the new pastor of HUMC, it was pouring rain but the place was still packed—chairs in the aisles—maybe to see the new guy; but, really, to hear an internationally known ensemble, The Alexander String Quartet, who performed that morning.

I was transfixed. These guys had played Carnegie Hall.

Meanwhile, on my last Sunday at the place I had just left, two weeks before, a six-person choir with all the musical attributes of a broken washing machine had sent me on my way from the Piedmont to the mountains with a rendition of “The Circuit Riding Preacher.” You have heard it, I’m sure.

The Circuit Riding preacher / went a’riding through the land,

With a rifle on his shoulder / and a Bible in his hand…

Yeah, no.

I mean I loved those folk, but on my first Sunday here, I felt like Dorothy looking out at Oz. I knew I was not in the Piedmont, anymore.

And, like Dorothy in Oz, it was a road, those five years. There were some lions, and tigers and bears, to be sure. Once or twice I looked up to see what might be coming for me. But I was never alone. I stood in line, did my part, just as you are doing yours.

For the next generations. That is the doctrine of apostolic succession.

Our doctrines, which is to say the things we believe, are not, in the words of Fr. Henri Nowen, “alien formulations but the documentation of the most profound human experiences… transcending time and place, (that) are handed over from generation to generation as a light in our darkness.”

It is light in my darkness that this Christian way upon which we walk is no

no uncharted road, but a road beaten hard by the footsteps of saints, apostles, prophets and martyrs. We thank you for the finger-posts and danger-signals with which it is marked at every turn, and which may be known to us through the study of scripture, of all history, and of the great literature of the world…

We are not alone in this journey. That is the doctrine of apostolic succession, and the documentation of the profound human truth that as Christians we belong to each other.

Think of it this way: most of us don’t know the names much less the faces of those who appear in the windows of our sanctuaries or the windows of our hearts… but they are crucial parts of your story, a part of your pilgrimage, even now. Subsequent generations will likely not know who you are, but you will be a part of their story and faithfulness, if you remain faithful, hopeful and loving. Those who came after us will find our footprints on their path, even if they do not know the names or faces that go with the tracks, just as we ourselves found the path ahead, courtesy of those who went before.

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One of the first lessons I learned about parables was this: they are mnemonic gifts given to us by teachers, preachers, or authors to help us remember one important point—which could have been stated didactically, as a formula or moral: “Being a productive disciple requires constant devotion.” But when couched in a story or apothegm for mnemonic purposes—“I am the vine, you are the branches”—we have a way to ponder and share that one meaning.

One of the first lessons about parables I had to unlearn, or reject, was that a given parable had a single meaning. The rest of it was true—they are gifts, memorable, worth pondering. It did not take me long, however, to realize that parables, carefully read, can, may, and often do mean many things at once. Even contradictory things—and therefore unlike allegories, where there is one to one correspondence between a given character or reference and a one to one “moral” or lesson. Parables lack pristine interpretation because they are so rich with meaning—indeed have a surplus of meaning—that what one discovers via careful study and reflection might surprise the source. That insight would be the interpreter’s gift to the teller.

Just so, I could say this: if the shoe fits, it’s too big. If it’s comfortable, it’s not for you. If it doesn’t fit, buy it. Wear it. Masochism is a spiritual discipline, and deformity is unavoidable result of pursuing the unattainable.

Or, I could tell you a story.

Let those with ears, hear.

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I knew a woman—let’s call her SF—who had, in a word, ugly feet. REALLY ugly feet.

Please be clear: I am not disparaging her, just reporting the observable, irrefutable fact that with one glance anyone other than Jesus would have refused to wash them, even if it were Maundy Thursday, and even he might have thought twice.

I will neither confirm nor deny that SF was my mother. One way or the other I knew her well enough to know that, had she been so inclined, she could rightly have said that she “was born that way.” Indeed, from the jump, SF was, as they used to say, “big boned,” and her feet no less than the rest of her. And so she remained, despite arduous attempts to reshape herself, until her death at age 93.

Now, one time she did manage to lose fifty pounds; even then, she outweighed her husband by twice that much and was taller besides. Only a couple of photos of the two of them survive, but in one of them at least their heads more or less line-up; he must have puffed at the same instant she scrunched.

Scrunching, of all sorts—that was SF’s characteristic presentation.

I never heard her verbalize any shame of her body, only her wardrobe: “Well, today, I could be frumpy or dowdy…” But I have it on good authority that she tortured herself with masochistic girdles (which did not so much shape her body as abuse it) till, I’m told, she looked like a tube of counter-whomp biscuits whose ends had popped off.

For the longest, SF’s mother made the clothes she wore, as it was rare for stores to carry sizes above 18. Later, as America…expanded, as it were… SF was able to find things that fit at The Avenue, The Dress Barn and even Hamrick’s. She wore mostly navy, gray, black, colors that were supposed to be “slenderizing.”

When she needed something special, she frequented a place called—I am not making this up—“Catherine’s Stout Shop,” which I later found out was not just a single store but a Memphis- based franchise that reached east into the Carolinas. Later, before all the stores closed but because so many women refused to open the door under such a sign, the name was changed to just “Catherine’s.”

SF once lit into someone I know when, after she let slip where she had purchased her new dress, he laughed incredulously and said, “the STOUT Shop?” He confided that he really did feel bad about that—for long years—you know, laughing at her expense. And in that way added to her shame. Which only added to her pique. The criticisms and disgust she ladled on others were spooned from a cauldron of self-loathing. If she had ever accepted herself as she was, she might have been more able (and willing) to accept her children (and others) as they were.

For many years she had and on-again, off-again “affair” with SEGO, a Pet Dairies precursor to Slimfast and the like. (Get it? SEGO? As in, SE(e the weight) GO? Clever hook.)

According to author Susan Yager, SEGO was “baby formula mixed with water and a poor substitute for food” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sego_(diet_drink)), but it came in several flavors, and more than one of them “chocolate,” against which SF was helpless, even if it were CINO.

SEGO was a liquid, but I do not know if SF ever used a punch-top can opener in order to pour and drink the stuff; instead, she put multiple $.50 cans into the freezer and pretended that the cylinder-shaped, frozen-solid that emerged (think: store-bought gelatinous cranberry sauce, but chalky brown and hard) was ice cream. Uh, no.

So, no wonder SF took it by spells: a season of absolute SEGO O/C, punctuated by seasons of absolute SEGO avoidance.

Over the years, SF brought various weight-loss apparatuses into her mostly unused “living room,” each of them designed to vibrate, row or otherwise disappear her girth. A mutual friend says she never used any of them more than two or three times before they disappeared back to wherever they had come from in the first place.

She was pitiable, really, though she would have resented your offering her such. And I am sure that it would not have helped her psyche to know much weight and, more significantly, size, have to do with genetics. I have wondered if she might have felt empowered by the current “blessing” of plus-sized women. I don’t know, in part because she was so full of contradictions. As when, rather regularly, she ordered, say, sausage and biscuits with thick pepper gravy and say, “Now this is my kind of eating.”

Then she would go home for a desert of frozen SEGO.

But I started this essay talking about SF’s feet which, as I said, were big. But neither did she take any kind of care of them. Which is to say, she never sacrificed “comfort” for style, so-called. That particular dyad worked against her short and long term. Which is to say, instead of taking care of her feet by wearing, say, New Balance walking shoes, she instead chose to buy and wear shoes that were at minimum a size or two too small. More scrunching. And to what end?

Il faut souffrir pour être belle, the French say proverbially—one must suffer to be beautiful—and SF surely suffered as, over time, in ways that from this distance seem rooted in sad, futile, vain imagination, she actually de-formed the feet she was born with.

To her credit, and unlike the unnamed step-sisters in Grimm’s original tale, SF did not cut off her big toe, or part of her heel in hopes of wearing the metaphorical glass slipper. Instead, she overstuffed her unfortunate and unsuspecting shoes with more foot than they could handle without fighting back. The result? Her non-sensible patent leather foot ware were vice-grips that turned her toes into a permanent spade. Her little and big toes were aimed at each other, while the middle three toes were, well, scrunched into space barely big enough for two.

Misdirected digits, nails like horn, callouses, bunions—it was painful to see. It had to have been agony to walk, the damage and pain radiating upward to her knees, hips and back. SF’s feet began to pronate so badly that she appeared to be walking on the inside of her ankles.

When she finally saw the doctors about it, they sounded more than a little like Granny Clampett telling Mrs. Drysdale to lose the girdle. They told her to get shoes with room in them, and wanted to fit her with in-shoe braces to give her some stability. She refused, of course, because —wait for it—the braces would make her feet “look so big.”

As would the SAS orthopedic shoes she bought but never wore.

And, so, she more or less limped, hobbled along, till she could barely stand or walk at all. Even to the bathroom. All the while feigning comfort.

SF was like the guy who bottle blacks his hair and thinks it keeps him looking young when, really, it makes him look not only old but silly… As an aside, I had exactly one session with a therapist who had just such ridiculous hair as that. I opined to myself, “This guy can’t be honest with himself, and he is going to try to help me on the path toward authenticity?” He recommended a book called Reality Slap. I thought that was what he needed at least as much as I did.

As did SF. Very like the counselor, she did not hide her disdain for other people, their size and sartorial choices. Without the least blush in her cheeks or sense of irony—and with only a distorted self-awareness—she was…projecting, I guess… when she looked down her nose at the her neighbors at the retirement home. There are “so many old people here,” she sniffed, which of course there were, but not many of them very much older than she.

+

Let those with eyes, see.

Jesus said,

“What do you think? There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work today in the vineyard.’

“‘I will not,’ he answered, but later he changed his mind and went.

“Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, ‘I will, sir,’ but he did not go.

“Which of the two did what his father wanted?”

“The first,” they answered.

Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him.

Matthew 21:28-32

SF has been dead for a long time, now, and I confess that, for reasons I need not share, I have not thought of her or her feet much at all over these last 13 years. That is, until the other day when much of what I have said came back to me in a pronated rush. I had posted a Substack essay about Sunday mornings and who is actually where when worship time comes (https://tomsteagald.substack.com/p/inside-intra-and-outside-extra-mura).

I made the point that the dyads I was taught as a boy, and more or less took for granted in one gradation or the other: that “good” people were in church on Sunday, leaving people who weren’t in church to be, if not bad, still not as good as we were, no longer held. If they ever did. I had seen irrefutable proof of it a couple of times—two witnesses, as required by law—and most recently during a visit to the Museum of Life and Science, in Durham, on a recent Lord’s Day morning.

