Achtung! -Bookmobile

Financial prospects for the firm of Busboys & Poets, at 14th and V, in this ecomony, do not bode well.

Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase, $15, captures only, nothing more, per Walter Benjamin, the "memory of a particular book on a particular day in a particular bookshop."

Forty-two years ago, likewise, the Colonial Plaza incident (forced return, the double-album, Wheels of Fire, $8; similar to an abrupt no-rolls exit from Ronnies, Rte. 50, the Congress Inn across the road, first Florida pit-stop, in the pool, spotting low-flying planes angling for a landing to the southeast, a gargantuan tropical spider crawling on an arm) salvages revelatory wisps --

-- toward that expressed by Ludwig Wittenstein, per Adam Phillips, "to clarify the world as he finds it, his stress on [clear-sighted] representations;" to "just that understanding which consists in seeing connections," wanting "to understand what is going on in his family as opposed to the child who takes refuge in a fantasy life."

When fantasy isn't accessible - if it were, it would self-negate - connections are few and far between.

New Gods 4 is the key to all the Infinity Crisis; a distant # 30 elaborates Trinity.

Kenny Shopsin says "the way I choose to function is to pick an arbitrary goal, become totally involved in it, pursue it with vigor. And what happens in that pursuit is your life." --did you catch this is also the Baby Steps therapy practiced by Dr. Leo Marvin?

Just when you think there's nothing left to conjoin, Timothy Ryback, delving into Hitler's Private Library, reconstructs Bishop Hudal's diplomacy "to fracture the Nazi movement from within, to leach it of its anti-semetic toxins, to infuse it with Christian beneficience," (though, the filter propounded is only the racial, not the religious, anti-semetism, which remains, loss-leader-like, to enflame upon).

What's left around which to construct? -neither arrogance, rebellion, commercialism nor ideology.

Greensboro Public, unlikely avatar of revolution, offers A World of Possibilities, while here, oppressed, headlines in the local rag bemoan, "we know the Bookmobile's on borrowed time and want very much to transition to a different kind of service."

Greensboro, Yes!, One City One Book, "Imagine All the People Reading One Book."

A bright May morning in your hometown. Glorious flowerbeds frame ordered boulevards.

The Bookmobile's here!'

Attired in a crisp blue uniform, peaked cap, sharp lines of fruit salad medals denoting Winter/Hurricane Season campaigns (Camille!), arrayed above the left pocket, Richard Deacon warbles, strict, and kind, street after street, "Get Your Book Here!"

So-oder-so.

One way or another.

Text of a Sermon Delivered Third Sunday in Advent 2008

Whenever I'm called to substitute-preach, I search online for the Episcopal Lectionary schedule - and the correct weekly readings upon which to base the sermon.

Once I've found what I'm seeking, just to make certain, I call the church to verify I'm at the right place.

This time I nailed it.

Except for the Old Testament.

And the New.

Other than those, I did find the right Psalm on my own.

Be that as it may, in the Gospel reading today, we see priests who also want to verify something -- in this case, not the Lectionary, but what this strange character - this John the Baptist, is all about.

Why?

The easy answer is that, per usual, throughout all the Gospels, whether it was John or Jesus, when the priests came a'callin' it was that they thought their authority was threatened and then, every time, without fail, they made plans to do something about it.

Can you imagine, this time, how angry they must have been - on account of folks, instead of seeking them out in their official capacity, in their robes of office, were heading down to the river to be baptized by a man, who as Mark reported last week in his Gospel, wore a camel skin suit and ate bugs.

Now, at this time in Israel, those uninterested in protecting their own self-interest, were holding out for a hero - someone who promised change, someone who kept the promise too (not unlike what featured in our recent Presidential campaign).

But, at the same time people seek change, they tend to keep their distance, and remain skeptical, as an in-built protection against being disappointed, hurt, again, and again, and again.

I was reading an article the other day about a woman who set out to follow every piece of advice from Oprah for one year.

When she embarked on this mission, she intended to prove people couldn't really change their lives by following Oprah - that it was all a come-on to sell books, diet fads, and such...

At year's end, instead, she ended believing what Oprah could do - if you were open to it - and that was introduce a certain honesty about an unsatisfactory situation, and then instill a willingness to change it, if you'll take the initiative.

In other words, a person can know themselves better if they discard their cynicism, confront their doubts, and then move beyond to make those positive changes.

In Scripture, we see the priests going out, like Oprah's doubter, to, as the Gospel says, "assess the authenticity" of this John the Baptist, this locust-eater garbed in animal skins, who's performing un-sanctioned baptisms.

Let's face it - are any of us sure, if we were seeking change, we'd be convinced it was for real upon first glance at John -- is this the person I'm supposed to entrust to change my life?

The other night, the Mrs. and I were watching a great holiday movie, Polar Express, the theme being there's this boy who wants to believe in Santa, but as he's growing up, he's becoming more and more skeptical about the whole thing --

Now, when I watched it, this time around, I noticed for example, in the town square at the North Pole where Santa hands out the first present, there were like a million elves there.

And I was thinking, if each elf took, maybe, 100 houses, and made presents just for those, then they might indeed be able to make all the Christmas presents in the world -- I got the calculator out - what about a million elves times X thousand, or ten thousand -- and I made these calculations the same way I do in the business world.

Even after I crunched those numbers satisfactorily, though, I still had nagging questions about the effectivness of Santa's overnight delivery service -- absolutely, postively? I mean we live on a dirt road where nobody will deliver overnight, anyway, and there's a lot more dirt roads in the world...

See, instead of learnng the same lesson the boy learned by the end of the movie, to simply believe, I was still being too practical about the whole thing.

Perhaps, as C.S. Lewis, once an atheist and skeptic, himself, wrote, if we just believe, plain and simple, we might end up, despite ourselves, surprised by joy.

To explain it another way, I can relate another experience along these lines I had where being too practical caused someone else not to believe.

A Miss Jones visited our homeless shelter from time to time. She wasn't actually homeless but living in a trailer. When she ran out of food, we'd take a trip to the supermarket to restock her shelves. For this, she was grateful and said many kind things about Christians and our ministry.

But Miss Jones also practiced a dangerous habit. Sometimes she would invite men, strangers, home, who, inevitably, after a few days, became abusive.

Then she would call and ask if I'd come over to toss them out.

Right.

Since evicting potentially dangerous felons from trailers wasn't specifically listed in the shelter job description, I'd suggest she call the police instead.

This disappointing advice turned her praise to scorn.

I certainly wasn't a John the Baptist to her anymore, pointing to Christ, and she told me all about it nothing spared.

Could I have done more? Maybe, probably - I don't know for sure - but I'll always feel guilty and hurt about the things she said.

In fact, it might have been her criticism that led, a week later, to doing something very uncharacteristic, and in violation of a very highly developed sense of self preservation and intolerance of pain, in others, but mostly myself, and that was to step between two arguing men, one of whom was holding a butcher knife, at the time.

I suppose I was trying to prove something - to Miss Jones, to myself, to others, maybe to God.

In John the Baptist's case, though, when he was challenged, you don't see false pride, or mock bravery, nor was it about proving something.

When he was challenged by the authorities, he said, plainly --

"No, I'm not the Messiah, or a Prophet, or anythng. I'm just a voice crying out in the wildnerness. I'm not the Light. I'm not even fit to tie the sandals of the Light. I'm only here to testify to the Light that's coming after."

It doesn't spell out how the priests reacted to John's reply. Some undoubtedly were relieved this potential threat to their authority admitted he wasn't the Messiah, and admitted even further, he wasn't much of anything at all, something we're not always prepared to accept about ourselves.

Maybe some of the priests were still nervous because he said, "You know it's not me but there is someone coming later that will rock your world."

There might even have been some people that day, quiet ones, dreamers, watching all this, who believed in John, sans skepticism, despite his appearance, and took away hope about the something exciting he said was coming after.

If we go back and read today's Old Testament passage from Isaiah, and accept it was written when the people of Israel were in exile in Babylon, so that, read in this way, it becomes about how to keep hope alive under very trying circumstances.

