Four Candles: Second Candle

This is the second part of an Advent cantata I composed years ago. Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four

In Part One, a lawyer (BARITONE SOLO), burned out on his work, came home to find the family out.  Now, resolving to experience Advent in a hurry, he reads the Scripture assigned for the second week of Advent.

The chorus sings the text of Luke 3.1-6, the music starting with all the pomp and parade of that list of names -- Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate, et. al. -- before flattening out into arid, elongated chant, to suggest the dry air of wilderness.  

CHORUS:

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Phillip, tetrarch of the region of Itrurea, and of Trachonitas, in the high priesthood of Annas, and of Caiaphas, the tetrarch of Abilene, the word of God came to John, the son of Zechariah, in the wilderness, and he went into the region about the Jordan, and he went preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin, as it was written in the words of Isaiah the prophet, the voice of one crying in the wilderness "Prepare a way for the Lord; make His paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, every mountain shall be brought low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

BARITONE SOLO: "Words"

"The word of God came to John in the wilderness."
Big deal. 

Words fill my wilderness,
Abstract and dry as breath.
Routine and meaningless,
My life explained to death. 

Words define, fix, analyze,
And take your faith apart.
What they mince, they minimize;
The mind scoffs at the heart. 

What once was "justice"
Is just "litigation."
What once was "truth,"
"interpretation."
What's left of "God?"
"Personification"
of hopes that I no longer trust! 

I know too much,
I see too clearly,
Nothing can touch
me, everything's "merely."
Creeds and ideals
I once held dearly...
Mirages that fade into dust --
My dry wilderness -- 

Arid, barren, prayerless.
I'm lost, abject, absurd.
Word, fill my wilderness,
but come without a word.

Part Three

Four Candles: Prologue and First Candle

A sweet fellow undergraduate named DeeDee introduced me to Advent during exam week at Duke in December 1980.  She invited our Bible study regulars up to her room around 11 pm, where we performed the readings for Advent and lit a candle each night, squeezing four Sundays of Advent into one week.


Later, when I studied composition under Dr. James Sclater, I used that experience to create a choral cantata with soloists who played contemporary adults in need of what the season of Advent offers.  I had Bernstein's Mass in mind, interpolating music theatre pieces with liturgical texts.

Four Candles, lyrics and music by W. Scott Smoot. Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four

 [Photo: Candles at St. James Episcopal Church, Marietta GA, today.]

CHORUS:

Advent, prologue to the year,
Rest before another climb,
Silence for the inner ear,
Space the Church has cleared in time.

SOPRANO

Two cars, two daughters, gone!
One with my "ex," the other dating,
No one expects my decorating.
If I deck the hall,
No one cares at all!
Except me.
This must be like other Christmases;
I'll make it to be!

CHORUS:

Advent, season set aside,
Waiting time the Church ordained,
Listening for that still, small, guide,
So ways lost can be regained.

(ALTO and BARITONE sing their lines simultaneously, in counterpoint)
BARITONE

Case closed, we won. Big deal.
Bankruptcy courts and corporations,
Titles and torts and two vacations.
I want out now; I want out now!
What I mean--
It's time to leave when
Even when you win it's only [another part] of routine!

ALTO

Airport snowbound: My luck.
After awhile in sales meetings,
Forcing a smile with "Season's Greetings"
I wanted home. I want home now!
Just as well, just as well--
I'm home so little,
It'll be like going home to just
another hotel!

(Now, the lines for CHORUS and SOLOISTS all intertwine.)

BARITONE

Lights out, drive home.
Traffic is [stopping]
Jamming the mall with last - gasp shopping.
Now, no one's home.
I need time. I need Advent.

ALTO

Airport hotel.
Taxi! Taxi?
Catch the shuttle.
Traffic is [stopping].
Room, please.
Dine at the coffee shop.
Maybe not eat at all -- just stop!
TV off.
What I need is Advent.

SOPRANO

From the bottom drawer,
Advent candles.
Advent like before
In an empty home.
Stop,
Dim the light

CHORUS

Set against the winter night,
Lively Advent candles burn,
Clear and concentrate our sight,
We who watch for God's return.

Return... reflect... restore... renew.

SOLOISTS (sing variously, coming together on the final 2 lines)

(BASS) Beside the fireplace...a flier from the church
(ALTO) Gift shop candles, cupcake size,
Gideon Bible, improvise.
(SOPRANO)Advent wreath, my mother's;
Prayer book, my daughter's.
(ALL THREE) What a fool to try to squeeze a season into a night!
My own Advent.

CHORUS:

Advent candles number four,
Each a sign of what has been,
Yet they promise something more:
What each life will see again.

First Candle: "Waves"
In this part, a sales representative for a corporation finds herself snowed in at a hotel. Tired of rootless life, she tries to recreate Advent in just one evening, lighting candles from the gift shop, and reading the first Scripture of Advent in the room's Gideons Bible, Luke 21.25-36.

The chorus sings the text, the accompaniment suggesting ocean waves. Then, looking out the window onto a city blanketed in snow, she reflects.

CHORUS

And there will be signs in the sun and moon and stars, and upon earth distress of nations and perplexity at the roaring of the waves and the sea, men fainting with fear and foreboding at what is coming on the world. For the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. Then they will see the son of man coming in a cloud with great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, look up, raise up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

ALTO:

"Signs in the stars?"
"The roar of the sea?"
Where's the one about room at the inn?
"Men fainting in fear?"
"The end of the world?"
The end is no place to begin.

I wanted a manger,
A silent night,

Not signs of distress
coming in waves
Like disasters all day on T.V.
The chaos on cable news,
Like chaos in ancient times,
Began with the world, in the sea.

"For in the beginning,
The spirit of God
Moved over the face of the deep"
bringing light from the darkness,
Land from the sea,
Life out of chaos.

