I note this week a most pleasant trip to the library. I found the tattered out-of-date tomes (Kesey, Twain, a New Yorker collection, Lewis (CS) and Vonnegut) I so love that haven't likely been checked out in decades (I miss seeing the proof of date stamps, the historical records in the life of a book, that have vanished in this too electronic age). A Friends of the Library lady offered lemonade to us thirsty patrons on the hot summer day. A congenial stranger made a gentle crack about how it looked I'd be busy over the weekend as I exited clumisly with all my stack, and there it was: pure happiness.
There's another fella in Denver, though, who appparently doesn't see things the same way. He used seven different names to obtain seven library cards, checked out 300 books, tapes and DVD's, per card, and tried to sell them for $35,000.
Yet I still marvel at the concept of a library; all those tempting books that you're trusted to take away and bring back. I've read about a library for tools, like rakes and chain saws, in Berkeley, and a bike library in Seattle where they're left unlocked on racks, available for everyone, to ride from Point A to Point B. I'm not convinced these programs would work everywhere. Perhaps in deference to Oregon-dweller Kesey's quote, "we never claimed to know precisely when the birth of the New Consciousness would take place...but as to the birthplace, we had always taken it for granted that the shining nativity would happen here, out of the ache of American labor," the new consciousness grew to full maturity, as always has been the dream of this manifestly destined country, out West (except for Denver).
We have a controversy down here in the Eastern Mid-Atlantic sticks where I live; about 800 of us take a commuter train to the big city. Other counties farther north up the line impose a two-cent gas tax to subsidize rail costs keeping any excess of their share to improve local roads. Even though the line terminates in our southernmost county, our politico's refuse to join the system; the letters to our local rag run highly against since 'why should taxpayers who don't commute help those that do.' These folks probably don't use the library either.
Common-good definitions aren't easy. I note an article in the Sun this week where a fella described as a "prominent defense attorney used to representing Baltimore thugs," has decided to moved to the suburbs after his 18-year old son was robbed at gunpoint near his Northwest Baltimore home, and a man who'd been shot, drove his SUV into his back-yard pool. He's quoted as saying even though "things are out of control, it doesn't deter me from my task, which is to make sure everybody, good and bad, reprehensible and sympathetic, are all protected by the Constitution. I got to represent some bad people sometimes who really are getting a windfall benefit from my zeal as it relates to people's constitutional rights."
He's saying he can just as passionately represent the hardest-to-defend from the 'burbs where his family is safe from his clientele. I had a similar ephiphany when I moved from a crime-ridden neighborhood to one of the safest communities whilst managing a shelter for folks too dangerous to be admitted to other shelters. Like our lawyer, I moved, but felt guilty enough to need to justify it. It always helped the guests to relate, if in their minds, they thought I had once, or presently lived in a bad neighborhood. I didn't disabuse them of the false notion, since it aided the work, and continued to lead them through their wilderness from a suspect position of false prophet. Why was this story in the Baltimore paper? Why is it news? Does it carry universal interest; a solidarity behind which liberals can feel better about themselves despite the hypocrisy?
I note other news this week, according to CBS, that Mother Teresa "was so doubtful of her own faith that she feared being a hypocrite. Where is my faith? Even deep down there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. If there be God -- please forgive me. If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true." There's that nagging notion of hypocrisy again.
I'm dying to see Christopher Hitchen's reaction. If you're not aware, he's criticized Mother Teresa in several ways. First, for fronting an institution, the Catholic Church, that prohibits birth control, meaning she was comforting dying babies whose tragedy need not have happened. If she did not really believe in God, I wonder if that takes her off Hitchen's hook, in a weird sort of way, or make it worse, as if she too was a false prophet?