There, I saw droves of really good people moving through the various exhibits, teaching their children and reminding themselves of the wonders and mystery of the earth. They seemed affluent, educated, curious, vibrant and interested—clearly devoted to their families, as well as polite and even hospitable to strangers. They do not say the right words, but…

Meanwhile, at that very hour, in Durham’s withering mainline congregations—much like the ones I have known and served—I could guess there would be among the gathered a lamentable lack of curiosity, or wonder, or enthusiasm, or laughter. They would say the right words, but…

In other, burgeoning congregations—generally comprised of folk who, politically, are right of center and in thrall to MAGA. In those churches, where some pastors and congregants are packing, I knew that implicitly if not explicitly there would be a detectable spirit of suspicion instead of hospitality; fear would prevail over wonder; defiant self-righteousness would have replaced deference and humility; in short, both theologically and ethically there would have been a loss of mystery, liminality and joy. On the face of it they seem very much like the church in Ephesus to whom John the Revelator wrote with a warning—that while they were great at judgment, they had forgotten the “love they had at first.”

Ephesus was in danger of ceasing to be a church. I fear that some congregations in this present apocalypse have already crossed that line.

And even in the congregations that tack left, despite our ministry and message of reconciliation, church-goers can be among the meanest, hardest and most divisive of souls. Many fear the kind of religious experiences that founded their traditions. Day by day, a lack of anything like faith as trust causes catastrophic failures of ministerial imagination, while personal transformation (read: sanctification) is not lingua franca even in Methodist churches. The whole taxonomy of salvation seems anachronistic.

So, who are the good folk and who are the…others? Any general accounting is most likely not simple or self-obvious.

I am sure, for example, that some of the people at the museum are peacock proud and as condescending about Jesus-followers as some of those in church are dismissive of the secularized. We might have hoped by this time that we would be past the days of New Atheists and the current batch of Fundamentalists (each group a pale shadow of their elders and betters), but… not yet.

“What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?” I more or less concluded the essay with Tertullian’s second-century question, but suggested the answer was not to be found in simple dyads, or traditional dyads, or even reversed dyads. Neither “city” is pristine, after all, and each has reason to be suspicious and wary of the other—but much to learn from and teach the other. That kind of mutuality can only happen on the other side of honest self-awareness.

Something like that.

An appreciative friend replied with a comment from the Benedictine writer, Joan Chittester, who that very same day had penned a bit of commentary on a difficult section of Benedict’s Rule. St. Benedict was talking about “restoring” a fallen brother or sister though various forms of reprimand and even physical punishment, while Chittester, noting that such measures would be justly abhorrent today, concluded that, perhaps, the cloistered life is just not right even for those who enter it.

“The person may be a very good person but, the implication is, (the monastery/convent) just may not be the place for that person. The shoe simply does not fit and the foot should not be wrenched to it.” https://eriebenedictines.org/spirituality/rule-of-benedict.html/event/2025/07/05/1751691600/those-who-refuse-to-amend-after-frequent-reproofs

A shoe that does not fit. Wrenching a foot into a shoe too small. Just like SF did actually, to the detriment of her body.

It is a parable, and in some cases a dark parable—of things that have been hidden for too long.

How, for example, some postulants and novices (nor all of them either Roman Catholic or, in the strict term, religious) force their souls into a space that deforms rather than transforms.

That self-loathing is a powerful prompt for judgment and condemnation. That some skeptics regard the church’s entire menu as SEGO is as preposterous as the spiritually obese clamoring for sausage biscuits and gravy. Both are poor substitute for real Food.

Curiosity about entering and following the faith is a good thing, unless it isn’t. For either party. Serious inquirers and the newly converted need to be clear with themselves if they can as to what they are seeking and why.

Churches entrusted with a soul’s instruction and godly transformation are blessed beyond measure, but they must be careful: terrible damage can be done to those who are forced (or force themselves) in such environs. This unwitting damage becomes culpable when prideful attempts are made to “restore” or “restrain/retain” those souls that really do need to lose the girdle.

+

My dad used to say that everyone had to have their own Damascus Road experience. I am not sure that is true—after all, only one person ever had such—but I have had some kind of moment which at the very least knocked me (again) off my high horse and for the moment has blinded me as to all I am supposed to see (or to suffer) on account of it. I hope Ananias will pray for me, as it were. Meanwhile I am determined to honor Paul’s challenge to the judgmental Corinthians: to not make judgments before the Day. Why? Because my heart and brain are a pair of really small shoes, and trying to wrench others’ experiences into them can only damage them and me.

+

Before SF died, she asked me to read I Corinthians 13 at her graveside service. And so I did, though it was a shoe into which her attitudinal feet never fit. She was not patient, in other words, or kind. She was so envious, so condescending (boastful), so self-seeking.

She regularly dishonored others and was very easily angered.

And, oh, yes, she kept a record of her many grievances.

In all those ways SF was precisely like the church I attended on Sunday mornings when I was a boy. And we called ourselves the good guys.

I said of SF that while the text didn’t fit her, or she, it, we had hope that as, we believed, she wanted in her best self to be loving, that grace would yet prevail.

I have the same hope for the churches. That on Sunday mornings we can grow up, put away our angers and impatience, our self-seeking and the like, and show-forth the love we have received.

That our own “ugly feet” will become beautiful preaching and living-out the Good News of Jesus and his love.

When I was a child, I thought, well, as most any other obedient, orthodox, Baptist child thought. I reasoned and spoke as I had been taught, and so if you had asked me, I would have told you that parables, all of them—and this one parable most particularly, had one meaning…

Because parables were memory tools, clever stories told by our Lord and Teacher to help us remember one thing. The main thing.

Parables helped us keep the main thing the main thing, and the main thing Jesus was teaching with the parable of the Sower is that in the world, that some people get it, and some people don’t. And even the ones who get it, well, maybe they don’t get it at all. A little, some.

And a few, you know, really get it…

Listen again:

A Sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came at ate them up. Some fell on rocky soil, where they had no depth of soil—they sprang up quickly, but with no depth of soil, they died just as quickly when the sun got hot. Some fell where there were thorns… and the thorns choked them. But some fell on good soil, where they took root and grew up and brought forty thirty, and sixty, and a hundred fold.

All of which means, what? It’s obvious, isn’t it?

Jesus is the Sower. The lessons he teaches… that’s the gospel. And the way Jesus slung that seed… you might consider it wasteful, so much of it landing where it would not grow, or grow for long, or bear much fruit. Or you could call it grace, such indiscriminate flinging…

And so much of it landing on the path—on the broad way that leads to destruction and hell. The ones that don’t understand—that hear it and reject it—they are like that path, their hearts hard as pavement. And the good seed just sits there till the ravens, the minions of Satan, just eat it. Like minions of Satan, they just gobble it up.

You’ve known people like that. The gospel… just doesn’t get through.

Now, there are some who receive the gospel, but are superficial. Have no depth of faith or commitment. They’re thin in their interests and dedication. They get saved big, spring up fast, but with the first bit of opposition, the first word of criticism, the first doubt… they just wither away.

You have known church members like that. Who are all about it. And then aren’t.

And you maybe know folk who believed. They really did. Wanted to be faithful. Were here for it. But they just have so much other stuff going on that their commitment is choked-off.

But then …there are those people—maybe people like you, people like me and my family—and how thankful you are and we were to be the good soil, the chernozem, receiving and growing and bearing gospel fruit…

That’s the way I thought, when I was a child. The way I reasoned and talked.

And…end of parable. Right?

After all, these were the lines that had been drawn. By Jesus himself.

And by my grandmother, Memie, who in her own way reminded us that on Sundays, good people like my parents, my sister and me, and she were in church, unless they were sick, and even then it had to be pretty bad to qualify as an “excused” absence (hospitalization and/or death were the only real credentials, neither of which automatically conveyed to the caregivers or aggrieved).

Bad people, on the other hand, were not in church, but they had this to their credit: the good sense and common decency to stay inside, out of sight.

Until… I still remember… the memory is vivid… of the Sunday morning we were on our way to the Radnor Baptist Church on Nolensville Road… Memie was scrunched-up in between my sister and me in our old blue Chevy Impala blue Impala—the interior as vinyl, pale gray; there were no seatbelts—the first time we ever saw a guy daring to cut his grass on the Lord’s day, Memie harumphed, “He doesn’t know when Sunday is.”

II

We did. We knew when Sunday was, and what Sunday was for. We knew the good guys from the bad guys. Who was in and who was out. Who were on their way to heaven, and who…were not.

It was just that clear to me when I was a child—when I reasoned and spoke as any other obedient, orthodox Baptist boy did.

After all, Jesus himself had made distinction. That was the main thing in the parable of the Sower.

Now, I was not completely naïve… I may have thought like a child, but Jesus had also taught us about the rocky soil and the overgrowing thorns. And so when we got to Radnor, I could more or less place locate our congregation—place individuals and even families—in their proper acre, as it were.

But no doubt that we, and a very few like us, were good soil.

Not only saved, but sanctified, we were sure, entirely, with hearts ready again that morning to receive more good seed. We were tithers even when times were hard. We went to Sunday School and worship on Sunday mornings, what we called Training Union on worship on Sunday evenings. We were there on Wednesdays, supper, RA’s/GA’s, and age-level choirs. Dad and I even went on Thursday night for “visitation,” door-to-door” evangelizing. We volunteered for VBS, work crews, mission activities.

Now, we knew—thought, reasoned, could dutifully say—that we were not saved by our works, exactly; that did not keep us from being humbly proud to advertise our works as proof that we had been saved.

We loved James almost as much as the Methodists did” “show me your faith without works, and I will show you my faith by my works,” all the while clinging to Ephesians 2:8-9, “For by grace are you saved through faith…” which was the go-to for every preacher I ever had.

III

When I was a child…

But when I grew up… or as I grew up… I had to put away such childish ways of thinking. I did not put away Jesus, or the Parable of the Sower, or my faith… but I put away some of my childish ways of thinking and reasoning.

And if you asked me today, this morning, I would speak this way: that parables, generally, and the parable of the Sower, most particularly, have many meanings… many layers of meaning applicability.

That those four soils—every one of them—are present in my own heart—part of which is so hard, so walked on and beat down, so bitter with jealousies and resentments, that the gospel of grace, of loving people even when they have hurt you, of doing for them what they would never consider doing for you, of giving generously—not buying influence or demanding power, but giving—that seed just lays there.

And the lower forty of my heart is so shallow. So thin. Yes, I believe, but what I believe and desire for myself and the church… sometimes, the first word of opposition or criticism and I can feel myself wither.

Overgrown? Am I saying my heart is overgrown with thorns? That thorns in the world—from seeds sown by politicians, and “newscasters” and the powers that be (do I need to call names?)—those thorns can just choke off what I know to be true and want to believe.

Worse, the weeds and the gospel get so cross-pollinated that the gospel is mutated, becomes something else… Jesus is no longer the suffering servant, dying for his disciples and his enemies in the name of peace, and is something more on the order of John Wayne, or Clint Eastwood, killing his enemies, in the name of justice, which is not justice at all, but vengeance.