Where is my land, my home?
Where's a light to guide me?
And when is there time to ask why?
My days come in waves,
I never look deep,
And never look up to the sky.

"The Son of Man coming in a cloud,"
"Redemption is drawing near,"
Bringing light from the darkness,
Land from the sea,
Life out of chaos.

Now I look up:
More snow.
The traffic far below
Winds by like a river of light.
The window makes a frame,
reflects my candle's flame,
Sets my eyes like stars on the night.

Part Two 

Marnie: Opera Live in HD from the Met

Sometimes I wonder if the human race has made any progress at all. Then I encounter a masterpiece of storytelling such as Nico Muhly's opera Marnie, libretto by Nicholas Wright, based on the novel by Winston Graham. The Metropolitan Opera broadcast Marnie to movie theatres around the world live in HD a couple weeks ago, when I saw it in Atlanta. Whatever else is wrong with the world, Marnie shows that we're getting better and better at creating musical theatre.

Marnie's music carries us from scene to scene with constant motion and constant variety of textures and timbres. We often hear the kind of repetitive figure in the orchestra that was the hallmark of music called "Minimalist" in the 1970s and 80s. Muhly worked awhile with pioneer minimalist Philip Glass, and his music follows composer John Adams' path out of the minimalist camp. For Muhly, the pulse establishes a floor; the orchestra dances on it, with sounds that glitter, chatter, stab, or rumble. We also hear Muhly's appreciation for Anglican choral music when he gives the chorus a sonorous a cappella piece "Guilt" early in Act One. Near the end, he quotes the Anglican hymn "Sing, My Soul, the King of Heaven" for an emotional effect. This music, lovely, rich with subtext, constantly involves us in the story.

The librettist and director use all the best modern techniques to draw us into that story. Mundane office talk mixes with gossip about the posh client Mark Ryland, recently a widower, who instantly makes a connection to a meek - but - efficient secretary named Muriel. Moments later, we know that Muriel is a secret identity for Marnie, disgusted by men, who has stolen from earlier employers under other names, whose mother berates her from some dark deed in her past. The rest of the opera opens up the material in that first scene. Transitions from the office to another location or time are accomplished smoothly, instantly by the shifting of lights and panels, each scene specified sometimes by a single piece of furniture. Backlighting conjures flashbacks to the unnamed misdeed of Marnie's childhood. [See photo]  Everything and everyone is colored in shades of gray, except for Marnie and a chorus of look - alikes, her other identities, all dressed in primary colors, who amplify her thoughts.


The transitions, the flashbacks, the gray - and - color scheme, the chorus of subconscious selves -- I've seen all of these before, but they all work so well, here.

After Marnie makes one misstep, joining the company where the boss is that wealthy widower Ryland, the collaborators Muhly, Wright, and director Michael Mayer keep the tension building as her risks mount. At a pub with all her co-workers, she fends off the attentions of a man who remembers her as "Martine." The librettist gives her a clever way both to deflect suspicion and to justify her ways to us, as she sings that we're all different people at different times, different to friends, to the head teacher, to our parents. They write a subtext - laden poker game with the boss's odious brother Terry, who presses himself on her for a kiss. Then Ryland confronts her, trapping her into marriage. The build up to his forcing himself on her, sung through, is intensified by the presence of a chorus of leering men in gray suits pressing around her on the bed. Artificial as it was, it seemed real. Breathless at the climax, I wept when act one was over. Not because it was sad; because it was just so well done. Even if the characters were all pretty sordid, it made me feel good about the human race.

Interviewed on screen during intermission of the HD broadcast, the artists involved demonstrated the care and imagination that went into making this piece so strong. Muhly explained how he associates each character with a different instrument that will sometimes echo the sung lines, amplifying the lies that the characters tell -- for all characters in this story are liars. The countertenor Iestyn Davies, playing the character "Terry," observed that he is the cast's lone truth - teller. When he pronounces the naked truth, his instrument, the horn, drops away.

We saw an interview with Soprano Isabel Leonard and the woman who directs costume changes. As "Marnie," Leonard has as little as 40 seconds to change her outfit. We saw backstage footage of the soprano's costume changes, her frantic running to make her entrance for that seamless flowing effect so important to the opera.

Baritone Christopher Maltman, who plays Ryland, admits that his character behaves abominably, but Maltman tries to convey what Ryland claims, that he truly loves Marnie. That shows in a tense scene in the second act, as Ryland and wife Marnie dress for a dinner party. She is icy to him. They're physically close enough to kiss when she helps him tie his bowtie, but she leaves the bathroom to dress. He sings after her words to win her over, his story about startling a deer behind their home, trying to call the deer back. The opera's action has proceeded so fast that this aria, with its metaphorical flavor, stands out for sadness and thoughtfulness. She returns, perhaps softened up by the words. She sings of her horse Forio, "the only thing I ever loved." When Ryland offers to pay to bring Forio to their manor if she'll go to counseling, she agrees.


That sets up another piece of musical story - telling, a fox hunt. We understand from the music, when she stands facing forward, that she is riding the horse. We understand, as she describes the frightened fox, that she identifies with it. And when she sings of the hunting dogs, we see the men in gray climb over each other in a slow - motion ballet that suggests the dogs roiling in their bloodthirsty pursuit. [See photo]  The conclusion of that tense scene is not less gripping for being inevitable.

Near the end, there's a clunky bit of psychoanalysis, outdated and facile, but it still leads to another moment that's no less wonderful for being inevitable. Under arrest, Marnie is supported by the brothers Mark and Terry, and psychologically liberated from a false guilt. We knew what the inevitable, fitting, paradoxical, and beautiful last words of our handcuffed protagonist's story would be.