Hitchens also criticized her for taking money from tinpot Third World dictators. I can relate. After the 2003 General Convention in the Episcopal Church, and the consecration of Bishop Robinson, one of the early 'Anglican' tactics was to admonish by withholding Diocesan contributions; their leader offered to divert parish funds to my shelter. At the time, devoted as I was to the welfare of my guests, I said yes. I'm not totally sure I would today after fully absorbing their tactics over the past four years, but is the greater good served by taking desperatly needed funds for the poor from a less than desirable source? (This is not a new dilemma; Pat O'Brien refused such funds from gangster Jimmy Cagney in the classic '30's movie morality tale, 'Angels with Dirty Faces.')
One of the greatest lessons from shelter world is it's hard to pin down absolutes. If a man freezes to death in the woods while he has a family of six brothers and sisters living in the area, it is not they who are the cause, if he rejected them, as much as the other way around. Should we have accepted the donation of a refrigerator from one of the sisters after his death? I have no qualms about saying yes.
In questions of the common good, there's no sure way to tell if it is, or if it isn't; no absolutes. Whether you're commuter, a taxpayer, a lawyer, Mother Teresa, or just a fella who takes great pleasure in losing himself in the stacks of the library, the most I can do to assure a common good, is to endeavor to do more good than harm, and leave it at that.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Friday, August 24, 2007
Voices
I note this week when I write I hear voices. When I'm feeling common sensical American, I hear Garrison Keilor or Jimmy Stewart; if I'm out of sorts and nostalgic, I hear the voices of the Beats: roll them bones, the Tao of Pooh, the greatest minds howl, etc. It might even be that voice you'd hear on the old Walt Disney show - the one that told about the time Old Yeller stumbled upon a skunk.
I've been reading two books the last few weeks; each carries a mood-influencing voice. The first is a John Mortimer, non-Rumpole, novel; the second, a book of blended fiction/reminiscences by Kesey.
When I read Mortimer, on the surface, there's the harried suburbanite; it doesn't matter if it's London or DC. In the face of ass-hat bosses, he always pricks the hot air of their pomposity -- where they are consumed by ambition, his only desire is to secure justice for those uponn whom the ass-hats assume the worst and won't grant the time of day. Mortimer's heroes find their niche through a competence and honesty that can't be bought or diverted for long by promises of advancement to an easier life. At best, the establishment thumbs their noses and dimisses them as non-entities; at worst, he's seen as a threat, because he can't be controlled -- in the end, things are made right -- mostly, in a twisted sort of way.
In Kesey's 'Demon Box,' he tells stories from the perspective of a person falsely seen as the hippie king, to whom all the poseurs gravitate, to either mooch, or shine in reflected faded glory. Like Mortimer, the stories are a process of distinguishing the real from the phony, the gentle from the violent. Kesey sets a tone, like James Herriott, where issues of life and death are processed through the birth and demise of animals within their relationship to humans. Kesey's farmer, like Mortimer's suburbanite, also has to be competent in his niche to retain a relative self-sufficientcy, and represent in the real world, the guise of the one we've striven to create in the forty years since the summer of love.
I know about niche-honesty from my days at the shelter. Where else in the world is it permissable to tell someone, "you stink - take a bath," without giving it a second thought? No malice intended, none taken. Where else can you witness a very dedicated volunteer comb lice from a guest's hair with humor rather than disgust? Where else do you work side by side with cops, er nurses and probation officers, where all vestiges of cover and camouflage have been swept away? Worker and guest are the same, except, for now, the worker hasn't given up on life.
The Mortimer novel, 'Quite Honesty,' unveils a recognition you come to at the shelter after time. The plot concerns 'do-gooders' who volunteer to associate with ex-con's to prevent recidivism. The book asks the simple question: why? That is, why do the same crime over and over and end up where you started? At shelter, if after much labor, working with a fella possessing a rap sheet 7 pages long, we succeeded in convincing someone to hire him, and the job starts on Monday, and in celebration, he gets wasted Saturday and Sunday, but then still wakes up on Monday morning with every intention of showing up - but doesn't after someone offers him a joint - why? Mortimer knows: excitement.
