Forward Day by Day: Refuge in a Storm

The greatest pleasure is to be safe from a storm -- but only just safe. So wrote John Updike early in his memoir Self-Consciousness. I took the photo for this article yesterday evening, listening to Toronto's jazz station on my phone; I've tonic water with lime at my right hand; I'm reading The Big Sleep. It's like a greatest hits compilation of my usual summer night routine, except for lights flickering and limbs falling on the roof. It's the biggest daylight storm of the summer.

Mia is dubious about sitting so close to the storm. But a radio interview regarding Winnie the Pooh taught me something about storms and fear that relates to a scripture below, Matthew 14.27. Piglet, walking in a storm with Pooh, asks, "What if a tree falls in the wind?"  Pooh responds, "What if it doesn't?"

Today was the last reading in the issue of Forward Day by Day that began when summer vacation was a few weeks ahead.  Now, teacher workshops begin day after tomorrow, and my anxiety is rising.  It's time to review where we've been in the lectionary - all those Psalms about refuge in a storm, impending doom, and holding fast to what is true.

May 2018 gave us readings by Miguel Escobar, director of Anglican Studies at Union Theological Seminary:

Acts 18.26 [Apollos] began to speak boldly in the synagogue; but when Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained the Way of God to him more accurately.  Escobar relates this to a concert pianist's description of his lifetime's work as "simply growing closer to playing what was written on the page."  In the same way, Apollos learns to preach "less about him and more about Jesus."  Escobar challenges us with a question: How is your understanding of the "Way of God" being challenged these days? Is the gospel shining through?

Acts 21.12-13 We and the people there urged [Paul] not to go up to Jerusalem. Escobar makes a "spiritual gift" of Paul's "ability to upset everyone, everywhere he goes."  Paul angers Jewish Christians by not insisting on the law, but also mocks the Gentiles' idol-worship; he alarms the other apostles.  The rest of Acts is about failing to soften Paul's edges, Escobar says. He asks us if we have a gift that can be sometimes sharp, and do we ever need to soften it?

Matthew 14.8 Bring me the head of John the Baptist.  All the readings assigned for this day deal with feasting and / or abuse of power (Ps 49, Eccl 3.1-15, Gal 2.11-21).  Escobar observes only a "tiny spark" of God's presence in this gruesome story from Herod's reign, but also observes how Mary sings Magnificat in Luke against this background of Herod's cruelty.  Escobar tells us to light a candle as we think how we are in some way a spark in the darkness of the world.

Matthew 14.16-17 "We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish." Escobar touched a sore spot for me as vacation opened up, when it hit me that I no longer have a "bucket list" of things I want to achieve, or any particular goal for the summer days: "Maybe you're … unable to see anything particularly inspiring or holy in the coming days.  You are not alone in these feelings."  This story of Jesus making plenty from apparent scarcity speaks to this feeling.  Escobar asks, "How would our world be different if we looked at ourselves and our communities as 'more than enough' for God to work miracles with?"

In June, meditations came from Marshall Jolly, rector of Grace Episcopal church in North Carolina.

Matthew 13.33 The kingdom of heaven is like yeast....  This parable resonates with the story of feeding five thousand. When we ask, "Is this enough?  Will this little bit amount to anything?" Jolly is reassured by the image of a little yeast that makes a big loaf.

Matthew 13.36 "Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field."  Jolly warns, "Although we should strive to garner an ever - deepening understanding of our faith, we must resist making our faith contingent upon our understanding."  Then, what is faith about? "Faith is about relationship.  And for that, we must continue along our journey with Jesus."

Fr. Daron Vroon of my church, St. James Episcopal, Marietta GA, made an interesting observation for our patron saint's day this past Sunday.  With John and Peter, James is one of the big three apostles present for three big events in the Gospels:  raising of Jairus's daughter from the dead, the mountain - top transfiguration, and Jesus' passion at Gethsemane.  In none of these pillars of the Jesus story does Jesus teach or preach. James and the others saw who Jesus is by what he does. And they never do understand when these events happen! As Jolly says, not understanding, but relationship.

1 Samuel 3.1b The Word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. Jolly writes, "We have become less attuned to mystery as a posture of openness.  So much of life is spent in a closed circuit -- solving problems, managing routines, controlling outcomes."  To be open to mystery, we must create a space in ourselves to stand aside from the circuits of our days.

Matthew 14.27 "Take heart, it is I; be not afraid." Jolly observes that all fear is the preoccupation with "What if?"  We still struggle with this, though more than 100 verses in the Bible tell us "fear not."

Acts 11.23 When [Barnabas] came and saw the grace of God, he rejoiced.... Jolly asks us, "Is there anything you're trying to fix that isn't broken? How might you move from fixer to encourager?"  As I consider the year ahead as head of a department comprised of gifted teachers who do their work in ways that I can only admire, I take this message to heart.

Psalm 74.15 Yours is the day, Yours also the night.  See my blogpost on this theme, Worship and Ordinary Life: Flipping Our Perspective. It draws from this meditation and from an article by Fr. Vroon.