The opera conservatives around us in the movie theatre were audibly moved, chatting about it enthusiastically in the lobby.

And I was weeping again, with gratitude, to see the integration of so much creative thought and plain old hard work.

Lentennial: Bernstein at 100, Profane and Sacred

The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra has been celebrating the 100th birth anniversary of maestro - composer - celebrity Leonard Bernstein.  The local NPR station's arts maven Lois Reitzes calls it the "Lentennial," appreciating Bernstein's legacy in conversations with music educator Scott Stewart. For my own personal celebration, I curated the ASO series for my fellow subscribers Susan and Suzanne and read Jamie Bernstein's Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein.  The big surprise in her book is that her experience of him up close was not so different from mine, long - distance.

In the early 1960s, while Jamie lived with Lenny in a town home across the street from Carnegie Hall, Lenny was also a presence in our family room, both on the black and white television and on the LP of the film West Side Story that I played obsessively. I recognized Leonard Bernstein before I recognized Superman. Lenny was a spectacle, arms waving, hair flying.

When West Side Story first showed on TV, I was 11 years old, and captivated all over again.  A few years later, our family saw his Mass directed by Robert Shaw with the ASO, a piece that grew on me over the next few years, with help from musician friends, who delighted in mastering his tricky time signatures.  I fell in love with Chichester Psalms the first time I heard it, and it helped me to fall in love with God and the aesthetic of Anglican church music.  By the time I graduated high school, Bernstein's music was what I sang at the top of my lungs when I was driving alone and happy, and it was his gnarly dissonances that I pounded on the piano when teenage angst overwhelmed me.  

I wrote all this in a letter to him around his 70th birthday, when there had been several unkind re-assessments of him in the press, abetted by a salacious unauthorized biography of him.  Flattered, he wrote me a letter, addressing me as "W. S. S.*", the asterisk taking me to a post script that pointed out that I shared initials with West Side Story.  He invited me to write lyrics for his next musical -- absolutely my own fantasy since 9th grade -- and set up a phone conversation.  

Jamie Bernstein is able to describe what happened next, because Lenny did it so often. Jamie calls it "shrinking" a man over the phone, "asking him personal questions and drawing him out," looking for a fresh young admirer to bed (307).  Within seconds on the phone, I knew he was drunk, alone, mouth full ("Crab; delicious"), and he was insinuating sexuality into the conversation: "You teach eighth grade, eh?  Their sap must be rising...."  He mocked my midwestern family's background ("How do you know so much about music when your family comes from Cincinnati?"), said he could barely understand me with my Southern accent (I have none), and volunteered that "some people say" his friend, my hero, Stephen Sondheim isn't much of a composer.  When he'd gone too far, and I was too angry, I fell silent.  He said, "You're not comfortable talking about this?"  We left the matter of collaboration for some other time -- I wasn't going to quit teaching to stay with him in New York.

Jamie, too, was appalled by her father's behavior, such as calling people "f***face," and sticking his tongue in the mouths of new acquaintances.  "I'm pretty sure he thought he was being an adorable rapscallion," she writes (266).   Throughout the book, she describes how he got away with speeding, bad behavior, unhealthy behavior, and never felt the consequences. She says he lived within a "magic circle." But it all came home to him in his sad, excruciating last two decades. His much - touted collaboration with Alan Jay Lerner for the musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was a "capital F failure" in the Bicentennial year; the death of his wife Felicia Montealegre left him unmoored (264). There had been truth in one of those unkind reassessments, by Leon Botstein, who wrote in 1983 of Bernstein's "haze of decadence and mental drowsiness, a mind exhausted by exposure, excessive fame, and wealth" (omitting, Jamie writes, the scotch and prescription pills) (267).

Like Jamie Bernstein, I cringe at a lot of Bernstein's choices.  She and I were repelled by his Kaddish Symphony, with its self-indulgent spoken text, which may have been directed at God, or at Lenny's own father:

...ancient, hallowed,
Lonely, disappointed Father:
Betrayed and rejected Ruler of the Universe,
Angry, wrinkled Old Majesty... (290)

(Jamie suggests that text was a description of Lenny himself, at least as he was in the last decade.)  We cringe at some arch and clumsy ideas in 1600;  we're embarassed by the way Lenny's opera A Quiet Place exposes private corners of his own life -- pansexuality, filial relations bordering on incest (explicit in the opera), resentments of his own father Sam -- the name of the father in the opera.  "And yet, and yet," Jamie writes of 1600, but she could mean any of his compositions, "So much of Daddy's music was beautiful. Wipe - your -eyes beautiful.... But his huge score had been stuffed into a vehicle that could not carry it" (183).  She quotes Stephen Sondheim saying," At least when Lenny falls off the ladder, he falls off the highest rung."

Lenny expressed his best self in the passages of his music that, for me, rise above everything else about him.  In my teens, I liked best his propulsive passages, present in so many Bernstein scores, where an orchestra exults in a rhythm that Jamie mimics with "Hot dog! Hot dog! Hamburger!" That would be the first Chichester psalm, the glorious "Rosinante" passage of the poem "To Julia Borgos" in Songfest, and the uplifting "Gloria Tibi" in Mass, shortened to "Hamburger! Hot dog!"

But now I love most those places where Bernstein draws a melody of spiritual yearning out of accompaniment that he himself calls "profane." The strings in the Jeremiah rise above the pounding of the orchestra in the second movement, subtitled "Profanation"; in Chichester Psalms, the boy soprano sings in Hebrew "The Lord is my shepherd" over a chorus that shout-sings "the nations rage!" (music intended originally for the Jets and Sharks, Stephen Sondheim tells us in his memoir); for Mass, Lenny makes the beautiful a cappella choral prayer "Almighty Father, Incline Thine Ear" from the melody of his "fetishistic" dance around the altar.  I'd include with these an intensely moving piece from Songfest, Bernstein's setting of a fragmentary Walt Whitman letter or poem,"To What You Said," making it a song of repressed love -- "Behold, love choked, correct, polite, always suspicious" -- over a relentless ostinato in the bass. (What a testament to Bernstein's resourcefulness that this music, perfectly fitted to Whitman's restrained, aching lines, was actually salvaged from 1600.)