But I have to believe that there is my heart a little patch, at least a little corner of that vast untamed acre of my heart, that is, has been, will be, receptive to the real gospel seed.

This parable—Jesus told us, as he told the crowds beside the sea, many things in the parable of the Sower. And yes, about how it is with the world out there, you know, should we go visiting on a Thursday night or otherwise tell people about Jesus—though, who does that anymore? “Church” may come up in conversation, but church is easy… what is hard is talking about Jesus; but when we do, or if, it’s just like Jesus said… out there. A few hear, most don’t, and even those who do… well, we’ll see.

That’s out there.

But another thing he is teaching concerns is in here, in our hearts. And we do well to ask ourselves how we receive the good gospel seed Jesus sows among us week by week… loving, which means, serving your enemies; forgiving even when people don’t ask; repenting, acknowledging your own sin; being a peace maker, giving your coat and cloak, turning the other cheek, seeking first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness; knowing the signs of the times…

How do we react? Like the four soils!

Nope!

I mean, yeah, but it’s hot out there. Wars, rumors of wars. Earthquakes, disasters, meanness.

I mean, yeah, but this is the real world—we have things to worry about.

But, yes, Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.

+

Out there. In here.

And then there is this: in here. By that I mean, in the church.

In here, today. Where Christ our Lord invites to his table all who love him…everybody okay with that part of it? Do you love Jesus? You are invited. If you don’t, you’re invited anyway because he loves you.

Christ out Lord invites to his table all who love him, who earnestly repent of their sin… or do you imagine you have no sin to repent of? Liar! Or, yes, you know you have sinned, but you have several excellent excuses, and besides, she or he is worse… Then there is this: what is repentance and how do it do it, when I am old and set in my ways…

The short answer to that is to see whether your heart and mind is, as Paul says, conformed to this world, mutated by the thorns, thinned by the rhetoric that will beat your heart and mind hard… and if so, renew your mind. Come again to sit at the table of Jesus…

For Christ our Lord invites to his table all who love him, all who repent of their own sins, and the church’s sins, and those who seek to live in peace with one another.

Not everyone does, of course. Even in the church. Did you know, some of the meanest, most judgmental, most condescending, most self-righteous people I have ever me arrived at church in a blue Impala—they are in church every Sunday, as are the pews, with hearts just that hard.

And still Jesus invites us to his table.

Today, once again, Jesus sets his table, like the Sower spreads the gospel seed.

And where will this bread and juice, land, so to speak?

The hospitality, the radical hospitality and welcome of this table… the love and grace and mercy that, if it lands in the good part of your heart, if you take it and cultivate it can make you loving and gracious and merciful…

Or not. If you don’t love Jesus, refuse to repent, and care nothing for his peace and peacemaking.

A Sower went out to Sow.

Jesus, once again, earnestly desires to share with you his own Body and Blood, to make you more like him… so that you can be a Sower, and a Host.

That on Sunday mornings, good people (like my parents, my sister and me) were in church. Bad people—or, at last, not so good people—were not in church. But they had this to their credit, most of them: the sense and decency to stay inside, out of sight.

Except for that one guy we always noticed on our way to Radnor who, if it were not raining, was always cutting his grass. My grandmother, squeezed between my sister and me in the back seat of the old blue Impala, would invariably harumph under her hat, “He doesn’t even know when Sunday is.”

Neither did the Roman Catholics, apparently, whose late arrival to my awareness was foretold by the cafeteria’s serving fish sticks on Fridays. They went to church on Saturday night! But they were outliers, as were the misguided, non-Pauline Adventist Sabbatarians! “They are sincere,” Dad would sighin both groups’ direction, “but sincerely wrong.”

For those of us in the Impala, however, things were pretty simple and to our self-satisfactions inarguably right: you know who were sheep, and you knew who were goats, by where they pastured on Sunday mornings.

Not that I was completely naïve even then. I knew that there were observable and empirically verifiable gradations of righteousness intra mura ecclesias (within the walls of the church). In our own little acre beside Nolensville Road, there were troubling hints that some of those who were with us were not really of us. That could only mean, of course, that the Enemy had sown tares among the wheat.

Nor was that the only bad news. When it came to the Sower’s good seed, tragically, some of it seemed to have landed on hearts as hard as the four-lane. Some had fallen into lives that, we had heard whispered, were overgrown with worldly worries. And another handful fell where it could find no way to root as those people were just shallow.

I was so thankful that we were not like those people; that the Steagalds were chernozem, good rich soil for the gospel’s seed. We regularly bore not thirty, not sixty, but an hundred-fold. We tithed in hard times, attended, volunteered, ordered our lives around the church and its business. And, yes, we knew that we were saved by grace through faith and not by works, but we also knew that by our manifold fruits anyone could tell we were not only justified but sanctified. Entirely. Among the very elect.

And therefore appropriately affected when other sheep wandered from the flock and into the wilderness; but rejoicing that even lost sheep could be found and returned to the fold and who, in any case, were eternally better-off than the godless, uncircumcised Philistines hiding their faces at home. And that one guy mowing his grass.

“Once saved, always saved,” after all. Isn’t that what the Bible said?

+

I am no longer a child.

I have put away, I hope, at least for the most part, my childish ways of speaking.

To my surprise, though, I find that I have not put away all my “Sunday” dyads: it’s just that they have changed. Radically. At the expense of what I once took for granted. And nothing simple or self-satisfying about it. A gradual spiritual solstice accompanied by earthquakes, two of them, and a tectonic shift in my deepest perceptions, flattening the flimsy church and world I had constructed—neither of which met code.

(Funny thing: in neither event was anyone else unsettled. The people around me were just enjoying a nice sunny Sunday in downtown New Normal. Only I was struggling for balance, lurching about like Jacob on his bad hip as I came face-to-face with what is empirically verifiable and inarguably demonstrable if one venture outside (or inside) the church walls on a Sunday.)

The first moment occurred many years ago, and I had all but forgotten it until a recent weekend in Durham with my family brought it back to the witness stand for corroboration.

I was visiting friends in Florida. Their home and church were near the water in St. Petersburg, and on Sunday morning at “church time,” surprisingly and for some unremembered reason, I was out and about near the marina. All that attends to that moment has faded from my recollections; vivid still, however, is seeing people riding their bikes, jogging, sitting with coffee, a scone and the Sunday paper at the Starbucks whose manager clearly didn’t know it was Sunday. There were people at the slips readying their sailboats, pontoon boats and catamarans for excursions into the Bay. More than a few glistening bodies were lying on the grass to catch some sun. Kids kicked a soccer ball, and cars were parked in the nearby aquatic center lot due to a Sunday morning meet. People had coolers filled with beer.

These were people who not only weren’t in church; they apparently did not feel at all guilty about it. If I were guessing, I would say their parents were part of the first or second generation of guiltless disbelievers who, if they were being strident, might have thought people like me should have the good sense and common decency to stay inside. This group evidenced no such belligerence, but might have been bemused to find that, a) I still did go to church; that, b) I still believed in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit; that, and most especially, c) I continued to entertain hope or expectation that they should go, or that, d) I seriously imagined they would find it meaningful. How anachronistic!

I suspect they were past thinking any of those things; you know, whatever. But maybe not. They might have gotten defensive/aggressive. This was years ago, after all.

These days, my kids and their spouses and children know how I have spent my life. Good for you, they seem to say. They let me say thanks before meals, but, you know, whatever.

In the words of that great American theologian, Sylvester Stewart, “different strokes for different folks.”

The second moment: this last weekend in Durham, NC. My family had gathered to my son and daughter-in-law’s new (to them) house/home and the life they are building there—she as a professor at Duke, he as an IT guy. A fun time was had by all, despite the oppressive heat. We attended the Carolina Blaze women’s softball team’s game at Bulls Stadium, saw Toy Story 5 in a wonderfully frigid theatre, and in between, on Sunday morning, went to the same Museum of Life and Science where my son and his wife were married 18 months ago.

The place was hopping, I mean. And crawling. And fluttering. There is a butterfly conservatory in the midst of the museum’s 84 acres—a popular wedding venue and my first experience with the place—where if a butterfly is agreeable it can be held by human hands or alight on a human face. Special as it is, however, the conservatory is the not the museum’s only highlight. There is a train around the park, splash pads, rocket engines, all sorts of tactile opportunities for whoever is so inclined. There is food, drinks, chairs under umbrellas, and loads of information about the everyday miracles and mysteries of the earth—or what people like me call “creation” or “natural revelation.”

The trains were sold out before we got there at 10:15. Everywhere I looked there were young families of various ethnicities and nationalities. Most looked educated, accomplished, concerned to teach their kids the nature of things. There were older folk, too, many of them appearing to have been what the young folk were… and none of whom, I suspected, would be caught in church on a dare.

Preacher that I am, I couldn’t help but wonder: what of the churches? On Sunday last? Even in Durham, of all places, awash in the glow of Duke Chapel. Which, magnificent as it is, still reeks of anachronism and stands mostly empty.

As they increasingly are elsewhere—so many congregations withering on the vine, most unable anymore to produce any fruit at all.

This, when the church, or so I have supposed and preached, is concerned with “special revelation,” the once and future mysteries of God’s way with creation and its children, conveyed though story, song and sacrament, evidenced in mission and service.

What could be more exciting? Indeed, as an old preaching professor of mine used to say, a sermon can be many things: long, short, exegetical, topical, thematic… but it can never be boring.

Only, whoever actually remains in the pews does look bored. Or unimpressed. One way or the other, uninterested. Unlike the folk at the museum, many of whom join so they can come back week after week to see again and see anew the exhibits they have seen before.

Among the ever-shrinking faithful—at least the ones I have observed or heard about—there is little analogous amazement and scarce real wonder or interest in reconsidering the Story and its proximates. Few know the Story anymore, or show and share with their children these inestimable gifts from our ancestors… and our Lord?

Which is to say, on the whole the faithful have lost the gift of testimony, whether to their children much less to anyone else, the experiences that shaped the lives and couched the deaths of their parents, grandparents and an innumerable cloud of witnesses.

It could hardly be more ironic! That whole denominations founded on the premise of religious experience seem not only devoid of but even afraid of that kind of thing.

It’s hard to be excited about what you are trying to avoid. Or to give lease to others’ experiences. Is the attempt to keep “natural” what is most “special” evidence of our fear that something or Someone might break loose? (Cue: Annie Dillard) There seems to be little if any energy or amazement at the mysteries and absolute miracles that are on display every time we gather. Who among us thinks of Baptism as radical? Or of Eucharist as a kind of actual and anticipatory hospitality of the world to come, the kind of welcome the world cannot give?