--that if you keep the faith, no matter what, then in God's time, broken hearts will be mended, ruined cities repaired, and the devastation of many generations healed.

In one translation, it reads there will be beauty for ashes -- and isn't that lovely in a resurrection-ish sort of way?

Today's readings are also not just about keeping hope alive - today's Psalm, 126, is about sustaining hope. This Psalm was written after the exiles came home to Jerusalem, which, indeed, fulfilled their initial hope -- but when they realized how much work it was going to be to actually repair the broken city, they became mighty discouraged. They lost hope it might ever be accomplished. And so what follows in Psalm 126 is a heartfelt plea to God for help.

Was the Israelites glass half full or half empty?

For Miss Jones, who I was speaking about earlier, there isn't even a glass to ponder - nor a dining room table, central heat, air conditioning, electricity, windows ... she might as well be in exile in Babylon since she lives far from anything with which we are familiar in our world.

Unlike the Israelites, she didn't go to God for help - she came up with her own survival plan.

Around mid-summer, she would take actions to conceive, and once she knew she was pregnant, she'd place an ad in the paper offering her unborn child for adoption to a family who'd take her in for the winter. Once Spring came, after giving birth, she'd return to the trailer.

I'm told she did this three times.

I was in the hospital room, one year, when she was in bed, the baby was in the basinet, and the adoptive parents were in the room ... hovering ... nervously... waiting to take the baby away.

For my part, it was extremely awkward, in the room that night, but for Miss Jones, it was simply another way she'd found to survive.

I've found, surprisingly, it's the same whenever there's a pregnant woman in a homeless shelter.

If you examine everything practically, then you think, you must think, this is a fine mess - how will she feed another child if she already has 3 or 4 or 5. Where will she live? How in the world can this work out?

But you find, sometimes, life isn't always about practicalities -- that when a woman gives birth in a shelter, it mystically transforms what's usually a dreary bleak place into a house of joy -- there's suddenly a Light, even in a shelter, like there was in a stable, that comes into the world, just like John the Baptist said it would.

I came across a marvelous passage in a novel the other day -

"When Tomas was born, he was very pre-mature. He weighed in at less than 3 lbs. I saw what I can only call a soul caught in that almost transparent body. I have never before been so close to such palpable evidence of the Spirit - Tomas - in his clear plastic womb, barely bigger than a hand."

To see a soul -- how cool is that?

There's one other tale out there that's my favorite Christmas story of all - it's Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol - and in that story one of things you read is how much of Scrooge's meanness derives from his hatred of Fred, his nephew, because his sister died giving Fred life.

No matter what we may think of Miss Jones' survival strategy, or women who give birth in shelters, or the circumstances of Fred's birth, we know one thing for sure - at the end of the day there's a blessed child in the world created in God's image, soul intact, carrying unlimited potential.

When these babies cry, those born in shelters, or in stables lain in mangers, babies that are despised for the sins of their parents, or because they are poor, or feared because they pose a threat to the authorities, or because the circumstances of their births are not what we expect --

then their unlikely births and survival, against the odds, testify to an unquenchable spirit - a Holy Spirit - which bids us serve, by challenging us to hold fast to what is good, to recognize blessings no matter where they come from or how they came to be, and to give thanks to the Creator no matter the circumstances --

lest we turn otherwise from God because our skepticism, disbelief, or need to preserve our worldly authority, depletes our soul so much we are unable to be surprised by joy.

Who are the John the Baptists in your life who point to Christ and make it easy to believe?

I can tell you a few of mine, here, this Christmas eve --

R, who rose from a sick-bed, to bring a meat loaf to the shelter when it was our time to serve, years ago;

J, a creator, like her Creator, of beautiful things;

K, our vicar and shepherd, through good times and bad, her's and our's;

A, the passionate advocate for political justice;

J, a sister who scolds her brother much, but still stands by him no matter what;

My bride, for marrying a man who believes in Santa, and has his head in the clouds more than his feet on the ground;

Perhaps, greatest of all, A, D, and beautiful godson, O, who carry our Light, our Spirit, forward with hope and promise.

All of these, all of you, in this congregation, here tonight, are my John the Baptists.

Like John, you aren't the Messiah, but you point to Christ all year long.

But, especially, at this time of year, in Advent, when all of us together believe the most amazing, strange, wonderful, miraculous true story - that a Light, a Star in the Eastern sky, the Son of God, a Savior, descends and is made man, and is lain in a manger Christmas morning.

Amen

Half-measures

Despite a radical prostatectomy, any claim to survivor falls short.

One surgical procedure, no chemo nor radiation, cancer done.

Attendence at Oxford for a week makes not a scholar. Five years of Reserves duty forges no warrior. A youth group leader isn't a dad.

Von Stauffenberg activates Valkyrie only after Germany is losing.

At Terezin, Goebbel's films depict four concert orchestras. Beauty for ashes survives, regardless, in 50+ pieces collected by the late Joza Karas including the opera Brundibar which portrays a sibling's attempt to buy milk in the face of an evil organ grinder.

A music review in the NY Times relates "Benjamin Britten composed the hauntingly powerful song cycle Holy Sonnets of John Donne in 1945 after visting German concentration camps and performing for Holocaust survivors with Yedhudi Menuhin."

Deep cries out to deep.

Not always.

C.S. Lewis reveals the life-changing experience of reading Beatrix Potter. The Joy animating the Surprise derives from pagan-medieval myth. The Spock-sort joy Tolkien knew after Rings morphed from the invention of a language.

Fundys, here, excel in ways progressives fall short, for to acknowledge the dangers of occult, grants fantastic power to Spiritual Warfare.

The sermon delivered this third Sunday of Advent past, aboard the Polar Express, investigates the precise moment Jesus realized He was Son of God.

Behaviorialists might argue it could not have been before age four since a tot's cognitive capacity does not yet allow for thoughts beyond self.

Terrible two's: God?

Joseph howling, "Look what Your Son did!"

Came the day He walked upon the waters of the ritual bath.

'Whoa'

Mary and Joseph humanize, instill, per Aunt May, Ma, Pa Kent.

Realizes 'with great powers comes great responsibility.'

Considers a uniform.

On the fifth floor of the hospital, an old nurse wears a cap out of date amongst cool green scrubs. A colleague said last week the beloved envelope making machine reminds her of the Chocolate Factory.

I wheel survivors out, each act, a full measure.

The Demise of Bobby Short and Joe

I pronounced the guilt upon Aracely, which had earlier lain on me, for transforming acts of mercy into selfishness.

Why?

No political dimension.

Clive James complains "in April '41, with a rampant Hitler already on the point of turning east, Thomas Mann's idea of a pertinent note in his diary was pudel gesund (the poodle is healthy).

Bob Marley could never only sing.

What, then, can we make of the New Yorker ad featuring Keith Richards pouting alongside a Louis Vuitton case?

Could it be, as the Baltimore (non-Gatesian) Creative Capitalism art collective, proposes, 'whereby things fall apart only to reemerge in new forms embolded by the failure of their ancestors, resurrecting discarded work that is unlikely to be appreciated in the culture industries of the academy?'

Frank Kermode conveys, a century later, how Loie Fuller could "penetrate the spectator's mind and awaken his imagination, revolutionizing a brand of aesthetics - the fire dance - her long dress spouting flame and rolling burning spirals twisting in a torrent of incandescent lava - her twirl buries the figure."

The altered state, and its implications, to achieve the same effect, seventy years on, is absent in the former, though forty years beyond even that, Cirque du Soleil recaptures the wistful Gallic mystique in Kooza.

Stephane Mallarme pronounces pure work requires the poet vanish from the utterance.

Joe died this week. I, of all people, the avatar of casuality, pointed out, he never left his desk sans sports coat. Bobby Short, the Porter crooner, the Admiral's caviar, ends his 36-year run, this year, at the elegant Cafe Carlyle.

Claiming history begins with us, we unintentionally killed Bobby Short, and Joe, rallying, instead, around Crosby's paean that we owed it to someone else.

Isadora Duncan reveals 'before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and iced champagne.'

Toni confided, Martha Graham, no longer able to walk, demanded she be carried in and out, unseen, before and after board meetings.