July's readings come with meditations by Susan Hanson, former chaplain and presently English professor at Texas State University.

Matthew 21.12-13 Then Jesus... drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple....  Hanson begins, "The issue in this passage is not that Jesus is capable of anger; it's that sometimes anger is what's called for."  She explains the system of making money from poor worshipers who bought birds for sacrifice. Jesus is telling us, "When it comes to worshiping God, we all enter the temple on a level playing ground."  She asks us, "When was the last time you felt angry?"  (Answer: I yell at figures in the news when I drive.)  "Was it justified?  How did you handle this feeling?" (I have to turn the station and breathe deeply and intone Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.)

Matthew 5.46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?  All the readings for July 4th had to do with the theme of sojourners or refugees. Dueteronomy 10.17-21, You all were sojourners once; care for sojourners and widows. Hebrews 11.8-16 Abraham was a sojourner in the land of promise.  Psalm 145, The Lord is slow to anger.... Hanson reflects that students who have called her "unfair" have most often been the ones doing well, complaining that she gave someone else a second chance.  How true!  "Fortunately," Hanson concludes, "God is more concerned with mercy than with giving us what we deserve."

Hanson asks a series of questions that arise from other meditations.  Forward calls these, "Moving Forward."  In EfM (Education for Ministry), we'd call these "Action" items.  If a coin with Caesar's image 'belongs to Caesar," what does our being made in the image of God imply?  And: How do you pay attention to and renew your most important relationships?  Is God inviting you to do some extra work on any of them?  And: (apropos townspeople unable to accept Jesus as more than the son of a carpenter) Are you blind to the changes in the people you love most?

One of the final readings of the summer break applies to teachers:  Romans 15.1-2 We who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves.  Hanson, a teacher, learned early "never [to] make anyone look foolish."  Her career as a writer goes back to the second grade teacher who told her that she was a good writer.  Good things to remember as I finish up this posting and turn my attention to the year ahead.

Jon Meacham Looks to History for "The Soul of America"

"We've been here before," said historian Jon Meacham for an interview with Atlanta's WABE-FM.  His book The Soul of America: The Battle for our Better Angels surveys times we've been "here" -- a place when fear and resentments erode confidence in our institutions. Focusing on internal conflicts that have happened since Lincoln's futile appeal to "the better angels of our nature," Meacham highlights what we did to recover ourselves.

As Meacham describes events of the past, we hear resonance with today's newscasts.  The "deep state" paranoia is old news: Senator Joe McCarthy claimed to have a list of 200 Communists in Federal Government (he didn't).  Support for the Ku Klux Klan actually spiked after exposés ran in a New York paper, because the idea that "eastern elites" purvey "fake news" goes back at least as far as Reconstruction (126).  Louisiana's Governor - and - Senator Huey Long easily cowed opposition by baseless accusations, lapped up by his supporters (143).  Heroic airman Charles Lindbergh rallied a large swath of the population calling for "America First," admiring fascist dictators, and warning against Jewish influence (155ff). Birthers fabricated African ancestry for Warren G. Harding when he made known his support of civil rights for black citizens (129). A governor of Georgia, speaking to a national convention of the Klan,  proposed "a wall of steel... as high as heaven" to keep out immigrants from southern Europe (120).

As someone has said, "Courage is the memory of past successes," and Meacham helps us to remember. Persistent truth-telling in court, political speech, and news media can work, as the facts eventually undercut the Klan's claim to represent the best values of civilization.  A deep American sense of fair play and decency can, and did, rise up in disgust at the haters and fear-mongers:  The Dalton, GA Citizen wrote of the Klan in 1925, "appealing to race and religious hatreds is … thoroughly un-American and … contemptible …" (127). The memorable line that deflated Senator McCarthy's three - year - run on fledgling TV's first reality series was the response to McCarthy's  smear of a young man on the staff of army counsel Joseph Welch, when Welch asked McCarthy, "Have you left no sense of decency?" (201).  The Red Scare that followed the Great War fell apart when the Justice Department's own practices to deport immigrants brought public outrage and ridicule.  Meacham cites an ACLU attorney's remark as typical of the time: "I hate to see people pushed around" (116).  Sometimes, it's just fatigue that deprives the blowhards of support. FDR paused his reforms in 1935 because people in any audience get tired of hearing the same high note over and over (35).