This little man, so self-centered, so arrogant, so voracious for adulation - was also a generous teacher, whose legacy lives in major musical performers and composers today.  There was the gross, profane side; but this lovely music rises above it.

• Read my piece, "The Weight of Bernstein's Mass." 
• I review performances by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra of Bernstein's first symphony Jeremiah (01/2018), second symphony Age of Anxiety (09/2017), suite from West Side Story (04/2013), and Chichester Psalms (04/2019).
• "Make Our Garden Grow," final chorus of his musical Candide, didn't mean much to me when I saw the show in 9th grade (my first Broadway musical!); but then, hearing it on the radio one Sunday thirty years later, I had to pull my car over because I was weeping. Why?  I'm still not sure; but I write in detail about Barbara Cook's treatment of the song in my reflection on her memoir.

I reflect on Bradley Cooper's film about Bernstein's marriage Maestro in A Star is Torn.

The Spielberg remake had me falling in love with West Side Story again (12/2021).

My anecdote about the phone conversation gets a bit more detail in a piece about Stephen Sondheim's Kurt Weill - Ira Gershwin parody, "The Saga of Lenny."

Thanksgiving for my dog Mia

It's Thanksgiving.

Last week, my students read Kobe Bryant's poem giving thanks to his "Dear Basketball." They appreciated his use of personification, his framing the poem with the image of himself at age six, and his use of the "tunnel" as both literal and figurative.  I challenged the kids to write a poem to something they love, personified, or to someone they love, not present.  They've been addressing sports, Spider-man, candy, grandparents, a friend who moved away.

We had been looking at simple sentences.  I tried my hand at addressing Mia in a single simple sentence.  The result was pretty good.  In a hotel far away from home, while she's at the kennel, I take this moment to think of her:

Mia,
Your tail thump – thump – thumping
in that Shelter cage,
deep dark eyes aglow
searching mine,
forelegs set for play,
nostrils quivering,
sleek black – and – white body shivering,
anticipating love,

you caught my attention and my heart.

[I took the photo of Mia moments after her vet had confirmed the worst -- bladder cancer, 1-2 years to live. Since then, the tumor has been removed, mostly, its remainder checked by drugs and chemotherapy.  I am thankful that Mia doesn't even know that she's sick.]

"Very Short Theology" Explores Angles on the Crucifixion

"Jesus saves," but, how? All the answers start with metaphors: Jesus is the sacrificial lamb, or a ransom paid to Satan for liberation of captives (us), or intercessor with a stern Judge. I've long been bothered by my inability to explain salvation the way I can explain the rationale of the Constitution, without metaphor.

For the Oxford University Press's series of "very short introductions," the director of Cambridge's inter-faith program David F. Ford has written Theology: A Very Short Introduction. He embraces metaphor and adds one of his own: the church's 2000 year "journey" with these images.

Salvation, from a word meaning "health," draws together threads from  Ford's survey of theological concepts. Previous chapters looked at the questions theologians have debated through centuries about the nature of God, ethics, evil, and Jesus.

For Ford, metaphors "intensify" the systematic intellectual exercise of theology. A metaphor can be "explored," and can arouse feeling, an energy that enables action. He surveys ways that the writers of the Christian scriptures imagined the saving efficacy of the Crucifixion:

It is as if the range of significance of the crucifixion was to be indicated by drawing on every sphere of reality to represent it. From nature there were the basic symbols of darkness and of seeds dying in the ground. From the religious cult there were sacrifice and the Temple. From history there were the Exodus and the Exile. From the law court there were judgment, punishment, and justification. From military life there were ransom, victory, and triumph. From ordinary life there were marketplace metaphors of purchases and exchanges, household images of union in marriage, obedience, parent - child relationships and the redemption of slaves, landlords whose sons are killed by tenants, medical images of healing and saving, and the picture of a friend laying down his life. Not all of those had equal weight, and some had far more capacity for becoming leading images around which others could be organized. (110)

He explores the major images, showing how they've enriched worship and action over centuries, and their drawbacks. For example, the military metaphors gave the Church "clarity of identified enemies," but also literal demonization of perceived enemies (112).

The metaphors clash, so selecting the best bits from each can't make sense. But, "If one sees [salvation] as a way of life rather than an intellectual exercise, then it seems that the heights and depths are only discovered by risking intense involvement in one of them" (113), and one can't journey on more than one road, and "one's intellectual outlook is, like all other aspects of life, shaped by the travelling." Theology, he says, provides a safe place along the journey where all the roads can meet.

After his glance at the Church's "journey" with these images, Ford identifies two more arisen in the past 100 years. There's the "Pentecostal" and "Charismatic" image for salvation, focused on Spirit, gifts, and community.

More interesting to this Episcopalian is Ford's identifying liturgy itself with the image of Jesus as bridegroom to the Church. Salvation in this sense is "union." As we participate in the liturgy, in prayers and readings and communal rituals, we are joining our lives with the life of Jesus, "married" in metaphor and indeed (114).

Dementia Diary: "Who was I Married To?"

Enough said.

Aside from that, a good morning with Mom.  These are a couple of photos of today, with one from last week.  [See my Dementia Diary page.]

"Merrily We Roll Along" in Atlanta: Mary's Time

Before a sold out crowd, director Freddie Ashley of Atlanta's Actor's Express Theatre said that the actors of his staged reading of Merrily We Roll Along were all "superheroes" for learning Stephen Sondheim's intricately interlocking musical lines in just one week.   Superheroes indeed, they performed the score and dialogue so well that we didn't care that they were "on - book."