If they'd never danced at all, this is sufficient definition.

Al Alvarez wrote Elie Wiesel's works are beyond criticism.' Wiesel himself is determined to 'establish a principle that every manuscript should be published' regardless of readability.

A Baltimore City Paper letter this week, from an 'Afrocentric pro-choice Catholic progressive liberal to my bones,' concludes, everyone must have an input in saving humanity. If not a cosmic war will destroy all humans as the next great starry explosion from the heavens - the next great flood.

Not that there's anything wrong with that but better if she'd stopped after bones.

How Roy Keeps His Dignity

When we visit the dump it's an adventure.

Mid way along the 20-mile trek, I informed the Mrs. we didn't need to check in at as we had been doing.

Past the gate, turning right, heading directly to the dumpsters, meant, as we discovered, travelling the wrong way down a one-way street.

The inevitable hullbaloo attracted the attention of the man in the shack.

Sheepish, plastered grins, exposed, we drove into range of his magisterial presence.

I blamed it on the wife.

As we giggled nervously, Roy peered into the distance, searching, in vain, for a runaway steer on a vast lonesome prarie.

Was it the same for our Dumpenfuerher, as it was, for Hitler's father, a retired petty bureaucrat, in Mailer's The Castle in the Forest, who "under it all was the heavy disappointment that he had not arrived at any of the powers and distinctions to which his intelligence should have entitled him."

Or for me, nearing retirement, wheeling patients in and out of the hospital, like other elders in our community who have time on their hands.

Are all vestiges of ambition (never burning in any event) now gone?

Might the wheeling man, old and past it, be dismissed, pitied, envied, by amibtion-ascendent doctors passing in the long corridors?

David Rothkopf wrote in Superclass that Thomas Friedman is a member of "a global elite of 6000 who have the ability to influence millions of lives."

That's out.

Evelyn Waugh contends, "it is often pride, emulation, avarice, malice - all the odious qualities - which drive a man to complete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew his work until he has made something that gratifies his pride, envy and greed."

No money to be made here...obviously.

Neither jealously nor envy are in play.

It's not of pride to create that which resembles the original thought.

Unfulfilled closure makes for uneasiness - a desire, Frank Kermode claims, "to satisfy an appetite for endings, marking off the period between two ticks, calling, even hearing, the second one as tock..."

Gifts, once possessed, were second-hand, manipulating mechanical skills of others.

There is no tock to the tick.

Spiritual Gifts inventory results recorded last Sunday indicate change.

Where hospitality was once foremost, during am era defined by shelter management, this has ebbed, replaced by 'mercy,' indicating, wheeling patients, indeed, conforms to the 2008 inner-Spotsy model.

Roy's wistful, desperate, landfall in an imaginary prarie tells much of how moving beyond what you are secures ambition-transcendence.

Found and Not Quite Lost

The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon is a classic 'Otaku' - the creepy obsessive who rarely leaves his room.

If Sheldon was just socially awkward, we might diganose maniakku, that is, one with only otaku-leanings. Yet after sabotaging his roommate's budding romance, this week, his dark, disturbing, traits must be addressed even as they are swept under the rug subservient to the pursuit of cheap laughs.

William Gibson offers "understanding otaku-hood is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web - the passionate obsessive is the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur; there is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic."

While the web punctures and deflates authority (after the emissions light glowed distressingly on Ranger's dashboard last week, the mechanic said it'd cost $105 to investigate; the web advised running two tanks of fuel fully through prior to panic, whereupon the warning light disappeared), the web elevates geeks to respectability.

--and fine art.

Collaborating with Murakami, Marc Jacobs, per the New Yorker, 'helped popularize bipolar tastes for high fashion (Louis Vuitton) and low celebrity (L'il Kim), popularzing the current enthusiasm for perversity and art, and combining overt cuteness (teddy bears!) with classic cool.'

Jacob feels "everyone should have a black outline drawn around them like a cartoon."

For his part, "Murakami's practice is not only referential of pop culture, but his entire life is symbiotic with pop itself, creating a reciprocal relationship between high art and mass culture, drawing upon imagery and personalities found in his day to day life," much the same material as Lautrec referenced and extracted from the dancers-artistes of his day to day life at Moulin Rouge.

In the parish hall, on Sunday, Robert and I discussed a former youth group member, an anime-devoted misfit - cloying, devoted, intolerable - yet, today, elevated in her arena like Jerry Lewis in France.

Perhaps it's a question of utility.

Rosetta Reitz, eulogized, as "an ardent feminist who scavenged through the early history of jazz and the blues to resurrect the music of long-forgotten women to create a record label dededicated to them," may have been otaku-jazz but rose above.

Havelock Ellis contends "Einstein was immediately preceded by the Russian Ballet."

Some otaku, otherwise, are left-nostalgic dead-ends: Hugo Chavez hosts the World Meeting of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity to discuss "The United States: a possible revolution?"

Still, if nothing else, Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig confesses, "before the advent of the Internet, geeks had to cower in corners alone - now they can gather forces online and discover many thousands of like-minded souls across the land - a step forward in the march of progress."

Thus what's written here makes neither impact, or money, nor advances quantum physics, or revolution, its existence (100 posts!), as written by someone in oversized Tiger slippers, in a Sheldonian room containing a Hideki Matsui bobble-head positioned next to an icon of St. Augustine's mom, carefully arranged on shelves of books precisely arrayed in height order, left to right, signifies nothing and everything of contemporary consequence.

Lost and Not Quite Found

When it was time to renew the University library card, I let it lapse.

Did you gasp?

I had to let go - it was a candy store so tempting, I hurt my neck.

Sometimes you must live within limits, satisfying cravings, in small doses.

Addictions can be sated in other ways -- attending book sales at surrounding country libraries provides one such fix.

I drove to a sale last Saturday in Ladysmith Village. Although there weren't any desirable books, as is often the case at the more rural locations, there were a few appealing VHS tapes: St. Maybe, once a fond seminary reading assignment, and Pinocchio.

The Village, not the event, made the more lasting impression. Turning through the gates, you encounter a community, the antithesis of the Route 1, you just left. Tidy homes cluster around a rectangular park. A cozy library nestles at the end of a tree-lined central avenue comprised of brick town homes. It's out of place in the nicest of ways.

IFC's been looping Waiting for Guffman this month. Wikipedia calls the movie a 'loving parody.' I don't think so. While other Christopher Guest films deflate heavy metal, dog shows and folk music, all already crying out to be lampooned, small towns like Guest's fictional Blaine don't necessarily deserve the same treatment.

We've been exploring this subject for weeks now discussing small town depictions ranging from the grotesque, like Anderson, Faulkner and O'Connor's, to the Sinclair Lewis more relatable treatment of formidable Main Street cliques. No one paints a finer American neighborhood mural than Anne Tyler, as she does in the highly recommended St. Maybe cited above, nor does anymore capture contemporary English mores better than John Mortimer.

-- yet this week, despite intentions to the contrary, the trail ended at Mailer's noxious Castle in the Forest, where, as if C.S. Lewis' Screwtape demon, instead of politely pursuing average suburban pew sitters, like us, schemes to possess the biggest prize of all: Adolph Hitler.

Whether it's a charming Southern village, or the Austrian hinterland, you and I may end up anywhere, as long as we keep trying on identities.

Until we find one that fits, we'll flail, desperately, at times; or, at others, deliberately proceed, as if we were ever arriving at a series of stations, rooting out the idealized totality of all our desirable mutual cultural references, whether a town of post-Scroogian conversions, Waitist diners, a Scrubtion hospital, or a miracle on every 34th street.

Often, lost in the stacks, I can't decide where to go.

You know it's time to travel on but you're caught in-between.

If you ride too many trains, at once, you may suffer an injury, as I did, at the University library.

Better to take it slow, one stop at a time, not missing opportunities, which otherwise, overwhelming, are missed.

Journey to the Center of the Neck

I take note this week of our annual trek to Kilmarnock in the Northern Neck where there's a store which sells customized t-shirts, sweaters and jackets displayed on irresistable $5 racks.