I add: impulse. The guests I knew rarely woke up intending to commit a crime - it was just when they were faced with the stark choice of going to work or something more exciting, they chose excitement. You can't call it evil - I know when there was a glorious Spring day, the temperature at 70, not a cloud in the blue sky - a real Ferris Bueller day - and I'd come trudging into the shelter after commuting the 40 miles to the office of supreme drudgery, and the fella's would come in from the woods, after a day fishing at the swimming hole, I'd think how nice it would be to live a Peter Pan life if you could get away with it. The problem for them is that they could get away with it while they were relatively young and strong - but if they were wounded, a clipped infected leg, a bad ticker, they were doomed, if there was no family left willing to take them in or they were unwilling to go.
Even if in many ways it was their choice, the economics of suburban life didn't grant much leeway to any of them who truly wanted to escape. That job, the fella, didn't show up for, rather than do drugs, was minimum wage in a discount mall. Sure, there's a dignity in working and making an effort, but even for those former guests who are doing exactly that, every day is a struggle to move beyond bare susentance, and it's 50-50 whether they sink or swim. In Mortimer's world, you survive as an honest petty criminal, where those who are their supposeded betters, the lawyers, judges, parole officers, are suspect. Their motive is not excitement - it's ego. Which is worse?
I note also an intriguing article in last month's First Things magazine called 'Groovin' on Jesus,' by Sally Thomas It's the author's contention that the counter-culture of the 60's led to a religious counter-culture today - that of the religious Right. The article, "purports to establish a direct causal effect between the Jesus Movement's impulse to re-invent culture and the activist energy of the religious right in the service of school-prayer, pro-life, and religious-liberty causes."
Hhhhmmm - there's a grain of truth here. Off the top, a cause like the home-school movement might, indeed, be a growth from the ACTS-like communes, the 60's ideals of family life. Yet, where the author see's a problem, in that an ethos "wherein citizens of the world will observe a common ethics based upon a common value system," as being imminical to a specific doctrinal application of Church authority, that is, the tried and true 'anything goes,' smear, I have no problem if committed religious observance leads to such a world. In fact, I think that's the point; what we do on earth counts, it's the real part of which we have some control, versus the promise of salvation in the next, the part that's out of reach, here and now. Mortimer and Kesey paint worlds where truth bursts pride. It occurs to me that this is the Jesuitical essence - at least that's what the voice that sounds like Charlton Heston keeps saying in my mind (the original Biblical Books-on-Tape voice, mind you, not the scary cold-dead-hands NRA voice).
Keilor, Stewart, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Disney, Heston, Mortimer, Kesey - the voices in my head. They're not the only ones - there's a mob milling around up there, each one, waiting for a chance to spill the beans. That's okay, I keep telling myself.
I've been reading two books the last few weeks; each carries a mood-influencing voice. The first is a John Mortimer, non-Rumpole, novel; the second, a book of blended fiction/reminiscences by Kesey.
When I read Mortimer, on the surface, there's the harried suburbanite; it doesn't matter if it's London or DC. In the face of ass-hat bosses, he always pricks the hot air of their pomposity -- where they are consumed by ambition, his only desire is to secure justice for those uponn whom the ass-hats assume the worst and won't grant the time of day. Mortimer's heroes find their niche through a competence and honesty that can't be bought or diverted for long by promises of advancement to an easier life. At best, the establishment thumbs their noses and dimisses them as non-entities; at worst, he's seen as a threat, because he can't be controlled -- in the end, things are made right -- mostly, in a twisted sort of way.
In Kesey's 'Demon Box,' he tells stories from the perspective of a person falsely seen as the hippie king, to whom all the poseurs gravitate, to either mooch, or shine in reflected faded glory. Like Mortimer, the stories are a process of distinguishing the real from the phony, the gentle from the violent. Kesey sets a tone, like James Herriott, where issues of life and death are processed through the birth and demise of animals within their relationship to humans. Kesey's farmer, like Mortimer's suburbanite, also has to be competent in his niche to retain a relative self-sufficientcy, and represent in the real world, the guise of the one we've striven to create in the forty years since the summer of love.
