Theology for Breakfast: The Holy Irritant in Forward Day by Day May-June-July 2024

Every morning I read the scripture assigned by the Episcopal Book of Common prayer, then relax into a short reflection on those readings offered by the quarterly Forward Day by Day. Every quarter I've culled highlights. See my responses going back to 2013.

May Reflections for May are by Reverend Kira Austin-Young, currently serving in San Francisco, where she and her dog pass by homeless encampments every day. She's reminded by Psalm 102.17 that "God favors the prayers of the homeless." While institutions provide short-term care and devise long-term solutions, she imagines her small part to be the answer to "the prayer of my neighbor."

Having read her piece, I myself walked my dog in a parking lot where we repeatedly encountered a homeless woman named Brenda. Three Sunday mornings in a row, she had politely rebuffed offers to buy her sandals, coffee, food -- but she brightened up considerably on Mothers Day when I asked if she was a mother. She wanted to tell me about her children and grand-children.

The writer struggles with Matthew 7.18, "Everyone who asks receives." How does that sound to families in the youth hospice where she was chaplain? She thinks, "There is not a one-to-one correspondence between what we ask in prayer and what we receive." (That, I'd say, would be magic -- harnessing God's power to do our will.) Pray specific prayers, anyway, she says, to make yourself aware of God's presence. "The victims are in our thoughts and prayers" has come to mean "We're not going to do anything," but she admits prayers at least prepare us for action and open us to God's will.

She "gets worked up" over public figures who won't deal with important issues. Responding to Psalm 37.7 ("Be still ... wait patiently for the Lord") she admits that getting worked up "is unhelpful at best, and at most, leads to evil." Besides, as Jesus asked in Mt. 6.27, "Can anyone by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?"

Public figures who disgust her need prayers more than anyone, she admits, and she needs to be the one to pray for them. She gets "likes" for snide comments about those leaders, but she hasn't "built up" anyone or anything by writing insults (Ephesians 4.29 "Let no evil come out of your mouth, but only what is useful for building up.")

There's humor and joy in some of her observations. Jesus is like a stand-up comic when he points out, "when John and his disciples ate nothing, the Pharisees said he had a demon in him, but when I and my disciples have dinner, they say we're drunkards and gluttons." The great line about "Leviathan that God made for the sport of it" (Psalms 104.27) reminds her how we know more about outer space than about the oceans that occupy most of our planet, and how much more there is to "the strangeness and untouchability of God."

July For July, we had essays by Philip Beyer, retired businessman and archdeacon of a diocese in Florida.

In Beyer's stories, the Holy Spirit manifests as a Holy Irritant.

• Beyer sought time alone in a chapel, but ended up listening to someone already there in great need. "The hidden treasure I found was at hand, not in solitude, not in my agenda, but fully immersed in human sorrow."
• During an outdoor service, he was annoyed by homeless people wandering by - until the priest invited them to join in.
• He remembers his newspaper delivery route, how angry he was at those who didn't pay up - but then the baker paid him in donuts, with the side effect of opening his eyes to the fact that his bag got lighter with each delivery, and his hardness softened to forgiveness.
• As an executive traveling with elderly tourists in Jerusalem, he impatiently took over the soft-serv ice cream machine to hurry the tour along, and discovered fun and friendship in serving them.
• Hassled by a man at a homeless shelter who kept demanding "more tea," he slammed a full pitcher down on the table. The man's disappointment opened Beyer up to realize, the man hadn't needed or wanted tea; he needed the attention (cf. Jesus and the blind man, Mt. 20.29-34).

The pharisees seem to have irritated Jesus. Their demand for a sign reminds Beyer of a sign he received during a morning run when he was feeling low. The voice of a cardinal caught his attention, then the bird suddenly appeared, lifting Beyer's spirits. He asks us if we've had such an experience.

Indeed: Riding my bike on the Silver Comet trail, I approached a couple from behind as they walked side by side. The woman was talking, gesturing, re-enacting some big confrontation. At something she said, the man turned his head towards her so quickly that his dred locks shook, and I saw his eyes open wide on her, his broad smile, his admiration and delight. I caught that spirit of love vicariously and I carry it with me to this day, as often as I recall that moment.

Beyer's experience in Haiti after the earthquake could be a parable. Beyers despaired of finding building materials for the parish church, but the priest didn't seem to be doing anything about that. As they toured the parish, the priest just hugged people and smiled and listened to their problems. Again, Beyers was irritated. But the next day, people showed up with materials enough to rebuild.