Meacham, putting familiar events in this purposeful context, creates the feeling that certain American characters have carried on a conversation across the centuries.  Some of these are historical characters who don't all get credit for insights or moral courage:

• Andrew Jackson headed off secession by South Carolina in 1832 with a positive invitation to the states' people to "contemplate" the "bond of common interest and general protection" of the Union, its encouragement of education and arts "Which render life agreeable," and its offer of "asylum where the wretched and oppressed find a refuge and support" (31).  Jackson concludes, "Look on this picture of happiness and honor, and say We too are citizens of America."
• Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower explained that leadership isn't "beating someone over the head" but a process of education and conciliation (39). No fan of Joe McCarthy, he prepared a statement defending the Secretary of State from the Senator's lies, but bowed to political advisors, and, to his ever-lasting regret, omitted that paragraph from a speech in McCarthy's home state of Wisconsin.  But TV newsman Edward R. Murrow used clips of the Sentaor's egregious moments to expose him; Ike gave a TV address warning America not to "fall prey to hysterical thinking" and promising that "the American belief in decency and justice and progress and the value of individual liberty [will] carry us through" the real dangers of the time (200).  A hard core of 34% of the electorate continued to support McCarthy, until the Senate censured him.  McCarthy faded from the news and drank himself into liver failure.
• Harding and Coolidge both stood up to popular opinion on behalf of ethnic minorities.  In Birmingham, the heart of the segregated South, Harding said "let the black man vote" and ensure "equal opportunity in economics and education" (127).  "Silent Cal" Coolidge wrote a rebuke to a reporter in New York who objected to a black candidate for Congress. Half a million black soldiers fought in the Great War, Coolidge wrote, and the Constitution guarantees equal rights.  "It is the source of your rights and my rights.  I propose to regard it" (131). The popular President's reply was interpreted as a rebuke to the Klan.  Speaking to the American Legion, Coolidge pushed back against anti-immigrant prejudice: "No matter by what various crafts we came here [i.e., Mayflower or "steerage"], we are all now in the same boat...." He continued to assert that differences of "racial stock" and culture

  will certainly be elements of strength rather than of weakness. They will give variety to our tastes and interests.  They will broaden our vision, strengthen our understanding, encourage the true humanities, and enrich our whole mode and conception of life" (132-133).

• Freedom from fear is a familiar part of FDR's rhetoric, but I was touched by a prayer he composed with daughter and son-in-law, using the Episcopal Prayer Book for a model, offered on the radio in the evening of D-Day:

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of Our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor... ...They will be sore tried by night and by day, without rest -- until the victory is won. ...Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogancies. Lead us to the saving of our country and with out sister Nations into a world unity that will spell sure peace.... They will be done, Almight God. Amen.

• FDR sent families of Japanese descent to concentration camps, while their white neighbors went in to snatch up their property. Meacham tells how General Joseph Stilwell rode the train cross-country to deliver personally the Medal of Honor to the family of soldier Kazuo Masuda. The General was making a public statement doing this, and brought along a movie star, 34 - year - old Ronald Reagan, who made this speech:

  Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all one color. [America, alone among nations, was] not founded on race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of, but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way (166).

  As President, Reagan signed a bill to compensate families for their wrongful internment, the bill numbered 422 after Masuda's all-Japanese-American regiment 422.

In the last chapter, Meacham condenses the lessons learned from his tour of American history, including "enter the arena" by engagement with the news and with voting, "resist tribalism" and regard with an open mind what the others are thinking, "respect facts and reason," "find a critical balance," and "keep history in mind."

The book enacts the advice found at the end of The Lessons of History, a slender book in which Will and Ariel Durant skimmed what rose to the top in the ten volumes of their encyclopedic History of Civilization.  Because the husband and wife both died shortly after completing their life's work, the final paragraph of that final book was their benediction.  Writing in 1968, a year of riots, assassinations, domestic terror groups, national shaming in Vietnam and North Korea, and political acrimony, they imagine history, not just as a "chamber of horrors," but, for those who look for "an encouraging remembrance of generative souls," history can be

a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing.

Sources and Notes

Meacham, Jon. The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels. New York: Random House, 2018.

Durant, Will and Ariel.  The Lessons of History.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968.

[See a related post about Ronald Reagan's final speech: "I hope I appealed to your best hopes, and not to your worst fears."  A posting about a song of the prophet Isaiah also turns into a reflection on America as a "celestial city."]

Dementia Diary: Mom's Great Escape

Mom laughs when I tell her how she eluded staff, security locks, and alarms to get into the closed "Evergreen" area and out into the garden undetected.  She laughs even more when I tell her that, the very next day, she somehow got out again, this time to take another resident across the street to see Mom's old Cincinnati home.  We're in Marietta, Georgia.  

[Photo: (top) The bank and driveway across the street from Mom's facility remind mother of (bottom) the library near her alma mater Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati.]

But, for the staff, Mom's "elopement" was no laughing matter.  Their solution was to put Mom in Memory Care, just what my brother and I wanted to avoid.  "When you go there," I explained to Mom, "you'll be beyond caring.  I'll come to water you twice a day."  That got another laugh from Mom.  We didn't expect Memory Care for a few years, yet. Nothing gets her hackles up faster than any hint that she's being "treated like a child."

The facility proposed a compromise.  She sleeps in her spacious apartment upstairs with all her beloved furnishings and closets of clothes; staff wakes her and takes her to the Memory Care unit for morning activities and lunch, until her Visiting Angel can assume responsibility for her.  At bed time, in her pajamas, she's not a flight risk anymore: she'd no more go out of her apartment undressed and unaccessorized than the Queen would.