Yes, when we come to the Table we dutifully sing, “Here, O my Lord, I see Thee face-to-face, here would I touch and handle things unseen; here grasp with firmer hand eternal grace and all my weariness upon Thee lean.”

Should be.

All I will say is that I often got flak—often—that I took too long administering the sacraments because, “we do this all the time,” and… you know, kick-off is at one. (Not kidding.)

“There’s a sweet, sweet spirit in this place”? Really? Now and then, maybe. More like a spirit of impatient curmudgeonliness, most days.

Look into most worshipers eyes, as I did Sunday by Sunday for 42 years, and see if for the vast most part they do not look distracted, or worse, flat. Unaffected.

Look at the folk singing in the choir and tell me honestly if you see very much joy to sing God’s praise. Look and listen to the one behind the desk. Will there be a Word from the Lord? Who, including the preacher, seems to think there is much hope of such a word?

The church is losing (or has long-since lost) its sense of liminality. Making it, at the very least, very different from the folk flocking to queue on Sunday mornings at the museum—who seem more interested in the goliath beetle rolling a ball of dung than we seem interested in Jesus, the Lord of the universe, blessed be he.

While Jesus gave thanks that God had hidden the mysteries of the Kingdom from the wise and intelligent (or sophisticated) and revealed it to more common folk, I do not condescendingly suggest or take it as an ironic vindication that the kinds of folk I saw in St. Pete and Durham have rejected the church more or less in toto.

Nor do I feel the kind of “affluent person envy” that St. James seems to have observed in his assembly. St. Paul reminded us to remind ourselves that while not many of us are rich or wise or elite, we are possessed of the most interesting exhibits ever: the abiding and eternal ministries and message of reconciliation—inestimable good news in this fractious time. Indeed, we are doctrinally and ethically glad that the church is a place where anyone can come and learn and grow without so much as a subscription or ticket. The problem is this: one listens mostly in vain to hear Jesus’ followers actually quote Jesus in this way. Neither is Paul reiterated (though Deutero-Paul is often quoted for the purpose of restriction, not expansion.)

What you rarely see is anyone very excited at all about what we are doing when we arrive at that time of day.

At the museum, the obvious ironies were so unsettling that I called a buddy of mine to help me think about it: how the museum is bursting with people completely at ease with diversity, who are “kin” in their appreciation for science and fact, and are (for themselves and their children) not only aware of but hungering for observable depth and tactile experiences of the earth’s richness. These are the paths in which they are leading their children.

And I blessed them for it, recalling that verse from Ecclesiastes 3, “that the only worthwhile thing there is for (men and women) is to enjoy themselves and do what is good in their lifetime; also that whenever a man does eat and drink and get enjoyment out of all his wealth, it is a gift from God.”

And yes, I know there are churches that seem to be growing—but the preponderance of them are Southern, Protestant or Evangelical. Most of these churches and their pastors labor in fields white unto harvest with sickles of political and ethical certainty. (I suspect that at least some of the folk I saw at the museum, those who grew up in evangelical climates, may have fled such displays, nor does anyone blames them when they do.)

Other churches that do trade in mystery—the Orthodox and the Catholic—are also growing, if not on a pace to equal the library’s, but far more rapidly than any of the places I have been or served.

I feel a bit of what I can only call homesickness for these families I have never known.

+

I am no longer a child. I no longer reason and speak as when I was.

I do not consider the folk at the museum “bad people” because they are not in church on Sunday morning.

Neither do I consider people in church “good people” just because they are there. I know better.

When I was a child, I had what I thought were inarguable and irrefutable dyads.

Now that I am an old man, I guess I still do. Just different ones.

And presently—and shockingly given my families of origin—I am increasingly comfortable extra mura ecclesias.

Who hasn’t hoped?

Who, including the non-pray-ers among us, hasn’t “inquired of the Lord,” even when we can’t name what exactly we seek—justice? healing? deliverance?—and even when we would not be caught dead crediting and “Lord” as its Source.

And not always in words, any of us, but in sighs and moans too deep for words who has not reached empty hands heavenward, as it were, pleading for a restorative, redemptive, healing word. Sensing, all of us, that in the short term it might be a dire word, an inescapably disastrous word. Such was the word that came to distraught King Zedekiah when he first posed the question to the weeping prophet Jeremiah.

At distance, we profess belief that even a bad word, if it is the Lord’s word, will ultimately, ultimately, be a redeeming word. Which is why we still seek it. People. Preachers. Overtly. Ashamedly. Sunday worship gives cover for whoever and however.

Which may be why some people still come to church on Sundays at 11, hoping to hear…something…that can be distinguished from the other days’ pontifications and chatter.

Which may be why we still seek it,

If Zedekiah manifests both the fear and the hope of our deepest personal prayers and longings, it even more signifies the kind of groaning preachers feel, who know they have no prophetic credential (or priestly license) if the Lord be silent (or distant).

No surprise, then, when preachers seek the Lord’s face. That is, unless they enjoy looking in the mirror.

No wonder that they inquire of the Lord. That is, unless they are too busy talking to listen.

They reach empty hands heavenward, strain with deaf ears, pleading for the Word to come. That is, unless they are content with their own musings—or pontifications.

Too many are content, busy, preening. The best they have to offer is an admixture of red (or blue) politics, bromides, boilerplate. And we have heard it all before.

Truth to tell, even those who do seek and inquire will ultimately offer nothing new. In fact, they are content to offer nothing new, except inasmuch as the old Word is always fresh and startling when authentically offered in a critical, “kairos” moment.

But what of other moments? That is to say, the preacher may or may not have heard a fresh Word from the Lord. Study or pray as she might have, come Sunday morning she still hungers for what has not been served according to her schedule.

And still she has to speak. But what? Leftovers? Kibbles? Heat-and-serve? Or maybe she just reads her favorite new recipe. Or an amusing anecdote about babysitting her grandson.

All of us, scrupulous or not, have stood empty before our people. Nor is it fun, as we used to say without blushing, to “mount the sacred desk,” never imagining the deep inappropriateness of the phrase or that, “having no clothes,” we were in terrible danger on account of “darkening counsel without knowledge.”

Indeed, Job’s answer to the Almighty—“Surely, I spoke of things I did not understand”—may be an apt benediction for my life’s work. Except here and there, now and then.

Still, for the preacher who is self-aware, there is often a prevailing anxiety that Drs. Dunning and Krugger were writing about us. Or, as my dad used to put in his notes: “Weak point…yell!”

And so it would be nice if, like the Friends, we could remain silent till real inspiration comes. Sadly, for the vast most of us, that is not our lot.

A bishop once reminded me, “Tom, we stand up to preach on Sundays, not because we always have something compelling or even interesting say, but because preaching is what we do. That public moment is rightly expected of us because we are professional persons. We have been authorized and sent—and the people we are appointed to serve come to church at all for this one reason: to hear.”

Well… yes and no. I mean, in the long decades since I have grown in my understanding of worship. When I was a Baptist, where preaching itself seemed the evangelical sacrament, I did not realize just how transactional knew that everything before the sermon as, for lack of a better term, foreplay—warming up the principals for the preaching moment itself and the invitation. You know, uh, the climax of the service. When people were to be joined to Jesus.

In the decades since I have put away a lot if not all that kind of superficial transactionalism. I know longer think or speak as I did when I was a child. I have studied, led, lectured and written about the comprehensive nature of worship: Word, Table, Praise, Prayer. And so many ways to be joined to Jesus even in a single service.

But, yes, still, especially in the Protestant South and even among United Methodists, preaching is the foundation and the capstone of the gathering.

There came a time, however, less kairos than poneros, near the end of my ministry—which in fact hastened my retirement—when, of course, I was obligated to peach but knew that my people weren’t there to hear, exactly, at least not for a Word from the Lord for us, concerning our call, our need for repentance, a renewed sense of discipleship, They were not hoping for transformation, in other words, but for information. Surveilling me more than praising God.

When they took notes, it was like keeping score. Whatever bench they were on, they planned to let their teammates hear about it. And these teams did not like each other, or me, because I was “unaffiliated,” either “woke,” or not woke enough. Too conservative, which is to say, too bliblical; or too liberal, meaning I didn’t preach the bible at all. That I was responsible—someone really said this—for eliminating the Bible from our congregation; or that I talked too much about Jesus and was too busy studying and teaching an anachronistic text when I needed to be rallying and protesting and volunteering or whatever.

I felt like a duck in a shooting gallery. That I was standing in the middle of a rush hour intersection and the signs were down. And everybody honking.

So many binaries. The elections, COVID, Trump, the fragmentation of Mr. Wesley’s church, the retrenchment of my congregation’s “leadership” in the face of new ministry opportunities…

My body began breaking down, too—four major surgeries in 14 months, after a cancer diagnosis in 2019—”outward” and visible symbols of my inward and pastoral dilemma.

I have been pondering that time—which for many of my brothers and sisters still obtains—trying to think whether or if I could have been more effective or successful. Or more faithful.

Did I miss the prophetic moment? Did I priest all my people? Was I a good and faithful servant, holding out my arms cruciform in order to include everyone? Or was I a coward, afraid to take a stand? But what stand should I have taken? For diversity and inclusion? Yes, and for me that meant embracing reds and blues, as well as everyone else.

Thank God for St. Paul, whose words to his Corinthian critics has proved a beautiful if somewhat ironic comfort to me: “For me, it is a very little thing to be judged by you or any human court. Indeed, I do not judge myself. My conscience is clear but that does not make me innocent. It is for the Lord to judge me… he will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart.”

I do not fear that judgment, though some might have reason to do so.

In any case, four years, now, after my retirement, I have learned a new word to describe that terrible era at my ministry’s end. It is a German term, and leave it to the Germans to describe dispassionately what many of us have felt and experienced existentially.

The term is Zugzwang.

Denotatively, Zugzwang describes that moment in a chess match and other “turn” games, when a player is obliged to move but whatever they do will worsen their position. Their position would be better, safer, if they could just not move, but that is not an option.

I have never seen the term applied to relationships, but boy do I know how saying anything makes everything worse.

Neither have I seen the term applied to preaching, but it surely applies.

There have been times when it was Sunday, yet again, and it was time, of one kind or the other. Or both: kairos and poneros: one kind or the other. The clock said 11 and the people had gathered, except for those who were still mad about something I said last week or two years ago.

And, oh, if only I could have stayed in my office, or never come to church, at all. If I never had to preach again, at least till the end of this sad era, I would have escaped the consequences of saying…anything…at all.

What did I do?

Shakespeare, by way of Buechner, lit for me what was most often hidden in the darkness of my own heart and soul: “The truth of this sad time, we must obey. Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.”

Which itself could be a word like the guy looking in the mirror, content with his own words. But for me, it was different than that. And with a pox on both their houses, I tried to build a home for everyone, believing we are each and all of us uniquely loved and summoned, uniquely empowered and sent, to make a reconciling and peacemaking difference in an increasingly acrimonious and warring world.