I know about niche-honesty from my days at the shelter. Where else in the world is it permissable to tell someone, "you stink - take a bath," without giving it a second thought? No malice intended, none taken. Where else can you witness a very dedicated volunteer comb lice from a guest's hair with humor rather than disgust? Where else do you work side by side with cops, er nurses and probation officers, where all vestiges of cover and camouflage have been swept away? Worker and guest are the same, except, for now, the worker hasn't given up on life.
The Mortimer novel, 'Quite Honesty,' unveils a recognition you come to at the shelter after time. The plot concerns 'do-gooders' who volunteer to associate with ex-con's to prevent recidivism. The book asks the simple question: why? That is, why do the same crime over and over and end up where you started? At shelter, if after much labor, working with a fella possessing a rap sheet 7 pages long, we succeeded in convincing someone to hire him, and the job starts on Monday, and in celebration, he gets wasted Saturday and Sunday, but then still wakes up on Monday morning with every intention of showing up - but doesn't after someone offers him a joint - why? Mortimer knows: excitement.
I add: impulse. The guests I knew rarely woke up intending to commit a crime - it was just when they were faced with the stark choice of going to work or something more exciting, they chose excitement. You can't call it evil - I know when there was a glorious Spring day, the temperature at 70, not a cloud in the blue sky - a real Ferris Bueller day - and I'd come trudging into the shelter after commuting the 40 miles to the office of supreme drudgery, and the fella's would come in from the woods, after a day fishing at the swimming hole, I'd think how nice it would be to live a Peter Pan life if you could get away with it. The problem for them is that they could get away with it while they were relatively young and strong - but if they were wounded, a clipped infected leg, a bad ticker, they were doomed, if there was no family left willing to take them in or they were unwilling to go.
Even if in many ways it was their choice, the economics of suburban life didn't grant much leeway to any of them who truly wanted to escape. That job, the fella, didn't show up for, rather than do drugs, was minimum wage in a discount mall. Sure, there's a dignity in working and making an effort, but even for those former guests who are doing exactly that, every day is a struggle to move beyond bare susentance, and it's 50-50 whether they sink or swim. In Mortimer's world, you survive as an honest petty criminal, where those who are their supposeded betters, the lawyers, judges, parole officers, are suspect. Their motive is not excitement - it's ego. Which is worse?
I note also an intriguing article in last month's First Things magazine called 'Groovin' on Jesus,' by Sally Thomas It's the author's contention that the counter-culture of the 60's led to a religious counter-culture today - that of the religious Right. The article, "purports to establish a direct causal effect between the Jesus Movement's impulse to re-invent culture and the activist energy of the religious right in the service of school-prayer, pro-life, and religious-liberty causes."
Hhhhmmm - there's a grain of truth here. Off the top, a cause like the home-school movement might, indeed, be a growth from the ACTS-like communes, the 60's ideals of family life. Yet, where the author see's a problem, in that an ethos "wherein citizens of the world will observe a common ethics based upon a common value system," as being imminical to a specific doctrinal application of Church authority, that is, the tried and true 'anything goes,' smear, I have no problem if committed religious observance leads to such a world. In fact, I think that's the point; what we do on earth counts, it's the real part of which we have some control, versus the promise of salvation in the next, the part that's out of reach, here and now. Mortimer and Kesey paint worlds where truth bursts pride. It occurs to me that this is the Jesuitical essence - at least that's what the voice that sounds like Charlton Heston keeps saying in my mind (the original Biblical Books-on-Tape voice, mind you, not the scary cold-dead-hands NRA voice).