Having blogged about the show a few times, now [see links below], I'll limit comments to exploring why I and my friends came away talking mostly about "Mary,"  secondary character.

As "Mary Flynn," actress Jessica Miesel makes a friendly, appealing presence. The fact that she alone wore vibrant colors made her stand out. But her voice is strong at all ends of her rangy songs, and she enunciates Sondheim's fast-flying lyrics. Thanks to the concert format, she's physically present throughout the show, if not in the action, then as witness in character.

Her role as witness, ever-present, may explain why, for once, the character "Mary" seemed to be closer to the show's emotional center than composer "Franklin Shepard." She starts as the bitter drunk, her lines all zingers, building to her enraged exit from Franklin's home and life. As each successive scene peels back the years in Franklin's relationships, we see Mary as the one woman in his life who supports and understands him, the only one not to manipulate him for her own needs. She tries to nudge him back to his mission he started with, to give the world "so much stuff to sing." Franklin's lyricist Charley Kringas gives up on Franklin before he'll give up that mission; Mary is the one who intercedes between Franklin and Charley. In this production, Mary's waiting literally on the sidelines throughout the show reinforced her role on the sidelines of Franklin's life.

Perhaps centering the show on Mary was not director Freddie Ashley's intention.  The usual center of attention, "Franklin," was hampered by his make up.  The poster shows "Franklin" actor Craig Waldrip to be a tousle-headed youth with friendly grin. The rest of the ensemble looks young, too; but only Waldrip had spray-on gray hair and age lines, so during the opening number we are alienated from him, even before the script gives us reason to be.  His get-up makes sense in the first scene, when Franklin's a middle-aged producer of commercially successful movies, estranged from old friends, flirting with a young starlet in front of his furious wife, and painfully aware that his movie panders to "what the public wants."  During that scene, Waldrip, all gray, looks like he's sucking a lemon. "Franklin" is not appealing, though everyone sings their praises of "That Frank."

The show's creators intended for us to warm up to the character as time, moving backwards, reveals a naïve but charismatic young man who dreams of making a difference in the world with his music. In this production, as the show goes on, the make-up and get-up distanced us from Waldrip, with collateral damage to our buying into his ideal -- a socially - conscious musical to be called "Take a Left."   Does anyone remember the impact of lefty Broadway musicals "The Cradle Will Rock?" Or "Flahooley?" The idea of a political musical that might change the society just isn't all that credible.


So the arc of Mary's story was the backbone of this production. That made the show's torch song "Not a Day Goes By" very affecting. The premise of the song is that Franklin and the character "Beth" (Laura Floyd) sing the song to each other in the night club where they perform his songs together, as a prelude to taking wedding vows. They promise that "Not a Day Goes By" but their love grows stronger. Watching from afar, tears in her eyes, actress Miesel sang the same words, "Mary's" painful expression of unrequited devotion to Franklin. In the final scene, Franklin has just met Mary, and he tosses off a line about how he should marry her -- and, in this production,  Miesel gave him a look of hope and adoration: the beginning of a fatal relationship.

[Photo: Jessica Miesel]

Other actors were strong. Juan Carlos Unzueta made Charley an affable guy, and his "Franklin Shepard, Inc." number stopped the show. Natasha Drena, the only Equity actor in the show, naturally played the older woman who seduces Franklin. I'd seen her before as Judy Garland (see The End of the Rainbow), and once again, she was a virtuoso manipulator - cajoling, kittenish, hurt, needy, petulant, sometimes all of the above in the space of a couple lines. As her first husband, Skyler Brown had long black curly hair, no gray, far too young for the part; but his baritone voice was commanding, and he certainly conveyed the man's pitiable puppy-like devotion to the woman who does him wrong.

[Photo: The cast and me. Photo made by friend Suzanne, who saw the John Doyle production with me in Cincinnati, and friend Susan, who saw the show in London and again with me in its HD transmission to movie theatres. ]

Previous blogposts about Merrily We Roll Along:

• How Did You Get to Be Here?  I reflect upon John Doyle's production of Merrily We Roll Along in Cincinnati.  
• Rhymes with Integrity considers the song "Growing Up," added to the score years after the premier, and how it integrates with the rest of Merrily. I wrote it under the influence of the HD transmission of the award - winning London production. 
• I reflect on a documentary film  about the original cast in A Merrily Little Christmas.  
  

Dementia Diary: Closing a Gate

Our school gives us Yom Kippur off.  I'm not Jewish, but this commemoration of the gates closing on Jerusalem's ancient temple has become my favorite holiday, not just because it's a break mid-week. On Yom Kippur, I reflect on gates closing and opening around me.  This year, I thought of the key-coded door at the entry to Memory Care -- where Mom no
w has spent six weeks.

I punch the key pad to get in and out.  More than once, I've had to hurry out before a gentleman who rushes me and bangs on the door when it shuts behind me.  Beyond this door is a warren of small apartments, community rooms, and spacious well-lit hallways.

Mom's one of the few not in a wheelchair and still able to carry on a conversation. But she's settling in. She has a routine, waking around 10, making herself lovely for lunch.  She chats with the staff and with visitors, since most of the residents don't seem to speak much.  A companion stays with her through the afternoon and dinner.  She pours wine from one or two small bottles of watered-down Moscato, and goes to sleep after dark.

For the first few weeks, I was getting angry phone messages.  "Where's my stuff?" "Why did you put me here?" "When am I going home?" But I've not had a call like that in weeks. She seems not to remember having lived anywhere else.