I would like to think I did that. Sort of. But it is the Lord who will decide. And whatever move he makes will only improve my position.

I mean.

I used to crave the mic. I aspired to the big, bad bully pulpit. I wanted to weigh-in on every topic, to debate every point, to prove how smart I knew I wasn’t.

These days, not so much. I have a different aspiration: to live quietly, as St. Paul advised the Jesus-followers in Thessaloniki. To enjoy time with my grandchildren. To get through eating and get to the golf course, all of which was on the agenda when I picked-up my granddaughter at “Humane Society Camp” and we pulled into Wade’s—a landmark meat-and-three eatery hereabouts. It is where she wanted to grab lunch, though I had suggested another place.

And, uh-oh. There in the fire lane was Lt. Governor Pamela Evette’s gubernatorial campaign bus. On the back of it was a picture of her “standing” between Artaxerxes (President Trump) and Mordecai (Governor McMaster). On the left side, beside a larger shot of her in her customary magenta pantsuit, there was a caption: “Trump Conservative.”

I prayed earnestly, “Lord, deliver me from this… Lead me not into this temptation.” Then I said, loud enough for my sweet date to hear, “I don’t want to talk to Ms. Evette.”

Which, given the circumstances, I already knew in my gizzard that I would have to.

Sure enough, the hostess sat us down two tables from where Ms. Evette was engaging three women, each of whom was nodding, all of whom seemed a bit starstruck. I said to my granddaughter, “I hope she doesn’t come over here.”

Which, of course, she did. And introduced herself. I told her my name was, “Tom,” that the beautiful, all-but-eleven-year-old to my left was Eleanor, and that I was neither a Trumpist nor a conservative, and that I did not like the company she was keeping—Trump, Hegseth, Miller, Lindsey Graham.

She said that what made our country great was the fact that we can have different opinions and still get along.

I told her to tell that to her boss, by which I meant Mr. Trump, who cannot take a joke, threatens to fire, impeach or otherwise ruin whoever dares challenge him, wants to reward the insurrectionists he pardoned for their attack on the capital while making fun of national heroes. He demonizes and/or belittles the loyal opposition and storms off set when a reporter asks a legitimate question.

I opined that Mr. Graham, and the other Mr. Graham, not to mention Bob Jeffress, were lick-spittle toadies, and worse than that, hypocrites in their “righteous” excoriation of Mr. Obama during his term, only now to offer unblushing defense of Trump’s immorality and Banana Republic regard for his nay-sayers.

I said, “Lindsey Graham distanced himself from Trump the afternoon of January 6 and was back on Air Force One on the eighth. That is not integrity. At. All.

“And Trump, while claiming he would not get us involved in any new wars, has wagged the dog, promising 39 times he had a deal, but didn’t, nor did he care—he said he didn’t care—that people like me were paying $4 a gallon for gas.”

She said, “Well, there are bad people on both sides.”

I said, “What ‘about-ism’ is not an appropriate stance for governance.”

She asked what issue concerned me most… I said, “There are many, but this morning I was teaching Revelation 11, where the text says, “The time has come for the destruction of the destroyers of the earth,” which makes ecology and the environment theological issues. She said that she and Mordecai has worked hard to prevent off-shore drilling for South Carolina. I said that was great but that we needed comprehensive policy about the environment, an end to climate change denial, and a stop to the kind of deregulation that allowed the merciless assault on our parks, else we leave a wasteland to our heirs.” I said that there were unscrupulous people using and abusing the earth, disobeying our first mandate, and that many of them were sitting in churches led by pastors who were once again doing their best to deny God’s freedom. And, frankly,” I added, “some of your supporters are probably not thrilled that a woman is running for governor.”

She told me that when she sits in church on Sunday, she knows she can only be responsible for herself.

I replied, “That is not at all true, especially if one’s ambition is to govern. Or to represent Jesus in the world. God calls us to be part of a people who are uniquely loved and called, uniquely gifted (empowered) and sent, to make a godly difference in an increasingly ungodly world. Those who say they want to represent their constituency, their opponents and our Lord are responsible for a lot more than themselves.”

She said, “Well, I can tell I do not have your vote…but I am glad to meet you. And your granddaughter.”

She went on to press more flesh and smile for, I am sure, more receptive diners.

I never raised my voice; neither did I let go her gaze. I did not want to talk, but when I was asked, I did not flinch. Yes, St. Paul says to aspire to live quietly, and I do, but I Peter says, “Always be ready to make a defense for the hope that dwells in you, yet do it with respect…”

In that moment that was my aspiration.

I did my best to speak the truth in love, which is to say, with respect. I would be not guilty of regarding or treating her with the same disdain she is treating her run-off opponent, a tactic she learned from her endorser. And many others.

Her aides stood by listening. I feel sure I was barely a blip on her radar—that none of them will remember a word I said. But I gave witness. And I tell the story here, not to pat myself on the back but to remind you also to be ready. To give an account. Of the reconciling and universalizing hope that is the best of Jesus.

It is not often that one gets the chance to speak truth to power—and especially to one among the many who are working what I believe is a Faustian deal both to reinforce and rationalize unjust structure of power. I may never get another. But you may. So be ready.

And until then, do as I hope to resume, which is to honor Paul’s counsel, to “love everyone more and more… aspire to live quietly… mind your own affairs… work with your own hands… and do not depend on anyone” but Jesus to tell you who your neighbor is and what your commissioned affairs entail.

I mean, just give me the burger and some fries well done and spare me the dining area drama. Inside, after all, on either side of the counter and both sides of the registers, people fuss and fume, spill their drinks and spoil their dinner—and the dinners of diners unlucky enough to be within earshot—and not least of unruly kids and crying babies.

What makes the din a lion’s den, as it were—at least if YouTube is to be believed—those tense encounters can quickly escalate from face-to-face into gun-to-head.

Remember the diner robbery in Boogie Nights?

Just saying, deaf as I am, I still hear too much. And I have eyes that have seen too much—too many Ken’s and Karen’s, too much stuff and nonsense. Which is why I do better—I definit4 do better—alone in the car, either on the go or sitting in the shade, to fish my repast by stages from the sack. Afterward, my chief worries are the crumbs on my mats and/or the occasional ketchup packet or fry that falls between the seat and console. After eating inside, however, I would have bemoaned the inevitable collapse of the Republic if left in the hands of overworked, resentful and surly hourly managers dealing with equally surly customers who think that for 4 bucks they are entitled to a Double-Wagyu burgers with Gardner’s Wisconsin Dry-Aged Cheddar.

Geez.

Only...

Eating on the run is not good for my swimsuit figure.

Neither, apparently, will such dining nourish my famished soul. The rabbis maintain that hospitality is more important than fasting, and if eschewing

company is a kind of fasting, letting people into my awareness could be construed as a form of (begrudging) hospitality.

Which wisdom I might could ignore if the Almighty had not previously weighed-in on such matters: “It is not good for a man to (eat) alone.”

Which is not quite what God said in Eden, or anywhere else but close enough that we are not surprised when prophets and revelators have visions of great family feasts on the Day of the Lord. Or when when Jesus a) earnestly desired one more meal with this friends begore dying, and b) made a meal the ongoing locus of his Real Presence with the disciples—we are well acquainted with the menu.

Which is why I sometimes make myself go into, say, a Burger King or Whataburger: to keep under subjection at least this one aspect of my abject fallenness: specifically, my tendency to self-isolate.

Additionally, I get the occasional invitation to dine with my family, as was the case this past week when my older granddaughter, her parents, stepfather and the other grandparents Outbacked in celebration of her graduation from elementary school. There were many other people there who had the same exact idea on account of same exact celebration—which vexed the proprietor of that particular location. Being, apparently, unaware of the special day, he had scheduled only two servers for what was at least twice the normal lunch crowd.

The staff was “down under” the whole time, so to speak, which gave me lots of time to...watch.

One two-person family, in particular, where in the twenty minutes I was aware of them, peripherally, they neither spoke nor... ate. The kid, who may well have been a classmate of my granddaughters, had his head down on the table as if her were taking a kindergartner’s nap. Either that, or he

would get up and go outside for a couple of minutes and then come back in and lay down his head.

Who I took to be his mother had a SMH expression (though she did not actually shake her head), but her look and his posture indicated something was broken. Or off. Their silence contrasted sharply with the conversation and laughter at our table.

In front of the boy was an untouched order of Outback’s best coconut shrimp, and when they finally left, I told my daughter I was going to retrieve it for us. She was horrified, and said I absolutely was not. But I said I absolutely was, and was ready to get up when the busboy came to clear the table. Dammit. My intention became a joke for the rest of our meal, and when we finally left, I passed a table where the recently departed customer had not quite finished his French onion soup. I said, “I think I’ll just finish that off for him.”

The next day, too, I would spend some time in a local eatery, though like the family the day before I didn’t actually eat at all. I was holed-up under the golden arches only because my grandgirls needed to use the McToilet. I normally try to avoid such dedicated visits (to fast food places or gas stations) but we were having a bit of an emergency. Any port, as it were, in a storm.

When I do make that kind of McStop, I customarily buy something—an apple pie, a cup of coffee—as a kind of cover charge for our visit; but the line was long, we had had lunch and, besides, I have “dined” many times at Ronald’s house without using the facilities...so, there’s that.

I was unwilling to send them into the place alone, so I followed them, but planned to stay by the door. Turned out, however, that the women’s restroom was, uh, backed up, so to speak (not the plumbing) and It would be a minute for the girls to be done—so a two-top cleared, I found its corner chair, sat down, and began to observe.

Now, I am no Alan Levi, and for me faces are only a part of it; but at the previous day’s commencement the principal had cited Dr. Seuss to the “class of 2033”—”Oh, the sights you will see” when you start opening doors—and I am telling you, this member of the class of 1973 also saw some sights, even before we pushed open the glass entrance that was smudged with multiple finger-and palm-prints.

One woman in particular. And all these weeks later, I am still not entirely sure what color graced her head. For the moment let’s just call it...pink. But really pink. I mean, you know, pinker than pink. Electric pink. Easter eggish, kind of like Frenchie’s hair in Grease when she had trouble in tinting class. But way pinker than that, even.

I’m telling you, this woman’s hair was ...fluorescent. Neon. Hyper-vibrant, as they say. And every bit as stiff, at least to appearances, as it was pink. Not a wig, I don’t think; more like Sherwin-Williams, not Revlon, made the stuff she used.