The Red Sea Parts: What Retirement Feels Like

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Scott Smoot on his bike in the Red Sea, virtually. Of course, Moses is going north, and I'm going south.

On my virtual bike tour of the world, I pause for a selfie wherever I have lived or have felt a connection. God's parting the Red Sea for the Hebrews' escape from slavery is certainly a great story, but I struggled to find a personal connection.

When I studied the photo of the iconic scene from the film The Ten Commandments, suddenly it resonated with the most recent period of my life. Those last years of teaching seemed so relentless, a couple of classes were so contentious, and the pandemic upended so much of what I had relied on for 39 years of my teaching career, that retirement is very much like what we see in Cecille B. DeMille's film. Oh, I do feel a clearing of my path to my end.

Enough said.

Miles YTD 1931 || 2nd World Tour Total 18,549 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: TBA

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Stars that Rise over The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger

A good crime novel needs lots of good characters. Victims, witnesses, suspects, detective sidekicks, all have their function. If they're well-drawn, we feel sympathy or antipathy, maybe amusement, as the story moves forward. So it is in William Kent Krueger's The River We Remember, except that his characters matter apart from their relationship to the crime.

There's Jimmy Quinn, wealthiest man in the county and most hated. He's already food for catfish in the Alabaster River when the novel begins, but we get to know him by how he bent his family's lives to his. There's also Jack Creasy, a man like used motor oil: "If you tried to get a grip on him, he slipped through your fingers, leaving you with the feel of grit and dirt and a desire to wash yourself clean" (214). Creasy whips up the town with his theory that Quinn's killer was Noah Bluestone, because Quinn recently fired him, and because Bluestone is "an uppity Indian."

Bluestone is admirable and fascinating. He lives away from town with Kyoko, the wife he brought home from the war in Japan. Before the war, he had played football with many of the other characters, including Sheriff Brody. He admits to a confrontation with Quinn just before the murder took place. "He was a big man," Noah tells Brody, "but he had a small spirit. He fired me instead" (95). We wonder why Bluestone won't say a word in his own defense, even when Sheriff Brody Dern arrests him for circumstantial evidence.

Brody lives with his dog Hector in quarters above the jail, where a print of Hopper's Night Hawks is his only decoration. Though the investigation takes Brody to dark places, there's a romantic comedy current to his story: while he continues to see his first love, married to his brother, he's growing to appreciate Angie Madison, proprietor of the diner next door. Around her, he's shy as a middle-school boy.

Angie's 14-year-old son Scott is an especially appealing character. He delivers meals to the jail for Brody and anyone in the jail. Born with a hole in his heart, Scott can't be as active as he would like to be. Scott has no father -- his mother's back-story makes an engrossing novelette-within-the-novel -- but in Brody, Scott finds a surrogate. If he can understand Brody, he thinks "maybe, even with a hole in his heart, he might feel like he was finally a man complete" (192).

All the currents of the story run through a a scene in the jail. Bluestone is being held for murder. His accuser Creasy is there, jailed for disorderly conduct. It's a week after Scott risked his own life to rescue a girl drowning in rapids of the Alabaster River. Now he has brought dinner to the jail. At Bluestone's request, Scott has also brought a branch from a cottonwood tree. Bluestone asks for the branch, then asks Sheriff Brody for a sharp knife.

Brody considered the request, the man who’d made it, and the boy. He said, “Step away from the cell, Scott.”

The boy took a step back. Brody reached into his pocket and brought out a folded barlow knife. He handed it to Bluestone through the bars. Creasy gave a snort of disbelief but said nothing. Bluestone drew out the blade and carefully cut the thin cottonwood branch in two. He folded the blade and handed the knife back to Brody.

“Take a look at this,” Bluestone said. He turned the cut end of the branch toward the boy. “See the star?”

There it was, inside the branch, dead center. A dark, five-pointed star. Brody could see it, too.

Scott’s eyes grew large with wonder.

Bluestone says that his people say that stars are born in earth, are absorbed into the roots of the cottonwood, and are all waiting for the time when the Great Spirit will release them by wind that shakes the branches.

"They fly up and settle in the heavens, where they shine and sparkle and become the luminous creations they were always meant to be.” Bluestone looked seriously at the boy. “Do you know why I wanted to tell you this story?”

Scott said, “No.”