After four days of her visiting Memory Care most of each day, I've heard from staff and Visiting Angel:  Instead of raging against locked doors and denying that she belongs in there with all those "old people," she is thriving on attention from staff.  Wherever she wanders in this extensive maximum-security wing, she meets staff members who know her, and she meets people like her.  During group activities, I'm told that her instinct as teacher of 3rd grade kicks in, and she encourages those less sentient than she.  [Photo: Mom enjoyed a visit by "Sammy Davis Jr." to the Memory Care wing Tuesday night.]

Also, during this week, there've been no phone messages from her about being lost, lonely, or angry. And, when I arrived around 8:15 yesterday morning, she was up and showering, in a great mood.

I've asked the management to show her a studio apartment that could become her home base in Memory Care.  The move must be her idea; dementia is quick to suspect that her sons are "putting her away."

[Photo: we visited the doctor Thursday, laughing about every problem.  "I have difficulty walking?  Oh, I guess I do.  I cut the compression stockings off with scissors?  Ha ha!"]


See other entries in my "Dementia Diary."

Forward Day by Day through Luke and Acts

Readers of the quarterly devotional booklet Forward Day by Day found something different in the issue for February - March - April 2018.  The readings followed straight through the Gospel of Luke during Lent and Easter, through Acts into Pentecost.  Friends and I who missed the usual lectionary readings also appreciated the continuity.

Here are some of the meditations that struck me most during those months.

Luke 5.18 Just then some men came, carrying a paralyzed man on a bed.... "There are two miracles in this story from Luke," writes Forward's deputy director Richelle Thompson. "The second is Jesus' healing of the paralyzed man.  The first is having people who will go to any lengths to show Jesus to their friend."

Luke 16.8 His master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.  Priest Lindsay Hardin Freeman admits this parable is "seemingly disheartening," until we see it "is not about money; rather, it speaks of preparing for the end."  She concludes, Our hands are never clean when we reach the end of our lives.  The steward improves the lives of the poor by reducing their debts and by closing the books so that all can move ahead."

Luke 24.42 Have you anything to eat?  I have to smile whenever I picture the apostles huddling together, stunned, while the resurrected Jesus chews his dinner.  After the meal, he goes to Bethany, site of a memorable meal with Mary and Martha, Mary's anointing of his feet, and the raising of Lazarus: Jesus evidently felt comfortable there.  Freeman concludes, "Joy, disbelief, and wonder combine with real events and real places to make up the core of our faith."

Acts 5.7  [Ananias's] wife came in, not knowing what had happened.  Why isn't this story read aloud for every stewardship campaign?  For Fr. Marcus Halley, Ananias and Sapphira die because they "live their lives divorced … from the reality of [the church] community."  Halley concludes that "community is not only a means to an end in God's economy -- it is an end in itself."

Acts 5.15  They … laid [the sick] on cots and mats in order that Peter's shadow might fall on some of them as he came by.  [See image]  Halley skips over the part about miraculous healings to meditate on Peter's many "shadows" -- "he's quick - tempered, impatient, prideful, angry."  Then Halley doubles back: "God uses our shadows to bear witness to the light that healing can bring."

A personal note:  The night that I read Halley's note about a personality's shadow, I dreamed about a student from another year, one who challenged me every day, cannily playing on every insecurity I have as a teacher and human being.  In my dream, I expressed how he had made me feel -- humiliated, angry, frustrated -- but also how I could appreciate and even admire him.  In my dream, he gave me grudging acceptance.

As Carl Jung would say, he was my "shadow," surfacing traits of myself that I work hard to keep submerged.  The dream brought healing, some relief from anger and shame that I've continued to feel years after that class.

Vacation to the High Museum in Atlanta

For a few hours, I commuted to Atlanta with my friend Susan, stopped worrying about Mom and politics, and learned once again at the High Museum's exhibitions "Outliers" and "Winnie the Pooh," that the pleasures of art begin with the question, "Oh!  What's this?" and deepen with more questions, "Why did the artist do it that way?  How did the artist do that?"

First, we examined three "waves" of artists the High calls "outliers," or self-taught, paired with trained "vanguard" artists who admired their work.  The "second wave" featured works from the late-1960s and the 1970s that were a vexation to my spirit; likewise the "third wave" from the past couple of decades, though Kara Walker's series of superimposed silhouettes of African American figures on 1880s etchings of the Civil War was fascinating in conception and execution.

But the first "wave" of so-called "primitive" artists made us laugh and marvel.  The earliest works in the exhibit were by Edward Hicks, including his biggest hit, "The Peaceable Kingdom."  Besides appreciating the vision from Isaiah of lions, wolves, lambs, and cattle making nice, we enjoyed how the painted shoreline shows through the image of William Penn making peace with Native Americans, evidence that Hicks added this latter-day Lion and Lamb image as an afterthought.  Other works of his were new to us, slices of life as he saw it in the early 1800s.  In one, we see in the foreground a herd of cattle, each one solid and differentiated with personality, looking placidly at the viewer; against a background of rolling hills and barn, we might miss the men, barely sketched in, who gesture in regard to the herd.  On another large canvas, Hicks preserved images of home, a textile mill, barns, river, animals, and one guy watching it all with a telescope from a clearing on the hill above the manor house.