Saturday mornings, I wake her early for breakfast at the French café [see photo]. She laughs out loud when I take her by the hands to pull her up to a sitting position on her bed. (Weight gain, side effect of a drug and of arthritic knees, has made sitting up difficult.)

Everything seems to be a laugh, now.  She laughs most at herself.  When, after a week-long search, her companion Laura found the room key in a flower pot on the shelf, Mom said, "Isn't that where everyone puts their keys?"  When I told her that my car, which she thought new, was the one I've driven for ten years, she quipped, "Well, I haven't seen you in ten years."  She laughs when I show her the grocery list she posted on the mirror:  "Apples, coffee, cigarettes."  She hasn't smoked in 50 years.  "Well, you don't want me to live to 100, do you?" she joked.  Incredulous that we elected this president, she asked, "Who did they run against him?  Hilary? Now, that was dumb."

Her favorite joke, the one that makes her laugh 'til she cries, is just for me to recount her escapades that caused the facility to put her in "maximum security" and to add new exit procedures building-wide. "I escaped four times?" she laughs.

So, that electronic gate makes us both secure.  For the first time in years, I'm not afraid that she's wandering outside, or falling down after over-imbibing, or just alone and lonely.

And we close the gate on dreading the day when she goes into Memory Care.  That day has, incredibly, come and gone without much drama. I expect this move to last, until the day she no longer will take my hands to lift her out of bed.

Related blogposts:
See related articles on my Dementia Diary page.
Here are two posts about earlier Yom Kippur holidays.  A 2015 bike ride among falling leaves reminded me of an overnight flight to visit to my grandmother fifty years earlier, for an essay I called "Memory and Ritual: Solice at the Solstice."  In 2016, I considered many gates closing as I approach 60, "Cycling on Yom Kippur."

My Spiritual Encounter with French Asparagus

Asked to refract my "spiritual autobiography" through the prism of "multi-cultural" encounters, I thought, first, of a plate of asparagus; then, of my last college roommate Andreas.

A child of midwestern parents in the late - 1950s, I had little experience of church.  My worldview was shaped, not by Bible stories, but by airtight, antiseptic packages. Food came frozen or canned.  On special occasions, the meat, veggies, and dessert were separated by aluminum dividers in a frozen TV dinner.

The world, too, was separated in packages: over here, the USA's good, hard-working people; over there, the relentlessly aggressive Communists; everywhere else, decadent Europe's socialistic freeloaders and the backwards continents where savage dictators oppressed starving people.

Time itself was parceled out by the half hour in TV Guide.  If dinner and the dishes took longer than 30 minutes, there was a risk of missing a portion of Batman or Bewitched.

When I did become involved with the church in my teens, Christianity was a package of just a few beliefs.  Life was a test of how closely I could adhere to those beliefs.  To be saved, I couldn't tolerate blurring of lines between fact and myth, right and wrong, clean and dirty.  I worried a lot about not being pure enough.  Rather than transgress, I would come to a full stop at an intersection, even late for a plane, even at 5 a.m., no car in sight.  I considered dropping out of a play that used the name of Jesus as an expletive in a punchline.  I scolded my friend Andreas for smoking pot in our dormitory at Duke.

Andreas was a baby-faced freshman from Philly, not religious, but open to anything.[IMAGE: My sketch of Andreas.] I took on the role of big brother to him, and also tried to convert him.  We argued, and he challenged me, but nodded and ceded the good points I made.  One night, I heard him talk Italian on the phone to his father and Swiss German to his mother.  I'd had no idea that he'd immigrated from Italy in fifth grade.  Starting then, he began to blur all my lines.  His father had fought for Mussolini; Andreas had experienced life under socialism; he knew the history of US interference with elections in countries where we helped install dictators.  He was a Roman Catholic, not because he believed the Gospel, but because that was part of his culture.

When he and I rented an apartment together, our cultural conversation opened up a new front, in the kitchen.  Andreas laughed at what I mixed with macaroni, something called "Velveeta Cheese Food".  He would make polenta from scratch, broil fish, and bake bread. He told me that "pasta" isn't just noodles, but the Italian word for the essential part of the meal, the part that assuaged appetite; meat wasn't for that, only for flavor.  He told me that Americans reverse priorities.  He said that Americans eat so that they can get back to work, but others only work so that they can get back to the table with family and friends.

A couple years later, I chaperoned high school students in France, and I saw what Andreas meant.  At 8 o'clock, the meal at a little country restaurant had already gone on a couple of hours, with wine, and bread, and small servings of varied dishes.  Between courses, I took a walk outside through the neighborhood where families were combined at backyard tables, pouring wine, playing with kids, eating bread. They were still at it when our group broke up around 11.  Later on the same trip, we ate at a fancier in-town restaurant, where one course was asparagus with butter and lemon, just two or three spears side by side on a small plate.  I'd never liked asparagus; but the sauce and elegant presentation made this stand out for all time -- I wrote a page about it in my journal that night.
[IMAGE: In my journal that same week, I sketched the view from my room.]

This cultural experience helped me to understand what I was absorbing from the Book of Common Prayer and from novels by Roman Catholics like Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, and Graham Greene.  Their stories, like the stories in the Bible, are filled with flawed people who may even try to get away from God, and cannot do so.  For these authors, God speaks through events, through broken people, and through mixed feelings.

I guess what Andreas and my experience in France and those Roman Catholic writers taught me was to stop looking ahead to the next thing, and to be present in this moment; to trust stories in all their ambiguity, though they may not always "go" with the dogma; and to see this world as something good in itself, not just as a proving ground.

I was primed, then, to understand what Episcopalians mean when they claim to have a "sacramental" view of life.  Wanting to know more, I signed up for my first EfM class.

For a deeper dive...

• I wrote about the asparagus and Andreas in a reflection on 19th century Americans influenced by travel in France. See my post Ah, Paris: The Greater Journey.
  