It should come as no surprise to anyone, then, today I'm garbed in a Mr. Rogers-style cardigan which identifies the wearer as an employee of the White Stone Family Practice.

What may be unexpected is that the elderly cashier who rang up the sweater said she'd only been to Fredericksburg once in her life.

So, here I am, constantly regaling you with tales of our small town life only to find out, in relation to a really, really small town, we are a big city after all.

It certainly ties in with the Sinclair Lewis Main Street novel I've been reading this week - where the new Mrs. Dr. Kennicott attempts desperately to fit into her newlywed husband's hometown of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.

A few months ago I'd disptached a resume via email to the Cal Ripken foundation. I was thrilled to see a response within an hour. Upon reading it, however, and finding the resume had been forwarded to the local Executive Director, I knew I'd never hear anything about it again.

While Carol Kennicott longs for the anonymous freedom she knew in St. Paul, the townspeople of Gopher Prairie boast, at the same time, of a friendliness not extended to her or any outsider. My offer to the baseball people of the city of Baltimore was doomed as soon as it was allowed to run aground upon the shoals of a small town clique (and children's sports cliques are the worst of all).

Our old sounding board, editorialist Rod Dreher, recently penned a paeon to Wendell Berry, noting, "who, as a young man, left a promising East Coast academic career to return to ancestral land to farm, write, and raise a family."

Dreher informs us, "most Republicans don't care for him because he is a harsh critic of industrialism, consumerism, and the unfettered free market as a destroyer of land, community, and healthy traditions," while, "most Democrats regard him as out of touch because he is a religious man who holds autonomous individualism, especially the freedom it licenses, to be similarly destructive of families, communities, and the sacredness of love."

--which leaves this Spotsyltuckian even more out of touch, if that's possible, as one who dwells in an undestroyed land of corn and soy farms no more than a dozen miles away from a wealth of welcome, much frequented, consumerism; and as a religious person, and member of a like-minded community, of autonomous individuals, who aren't suspected of destroying, or spreading license, but, instead are gathered together within an encompassing diversity which, through its inclusionary nature, strengthens our congregational family and its sacredness of love.

Having gone this far, we're taking it to the limit.

We're moving on to a place which'll make Berry's head explode.

-- Malltown, USA!

A wondrous place 15.5 acre plot in Glendale, California, in which to live and shop in faux locales as varied as Rodeo Drive, Rush Street, Vegas, Boston or New Orleans.

Developer Rick Caruso, in the NY Times, explains "the whole idea isn't just to shop or eat or go to a movie, it has more to do with recovering that which is lost in Southern California's car culture -- the sense of community that comes through street life."

Ah, there's the vaunted theme 'community' again.

While Dreher/Berry believe they've captured the essence of community with their value-laden, unrealistic-for-most-of-us, back to the farm schitk, Caruso offers something much more reachable within our grasp.

Fifty years ago my dad and I walked under the El tracks in Brighton Beach to a bakery which smelled like heaven if heaven smells like warm fresh bagels and biolis. If Caruso constructs the same quaint old New York scene in L.A. could it not jog genuine memories of those who've experienced, and still desire, the real thing, and, what's more, is available to millions more, creating a new/old world which no longer exists for anyone except in this mode if not at all?

It's the privilege of age to no longer pretend to ideals you don't hold even if it's self-serving to grandstand them for others.

I can actually admire farmer cum rugged individualist Wendell Berry from a distance without copying him just as I've admired Dorothy Day all my life for her ministry to the poor and voluntary poverty without ever aspiring to the latter.

I'm glad someone does it as long as it's not me.

The Future of Aging

As a person who put the "I" into ISFJ it takes persistent encouragement to draw this introvert out. So it was last week at Senior Camp as told in last week's tale, Seven Miles to the Horizon.

Even those senior saints were only partially successful. The ninety-two year old who befriended me desired I party until the wee hours of 10 p.m. When I slunk away per usual, at 8:30, she bid her companions undertake unsuccessful extraction missions.

On travel in Greensboro for the company this week, I read in the complimentary hotel USA Today how Billy Graham is marking his 90th birthday. This time it's personal - he's pictured at his Montreat, NC, mountain-top home, rocking on a porch built by a relative (may he RIP).

The article dangled a too-tempting-to-resist 1960's Woody Allen interview captured on You-Tube. It's worth watching for the good-naturedness alone beyond any notion of the odd pairing.

The interview led to something unexpected. Alongside the clip was another of a Larry King interview I quote frequently in Sunday School where Graham was asked if he thought he'd go to heaven, to which he responded, "I hope so but don't deserve it."

It wasn't this gracious response, but another, which led to something of which I was totally unaware. When Graham responded to King it wasn't for him to judge whether followers of other faiths went to heaven, it apparently unleashed a torrent of condemnation, as cited briefly in the USA article, but not with the intense vigor found on the net, and which subsequently spawned a full-fledged anti-Graham industry.

It shouldn't be suprising to Spotsyltuckian readers that the Greensboro Borders is a familiar and required destination for all my corporate companions prior to dinner. Surveying the magazine rack, I was drawn to purchase the Christian Research Journal containing the article, "Navigating the Emerging Church Highway," the same topic Phyllis Tickle presented at senior camp the preceding week.

Mark Driscoll defines the emerging church 'highway' as consisting of four lanes: Emerging Evangelicals; House Church Evangelicals; Emerging Reformers; and Emergent Liberals. The first three are delineated acceptably orthodox in one way or another; the fourth is described as having "drifted away from a discussion about how to contextualize timeless Christian truths in timely cultural ways and has instead come to focus on creating a new Christianity," i.e. as heretical and apostate.

While Driscoll annoints the sacred trio as cleverly packaged for younger generations, the fourth is condemened, as is the ecumenical Graham, for "discussing the need for unity between all religions."

After a Presidential election which promises the vision of a broader American landscape (absent the disappointing passage of Proposition 8), George Will pictures the South, as "beginning to look less like the firm foundation of national party than the embattled redoubt of a regional one."

Akin to the U.S. Pacific strategy in World War II where only islands suitable for airstrips were invaded (with the exception of the Phillipines as a sop to MacArthur's ego) leaving others to wither on the vine, this is ever the fate of fortresses, orthodox or territorial, where history passes by untouched.

Clive James' Cultural Amnesia profiles Heinrich Heine, a 19th century German journalist, essayist and poet. Wikipedia states Heine was 'born into a family of assimilated Jews, who were subject to severe restrictions, forbidden from entering certain professions, including an academic career in the universities.' Heine justified his Lutheran conversion by describing it as "the ticket of admission into European culture," something I also claim in relation to Virginia. Would it have been otherwise for both of us!

The AP reports conversely on an American woman, who "sought to make a new life for herself as a Jew in Israel." She studied intensively for a year, took a Hebrew name and adopted Orthodox custom and wardrobe. Five years later, Israel's Rabbincal High Court annulled her conversion over the question whether anyone can be Jewish if not born of a Jewish mother.

I note in the same USA Today which jump-started this week's reflections where a sketch, Tiggers Don't Like Honey, from The House at Pooh Corner, sold at auction for $49,770. The value accorded to this drawing implies something about how we cherish the image of simple hospitality.

Whether in relation to family, a circle of friends, the workplace, a parish, community or nation, my faith stands or fails in the existence of real or imagined places like The House at Pooh Corner. Houses, where people who are nicer than I, gently serve, instead of barricading the door shouting all the reasons I can't come in.

As long as there are people in my life who persist in such gentle hospitality, some of their kindness may yet succeed in drawing this old ISFJ out.

Seven Miles to the Horizon

I note this week even Hitler saw the sunny side of the Munich agreement.

Most historians agree the pact tied the angry dictator's hands at the same time he was intent on war. At first blush they are right. Upon further reflection, the Fuhrer realized the very generals who opposed agression against the Czechs would be retired when actual hostilties commenced, and was, for a time, content to wait them out.

This would not have been the case had Herr Schickelgruber taken his tea alongside the old timers I was with the past few days for they've never retired.