“When you saved that girl, I told you that you’d received a gift. The gift is like this star at the center of the cottonwood. It’s inside you now. Someday, when you need it, it will come out, like the stars when the wind shakes the cottonwood trees, and it will shine for you, well and truly.”

The boy seemed to think about that.

“What a load of horseshit,” Creasy said.

The story moves on to an action-packed conclusion. Before it's over, Scott has had cause to be ashamed of himself, and an opportunity for redemption. All the characters' stories have their own finish apart from the denoument of the mystery.

Links to all of my responses to William Kent Krueger's novels, including his Cork O'Connor series, are listed with short descriptions at my Crime Fiction page.

Pedaling through Petra

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Scott Smoot at Petra, virtually, holding Susan's Kodak print

 

In the land now called Jordan, Petra is what remains of an ancient city that was carved into sandstone cliffs. Wikipedia says Petra's heyday was 2000 years ago, but I know nothing more than that. It lies on the line that I'm tracing on a map of the world, mile by mile, as I ride bike trails around Atlanta. My rule for this virtual world tour is to aim for places to which I have strong connections.

My connection to Petra is the snapshot I'm holding in my virtual photo. My friend Susan took that snapshot in March of 1999 during a tour of the Holy Land. Susan actually enjoys touring extraordinary places to see extraordinary things in person.

For me, these virtual visits are enough. I prefer my round of visits to the store, to the church, to Susan's house, to the restaurant we visit each week, to my sister's home, to my Mom's room, to the bike trail. "Same old same old" sounds to me like a good thing.

Besides, there's room for the extraordinary in that routine. For my recent birthday, Susan treated me to our annual dinner at Spring, a restaurant we can walk to from her house, where each course is a special experience. Dessert this year was the apotheosis of humble rice pudding, a mix of textures and flavors I'll not forget.

She also presented me with her painting of my dog Brandy that captures the eyes alive with interest, the ears cocked in curiosity, and a single white hair that rises from the tip of Brandy's copper-brown tail.

In an ordinary week, we'll cover an extraordinary range of topics in conversation over take-out dinners and homemade pizza and walks with the dog.

So let my visit to Petra be dedicated to Susan in gratitude for her extraordinary friendship.

Miles YTD 1543 || 2nd World Tour Total 18,161 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: The Red Sea

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Jerusalem on My Mind

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Scott Smoot joins a bike tour of Jerusalem, virtually.

As I've pedaled 17,987 miles on trails around Atlanta these past four years, I've traced those miles on the globe, making virtual stops at "places I've lived or loved." My goal this year was to reach Jerusalem on my 65th birthday. A thunderstorm nixed that, so it's one day later.

Though I've never actually been to Jerusalem, it's a place I've lived or loved because I've been there in my mind before sunrise every day for at least 10 years. The morning service of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer opens with a choice of Psalm 95 or 100, which both tell us to enter Jerusalem's gates with thanksgiving. Then the BCP assigns readings in other Psalms, the prophets, and New Testament scriptures. Then I read the day's meditation from the quarterly Forward Day by Day.

Just last week, Jerusalem was subject of a meditation in Forward. The writer, Rev. Erin Morey, commented on God's instructions in Exodus for building a worship space. The Tabernacle is modeled on the future Jerusalem temple. Minute details include the patterns on curtains. Morey reminds us, "Those texts were compiled during the period of exile in Babylon. [The editors] far from home, were describing a physical space that no longer existed in this world." So, "the words became a worship space for God's people" [italics mine].

That's the Jerusalem I enter every morning. If it's not a story of Jesus or a prophet in Jerusalem, then it's one of the psalms. In some of those, Jerusalem sounds a lot like middle school, with judges at the gates, the bullies from the "popular" clique, and former friends spreading rumors behind your back.

But I love the Jerusalem of God's promises, where nations will stream to your light, where the gates will always be open. See my blogpost about the inspiring vision of Jerusalem in Isaiah, and how it in turn underlies America's origin story, City on a Hill: Vision for America (06/2018).

One of my favorite lines about Jerusalem comes at the end of Psalm 87. It tells how people from all over the world will want to claim Jerusalem as their birthplace, concluding, the singers and the dancers will say [to Jerusalem], "All my fresh springs are in you." The editor of the Oxford Study Bible speculates that a line may be missing, but the verse makes complete sense to me, as I've practiced arts all my life. The psalm says that the city has the drama, the beauty, the lamentations, and the promise of glory, to make Jerusalem an endless inspiration.