She was snarfing a Big Mac. Only later did I notice she had a companion, a slight woman who was lost in the reflection. The pink lady (not to be confused with Rizzo or Marty or the others) had a heavy silver nose ring—it must have weighted a half-shekel or more. She had several other piercings besides, in her ears and lips and, I suspected, eyebrows. (I could not see for sure as she wore glasses whose temples were wide, shiny black plastic and whose lens-holders were similar but perfectly square). On the generous canvass of her right arm there were bad tattoos, as there also were south of her cutoff shorts that, to my old eyes, seemed way too short given her particular silhouette...and therefore too revelatory regarding what should have remained more nearly private. For the diners’ sakes if nothing else.

Her tee shirt read, “Definitely Maybe,” which surprised me. Upon entering I had seen only “Def...” and assumed, wrongly, that it would say, “Define

Normal.” But before any of all the other, what I saw first, what I think everybody saw first, was her hair, which may have been the point. She may have wanted to be seen; and who could not have seen? Because, as I may have mentioned, her hair was like, really pink.

I don’t know how much you actually learn in such a setting, but enough to know that if you look at all you will surely see a lot—which may be enough to make you wag your head incredulously and roll the stone over your heart. Unless such signs and wonders perhaps open your heart a little, humbles or at least forestalls your judgments. I mean, what do I know about anything? Much less less anyone?

Across the small dining area from her, a woman and I guess her four children, were dressed as if to go to Olan Mills. But something looked a little off. They were not candidates for “Awkward Family Photos,” or anything; more like they were on their way to a United Pentecostal-Holiness Church convention, about which I know a little because I bumped into one of those in Orlando, by accident, when my daughter and others in her junior high grade and dojo...uh, dance studio... took their taps and their too-much-too-soon make-up to Universal. So, our kids (and not a few of their mothers) looked more than a little like Jon Benet—or Jezebel waiting for Jehu: eyes painted, dressed in leotards and feathers. Meanwhile, their UPC peers (and those mothers) wore no makeup at all, wore dresses below their knees, and hair that was naturally colored but stiffer with lacquer than the pink lady’s. And curled, I mean, in loose ringlets.

Some of our people made fun of them and... the anomalies: serious hairdo’s framing serious facedon’t’s. They were different, but I thought we had no right to criticize.

Anyway, in McDonald’s, that lady had hair almost to her knees, gathered in a messy and loosely-braided pony tail that, in truth, might have made a good tail on a pony. The kids were color-coordinated to match her modest

blue and white polkadot skirt and jacket. One of the boys had a white chrysanthemum on his left breast. All of them looked a bit uncomfortable to be in such a worldly place, which of course drew my attentions and spiked my curiosity. I decided to be bold (my kids will tell you that is an easy step for me) and ask if they were, in fact, UPC. When the woman turned to my query, I instantly knew I was wrong in my speculation: she was wearing make-up. Nor did she understand the question, at least initially. When I clarified—”I am asking after your religious affiliation: UPC: United Pentecostal-Holiness Church?”—she shook he head (which I anticipated) and answered in an accent think as the pink lady’s nose ring (which I did not anticipate): “No, I’m sorry,” she said, and quickly gathered-up the kids and left.

I would soon follow her outside, so soon on the heels of her sensible white patent leather shoes (my girls finally emerged from the McToilet), she looked at me over her shoulder, as if to make sure I was not stalking her family. I could sense her relief when we got in our car which was parked between hers and the golden arches. But as we ourselves were leaving more smudges on the glass door, in walked two more girls, who looked to be both thirteen and twenty-five, grown way too soon in cut-off overalls that were, again, too short and midriffs stretched way too tightly over way too little.

Was I Alan Levi?

More like Thomas Merton, at least a little, who, wrote in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander of a moment in Louisville

...at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, (when) I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . .

This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud. . . . I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

Then it was as if suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . • • But this cannot be seen, only believed and `understood’ by a peculiar gift.”

So, thank God for the drive-through, but thank God, too, for those moments in restaurants when we wake for a liminal moment from our dreams of separateness—at least until the crying babies and unruly children thicken the liminal spaces again.

Jackie was not a woman, but he forever sensitized me to the presence of folk most would rather not see. Over and over, I note how people turn their heads at intersections, hoping to avoid eye contact with the person standing there with a little cardboard sign in their han.

I am not guiltless in this regard. That said, I suspect I have something on the order of appreciation where others feel mostly apprehension, primarily because of Jackie but also because with another twist or two I might have been at the intersection myself.

A friend of mine recently mentioned to me that, since her retirement a year ago, she has been taking pictures of old buildings, decrepit and decaying, standing alone. She then paints and frames what she has photographed as a kind of homage in acrylics and grief that all things change and rarely for the better. But she brings them back to life, in a way, proving that there is yet inspiration to be found in death and, well, expiration. Is her art imitating her life? Is her life deepening her art. Yes. Both. Of course.

I too find old buildings oddly beguiling, but they need not be abandoned to speak to me. My little house is well over 100 years old and in many ways just like me. It’s been through a lot, that to say, and as a result lists a little to port. Its walls are a little out of whack, leaving light and, depending on the season, hot or cold air to enter or leave in whichever way is most uncomfortable to me. The floors have been patched here and there, primarily in front of the three (now) non-working fireplaces. In sum, the wood sags a little, just as do I, so that my each and every step features stereophonic pops and groans—from both my legs and my floor. We are a percussion section to ourselves.

Be that as it may, it is these poor, unfortunate women who fill my vision and shape my thinking. I find deep resonance with those who, because we seldom listen, are unheard. And who, because we avert our eyes, are for the most part unseen.

The first woman I mentioned? A few days after I saw her and “Sugar and Spice” I saw her staggering up and down a street near the college, singing and point at passing traffic.

A day or two after that I saw the “second” second woman, who was definitely not singing, but in the time she remained in my line of sight—again, I was driving, this time past the newly renovated public library and across the street from construction on the new city offices building—she 1) screamed at passing traffic, including my car, for what I can only imagine were erstwhile offenses that were still vivid to her fevered mind; and 2) spit at and kicked a sign announcing that, due to the construction, the sidewalk she wanted to take was closed. In my rearview mirror I saw her yell at… something or someone I couldn’t see. I have not seen her since.

The third woman was also walking in the same way I was heading. I had actually thought to offer her a ride against the afternoon sun and whatever predator might be looking for easy prey, but thought better of it…for several reasons. If I had had a pickup truck, I might have offered the bed,

but no way I was letting her in the passenger seat of my car. Once I passed her, I did not think of her again until I was heading back home. In the meantime she had walked maybe 2 miles, and this time I could see she was talking to… someone. Or something.

I have not been able to shake the memories of those three women, or to quit asking myself what God might have wanted to show me, or teach me, or tell me.

+

“Deep calls to deep at the thunder of thy cataracts,” scripture says (Psalm 42:7), and for whatever else that might mean I have decided that there are times—moments—when we are caught in sudden storms or squalls of forced perspective. In those moments we may be soaked with the kind of self-awareness that evaporates as quickly as rain on asphalt when the sun returns. Or maybe, like the ancients who dug cisterns to catch and keep some of the occasional deluge, either for sustenance or for ritual bathing, we may immerse ourselves in it what falls on us and try to learn.

Some would call such moments liminal, the thinning or the fading (or disintegrating) of the buffers and boundaries that typically sequester our self-awareness. Others might instead use them to further and more effectively buffer themselves against empathy. Whether these thin places evoke real compassion, born on what Gadamer called the “fusion of horizons,” or prompt the kinds of condescensions and judgment that amplify their condition as a way of denying our own shadows, is, time to time, a live question.

I suggest that a sense of identification is unavoidable if not always willingly acknowledged. Think of the bass handbell that, when rung, is almost subliminal: one feels it more than hears it, and still the eardrum vibrates. The bell has done its anchoring work.

Occasionally, the subliminal becomes infrasound, which can trigger discomfort, disorientation or nausea. For those who are at ease in Zion, so to speak, they—which is to say, we—may need to be “rung-up” in precisely that way.

Indeed all of us need such moments of identification, of liminality, to remind us who we are and who the other is… and is not. If we see the other, if we hear what we are being told, we may get cold chills. We may laugh unexpected laughter or cry unbidden tears. However it manifests itself, More arrives and, one might hope in advance or on reflection, shakes the foundations of the superficial détente in which most of us live our lives. In such a liminal moment: we are transported to the dankest, darkest corner of our psychological and emotional basement, where there is mold, mildew, and rats.

Or we find ourselves in the corresponding attic where unmarked boxes seem to support the roof. And also spiders. One way or the other, or in both ways, insight or awareness is either heightened or deepened and you come away from the moment feeling as if you are emerging from a waterfall (or, as the Bible call it, “cataract”)

Unless one just…looks way.

But if we have the courage to look and listen, the lines fade. Horizons fuse. Experience takes the helm from understanding and for a moment we see higher, deeper, farther, more widely. Fullness or something like meaning is tapped-out in what might as well be Morse Code.

It can be unsettling, to say the least, to catch sight of a image or truth we’d rather not consider. But we have to consider, to ask, to empathize. We have to identify with whom we would often rather shun, for are people too, and we must reply.

+

Tom, do you see? I came into your house and you did not greet me, or give me water to wash my feet, or kiss me.

But, Lord, it could have been dangerous. They are likely mentally ill. Lord, if I had had a pickup…

Sundays, either.

Why is it so popular? I can’t speak for anyone else but for me it has everything to do with the fried chicken livers and onion rings, a salty, cholesterol-laden, health-defying ambrosia I allow myself about once a quarter. And this was that day!

(Oh, to be in Defending Your Life’s “Judgment City,” where visitors can eat all they want of anything they want and never get full! “You like this pie? Here are a dozen to take back to your room!”).

So full, so fat and so happy, I knew my feet wanted to hopscotch their way to my new car. I was truly thankful for the food, the Passport and the rest of these my many, many blessings and privileges. I knew better, though, than to test my newly replaced (and insurance subsidized) hip. My only worry at that moment, apart from my next glucose alert, was whether the greasy pungencies left from lunch would spoil that wonderful “new car smell.”

If I had been of a mind to do it, I could have burped my way through Old 100.

That is when I noticed… who used to be a little girl, somebody’s daughter, maybe somebody’s erstwhile wife or mother, still, over by the bushes and listing to port. Then to starboard. Back to port, and to starboard, back and forth, rocking unevenly like the broken hull of an abandoned dinghy, slammed to the reef by the gales of a previous storm. Or storms. And now, unable, it seemed, to break free from of the tides, or the breakers that slap her again and again, back to the rocks. Unanchored, untethered, lacking a true manifest (or so I surmised) for all the toxic cargo she carried, she was a ghost ship with no other heading or destination than here. The bright sunshine on my shoulders cast over her a long shadow. At least to my eyes,

Other diners, docking or shoving-off, looked away; once she showed up on my radar, however, I could see nothing else. In an instant I tacked hard toward her. I had some change in my hand—a few pieces of paper, a few coins—and I intended to offer it to her.