One, serendipitously, is the daughter of a General who had a hand in winning the war Hitler started after his recalcitrant generals took their pensions - her father, a cavalry officer, played polo with Patton at Ft. Riley when old Blood & Guts was inventing American armored tactics, and before both men riding Sherman tanks swept across the deserts of Africa and the French plains.

Another, at age 97, plays gospel hymns on the piano at nursing homes in Richmond. She led us, holding hands in a circle, singing love given away always comes back like a penny well spent.

Come Wednesday morning in senior camp at the Shrinemont Episcopal Retreat Center, atop Mt. Jackson, the agenda listed conflicting workshops. One featured a new Bishop who'll replace the old bishop upon his retirement; the other called Stories to Pass On.

Choosing Stories, implying nothing untowards the new Bishop, who seems an earnest young man, follows a personal pattern of avoiding situations where any whiff of ambition is present. I've never understood why I resent ambition. It might have something to do with a lack of the quality in myself instead of the person to whom the resentment is mis-directed - yet, when you sail farther from shore, closer to the horizon, even small ambitions, never realized, drop away, freeing the personality to pursue nobler things, or nothing at all, if you so choose.

When asked to tell stories they wish to pass on, an elegantly dressed woman revealed, living as a child, on Park Avenue, at 92nd street, she saw a stoller begin to slide down a hilly sidewalk, only to be rescued by the family dog who grabbed the handle by his teeth.

A 100-year old woman described her life purely in economic terms, recalling a 60 cent water bill in 1946, $7 rent, $5 a week for wages, and 2 cents a quart more, by picking strawberries, butter beans and blackeyed peas (and happy to get it!).

The aforementioned piano player told of Mennonite gatherings at harvest time and attending Princeton when Einstein was in residence. She advised us to always sing the meaning of hymns.

When travelling by car, rather than plane, I carry a multitude of books which I arrange in stacks around the unfamiliar room, so upon awakening, I may spend time, as I do at home, in the shifting worlds I'm currently investigating. It's not surprising to any Spotsyltuckian reader that the idea of the American small town is a subject to which we frequently return.

Two books in one stack on the bedside table, Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, and Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson, contrast ambition and reflection as did the selection of workshops. The former tells the story of a young woman determined to beautify a Midwestern town; the latter contains meandering tales of what Anderson originally called grotesques which carry no ambition but to draw only upon episodic emotion.

A third, on a second stack, Lipton on Lipton, also ventures here, describing the split of method acting schools, one following Action-Objective and the other pursuing Emotional Memory; the first relies upon action to induce emotion, the second, drawing upon emotion to instigate action.

Shrinemont itself for Virginia Episcopalians is a small town where action invests motion, and then all emotions, henceforward, are informed through action. The circumstances of individual visits blur while the emotions of tradition linger to open a heart so that even a foolish love song offered by a 97-year old saint carries effortlessly the quaint wisdom of gentility.

There's a reknown soft-serve ice-cream stand in our fair town. If I park around back, an elderly gentleman inevitably appears to warn my pick-up projects too far out in the passing lane. He was similarly advising another patron a few weeks ago when a man with a gun ordered him to sit on the ground. When he refused, the robber fled, only to return and demand his wallet, also, to no avail.

The intrusion of violence belongs not to this story. When the circle of ancient Episcopalians concluded their stories, I told them how I worry, approaching retirement, that the structure gluing my life together may not hold, and I'll be lost, as if an assailant disrupted the night.

After basking otherwise in the light of this honorable company of women, I now imagine sailing the last seven miles to the far horizon trailing only a gentle wake marking courageous passage.

Say it Aint So, Moe

I note this week amazing changes in the offing.

Have you heard of the A-11 offense? This is where High School coaches play two quarterbacks and nine receivers since its believed offensive lines can't stop linebackers who've evolved too fast to block.

Progress like this isn't always physically possible. Scientists say there's a foreign language gene, for example, which turns itself off after adolesence. I don't doubt it judging by the way the genes in my body controlling brazil nut allergy and lactose intolerance flick on and off like light switches.

Apparently age is key: Joseph Horowitz' new Artists in Exile tracks careers of younger Europeans who flourished in America, older ones who couldn't adjust, and some, like Garbo, who achieved a certain stasis, not returning home, yet keeping their distance.

Its not just about space, though, it's time too.

A recent concert at Lisner Auditorium featured Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester playing German hits from the 1920's. According to the Post, "Introducing the hit "Mein kleiner gruner Kaktus, Max briefly outlined the plot - cactus falls from a balcony onto a neighbor's head - adding, this song is still very popular in Germany because we still think this situation is funny."

Speaking of relevant comedy, turning onto TCM last Saturday morning, waiting for sister Jill to arrive, I watched The Three Stooges Go Around the World in a Daze - another situation you still think is funny or you never did.

I opt for the former. Look, all the classic elements are present in this film - even the ancient Niagria Falls Slowly I Turn gag, not initiated here by the usual Curlian, "Moe, Larry, the Cheese," triple-chant, but by Larry playing Three Blind Mice on a snake charmer's pipe.

Even so, when this film was produced in '63, the times they were a'changin: an attempted double-eye poke is retrieved by a chagrined Moe, who says, "We don't do that anymore," referring to the PTA's dubious campaign of the day to rein in the faux violence.

I couldn't help wondering if they were around today, might the Stooges visit Dr. 90120? Could botox, a facelift, and a reality show where the three boys lived together as off-kilter roommates, revitalize this beloved trio for contemporary audiences?

I gotta tell ya - as I was flipping channels before landing on TCM (the Today Show on 4, the Early Show on 9, 'The Suite Life of Zack & Cody on Fox), nothing was remotely competitive. The actors playing Zack & Cody appear to be the same cookie-cutter 'stars' I never recognize on the Red Carpet runway shows prior to the Emmys.

Wasn't there a time you knew everybody? I had a paperback once with short bio's of every Major Leaguer including five rotating Cubs managers. The Eye Magazine Rock Pile poster on my bedroom wall displayed members of every rock band who counted. It was all so manageable.

Speaking to friend Larry this week I previewed an upcoming Spotsyltuckian piece on how Harvard, for God's sake, is growing unstereotypically competitive -- I thought Ivy League schools still played walk-on's - you know, where someone in the quad on Thursday with a megaphone shouts, "hey, who wants to play on Saturday?"

"C'mon Spotsy," Larry responded, "do you live in a Marx Brothers movie?"

Turning down hometown Caroline Street, espying Jack Elam leaning hard against the wall of Hunan Gardens flipping a coin, I know who and what to fear. Stopping off at the fire station to pet Sammy the Dalmation, spotting Burt Mustin asleep in his chair, I recognize how to grow old usefully by grace. Barry Fitzgerald, sweeping the steps of St. Georges, exemplifies a natural practice of faith. Drinking a milkshake at Goolricks, next to William Schallert, kindly scion to the Patty Duke family, and countless others, teaches all I need know regarding the dispensation of fatherly wisdom.

A scurrilous rumor going round says if Moe hadn't died in 1975, the Stooges intended to team up with the Ritz Brothers to make an R rated movie.

Say it aint so, Moe.

The Remains of Rummikub

I note this week the extent I've married into a competitive family.

There is no Sunday dinner unaccompanied by a rousing board or card game.

Just as it was playing Invisible Ed years ago in hearts, the trouble is I play the hand in front of me as if there was no past or future.

When you consider the overwhelming options facing you on one turn in Rummikub, it uncomfortably numbs.

How decisions are sorted through fashions the narrative of Fateful Choices, the latest by prolific historian, Ian Kershaw, who possesses the knack (marred by a professorial habit of repeating himself) for delving into the very areas for which you've always longed to obtain extensive clarification.

Such is the case for May 1940, when the French were losing to the Germans, and Britain faced the choice to negotiate or fight on. It came down, as it so often does, to two duelling protagonists, here Churchill and Halifax, persuading three other members in the War Cabinet toward their conviction.

This past week I was embroiled similarly - not that the fate of a nation hung in the balance, but, instead, the outcome of a multi-million dollar project.

In both, mistakes were made by others leading to the crisis point. Winston had warned of the dangers of appeasement for a decade. I faced project leaders who failed to test new machinery adequately so that it failed upon attempting to go live.