• Flannery Would Love It! . I visit the author's home, see the film of her novel Wise Blood, and reflect on her work.
  
• Saints in Spite of Themselves. I reflect on Greene's full body of work. In Escape Clause I re-read Greene's novel The Heart of the Matter. In What's Funny About The Comedians?, I compare Greene's suspenseful and darkly comic novel about Haiti with the tedious movie made of it.
  
• Third Take on The Second Coming. Walker Percy writes novels and essays that I've appreciated without liking them much. I worked hard to appreciate this novel, and got good results.

Pottery and Poetry: Labor Day, 180 B.C.

A scribe named Joshua ben Sirach wrote a lovely tribute to workers, suitable for Labor Day, ca. 180 B.C..  It's chapter 38, verses 24-34, in an apocryphal book, Ecclesiasticus, or, The Wisdom of Sirach, included in the Oxford Study Bible.

We know a lot about Sirach, because he ran a school for scribes. He tells his disciples not to think themselves better than anyone else just because they work with words and information.  "The wisdom of the scribe," he writes, "depends on the opportunity of leisure."  Only those who have "little business" to do have the luxury of wisdom.

Sirach describes each worker with a sort of refrain, variations on the expression, "He sets his heart on" his craft.  The farmer "glories in the shaft of the a goad," and his talk is of bulls: "How can he become wise?"  Yet "he sets his heart on plowing furrows, and he is careful about fodder for the heifers."

The makers of signets are "diligent in making a great variety [and] painting a lifelike image."  The smith, "intent on his handiwork," even while "the breath of the fire melts his flesh," "inclines his ear to the sound of the hammer."  The potter "moulds the clay with his arm," "sets his heart to finish the glazing," and still "is careful to clean the furnace."

These artists are "not sought out" for advice, do not "attain eminence in the public assembly," and "cannot expound discipline or judgment," yet "without them a city cannot be established," and "they keep stable the fabric of the world" (v. 34)

Most lovely of all is Sirach's conclusion to the poem, "Their prayer is in the practice of their trade."

Across the millennia, I hear Sirach speaking to me and my friends.  We are all of the "scribe" class, the ones with the degrees, the ones who spend our days talking and writing, manipulating figures, ideas, and images, people for whom last week's breakdown of the sanctuary's air conditioner has already entered into church lore as the Sunday we had to suffer a full hour in summer heat.

I and my fellow scribes sit at the same table as politicians, college presidents, financial advisors, authors, and symphony conductors.  Every one of us has a pile of funds in front of us, and some services that we offer, and all our "work" is a matter of  swapping around what's there on the table:  real estate, financial products, opera subscriptions, books, classes, brand name consumer goods, $100 meals.  As a teacher, my little store isn't so much, but I've reasonable assurance of livelihood and protection against calamity, so my place at the table is secure. Sometimes, a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs brings some new wealth to our table, some new services -- and we make room.  

The men who put the roof on my house a couple summers ago, and the courteous man in his 30s who served me my breakfast yesterday are not seated at that table, though they work much harder than I ever have done pushing my papers. I know: I spent a day roofing, and a few years working in a restaurant, and a few more years working in my dad's chemical factory.

A living poet, Todd Boss, spoke to what I feel in his poem "Apple Slices." As his dad's "jobsite grunt" on building projects, he and his dad shared the contents of a lunch box, listed ingeniously to make someone reading the poem aloud chew and lip-smack the words.  Boss concludes about himself,

another well-paid

well - fed, college - 

bred paper pusher, I

wonder that I've never

labored harder, nor

eaten better.

        - from Todd Boss, Pitch, p. 22-23).    

From Sirach, I take the message to heart that the work of today's "scribe" class shouldn't be valued so highly, the services of the hourly wage-earners valued so little.  Let's pay them enough to put them at the table with those of us who can be confident in our food supply, housing, and health care. If that means a commensurate decrease in the profits that go to my quarter-million dollar investments, so be it.

English Teacher Reinvents Wheel

One of my colleagues in the Middle School English Department said last year, around late October, "I feel like I have to teach everything at once!" Figuring out unfamiliar words, learning terms, decoding complex sentences, using quotations to support ideas, finding structure -- everything intertwines. Another colleague years ago told me that she imagines English class as an immense clock: the first weeks of each year, she struggles to get all the inter-connected cogs moving in sync.

That's how it's been this year. My lesson plans grew to be ridiculously long and involved, even for the first class meetings, one-half hour each.  They got worse as I made mid-course corrections daily. But I should be an expert on this, by now.  Every year, I reinvent the wheel because I feel that the year depends on getting some concepts and procedures across early, and because I also feel like I'm cramming way too much into our first weeks.

Here's what I think I've done during these first weeks of school. Maybe this will help me begin next year.

First day, I invited the students up to two white boards labeled "fact" and "fiction."  What words do they know that relate to the root fact, fect, fict, fice, -fy?  They all have to do with "making" -- whether made solid, or made up.  We call literature "fiction," and history "fact," but even fantasies are anchored in real life behavior, and historians use their imaginations to probe motives and decisions.   This demonstrated for the first of many times how a knowledge of words' origins can help us to understand their meanings and connections at a deeper level. Besides, "Fiction adds to our store of experience."

Second Day, I brought in plastic bins of drama props and costumes, one for each third of the class. The challenge was for each person to choose props they liked. Then, I challenged each group to contribute to an improvised story involving themselves and their chosen objects.  It was fun to dig past the things on top, exhilarating to imagine connections between unrelated objects. [Photos: Thinking literally "out of the box."]

We used "unpacking the box" as a metaphor to explain writing.  The kids are "unpacking" their experiences, looking for "Aha!" moments.  This ties in with the summer reading, for which they were told to mark "Aha!" moments, repeated actions, etc. etc.