We enjoyed wood sculptures by Jose Delores Lopez on the theme of Adam and Eve. One has them in carnal embrace, but she's looking over her shoulder.  In another, the tree's twisting branches camouflage the twisted serpent; while Eve reaches up to the forbidden fruit, Adam hangs his head as he reaches out for what Eve has -- "submissive," Susan said. Or maybe mournful?

Self-taught artist Horace Pippin (1888-1946) produced a couple images we loved of African Americans' homes in Pennsylvania.  One shows the boy on the left, kneeling in prayer at his bed; snow gathering in dark panes in the center; a woman sewing in her rocking chair at the right.  Another picture made us laugh out loud: no people in sight, but around sixteen ceramic dogs are collected on the mantel, arranged by height to mount towards an elaborate clock.  Details of the rug, chairs, even the grain of the wood paneling, are all lovingly preserved.



Pippin was an influence on "vanguard" artist Jacob Lawrence, whose wonderful picture "Sidewalk Drawings" didn't attract my attention.  Susan called me back to appreciate the perspective: We're looking down on kids making chalk drawings on black top.  Suddenly, I was enjoying layer on layer of fun images and incongruous juxtapositions.  [See photo]


                                                         We also loved "American Interior" by Charles Sheeler, 1934.  There's no story here, no person to identify with, not even a single perspective.  But, once more, we get the loving details of rug patterns and textures.  There's the artist's exuberance, where sunlight causes a corner of the whicker chair to jump off the canvas at us.  In the vase, we see reflections of the room, and, through those, we see the picture on the plate!  The more we look, the more we see to enjoy.  [See photo]

After that exhibit, we moved on to see first drafts of E. H. Shepard's drawings for A. A. Milne's classic children's books.  I admit that I've barely given Pooh a thought since I leafed through the books during "nap time" before age six. I couldn't read, but actor Maurice Evans read several stories aloud on a pair of LPs, and those I played over and over.  The exhibit's commentary helped me to appreciate some elements in the collaboration between writer and artist, how body language expresses each character, how sequences of drawings could prolong the comic effect in Milne's narrative, how the drawings sometimes helped young minds to appreciate irony in the words.





I noticed a preponderance of drawings from behind characters, a choice that makes sense: they're moving forward in their story, not at us.  Facing away, their postures tell the story.  Besides, the rumps are funny.  Again, we saw where Shepard erased, enlarged, and wrote notes to himself. [See two photos, by Susan]

After the High, Susan and I continued our self-education in the ways of MARTA, taking the train to Decatur.  It's like a college campus for grown-ups!  At Leon's, we enjoyed tasty vegetarian sandwiches, hummus, and midday cocktails.  [See photo]

59th Birthday

I rode 59 miles on the Silver Comet Trail to celebrate my 59th birthday, averaging 16.1 miles per hour.   When I started this tradition at 34 years old, it seemed like a good idea.  My retired colleague Harry Guckert, seeing me at the Publix store after, said, "Your 90th birthday will kill you!" I said, "Well, that's kinda the plan."

[Photo: Me after a rain storm mid-way in my 59 miles]

Mom gave me a nice check and a coaster with the motto, "Martinis -- they're not just for breakfast anymore."  Perfect!

On the 15th, I read Amos in church, and we had a great sermon about the true meaning of church as expressed in Ephesians.  At the home, they lost Mom.  Somehow, she eluded the security systems and got lost in the garden of the "Evergreen" section of the home, reserved for hardcore memory cases.  She laughed and laughed!  I enjoyed seeing seven or eight blue-clad officials of the home searching everywhere for her.

Todd and his wife Alice came to visit.  I read some poetry by Linda Pastan. The CBC's Jazz91 brought out an archived interview between gracious pianist Marian MacPartland and supreme vocalist/pianist Carmen McRae, two musicians I've loved since the late 1970s. Mia decided she wanted to sit on my lap.  [Photo]

 Then I enjoyed making pizza with Susan, listening to the CBC's jazz  station.

Fine 59th.

Reagan's Final Speech: "Your Best Hopes, Not Your Worst Fears"

His elegant farewell note lay a couple years in the future, when he would write with gratitude for those who would be seeing him through to the end of dementia; but he didn't make another public speech after his endorsement of George H. W. Bush at the Republican National Convention in 1992.  What he said in conclusion struck me more forcefully than anything else in the speech, and I've been surprised not to hear it quoted more often:

And whatever else history may say about me when I'm gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts. My dream is that you will travel the road ahead with liberty's lamp guiding your steps and opportunity's arm steadying your way.

Dinosaur on Bastille Day

[Photo: The author, riding around Stone Mountain Park, GA, happened upon the park's "Dinosaureum."]