Where Churchill was already familiar with the limited composition of a wieldly 5-member War Cabinet, I had to fashion both an ad hoc crisis advisory group of trusted loyal experts reporting only to me, and assess the composition of the body of decision-makers I had to convince. It was also necessary to restrict lines of communications to control events and eliminate the go-arounds which might harm the unified credibility of the arguments I would make.

Like Winston, it was necessary, or at least to be perceived, as keeping alternatives open while events took their course. Much time was spent by the War Cabinet deciding whether to approach Mussolini, at the request of France, as an intermediary to Hitler, and to prevent Italy from entering the war, while France was not yet beaten before it became a moot point -- I likewise bought the time needed for the manufacturer of the peripheral but critical product for which I'm responsible to retool their processes in compensation for the inadequate machine testing.

Terms of any debate must be pre-established. Churchill took time prior to the arguments to consult the wider institutional Cabinet, not only to guage their thoughts in terms of future support for the outcome he desired, but to gain the lift of shoring up his confidence.

Whereas Churchill was the prime decision-maker, even though he needed the unified consent of the War Cabinet for public consumption, I am not, so a crucial component of any strategy in this regard is to pre-brief the highest official involved to assess their perspective and to set terms of a civil debate where logic gains the opportunity to overcome emotions of those adhereing to illogical positions out of pride.

Although sniping continues and guarding the flanks is still the order of the day, I remain in control of the field so that 'fateful choices' may be made to overcome the crisis.

Last week in Sunday School we serendipitously considered whether there is anywhere in the world where such manipulation as described above isn't necessary.

I had once thought it was our parish.

Then, one after the other, we fought: over whether the Priest or featured praise band controlled the contemporary service; along the lines of a generational multi-family squabble which drew boundary lines among old friends; about whether the church should move from a former blue-collar neighborhood now turned Latino; to a congregational divorce after the consecration of Bishop Robinson.

What remains after the rummikub universe of choices was exhausted is a faithful Episcopalian congregation not geared toward inherent manipulation since there are no battlements to defend.

Openness and hospitality are the core values of present parish existence. Suzanne questioned, in Sunday School, whether non-manipulation is possible continually as the newly constituted parish consolidates around people and side issues. Eric says he doesn't think any group can exist for long without some sort of manipulation. I respond, maybe so, but what's left of the original St. Margaret's Episcopal Church remains the least manipulative environment of which I have direct experience.

When core values truly lived-out are positive by nature, participants need not sow seeds of new dystunctional maladies.

Long Memory

I note this week a certain nostalgia for the Cold War.

It arrived noticeably as I watched Torn Curtain on TCM. Paul Newman portrayed a double-agent defector tricking an East German egghead into revealing a missing mathematical equation needed to finish an ABM system which will end nuclear war.

Right.

Unlike the cardboard version, and more like thousands of the 'Greatest Generation' who are passing each day, a real espionage player, Wolfgang Vogel, the lawyer at the heart of the most famous Cold War spy swap, Gary Powers for Rudolph Abel, has died at age 82. Abel was the first modern 'James Bond' I read about in the Classic Comics Illustrated Story of Espionage which began with Joshua at Jericho and ran straight through the Pinkertons and Mata Hari to the contemporary times of my childhood.

In aid of manning the last vestigal Cold War ramparts, I worked, upon coming to Washington in the late 1970's, alongside folks who drew concentric circles around major U.S. cities to estimate survivable fall out should the Russkies drop the Bomb. I'd been prepped for this sort of employment at UCF where we'd studied Herman Kahn's 'On Thermonuclear War,' and 'On Escalation,' discovering among other quaint theories, it would be alright for the elderly to consume radioactive food since they'd die naturally of old age anyway before the inevitable cancers ate them alive.

There's a nostalgia afoot in Russia too these days which pre-dates the Cold War.

We've just learned their Supreme Court has recognized Czar Nicholas II and his family as victims of the Revolution and consequently rehabilitated the Romanovs ninety years after their execution in a Siberian basement.

Why now?

After KGB archives released in the 1980's revealed the full extent of Stalin's crimes and the sham of constructed Soviet history around them, the nation required a new national mythos to justify its legitimate accomplishments in the 20th century and its status today as a great nation which it has seemingly always needed to confirm since Peter of Great insisted on it. What's emerging thematically now is the same pre-1917 patriotic and Orthodox panorama Stalin himself employed to rally the country in World War II and the same supposed golden age touched upon in the last book by Solzhenitsyn.

Upon Solzy's passing, Rod Dreher, the Dallas Morning Herald editorialist, condemned liberals for turning against him after the famed Harvard speech. What Dreher has failed to internalize, as a non-minority American, is a revitalized Imperial Russia, even under a sort of freely elected Putin, or a puppet, is impossible in lieu of welcoming home the vicious ancient running dogs of chauvinism and anti-semitism.

The Bolsheviks weren't all wrong in sweeping away despotic royalty - they just replaced it with something worse, and its return doesn't bode well for anyone.

Or, more plainly, its return means settling obscure European scores like ones represented by the beautiful silk topographical map I possess once used by the Kaiser's General Staff to plan for war in remote Salonica.

In the 18th century, Catherine the Great, in another example, invited Germans, and their technical modernizing influences, to settle on the Volga. Alongside other ethnic minorities, like the Chechens, Stalin eventually deported them all to Siberia. After his death, a small number returned, but as time moves on, unless more Germans emigrate to bolster the region's identity, this cultural enclave will disappear. As long as an agressive Russian nationalism constitutes the basis for foreign policy such emigration is unlikely.

After the hard-line coup attempt, and genuinely democratic reformer Boris Yeltsin on the cusp of power in 1994, the obvious question was 'will democracy hold?' Tragically, it wasn't to be, since Yeltsin's authority ended similarly to DC's own Marion Barry -- addicts who became footnotes and punchlines. Putin, in contrast, photographed this week in martial arts togs in that wierd Red style (Mao swimming the Yangtse) bridging past and future: a steely-eyed KGB-cum-Czar black belt.

Last week I noted I was reading Figes' The Whisperers about the nature of private life in the Soviet Union. As a third-generation American of paternal Polish Shetl descent, I embody an old country Eastern Slav soul as much as the maternal English half which most often fails to balance things out.

Rather than The Whisperers, the book of my life yet to be written is called The Brooderers.

This biography floats impossibilities of political idealism minus fatalism - in America where flexibly bends left or right according to the times, fatalism is positively negated and culturally approrpriated. In a country otherwise lacking checks and balances, and a marketplace insufficiently vast to subsume all in its wake, it's far easier to express existential doubt and grief through aggresive internal and external policies while looking contemptuously upon those who struggle through the confusions of choice and freedom.

While witnessing first-hand the critical contempt in the sad doe eyes of Eastern emigre summer vacation waitresses on the Outer Banks, I asked a friend just back from Russia if she thought youth there were moving beyond politics to American-style consumerism. She confirmed fashion and traffic in Moscow were decidedly Western. Most folks crinkle their noses at American pop culture; I'd rather see people shopping than committing genocide.

Why would any foreign policy today want to play to the worst fears of the Russian psyche by encircling the Motherland with missile systems and antagonistic neighbors? How better to supply a rationale for a super-nationalist patriotism needed to overcome an eternal national inferiority complex?

--For dwindling world-wide gas and oil resources, of course, and to indefinitely feed an industrial-military complex which not only must fight active guerilla wars but can only sustain itself, long-run, through promoting the idea that conventional wars amongst major powers over seemingly obscure issues like the rights of Volga Germans are still a nostalgic desirability and in the national interest.

And so the forces of capitalism ever ignite the dialectic fires of fascist totalitarianism, no longer Communist, but attired in the royal finery of Czars.

Sic Hefner Tyrannus?

I note this week a meeting at St. Margaret's on how to launch a children's program called Godly Play.

Since Christmas is just around the corner, the suggestion was made that we hold a pageant to stir enthusiasm.

There was a gasp.

"No pageants!"

"Why not, for heaven's sake," I gasped back.