Keilor, Stewart, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Disney, Heston, Mortimer, Kesey - the voices in my head. They're not the only ones - there's a mob milling around up there, each one, waiting for a chance to spill the beans. That's okay, I keep telling myself.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Authenticity
I note this week my disagreement with sports talk radio hosts I've heard who say they don't care whether Bonds used steroids or not. They say the excitement in baseball is centered around the homerun - that baseball is merely entertainment - if steroids produce more homeruns, it adds to the entertainment value; a greater degree of entertainment fills the seats; and that's good for baseball.
My baseball hero is Mickey Mantle; a person as flawed as I am. He said all the time, "if I knew I was going to live this long, I would've treated my body with much more care." Amen to that, brother. Sure, he was doing things off the field that weren't commendable. These things he did, however, never enhanced his abilities on the field; indeed, they detracted from them, and yet, he was still a great player in spite of the self-abuse.
There's something familiar in that which relates to my ordinary life; that despite my flaws, I do my best when it comes to what really counts - in the end, it's a matter of determining what's real and worth the effort, giving that all you've got, while not paying much attention to what doesn't count for much, or to that which may have unkind consequences.
At the end of his life, after he'd been criticized for allegedly jumping to the head of the line for a liver transplant on account of his fame, (I told my wife I had given him one of mine - she said, "you only have one liver, dummy, he's not asking for your one of your kidneys...), Mickey said to the world in a press conference from the hospital, just days from his death, "if you're looking for a role model, it aint me." Honesty, class, authenticity: can you say the same about Bonds and, for that matter, most of the rest of the sports world today?
Kids today have a hard time distinguishing between what's real and what isn't; they've not been conditioned to know the difference. The AP reports about a study where children were given identical carrots in McDonalds wrappers and plain wrappers. Fifty-four percent, to 23 percent, preferred the McDonalds wrapped carrots -- presumably, the other 23 percent, the normal kids, didn't like carrots at all...
My mom said to me once "only you could move from our small town in Florida to DC for work and still end up in a small town in Virginia." There's a story in our local hometown rag about a drug store down town that's been open for 138 years. There's still a soda fountain "where locals gather for malts, floats, and homemade chicken salad, and a pharmacy in the back where you can literally get your prescriptions made to order."
You could even find a place like that in the heart of DC until about 15 years ago - a small lunch counter in a drug store on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 21st Street. My friend Rob and I walked down to it once a week, for many years, for the best burgers and milk shakes in town - the counter gals were a grouchy lot, but you felt it was the same type of fuss your mother made when she wanted to make sure everything was taken care of around the house.
The sense of what really matters permeates our church struggle - when I read about a mega-church in Texas that cancelled a memorial service for a Navy vet 24 hours before it was to start when they found out he was gay; a 93-year old elder of our Diocese who's now worried she won't have a funeral because a majority of local congregants, with whom she's gone to church for 50 years, decided she isn't in communion with them anymore; or the 18 men in Nigeria, including 5 from the human rights advocacy group, Changing Attitude Nigeria, that have just been arrested on trumped up charges of sodomy, and now face the death penalty, I know what's truly at stake.
When the newly re-elected Bishop designate of South Carolina says, when asked point blank, if he will leave the Episcopal Church, if consecrated, and responds, "I don't intend to leave," I know he's not being authentic.
When one of the 21 deposed priests of the Diocese of Virginia, after having told the search committee of the parish that interviewed him, and the Diocesan office, that if called, he would not leave TEC, then proceeded to leave, and led his church out as well, claiming rights to the property, says, "this [deposition] news does bring great sorrow to my heart," I know he's not being authentic.
This is what it means to be authentic: you honor our veterans; you don't cause a beloved elder of the parish worry, sufferng and undue pain at the end of her life; you speak clearly and keep your word; you recognize and accept that the things you say, and the groups you join, can mean life or death, even for people you don't know, on the other side of the globe.