Her face was gargoyleish, her eyes light- and life-less. Vikings on their way to rape, pillage and plunder could have done well with such a fearsome prow to slice through rough waters.

In the few seconds it took me to tugboat my way to her, I made several easy assumptions: the deep lines in her leathery skin? From standing on street corners with cardboard. Her toothlessness? Had to be meth, don’t you think? Driving away, later, I wondered if either thing were true. If it is easy for people like me to make reductionist assumptions; it is harder, even with facts, to know the deep truths of things.

Her expression never changed as soiled and calloused fingers closed over the money I gave her.

It occurred to me to wonder how she would use my gift, whether as a bailing bucket or to make yet another small breach to let in more water. I wanted to help; I fear I enabled. So many times through the years I felt such ambivalence, hope comingled with dread. I might even have voiced my opinions on how she might use the money.

She said nothing in reply. She did nothing. Despite her face being inarguably self-incriminating —at least that is the way I read the deep lines on her toothless face, as terrible testimony of protracted masochism—her affect was flat. She did not seem to evidence either guilt or shame, or maybe there was nothing for her to feel guilty about, or to be ashamed. It may not have been her fault, or maybe it was, or both things, more likely, warm fronts and cold fronts colliding and causing ship-wrecking storms. In any case, she did not glance down, or up, or sideways. She did not avoid my gaze, exactly, but neither did she look at me with anything like comprehension. Or connection. She seemed no more surprised that I gave her something than she was that others diners steered their way to the other side of the parking lot.

I thought of Job: “This man gives. That man doesn’t. Whatever.”

Suddenly, I felt a rush of self-congratulatory judgment. I thought to myself, “She should show some gratitude. Some respect. Thank me, at least.” Quickly followed self-incrimination: “Tom, you have no idea! Why do you think you have the least clue as to what she has been through or what she ought to say and do?” I knew better than most how easily I might have wound-up by bushes at the edge of a parking lot, quoting Bible verses and preaching to people no one else could see. With no light in my eyes, either.

Had she meant to end-up homeless? On the street? Without aid or comfort except from the occasional stranger? I thought of Jackie on his bicycle, wondering if anyone cared about him. Did this woman wonder such a thing, or was she past wondering at all?

I wondered whether she ever had ever had children of her own, what she had told them, if she had had time enough to tell them anything at all.

Was she fated, somehow, to this place and time?. Maybe her one purpose in life was to provide self-righteous prats like me a chance to actually serve one of the least of these. If so, that was her service to me (they also serve who only stand and rock), giving me reason and opportunity to obey the command of Jesus over against just talking about the idea of serving the poor and marginalized.

Or maybe she was cipher, a stick figure, a figure right of central casting and a reductionistic moralist’s easy illustration for dire warnings to frightened audiences: “Don’t let this happen to you!”

Or was she all those things, depending on what you had eyes to see and how you choose tin interpret it.

Some days later I saw her again, this time a few blocks from where I gave her money. I was driving along a busy street near the university and took note: she was pacing erratically. Ten steps north, if barely in a line; a staggering three-point pirouette; back to where she started. Like a dog returning to its vomit. She was waving a piece of paper and…singing? Maybe. But her scowl, her leathery and deeply wrinkled face, her toothlessness and pointed chin appeared to transpose whatever she was singing into a vile imprecatory. Or craziness.

Many years ago, now, in an unnoticed, unread, chimerically covered and long-out-of-print book entitled, Praying for Dear Life, I described him and a couple of our encounters:

On my way to the hospital to see (church members), I see a familiar figure pedaling slowly along the highway. Jackie is the closest thing we have around here to a street person. There is a sad monotony, a futility, to his daily rides. He has no home—he sleeps in a distant cousin’s back yard—and he has no destination either. He just pedals one way and back the other as long as there is light enough to see, slowly and to no lasting purpose. Many besides Jackie are on the same bike. The morning after we moved to town, he knocked on my back door and said, as if he were ordering a la carte, “I think I would like a tomato and cheese sandwich and a glass of milk.” I invited him in and sat him at the table, sliding boxes so that there was room for a paper plate, and served him dinner. My wife, Jo, came in about then. “You a preacher, too?” he asked. “No, but I do work for a church.” “Do you believe in Jesus?” he asked neither of us in particular, and together we replied, “Yes, we do!” “I do, too” he said, smiling, “Good for you!” I said. He dropped by every few days after that—he liked the way I made a sandwich, he said. Over those first few months several church members took me aside to set me wise. I listened patiently, but kept making him sandwiches. Yes, he could be a bother sometimes, and most folk had long ago lost patience with his drinking and panhandling, but every time I saw Jackie I thought of Jesus’ command. Jackie was one of the least of these, and it was to serve Christ that I served him. If only I could remind my congregation of our Lord and his commands as effectively as Jackie did that for me,. Once, I saw him walking and so I stopped and gave him a ride. He didn’t seem to recognize me until I asked him if he wanted a tomato and cheese sandwich. “You that preacher,” he said. Jackie told me that somebody had stolen his bike, but it was okay because it had a flat tire anyway. We drove for a few miles, silent, till we came to a stretch of road where he said, “I think I’ll get out here.” And sod he did, saying, “It’s nice to know someone cares something about me.” Another day, when I was studying at Hardee’s, I heard a commotion, Jackie was at the counter and he was upset about something. He was belligerent and solicitous by turns, arrogant and angry in one breath, ashamed and self-reproaching the next. He was so alone, and I can only imagine that he had come into this little place for whatever companionship, whatever koinonia one might have from being among, if not with, strangers. But even this little fast-food communion of saints and sinners was soon denied him. He was told to leave, and so he did, but not before one last barrage. “I’m a person too!” he said. There was no reply. There was not reply. Then he offered another embarrassed apology. But no one was much interested. I think everyone else, most of them, anyway, were looking the other way. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Had he meant to end up dirty, hungry and half-crazy? When he was a younger man, had he dreamed above all other dreams to become a vagrant? An outcast?...Something happened to him. Maybe he did something. Who can tell? People break in so many ways, at so many angles. And I could have been Jackie. It might have been me who was so broken. It was me, to tell the truth, for a long time. I was alone and frightened, begging for attention, craving acknowledgment and understanding. I Know what it is like to be ignored, outcast, forgotten and not guiltlessl. Jackie was my brother, my twin: my name, after all is Thomas.

Almost wherever I go, I see him still, pedaling. At intersections, the words on the cardboard say to me, “I think I would like a tomato and cheese sandwich.” I can read the angry lips saying, “I’m a person, too!” And underneath all of that, the abiding hope—for all of us—that “somebody cares something about me.”

This morning I passed a one-family double-wide sporting a flag with those stylized and historic, declarative and aspirational words—words so enshrined and famous that many if not most Americans know them, but do not regard them so reverently as to prevent their use and abuse. That to say, whereas those three words were meant to denote an unum to our pluribus, at least ideally and…eventually… anymore the term connotes not the “melting pot” we were taught to applaud, but hateful and divisive boiler plate that scuttles almost any conversation.

There were several cars, a tractor, and an RV the size of a small battleship in the driveway, and while I did not have either the time or the perspective to perform an even cursory examination, I would be very surprised if there were not decals and bumper stickers festooned on those vehicles with same words. Or a coiled “Don’t Tread on Me” snake.

Meanwhile, I could not help seeing at the entrance to the driveway, a sign proffering the homeowner’s special brand of hospitality: “This is a Liberal-free Zone.”

I consider it a biting irony that from the looks of it many who fly such flags, affix such decals, or otherwise trumpet “We the people…” seem in actual practice the least able to demonstrate any real commitment to such an inclusive politics. And if it can be argued that the Founders wrote better than they believed, all the more reason for us to re-ordain and re-establish our bedrock assumptions: that all persons are created equal, that the blessings of liberty are to be perpetually secured for ourselves and our posterity and that tyranny of any sort, if a threat to any one of us, is a threat to every one of us.

Sadly, some of the “we” have a much narrower constituency in mind for their passions and politics that Lady Liberty. Trump’s people have maintained that Emma Lazarus’s invitation is poetry and not policy. Okay, but I would suggest that whatever “we” they (and their fans) have in mind comprises a radically redacted pluribus in service to their particular unum. Like the materialists/atheists among us, they imagine that subtraction is addition, that less is more, that diversity is a lie and illusion, while their prejudices and selfishness are, in fact, the bedrock realities that made America great the first time… and can M A G A.

Pluralism is demonic, and those who advocate for humanistic and liberal policies are of the devil.

A corollary: the only “we” who qualify as “the people” are those who voted MAGA in since 2016.

A retort is that, in fact “we the (rest of the) people” did speak in 2016 and again in 2020.

“Not my people,” they might reply, and in that regard may be more or less accurate: their people, as they number them, were Trump supporters and remain so. For them to have ascendancy they are unashamed to disregard whole segments of the population, for any number of reasons.

It’s an odd circumstance: “We the (select) people” do not recognize “they, the (other) people.” And so it will stay, I guess, till there is a reconstituting of America.

We were occasional pen pals, dating to 1979. In the years following I heard from him about as often as Abram heard from God, but each letter I got—in that tortured, felt-tipped scrawl that required real time and, sometimes, the assistance of a couple of friends to translate—was almost as theophanic.

In my retirement office I have a monstrance, a reliquary, in which I keep the letters I received from him over the years. The first arrived when I was in seminary and as lost as a soul might be. My life was in ruins, its pattern as indecipherable as the Hebrew I was unable even to see on the page as writing, much less translate it. I was in absolute, abject, potentially self-destructive misery.

And then I discovered The Alphabet of Grace. Or it discovered me.

I took it with me to the bathtub. I read it through, twice. I emerged as if from a womb, or from baptism. I was all right. I knew of nothing other to do than to shoot an arrow into the dark: to write him by way of Seabury Press. A fortnight later I would receive two handwritten (and almost illegible) pages. He told me the TRUST story we would all read later, but in that moment, it was as personal and potent a word as it was for him when, his stopped on the side of the road for lack of a route or destination, the banker’s license plate came as if a word from on high.

That book saved my life. Literally. And my ministry. And made me both love and want to be Frederick Buechner, in hopes of someday invoking healing grace for other hurting souls.

In Decatur, I heard him deliver The Sacred Journey. I spent time with him (I interrupted his working a book of crosswords) and asked if he would sign all his books. He kept them overnight and signed them all. I had highlighted almost every word in The Magnificent Defeat and he wrote: “For Tom, underliner extraordinaire, from his underlined friend, Fred.” In Charlotte, I heard the Now and Then lectures. I ordered cassettes of his Beecher lectures and, from years later, his Trinity Lectures. The latter I savored in a hospital waiting room while waiting with a family whose patriarch was undergoing bypass surgery. Tears leapt to my eyes when he asked, “Is the Lord at hand indeed? Is it finally true what we have believed and hungered to believe? This side of Paradise, who can say with absolute certainty.” He was telling asking my questions and telling my secrets, too.