An extended inquiry later revealed the underlying Montessori-like ciricculum of Godly Play is founded upon a 'theology of playful orthodoxy.'

In his book, The Whisperers, Orlando Figes describes another sort of educational game called Search & Requisition. Boys played Red Army Requisitioners who menaced girls playing bourgeois speculators hiding grain.

Sounds like fun.

Figes continues, there were schools where children were encouraged to organize their own police; invited to write denunciations; and to hold classroom trials.

One young lad, encouraged by this mother, established The Central Bureau of the Russian Committee of the Association of Children of the World. As they marched through the streets carrying home-made banners and singing revolutionary songs, crying out, "window-watcher, shame on you," to observers fortunate enough to be watching the parade from home.

The point of it all, according to Figes, was to create absolutists who'd broken free of convention by supplanting love of family with party loyalty.

Speaking of female encouragement, or not, every time I'm caught watching The Girls Next Door, I change channels immediately lest my absolutist wife tut-tut every five seconds. Where I envision a new kind of, albeit highly attractive family, free of old conventions, the Mrs sees Bimbos.

Could Hef be the ultimate catalyst for the fulfillment of Leninism?

Twenty years after the clubs closed in Chicago former Bunnies held a reunion. Their ranks included writers, feminists, real estate executives, an accupunturist, even a retired homicide detective.

When they worked for Playboy, they were well paid for that time; there was equal opportunity for women of color; and there were strict no-paw rules for patrons. According to one, "Believe it or not, Hef was ahead of his time when it came to issues of sexual harrassment."

I note last week the funeral of Russian journalist Magomed Mutsolgov who officials say was shot trying to take away an officer's gun but whose lawyer says was shot in the head point-blank.

We sometimes wonder why Russians desire strong leaders. It's not hard to see how, building upon existing Czarist repression, the education of Soviet children conditioned them to accept Stalinist show trials where millions were exiled and shot.

The Whisperers asks if it's possible to retain any sense of morality when private life goes public.

In The Girls Next Door private life also turns public.

According to sociologist Max Weber, "in an individual society, religion became a private matter, so the USSR abolished individuality and privacy, with the Party taking its puritanical place."

Puritanical ideology inevitably turns lethal; libertine culture may eventually empower or denigrate women.

Murderour dictatorship or anything-goes

There's a lot at stake here.

Best to hold a Christmas pageant, don't you think, just to be safe?

Big Monkey Gets It

I note this week, at 4 months, 4 days left, I don't want to fly for the company anymore.

After being banned for costs from flying out of Richmond, and therefore taking the lazy two-lane country road to the airport, I can confess, faithful readers, that upon driving to Dulles, last Monday at 4 a.m. (the only way to avoid the legendary DC rush hour traffic), I got lost, ending up, panic'ed, in the cargo area.

Comparing her husband not unfavorably to the confused berry-picking Henry Fonda, the Kate-ish wife put the disaster in perspective, declaring, "you old poop - it's a wonder I didn't see "elderly man found driving on runway," on the 11:00 news" -- but that's only the beginning.

-- the airlines have got to be doing something which saves money on cabin pressure since my ears popped so painfully upon landing in Oakland, I couldn't hear for days lest it sounded like I was underwater. I've also got a sneaking suspicion that contract flyers are automatically assigned cheap middle seats even if old-man bladders require bathroom breaks once every 45 minutes.

Pure misery from start to stop - I've no desire to go anywhere at all if I can't get there in the pick-up truck. I've no great desire, frankly, at all, to leave home.

What I do, anyway, upon arriving at a destination, is recreate home. In Oakland, the hotel includes rooms (beyond per diem of course) with kitchenette. It's a price I'm willing to pay - two blocks away, there's the Trader Joes to buy bagels and eggs for breakfast and gourmet microwave pizzas for dinner. The office is a mere few blocks easy walk the other way. Topping it off, there's a Borders across the street.

This last time, however, I did venture out one night, knowing I'd never return.

Others had rented a car so I accompanied them over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, a city I got to know very well before the office moved from the Embarcadero to the East Bay.

As it is with every city to which I travel, I carve out a neighborhood to which I become accustomed. My usual place to stay in San Francisco is Executive Suites, south of Market, which is an apartment, not a room. I walk to Union Square where there's not only an excellent Borders but also Rasputins, a grand used cd store. Then up through Chinatown to North Beach, up Columbus to the corner of Broadway, and, of course, to City Lights; returning on a circular route, strolling downhill, visiting Stacey's, at Third and Market.

In the neurotic's world, if you're anxious, easily upset and more emotionally unstable than usual, away from home, you gravitate towards not only that which restores a semblance of security but that which affirms what already makes you blue thereby validating the familiar alienation you carry wherever you may be.

Establishing boundaries through minimalism is what sets existence.

It brings me to a point where I can even communicate with you: arise, make coffee, position myself so the laptop reaches the easy chair and the cup, read a comic to loosen brain juice, a stimulating short bio or essay, and then a chapter from the curent open book -- now, write.

This routine isn't immune to change: the economy has driven a stake through the heart of Big Monkey, my beloved comic shop. A place where I could not only discuss the latest cosmic happenings but one that's seen me through the more pedestrian divorces, cancers, and weddings.

Upon devastating loss (Pearl Harbor, Titanic, come to mind), you grasp for a way to re-organize. Big Monkey is dead - long live Little Fish.

Today I'll log on to DC (I gave up Marvel after Civil War fizzled so badly), choose current titles (traditional - Green Lantern, Flash, Supes, Justice League), re-subscribe at Little Fish via email, alter the Saturday driving logistics of comic shop, library and supermarket; restore normalcy.

Brian Wilson knows exactly what we're talking about:

It's good to travel
But not for too long
So, now I'm home where I belong
And that's the key to every song.

R.I.P. Big Monkey

Going Post-historical

I note this week a special gift - a new e-mail exchange with friend Bob who wrote to recommend a book of conversation between theologians Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright.

I ask in return, for starters, whether choosing to believe is the same as believing.

Bob responds, "it is easier to choose to believe Jesus is the son of God than search for alternative explanations to historical truth," contrasting this simple certainty to those like Borg (implying myself likewise) who encounter Scripture as: (a) a mix of history remembered and metamorphized; (b) discerned through the lens of personal experience; and (c) reflected through the judgment of mainline scholars.

Bob's declarative statement is authoritative; the a, b, c's are not.

Copping to (b), not (a and c), I spent the week listening to Brian and Dennis Wilson. In the Pacific Ocean Blue liner notes, producer Gregg Jakobson writes, "Dennis was never a long-range thinker. He was the most present person I've ever known. Dennis was so focused on each song that he hardly thought about it as an album."

Minus sharp beginnings and endings, each song bursts abruptly into beautiful harmony, expends itself, and fades, natural as a passing storm at sea.

It's never easy to experience Scripture in a present non-linear fashion (I even own a Bible which re-arranges Books into what's proclaimed to be the logical timeline).

Biblical stories appreciated in themselves, for themselves, lack the narrative of temporal progression, and don't carry for the reader an appeal upon which to plant seeds of authority.

Nietzshe said he could only believe in a god who can dance.

Genesis dances like other Creation myths of the ancient world. This proves it neither true nor false since the ways people imagine what's lost to time may have some bearing on what can be only one original truth.

God's answer to Job when he sought progressive narrative was that he gaze at the heavens and ponder who marked off their dimensions while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy.

Listen to the magic of yet another dancer: "He closed his eyes, and behold, he made a mountain rise, widened the banks of the river, created a forest, made the stars ascend to heaven, erased the clouds, became smaller and smaller, with a head like an ant's egg and very long arms and legs - at his gesture the wind blew through the town square lifting men and women into the sky; while his messengers, old servants in gray frock coats, climbed tall poles hoisting enormous gray sheets from the earth and spreading them out on high becuase their mistress wanted a misty morning."

Whether Job, or Kafka, and stories which have no basis in experience, either your ideas inform the experience of reading, or the experience of reading informs your ideas.

Whether the Bible is history remembered or metamorphized is unimportant when reveling in its beauty and majesty; and the judgment of mainline scholars, though interesting to read when you're in the mood, isn't determinate when all ideas are open doors.