Mondays, I've given a series of short lessons called "Parts and Recreation."  Six parts of speech appear in a text they know by heart, "The Pledge of Allegiance," making it a good review.  Then I had everyone put their hands on an object in the room, all nouns; then I challenged them to use the noun as a verb or an adjective (a chair; to chair a meeting; a chair cushion).  So parts of speech may play different parts in a sentence.  (Thus I prepare them for verbals and adjective pronouns).

I asked students to make a display for parents' night by taking a selfie, taking a photo of a favorite object, and joining subject and object with a caption.  We had those objects either as "direct objects" or "objects of prepositions" ("I hug my dog" v. "I play fetch with my dog").  Next week, I plan to get into different kinds of phrases by challenging them to use phrases to add background info to those simple sentences with phrases that answer who? where? when? why? how?

I took time at the start of each class of that first week to read strategically chosen bits of The Pearl.  We saw the fisherman Kino as a "killing machine" in an action-packed finale to the novel; we saw his anger at being shamed at the doctor's front gate, early in the book;  we read carefully the scene when the doctor claims to be curing the baby, when he's actually causing the symptoms. Kids saw immediately that Kino hasn't exactly "changed" into a killing machine: the anger and violence were latent at the start.  Kids who told me they were bored by the book were excited by these passages when I read them, and I promised to teach them how to appreciate what they read the way I do.

I brought out a jump rope and clothes pins.  We "plotted" the readings I'd done, to see how the protagonist's decisions move the story forward to its climax. In each class, a volunteer protagonist (from pro- forward, agon conflict) struggled past classmates' obstacles to get back from me an object I grabbed from their desk.

The next day, I brought out three more ropes and clothespins, having the kids trace parallel developments in character development of Kino's wife Juana; in a theme of Kino's being exploited by the privileged people of European descent; and in the descriptions of the pearl itself - lovely at first, monstrous and ugly near the end.

This week, I'll ask the kids to write about two "Aha" moments of their choice from The Pearl, to show that these either do or do not tie in with at least two of the four "jump rope" strands that we traced through the book -- plot, character development, theme, or development of a symbol.  (I've not been able to follow through on a scheme to have groups challenge each other with passages that they feel serve only one purpose or less. One boy was highly motivated to prove that passages in the book were useless and boring.)

Looking back, I see interconnections.  But I wonder if the students see all this as just one darn thing after another?

Bicycle Mile Posts

The first selfie, taken today in the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood of Atlanta, marks the accumulation of 20,000 miles on my bike since I started keeping records on line in 2001.



The second one, from two weeks ago, marked this year's 2000th mile.

See reflective pieces
• Alone on Two Wheels in Atlanta (06/2016) and
• Cycling on Yom Kippur (10/2016)
• See a post about a mid-winter ride, What a Little Sunlight Can Do (01/2018).
• My July 4th ride through diverse Atlanta neighborhoods inspired this reflection Does God Bless America? (07/2017).
• There's more on cycling, including links to reflective pieces, at my Cycling page.

Portrait of a Lady, Season One

Isabel Archer turns down proposals from two handsome men of means because "I don't want to begin life by marrying.  There are other things a woman can do," and she rejects "security" that comes with "deep exclusion."  This independent young woman, blithely self-confident, was ahead of her time in 1880, and young women I know of still haven't caught up to her.  No wonder that her story, told in Henry James's greatest hit, The Portrait of a Lady, now has two follow-ups:  John Banfield's Mrs. Osmond, and Colm Toibin's The Master.

Like a series on Netflix, The Portrait of a Lady developed through episodes in The Atlantic Monthly back in 1880-1881.  Awed by Henry James when I read the work for an independent study at Duke 40 years ago, I didn't appreciate how James played with popular conventions and contemporary topics.

Like any comic operetta of the time, the courtship of young, appealing, level-headed Isabel is buttressed by the stories of two other couples.  There's a comically quarrelsome older couple -- mild Mr. Touchett, expatriot American millionaire, and his opinionated wife.  Then there's the comical juvenile couple, a Yankee newspaper's intrepid lady correspondent Henrietta Stackpole, who "cares nothing for the past" and who "knew perfectly in advance … what her opinions [of Europe] would be," pursued doggedly by a minor British peer named Bantling.

James was having fun with the fad for globe-trotting journalists like Nellie Bly.  There was a marketable interest in the Old World (read Ah, Paris: The Greater Journey in my blogpost). James plays with the text messaging of the day, giving us elliptical telegram messages from Mrs. Touchett, who thinks "clearness is too expensive," but she doesn't spare on complaints:  "Changed hotel, very bad, impudent clerk, address here."  James gives playful names to minor characters: Mrs. Pensil is a thin writer, the Climbers are social wannabes from the US, and he names the virile upright suitor from America "Caspar Goodwood." James also gives us epigrammatic wit from Isabel's cousin Ralph Touchett.

By the end of volume one, sort of "season one" in today's terms, Isabel's friends, including the two rejected suitors, are all joining forces to prevent her from falling for a shady expat artist named Gilbert Osmond.  In Season Two, the comedy becomes tragedy, as Isabel's headstrong self-confidence leads her into a trap.  In the climactic scene of that book, she has respite from her bad marriage, but chooses to board the train that begins a journey back to her awful lawful husband.

That's precisely where Mrs. Osmond picks up.  I've read just enough of that to appreciate how Banfield emulates James's interior explorations with a lighter touch.  He also introduces Isabel to suffering of a different sort, bringing her face to face in London with a lost man weeping on a street corner, and with women's rights activists.

I'll report on subsequent seasons of this wonderful series when I've had time to "binge" on them.

[See my reflection upon re-reading one of James's earlier hits, The American.]

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."]