On July 14th, Bastille Day, I think of words about the French Revolution by a man of the time, Edmund Burke, Anglo-Irish parliamentarian who supported American independence.  He was spiritual patriarch of conservatism as I knew it, before I became the dinosaur that I am today.

Responding in the early 1790s to the Terror that quickly emerged from the euphoric chaos of Bastille Day, Burke told how he'd met the charming Marie Antoinette in her youth.  He deplored the revolutionary mob's treatment of her: "The age of chivalry has passed; the age of economists and calculators has succeeded."  He added, "To them, a Queen is just a woman, and a woman is just an animal, an animal not of the highest sort."

When I unpack those words, I find all the elements of conservatism that I value.  Economic theories take a back seat to humanity. Burke would have us all be courteous to royalty and non-royalty alike, with special care for the defenseless. [See my 2015 reflection on Burke and Bastille, "Logic and Faith: How to Judge Value."]

Unlike "etiquette," formalities intended to distinguish upper-class from lower, "courtesy" is an attitude towards individuals, essential to conservatism as I learned it.  Courtesy on a societal scale is "justice", and its partner "rule of law" applies up and down the social scale, to prevent both tyranny of the elite and tyranny of the mob.

I trace my conservatism back to Burke.  I see it in Abraham Lincoln's insistence that, while minority rule is unthinkable, the rule of the majority must be limited by laws to protect the interests of the minority. Theodore Roosevelt was gung-ho bootstraps and laissez-faire until activist Jacob Riis showed him tenements crowded with hard-working immigrant families trapped in a system that amounted to a slavery, and TR worked ever-after for a "fair deal."  The figurehead for conservatism in my first forty years was National Review's creator and editor-in-chief William F. Buckley, who counted arch-liberals among his close friends. (The Buckleys and the Ted Kennedys shared a ski vacation every winter.)

Early in the Reagan years, George F. Will wrote a book-length essay Statecraft as Soulcraft to lay out a conservative vision of a state that actively models, ensures, and inculcates the values that must be shared for democracy to work.  My list of those conservative values would include courtesy, openness to information and ideas, and  respect for prescribed legal and political processes even when the results don't go our way.  My list would not include tax - cuts - no - matter - the - situation,  or demonization of foreigners, the Media, or the other party.  This makes me a conservative dinosaur.

I'm not alone. In the past couple of years, prominent conservatives besides George Will, including members of Congress, have expressed alienation from the party they thought they belonged to.  Among these are historian Max Boot, Republican strategist Steven Schmidt, speechwriter and head of George W. Bush's faith initiative Michael Gerson, former evangelical activist Rob Schenck, and Bill Kristol, longtime editor at the National Review after Buckley.  

Like the dinosaurs, we're looking at a world we don't recognize.  Also like the dinosaurs, we have to admit that  the change has been a long time coming.  [I wrote about these feelings in 2013: Civics Lesson for Republicans]   Gerson's 2007 book Heroic Conservatism carries the subtitle "Why Republicans Need to Embrace America's Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don't)."  He didn't anticipate that the party's continuing to reject those ideals would result in electoral success, but he wasn't writing just about elections.

David Frum, another speechwriter for George W. Bush, saw the ground shifting under him in 2011:

America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners. When I entered Republican politics, during an earlier period of malaise, in the late seventies and early eighties, the movement got most of the big questions—crime, inflation, the Cold War—right. This time, the party is getting the big questions disastrously wrong.

Frum compares "conservatives" at the time of his article to those of just a few years before:

• While Bush defended the "earned-income tax credit" from attempts to "balance the budget on the backs of the poor," members of his own party called low wage earners "lucky ducks" for not owing Federal taxes.
• Bush "routinely invoked 'churches, synagogues, and mosques'" but in 2010 members of his party called it "an outrageous insult" to build a mosque near Ground Zero  
• Conservatives attacked the Affordable Care Act, though it was modeled on a public - and - private health care plan proposed by Republicans in the Senate to be a conservative alternative to Clinton's proposal.
• "Today, stimulative fiscal policy that includes tax cuts for almost every American is 'socialism.' In 2001, stimulative fiscal policy that included tax cuts for rather fewer Americans was an economic­-recovery program."

Frum concludes: "I can’t shrug off this flight from reality and responsibility as somebody else’s problem. I belonged to this movement; I helped to make the mess."

As dinosaurs, what are our choices?  One option is off the table, for me: the discourteous personal attacks on public officials going about their private lives at restaurants and movie theatres.

Historian Jon Meacham has written a book that may contain some answers.  The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels collects episodes from our history when, as now, the discourse degenerated.  He cautioned in an interview that his message was not, "We've been here before, so you don't have to worry," but, "We've been here before, and here's how we've gotten out of it before."

Okay, I'm ready to read.

Uncle Sam and Aunt Harriet: A July 4th Memory

My Aunt Harriet, so accommodating most of the time, insisted on celebrating July 4th her way. She had me load her walker into the car for a drive to the supermarket so that she herself could pick out the right buns, Brats (rhymes with "lots"), sauerkraut, condiments, and corn on the cob.  At sundown, she would supervise me at the grill, and we'd watch Public TV's Capital Fourth concert while we ate.