Miles YTD 1369 || 2nd World Tour Total 17,987 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: TBA

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NOTE: Later, add →

My Dinner with Clint Smith, poet

I owe Clint Smith a blogpost. He brought a lot of attention to my blog when I wrote about his first collection of poetry. When his second collection came out last year, I wanted to return the favor, a.s.a.p.

Yet I felt funny preparing to write about Clint's Above Ground. His voice is so engaging in these poems, and he tells so much of his daily life, hopes, and memories that reading him is like listening to a particularly entertaining friend over cocktails and a good dinner. To pull out a legal pad and make notes felt wrong.

So I'm looking back over his poems the way I look back over a satisfying conversation.

[Clint Smith, photo from The Daily Stoic podcast page. Join nearly 4000 others who've read my post "Poetry of Clint Smith in Counting Descent" (07/2021).]

First, he shares snapshots of the kids -- lots of them -- mementoes of joy, wonder, laughter, exhaustion. Kids at bed time, at bath time, a baby in the womb no bigger than a fingernail, a baby strapped to Clint's chest as he dances in the grocery store -- before the manager asks him to stop alarming the customers. His boy wonders about space and the ocean. "Prehistoric Questions" about what killed the dinosaurs lead to the boy's asking, will he die, too (94). The father gives an inspired honest answer that's one of the biggest laughs of our time together. Ok, there was one bigger laugh in "You Ask Me What Sounds a Giraffe Makes" (78), but I won't spoil it by repeating his son's hypothesis.

Smith gets wistful when he sees reflections of earlier generations in his children. Setting his infant daughter into her grandfather's arms, he writes I saw the way your brows / furrowed just like his, how your eyes carry the same pools of wonder ("Roots" 25). He tries without success to explain to his son how we see stars as they were millions of years ago, but he does explain that he can see the "stardust" of his grandmother in this child she never met ("The Andromeda Galaxy is the Closest Galaxy to Our Milky Way" 92). He marks the day when he was no longer able to recall her voice (69).

He keeps coming back to his family tree - literally. It's in a park in New Orleans where his mother brought him to climb as a child, where she climbed as a little girl. In "Tree Rings" (40) he remembers how its branches bent down to the soil as if it had long been waiting to scoop us up. He shares what sounds like a memory about that tree, Two people in New Orleans fall in love under an oak tree whose branches bend like sorrow ("All at Once" 3). His grandmother's voice, he tells his daughter, was the shade under an oak tree / and her laugh was the branch that / stretched down to let you climb it ("Legacy" 51). The tree also brings up bitter reflections about Katrina and its aftermath.

He tells how he's carrying on "Tradition" making French toast with his kids, as his father and his father's father did, though he doesn't remember the recipe so much as the feel of his father's hands wrapped around his (26-7). When he hears a tone of anger creep into his voice in "Across Generations," it's the echo of men attempting / to unlearn the anger on their father's / tongues.

So his conversation sometimes turns towards anger, but Smith keeps cool. He finds indirect ways to express what's bothering him. He lets us figure for ourselves that the customers alarmed by his dancing were white. He doesn't cite studies that show that doctors are likely to discount the concerns of black women when his wife's pregnancy goes awry. He detaches himself from the story, focused on her determination to save herself and their child while the professionals tell her "It's All in Your Head" (9). He gets a "Gold Star" from onlookers for being such a good dad, leaving unspoken the stereotype of the absentee black father (72). (For a white man's perspective on a black father, see my poem Behind Prejudice, written before I saw Smith's book.)

Smith channels anger at the way things are into his anxiety for the way things will be for his children. In line at the grocery store, he hears a white woman denounce a black athlete who knelt during the national anthem, blatant disrespect that would get him killed in some places, she says, approval implied, before she tells Smith how cute his infant son is. Thanking her, Smith silently asks his son, will she or someone like her, encountering you years from now, forget you were ever this boy and make you into something you aren't ("Your National Anthem" p.22-3)? Dispassionate lists of medical history "For the Doctor's Records" morph into spiritual anxieties: I run four times a week / but usually it's away from something and another black boy was killed by police, and, I haven't cried in a long time (66). Teaching his kids to marvel at the 17-year cicadas, he's suddenly disturbed to think about the society his adult children will live in the next time the cicadas come "Above Ground" (84).