P.S. In the past few weeks, I've seen references to the yahoo I've been writing about in Garrison Keilor's book on why he's a Democrat with also a passing reference that the originator of the designation is H.L. Mencken. I've read some Mencken, at the local library, finding much of it appalling and dated, but if anyone has a direct citation to the founding of the original yahoo label, I'd be appreciative if you'd pass it on.
My baseball hero is Mickey Mantle; a person as flawed as I am. He said all the time, "if I knew I was going to live this long, I would've treated my body with much more care." Amen to that, brother. Sure, he was doing things off the field that weren't commendable. These things he did, however, never enhanced his abilities on the field; indeed, they detracted from them, and yet, he was still a great player in spite of the self-abuse.
There's something familiar in that which relates to my ordinary life; that despite my flaws, I do my best when it comes to what really counts - in the end, it's a matter of determining what's real and worth the effort, giving that all you've got, while not paying much attention to what doesn't count for much, or to that which may have unkind consequences.
At the end of his life, after he'd been criticized for allegedly jumping to the head of the line for a liver transplant on account of his fame, (I told my wife I had given him one of mine - she said, "you only have one liver, dummy, he's not asking for your one of your kidneys...), Mickey said to the world in a press conference from the hospital, just days from his death, "if you're looking for a role model, it aint me." Honesty, class, authenticity: can you say the same about Bonds and, for that matter, most of the rest of the sports world today?
Kids today have a hard time distinguishing between what's real and what isn't; they've not been conditioned to know the difference. The AP reports about a study where children were given identical carrots in McDonalds wrappers and plain wrappers. Fifty-four percent, to 23 percent, preferred the McDonalds wrapped carrots -- presumably, the other 23 percent, the normal kids, didn't like carrots at all...
My mom said to me once "only you could move from our small town in Florida to DC for work and still end up in a small town in Virginia." There's a story in our local hometown rag about a drug store down town that's been open for 138 years. There's still a soda fountain "where locals gather for malts, floats, and homemade chicken salad, and a pharmacy in the back where you can literally get your prescriptions made to order."
You could even find a place like that in the heart of DC until about 15 years ago - a small lunch counter in a drug store on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 21st Street. My friend Rob and I walked down to it once a week, for many years, for the best burgers and milk shakes in town - the counter gals were a grouchy lot, but you felt it was the same type of fuss your mother made when she wanted to make sure everything was taken care of around the house.
The sense of what really matters permeates our church struggle - when I read about a mega-church in Texas that cancelled a memorial service for a Navy vet 24 hours before it was to start when they found out he was gay; a 93-year old elder of our Diocese who's now worried she won't have a funeral because a majority of local congregants, with whom she's gone to church for 50 years, decided she isn't in communion with them anymore; or the 18 men in Nigeria, including 5 from the human rights advocacy group, Changing Attitude Nigeria, that have just been arrested on trumped up charges of sodomy, and now face the death penalty, I know what's truly at stake.
When the newly re-elected Bishop designate of South Carolina says, when asked point blank, if he will leave the Episcopal Church, if consecrated, and responds, "I don't intend to leave," I know he's not being authentic.
When one of the 21 deposed priests of the Diocese of Virginia, after having told the search committee of the parish that interviewed him, and the Diocesan office, that if called, he would not leave TEC, then proceeded to leave, and led his church out as well, claiming rights to the property, says, "this [deposition] news does bring great sorrow to my heart," I know he's not being authentic.
This is what it means to be authentic: you honor our veterans; you don't cause a beloved elder of the parish worry, sufferng and undue pain at the end of her life; you speak clearly and keep your word; you recognize and accept that the things you say, and the groups you join, can mean life or death, even for people you don't know, on the other side of the globe.
P.S. In the past few weeks, I've seen references to the yahoo I've been writing about in Garrison Keilor's book on why he's a Democrat with also a passing reference that the originator of the designation is H.L. Mencken. I've read some Mencken, at the local library, finding much of it appalling and dated, but if anyone has a direct citation to the founding of the original yahoo label, I'd be appreciative if you'd pass it on.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)