I was aunt-sitter in Chanhassen MN at the split-level home of my cousin Ann, whose husband Ken had outfitted the lower level for Harriet.  While Ann and Ken got away for a couple of weeks, I was warned never to leave my aunt for longer than an hour, because of her diabetes and the risk of falling.  Ann left us a strict schedule: blood sugar test at 7:30 a.m., pills, breakfast; mid-morning snack; lunch; mid-afternoon snack; blood test, pills and dinner.

Between these critical points, I re-designed my website, and walked Harriet's sweet and yappy little dog "Annie." I took a 52 - minute break each day to ride a bike around Chanhassen's streets, a route highlighted by a narrow trail through a nature reserve where, once, a tiny lemon - yellow Minnesota Gold Finch - first I'd ever seen - darted out of the brush and dipped in the air just ahead of my bike.

The routine of aunt - sitting might seem restrictive, but I look back on the two weeks as a golden time.  My life, like my recreational biking, has long been a steady round of predictable features: school semesters, seasons of the Church's liturgical calendar. But those two weeks out of my life made a charming passage, just as that little nature trail made a break in my daily round; and in that two - week passage, Aunt Harriet's special 4th was like the Gold Finch: an unexpected delight and a vivid memory. Our private celebration of national history enveloped her personal history, and still reminds me of so much that I loved in her.

Those brats and sauerkraut, so German, must've reminded Harriet of childhood in Cincinnati, where immigrant families in her neighborhood still spoke German. When she was born October 4, 1921, the German names of Cincinnati's streets had just been Anglicized in the patriotic anti-Kaiser frenzy attending our nation's entry into the Great War.

She and her younger brother lived well in the 20s, but everything changed with the Depression.  Her father, guilty of some shady dealing -- to pay for Harriet's medical needs, I've been told -- lost not only his job, but hope for getting another. Everyone else worked: Harriet sewed, her mother cleaned homes, and her younger brother sold newspapers and got work  at Proctor and Gamble.  In the Depression's worst year, her littlest brother -- my dad --  was born, asthmatic, requiring care, both constant and expensive. The rest of their lives, his two older siblings could get pretty bitter about what they'd had before the family lost it all.

But Harriet was a fighter.  Speaking at her memorial service in January 2009, my dad told the story of some bully at the bus stop lighting a match, its sulphur fumes setting off an asthma attack for him.  "Sis chased the boy all the way to his house, through his front door, up into his bedroom, and she beat him up."

[Photos: Harriet Ann, her mother Harriet ("Mamaw""), younger brother Jack, and youngest brother Tom, ca. 1990 and 1962 -- with their father Dewey Smoot ("Pop")]

She married a medical student named Bert, and, as she told it, she did all the studying to get him through Johns Hopkins in the late Forties.  By the time she met me, her toddling nephew, she was living the high life in LA, circa 1962, where her husband was surgeon to the stars.  (When Oscar - winning actor Spencer Tracy died on the operating table, Uncle Bert was one of the doctors.) Her life was still a struggle, involving alcohol, infidelity, and, by the 1980s, her husband's Alzheimer's. Her mother, recently widowed, came to help look after Bert; after he died, Harriet had to take care of her mother.

Up to that point in her story, I'd rarely seen Aunt Harriet.  I'd seen my mother's family in Cincinnati every summer of my life; but my California family was out of reach except for special occasions every few years.  Harriet liked to recall how, around age three, I tapped her awake in the middle of the night to whisper that I couldn't find my way to the potty.

Once she'd moved to the east coast, to North Carolina, I could drive up to see her and my grandmother pretty regularly.  We found we had a lot in common.  We were the family's only two Episcopalians, the only keyboard players, and the only fans of the composer Olivier Messaien.  We shared mystery stories, and she taught me some of the obscure little words and names that you need for crossword-puzzles  (ort, adit, Ara, and Ott). We loved dogs, and we enjoyed cooking, even with her restricted diet.

She moved to Minnesota when my father took my grandmother to a nursing home.

On the 4th, I asked if she minded my making a martini. Was that kosher, A.A. - wise?   No problem, she said, adding, "Gin was my drink."  I remember:  She let me have the olives from her martinis at my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary.  In fact, I've always reacted to the aroma of gin the way others do to chocolate chip cookies or baby powder, as a whiff of a warm, loving childhood. She may be the source of that!

We enjoyed our Brats, tuned in the music on TV, and watched while the slow Minnesota sun took its sweet time to set.

Tonight, it's just me and Mia, and the mysterious neighbor whose home is dark and quiet except when he has buddies over for fireworks on New Year's and the 4th.  I've got my martini, my brats, my sides, and my gratitude for Aunt Harriet.

Baroque Passion

Music lovers I know draw their line at Baroque.  The music lacks emotion, they say.