Telling about his visit to a Confederate memorial (research for his book How the Word is Passed), he imagines what it would feel like to fall asleep in my home, to wake up, and to find my children gone, "When Standing in a Cabin at the Whitney Plantation" (102). The story draws extra power from all we've heard about the delight, hopes, and fears poured into his children.

Maybe it's just my love of language, but Smith's best moments of our time together were his dissections of language itself. In "Nomenclature," he explores his mother-in-law's native language Igbo, in which subtle changes of inflection turn sight into love (34). Putting a child to bed in "Ars Poetica" he explains that poems can be about anything -- a lamp, a door, Pluto. POEMS ARE INSIDE OF ME? the child asks, lifting his shirt to see the poetry in himself. They are, his father says (82), which seems to me like a huge blessing. Most of all, I love what Smith does with "Punctuation," demonstrations of how a little mark can change a meaning,

There is something in your eyes I can't get out.
There is something in your eyes; I can't get out.

 I am trying to help
  or
 I am trying to run away

each example better, deeper, more sorrowful than the last (96).

I enjoyed our time together, and I revisit it often. Can't wait for the next time.

Summer job, 1973: Scrubbing Decatur Stadium

Riding my bike through Decatur on my way back from Stone Mountain Park, I paused for a selfie at the football field of Decatur High. 51 years ago this month, I scrubbed every inch of the home side bleachers. (I would've marked the 50th anniversary last summer, but a hernia precluded such an arduous ride.)

Less than a year before, Dad had purchased West Chemical Engineering Company on Huff Road, not far from Tech. Where townhomes and expensive restaurants now stand, Dad and a couple employees (me included) manufactured soaps, disinfectants, and water treatments in a shed behind an old house. Photo: Dad with Mom at the corner of Huff Road and Ellsworth Industrial Boulevard. A shed with 100-gallon mixers was attached to the back. [For more on work at Dad's company throughout my teen years, see my blog post Prep Kid in a Factory (09/2022)]

But Dad gave me a special mission that summer, when I was between my eighth and ninth grade years. Atlanta City Schools were his customers, and the concrete stadium seats at Decatur high were gray and mottled black with thirty-plus years of soot. Dad bought a piece of new technology called a "pressure washer." With a college kid named Jerry who drove and oversaw my work, I scoured the whole stadium, one one-inch strip at a time, from the upper left hand corner of this picture to the lower right-hand corner. Then I repeated the process to "seal" the concrete with a polymer mix that would keep grime from lodging in the surface.

Here's the "before" picture that Dad took on a cloudy day. In the "after" picture (which I haven't located), the concrete gleams white as vanilla ice cream.

The hardest part of my job was to fill the pressure washer's tank with a toxic soap mixture every few hours. I hauled a five gallon bucket filled with hydrochloric acid from the locker room (lower right) back up the stairs to the pressure washer. The acid has a sharp smell that burns your eyes and lungs. I'd hold my breath, advance ten steps, set the bucket down, run from the fumes, gasp, run back to the bucket, and repeat.

Did I mention, there's no shade there?

But looking back, I'm fond of that time. Jerry had little in common with me, so I had eight hours a day to myself -- good thing, for an introvert. He did have a portable radio, so I heard a lot of pop songs -- "Yesterday Once More" by the Carpenters, "Diamond Girl" by Seals & Croft, "Touch Me in the Morning" by Diana Ross -- songs that bring the whole summer back to me with a smile. Sometimes Jerry would give me leave to cross the street to a hot dog joint.

Something else was fascinating. On the right side of Dad's "before" photo, we can see some of the blocks of public housing. We were the only two white guys in a neighborhood where everyone I saw was black, a new experience for me. The homes had no air conditioning, so all the windows were open, and I heard all day the sounds of lives very different from mine.

I once wrote about those summers working for Dad in my resonse to a study about repetitive work. When workers' "executive" brains are engaged in the repetitive action, the rest of the mind is free for problem-solving and daydreaming. I agreed: That's what made heaven out of summer afternoons of hot, sticky, smelly, repetitive work in my dad's chemical company. Tightening lids on hundreds of soap bottles, pressure washing dozens of 55-gallon drums, bleaching the bleachers at South Decatur High School -- I was rapt in my own imagination, writing scripts, imagining alternative futures for myself, replaying scenes from my life with different outcomes.

I didn't see Decatur High again until 2009,when I started riding my bike through Decatur. Aluminum bleachers had replaced the concrete, and the public housing was replaced by expensive condominiums. Time had erased my work. But I'm proud to mark the anniversary.