I had not heard from him in a while when, on the day before he died, I was arranging my study. I placed the monstrance in a place of honor and prayed blessing on and thanks for Carl Frederick Buechner. Next day, I learned of his passing and prayed the kind of a prayer again (as I do on every remembrance of him) trusting that he knew “plenty, and all of it was good.” He had fallen into Paradise, or into nothingness, maybe, as he himself said by way of George Macdonald—but off the “same precipice as Jesus, John, Paul and others who were “lovely in their lives and make the nothingness into which they have passed like the Garden of the Lord.”

“The Heart of the Matter,” from The End of Innocence (1989)

The great American theologian, Don Henley, presenting the research of Mike Campbell, J.D. Souther and Henley himself, here offers incisive commentary on…well, many things. The first referent for them is Henley’s prior marriage.

I got the call today and I didn’t want to hear, though I knew that it would come.

An old true friend of ours was talking on the phone, she said you found someone.

And I thought of all the bad luck and the struggles we went through

and how I lost me, and you lost you.

What are these voices outside love’s open door?

Make us throw off our contentment and beg for something more…

I’m hip. Which is to say, I have had the same experience… almost. My ex-wife made the call and I suspect I was the only one traveling those old roads as we talked.

Henley’s remarks, if not altogether obviously, echo the summary statement of another great American theologian from a previous era, Neil Sedaka: breaking up is hard to do. Yes, it is. Even when it is a relief, there is most often a measure of sadness and pain, and a sense of failure. But if Sedaka would try to undo the hurt and breach, to “make up” again, Henley has moved at least practically beyond such dreams, if he even had them.

He is learning to live without (her) now, although he is not impassive (I miss you sometimes); his wizened lyric is, a not-so-simple nod to the inevitable—the fulfilling of dread expectations, the loneliness that even a new love cannot soothe entirely. Henley might well quote John Baillie who noted that every present joy is so mixed with sadness as to leave one still searching for… something else.

Sometimes our longing takes the form of “quiet desperation.” Other times, people will listen to the voices outside love’s open door. Inevitably, however, most of them will find that the expanse between the chop of our current discontent and the unreachable shore of imagined contentment is the Bermuda Triangle and ever-more unnavigable (there are rocks, reefs and even mines infesting the waters). Correspondingly, it may be that what beckons to us is not only heard but attempted in those treacherous waters.

Ever the ethicist, Henley says to his ex-, and also to us, what he seems to have said to himself as a part of his situational and self-remediation:

There are people in your life who’ve come and gone
They let you down, you know they hurt your pride
You better put it all behind you… ‘cause life goes on
(If) You keep carryin’ that anger it’ll eat you up inside, baby

If there is any good news to report, we are left with the sense that, as experiential prolegomena to his eponymous thesis, the bad news seems to have served as a pickax to raze some of the inner walls he had built with his work. It could be, in fact, that he had already been excavating some of the other ruined places in his heart and mind—losses, disappointments, angers and resentments, other little “deaths.” As to the “big death” that is coming for us all, it provides not only impetus but urgency as he confesses his own finitude (the flesh will get weak and the ashes will scatter).

He asks, rhetorically, how love can survive. Forget flourish; how can love survive, when …the times are so uncertain (and) there’s yearning undefined (and) people filled with rage… in such a graceless age as that one, and this one. Where can we see or share or receive the tenderness we all need?

It is only on the other side of those questions, which is to say on the other side of all the bad luck and struggles and situational amnesia, that he remembers what he might have forgotten—the heart of the matter, where there is a word, which is an act, which is both a reason and a way to turn relational horror into something like healing resignation… not in the sense of settling, but in deference to the reality of real things: heartbreak, for instance, physical decline and death.

Death is coming. For us all. When, we don’t know. Nor how. But that, we do.

So how does love itself survive, even if you don’t love me anymore?

Forgiveness. That is what he needed to learn again—and what we need also to remember as it seems to be something we seem to have forgotten. The more (we) know, the less (we) understand… Henley, Souther and Campbell know their Socrates… so we must return to Square 1: forgiveness.

Forgiveness, says Frederick Buechner says, both acknowledges the reality of hurt—by all accounts I ought to call it quits between us—but also the value of the relationship that has been damaged: “My love for you is stronger than my anger.” toward you” (my paraphrase).

The Talmud says that God forgives us in just that kind of way.

The act of forgiveness is the only way to begin the more comprehensive process of what formal theologians call “redemption,” or more particularly, “reconciliation,” when the forgiver and the forgiven resume their mutual journey, though the first “new” steps re often taken warily.

That journey can only begin with the first step of forgiveness. Extending the journey will undoubtedly demand more. So how can we relearn courtesy, humility, meekness, peace-making and blessing?

Which has never been more urgent than in this graceless age.

Turns out, however, that there is such a thing as a free dinner.

AND, believe it or not, a free cremation.

Mic drop.

Yes, dear reader, you read that correctly. And not only I, but you too can be cremated free of charge! As an added benefit, on the anniversary of your “passing” a tree will be planted in your memory in a national forest (as to how your relatives might find your tree in a national forest, I am sure I do not know). Furthermore, your cremains will be returned to whomever you designate, in as little as three months, though it might be fifteen (the average is about seven) in an engraved box. Somewhere along the line, your same designated folk receive a nice letter of appreciation for your willingness to be freely cremated.

I promise I am not making this up. A free cremation. Which looked pretty good to me when the banner appeared on my phone under the heading of, you guessed it, “Free Cremations.”

I found about this amazing offer quite accidentally—which is to say, by way of that free dinner I mentioned. Quibblers would say it “cost” me two hours of my life and attentions on a recent Tuesday evening; but in terms of legal tender, the dinner was, in fact, free.

Neither are we talking fish sticks and instant mashed potatoes. No, no. This was a really nice repast (filet medallions, a baked potato and asparagus, following fresh chicken fingers and fried shrimp appetizers) at an upscale bistro in our little town. Nor was I the only pigeon …uh, invited guest. Other citizens had been invited to dine by way of a targeted mailing from a local attorney who wanted to educate us and, it would turn out, sell us on trusts, avoiding probate and all that sort of thing. His services were pricey (about $5K), a fact undisclosed (but understandable) until till many, many horror stories and doomsday scenarios had been advanced by way of PowerPoint. I didn’t bite, though—either on the pitch or the main course, even (I had, perhaps nervously, eaten too much chicken and too many shrimp), but heading to my car with my dinner in a take-home box I started thinking more about end of life things.

Now, I know very well—in my mind and in my bones—that the days ahead of me are way fewer than the days behind me. I mean, I have had ten knee surgeries and five of them knee replacements, which surgeries take a cumulative toll on a body.

Additionally, I have had two hip replacements, the last of which, unceremoniously, cast me for a few days into the bowels of hell. I may have an obscure condition called Anterior Cutaneous Encapsulated Nerve Syndrome (ACNES), a diagnosis so rare that my doctor had to read up on it, having never before heard of it. And I would be remiss to omit that I am a couple of months past my 71^st birthday, having had surgery for the same cancer that killed my father when he was two months past 72.

Offsetting that paternal inertia (Dad’s brothers, three of them, died early of a cerebral hemorrhage or heart attack), my mother’s mother lived to be 104 and a week; mother lived to 93; and Dad’s mother was, I think, 85 or 87 when she died. I was in eighth grade.

Call it a genetic crapshoot, give or take my cigars and bourbon and diabetes.

Anyway, one of the things I had already been determined to do, but had not done till yesterday, was talk to a funeral director about prearrangements. Which should be a simple matter: all I want, basically, is to be doused with gasoline and torched, with what’s left after that buried in my daughter’s back yard with the other dogs. And no—which surprises folks—I do not want a formal funeral service. Been there, done and said that, for over four decades.

Instead, I hope my friends, some of them—there are not that many, really—will gather at my daughter’s house for a cookout. I hope they will sing songs I have liked or performed, or that remind them of me (“The Little Brown Shack Out Back,” for instance; and “Paradise,” “City of New Orleans,” and “I’m Into Something Good,” “Grandma’s Feather Bed” and, of course, “Margaritaville”). I hope one of my preacher friends will say some appropriate words in there somewhere and that everyone who wants to will tell their favorite story about me. As to what might be called an “faith component,” because I am a person of faith, I hope a playlist will play on a Bluetooth speaker—“Reaching” (Carolyn Arends), “My Shepherd Will Supply My Need,” “Speak, O Lord” and “Grace Greater Than our Sin.” I hope there will be wine and good bread so that one of the preachers can consecrate Communion for everyone to share/ Then, after all the good wine and beer and bourbon has been finished, I would like someone of have provided everyone a little sheet with the words to “Come, Thou Fount, of Every Blessing,” my favorite congrational hymn, so that who can join in, will.

Anyway… yesterday, I did finally talked to a funeral director about prearrangements. And granted, the chapel I visited was upscale; but when—like the lawyer, after her spiel—she said with a straight face that the fee was $4300, I stifled a cough) and thought to myself, “There have to be… options.”

So, I Googled “Affordable Cremations in my area.”

I saw a list… $2300, $1595, $995… I was about to call the $995 chapel, when a banner appeared on my phone: “Free Cremations.” I called the number, talked to a nice man who used to work at a funeral home where I live. And indeed, the cremation he and his company offer is free, at least in terms cash or credit. All you have to do is sign-over your body to medical science. Your “full body donation” helps to train doctors, pathologists, EMT trainees—perhaps even morticians, for all I know. And then, whenever whatever institution, wherever your body lands, is done doing their particular excavations, the above kicks in.

Sweet! Win-win. A last gesture of incarnational care.

The fellow knew of the exorbitant cost of the one place I visited. He me about the $995 place—assuring me it was both legit and respectful. We talked a little my health and such. Soon enough, I asked him how to proceed. There was a slight pause. He said, “Well, you can go to the tab on our website where you fill out a form that will allow us to determine your suitability for donation… (pause)…but keep in mind those $995 people.”

Now, I am not sure that what I heard is what he actually said.

What he actually said was, “…keep in mind those $995 people.” What I heard was, “Uh, I don’t think you will meet the requisite requirements for donation.” Translation: We don’t really want your body.

Well, guess what? Neither do I! Neither does any woman I know!

But, I mean, geez. Even medical science does not want my body? What’s left of it, anyway?

My sister suggested that the only greater indignity is if they took it, then returned it two weeks later with no note. And who would know if they planted my tree.

I called my nephew with the story. He said, “Of all the things I have ever heard about your body over the years, this is…uh… the… least surprising.”