Even Leonard Bernstein agreed. The great conductor / composer, in his teens failed to find in Baroque music any of the drama and passion that he sought in the swelling Romantics or the dissonant Modernists. He tried to spice it up adding his own dynamics and variations in tempo when he played Bach and his ilk.  Only later did he come to understand that Baroque composers expressed one emotion per movement.  (see Bernstein's book, The Joy of Music.)

I, too, have found Baroque music to be charming and brilliant as an eighteenth-century timepiece and no more emotionally involving.  I've enjoyed the Baroque for background music, tuning in to the radio program Sunday Baroque while I make breakfast or read, knowing that the composer will run a limited amount of material through a series of more-or-less predictable procedures to fill the air with music sometimes ebullient, grand, or contemplative, and always steady.

But this past year, Bach and Handel took me by surprise during live performances, and I felt them reach through the centuries to grab me in a way that struck me as modern.

First, the Cathedral Choir and Schola of St. Philips Cathedral, Atlanta, Dale Adelmann, conductor, teamed with The Atlanta Baroque Orchestra, Julie Andrijeski, director, to perform Bach's St. John Passion at Roswell Presbyterian Church north of Atlanta, February 24.   A soprano singing solemnly of Christ's suffering momentarily lapses into a dancing, bubbly celebration of what this means for us and for mankind, a victory over death!  Then, just as suddenly, she seems stricken anew by the immense cost borne by our savior.

Then, at Easter, our little choir at the Episcopal Church of St. James, Marietta, GA, performed Handel's Hallelujah chorus from The Messiah.  With organ, strings, and brass, we sounded bigger than we are.  Now, this is a piece I've known since I listened to Dad's LP before kindergarten, sometime around 1963, and I knew what to expect.

Handel does his Baroque thing: after we hear the phrase, "Hallelujah" a few times, at different pitches, and each voice has taken turns with it,  he throws a new phrase into the mix, and there's mixing and matching, along the same lines as before:   King of Kings and Lord of Lords!  And he shall reign forever and ever.

In the middle of it all, every time I sing this, I have to smile.  We basses sing snippets as punctuation when other parts take a breath:  "forever"  (long pause) "and ever" (longer pause) "forever and ever."  We concentrate on the counts or we'll gum up the works of this charming clockwork.

At Easter, just when I was thinking that, really, it's just too much, the trumpet came in with a descending run of sixteenth notes, coming down into "King of Kings!" at a higher pitch of the scale.  I burst into tears and couldn't sing for a couple pages.  It's energy, it's care and craftsmanship, it's full-hearted, full-throttle statement of belief and joy, and it's hugely communal, every part different, every participant concentrating, every note fitting just so into place, and all of it holding hundreds of listeners transfixed while we sweated every beat.

I love my modern composers.  I loved hearing Bernstein's Symposium at the Atlanta Symphony around Easter, with its openly emotional melodies, tugging undercurrents, and startling dramatic eruptions.

But I give the Baroque its due, too. 

Playful Dog

Just after sunrise this morning, when I asked Mia if she'd like to go for a walk, she'd already heard my car keys jingle, and she knew what was up. What followed happens every time: She jumps, her gleaming eyes meeting mine in mid-air.  She runs to fetch a chew toy to carry with her to the car but drops it when the hatchback goes up -- sniffing around the car is so much fun.

We walk in places where other dogs aren't liable to be, because she still reacts with hysterical yelps, jumps, and twists, despite thousands of dollars with different dog trainers.  The perimeter of the Publix strip mall is usually safe, and an odiferous delight for a dog with a liking for rotting food and the bread trucks unloading.  A driver tossed her a tennis ball this week, which she gripped in her jaws and held up proudly as she pranced alongside me.  Once this week, at twenty paces, she tugged straight to a thicket of bushes and dove in to produce a chicken bone.

At home, she loves keep-away, and she loves tug-of-war.  But most of all, she loves to retire under the table or on the stair, in my view, to chew her prize.

Her malignant tumor was removed in April, but cells spread still.  She's getting tumor-shrinking drugs and chemo every three weeks.  She doesn't know she's sick, except when nothing comes of her squatting.

I'm enjoying every moment with her that I can.  I want to learn from her how to play with such abandon, how to trust, how to enjoy what comes, how to accept what I must.




Some other postings about dogs on THE WORD SANCTUARY.

• I've written about Mia before,in "Mia's Anima, a Dog's Soul" and, one of my most popular postings, "The Dogless Days of August," about the period when she was away being trained.
• I enjoyed a few years with young Mia together with her older playmate, Luis. "Trying to Catch My Old Dog Luis," was my effort to "capture" his physical presence in words, while he was still with me; a year later, I wrote, "Luis, Rest in Peace."
• "Dogs are Poetry" is a reflection on a spiritual dimension to dog ownership, focused on Dean Koontz 's faith-tinged memoir of his dog, Trixie, and a book by monks about the dogs they raise, supplemented by my own experiences with Luis and his mentor Bo. 
• About Bo, there's "Remembering Bo," and, from a year earlier, an essay that began, "This may be Bo's last winter."