The Spotysyltuckian can't be authoritative when it's about the appreciation of learning external to its relation to a progressive historial sequence which by its nature eliminates any claim to authority.

That may be what divides us, theologically, Bob, but never, as friends.

A Priest & Rabbi Socially Invest

I note this week the death of animator Bill Melendez, the genius behind A Charlie Brown Christmas.

In our house, just saying 'light's please' conjures up all we hold gentle and good.

The obituary revealed the show worried CBS since, non-traditionally, it lacked a laugh track, used real children as voices, contained a jazz score, and of course, featured Linus reading the New Testament in response to Charlie Brown's plea for anyone who call tell him what Christmas is all about.

It's a holiday classic unlike any other especially the self-proclaimed 'Holiday Classics' brochure which came in the mail displaying a card decorated with snow flakes and a block left blank to enscribe "Your Company Name Here."

It catches the wife unawares as to why it unleases a torrent of abuse since she wasn't present, these seven Christmas eves ago, when Boss Smarmy ordered attendence at the office party because "it's good for business."

Articles abound this week highlighting similar absences of ethical connectiveness.

How about "Neglected Georgetown graveyard upsets families," whereas "the university has appeared at times to be a reluctant cemetery owner, skimping on maintenance, fighting with owners of burial plots, and, at one point, seeking to remove the graves so that the land could be developed."

The response, "we're in the process of evaluating options,' sounds much like the squawks of adults whenever they make their offstage vocal appearance in Charlie Brown's world.

How about "Rabbis Debate Kosher Ethics at Meat Plant," when it took an immigration raid at a kosher meatpacking plant to unearth heretofore unaddressed low pay, unsafe conditions and violations of child labor laws.

The aftermath exposed a rift between Conservative rabbis who want to nail Good Housekeeping mazzuzahs on factory doors versus Orthodox owners who squwak efforts like those are "likely to backfire by raising the price of kosher food," and whose PR firm allegedly posted derogatory comments attributed to the Conservative leader.

How about "Socially Responsible, With Egg on Its Face," wherein Pax World, a leading socially responsible investment firm was "taking stakes in companies involved with alcohol, gambling and military contracting," so much so, "Pax World itself might flunk other fund companies screeing process."

Their CEO squwaked, "The idea that you should exclude entire industries because of certain concerns is perhaps an old-fashioned, knee-jerk approach that isn't most appropriate for today's world."

Well, yeah, isn't being sort of financially inappropriate rather than only harvesting landfall profits the whole idea of socially responsible investing?

I admit the last example isn't as clear-cut - it may not be very possible on the complex field of mutual fund investmenting to obtain a fair degree of purity - like the vegan who rides on wheels manufactured with animal fat, or like Ben & Jerry, who after they sold out to an international conglomerate retained authority to direct 10%of profits to social justice causes.

Perhaps 10% is all any of us are capable.

In Spotsyltucky, we've repeatedly discussed it's about confronting the constant problem of Wal-mart. You already know when I managed a shelter it's where I could most stretch a dollar buying 97 cent deodorants and $8 sleeping bags. It's also where I hunt $3 shirts for fun.

Up until now there was no smoking gun.

Robyn Blumner, of the St. Pete Times reports, "Wal-mart made it clear in mandatory meetings around the country that a Democratic victory would be a disaster for its anti-union business model."

What model?

Blumner reports "in 2000, the company famously closed down the butcher shop operations in 180 of its super-center stores when one group of butchers in East Texas voted 7-3 to unionize."

Oh, that model.

And so for now it's adieu to Wal-mart.

As far as I know, Target, Kohls and Hechts (now Macys) aren't relatively as bad in light of our recently established 10% standard.

Hey, I have to shop somewhere.

Nothing today is 100% certain with a Hitler perched obviously atop the scale. Even Dorothy Day gave a certain amount of leave to Catholic Workers who fought in WW II.

There are still times the evidence grows so ponderous something must be done while listening quietly for your Linus to tell what it's all about.

If Walt Disney had fired Bill Melendez in 1941 for striking to unionize artists there might never have been a Charlie Brown Christmas to celebrate.

Positively Job-like, Part 5

I note this Sunday, at St. Margaret's Episcopal, in Lake Ridge, we took on Manning's Chapter 2(B), pages 42-51, The Life of Christ.

Manning begins stating as long as Jesus was still human, He couldn't gain the power, through suffering, crucifixion and redemption, to transfer via the Holy Spirit to us. (It's why God answered His question as to why He must endure the bitter cup.)

Manning posits, then, that according to John, the only real sin is to resist the power transfer, because that, my friends, represents a deliberate rejection of God.

We'd discussed in previous classes, in terms of this book and others, as to whether folks of other faiths can be saved.

My question, in light of this, is what about atheists? According to a recent news story, there is a GI in Iraq who negates the common phrase, 'there are no atheists in foxholes,' by declaring even under deadly fire, to the chagrin of his superiors, and subsequent legal actions, he still does not believe.

Discussion led to another news item, namely, the Mother Teresa confession she'd lost her faith, and I believe, never regained it before she passed.

I offered the story of the social worker from our shelter for the chronic homeless who decided she'd only work every other week, going, otherwise, to a food pantry where those on the edge of being homeless came for groceries.

The difference between the former and latter is that at the pantry, there is still hope for an outcome other than jail or death. Sometimes those who work in desperate conditons first lose hope and then lose faith.

Manning compares a Communist who admires the general idea of Marx, but not specific doctrines, to Christians who talk the talk but not walk the walk.

It led us to consider limosuine liberals, comparing Rich Mullins, who decided with wealth and fame, he'd deliberately adopt a life of intentional poverty and service, opposed to what appears on the surface to be a flaw of a great hero of mine, John Lennon, who wrote 'imagine no possessions,' but didn't follow through personally to the best my knowledge.

Jill took exception to the contrast - she described how she'd recently read of folks who committed suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge - they make a splash but it doesn't last long. Perhaps Lennon, while not obviously walking the walk, through his song Imagine, inspired others to do so, creating a big splash, with many ripples.

Okay, then, what are we supposed to do with the exemplary power that comes to us from the Cross?

Does John's definition of sin compare with an old favorite - that of St. Augustine's falling back into comfortable bad habits, followed as penalty by a Calvinist demotion from the Elect (or the broader 'Chosen' as Suzanne points out), or by the once exclusively Catholic destination of purgatory where the magnitude of sin determines the length of stay.

What about non-celebrities like us?

Or, maybe, just one more: ex-President Carter, his lust in the heart confession? I'd read somewhere that men think of sex every 7 seconds. (Asking the women if it was the same, Ann responded, no, with us, it's every 7 days!)

Okay, then, how many people in this class agree that thinking about sex but not acting on it is a sin?

One yes, 7 no's.

Luke pointed out since Christian men (at least) can't avoid thinking about it, we shouldn't dwell on it.

I pointed out the story of Constantine who wasn't baptised until a minute before his death lest he sin - though, that would still have allowed plenty of time for 8 separate seven-second intervals...

Manning quotes Kierkegaard drawing distinctions among Christians: 'drama' people who are caught up in the Passion personally; and those content to admire Him from a safer distance.

My question for the parish of St. Margaret's is what is a surburban American parish to do with our piece of the power?

Although we don't talk about it much, our existence as a continuing church, when we could very well have not re-consistuted after the split, is something we are in itself which, and which we know from the reaction, like Lennon's 'Imagine,' inspires others.

Beyond that, returning to where we started, answering Manning's question, "How can God who was impossible become possible for atheists and those whose faith is wavering?" - there is class agreement that for a parish of our composition and disposition, we are in general, invidually and corporately, people whose daily practices include smaller acts of kindness of which God only knows.

Kate's sermon focused on the Old Testament reading where Moses is assigned various job duties by God. To which Moses responds with excuses. "Shut up," God explains.

(I love that - Damon Runyon coined it as God's response to Job - others take credit for the line - everyone steals since it fits like a glove in so many places.)

And, maybe, for St. Margaret's as we continue to reconstitute, not knowing our future, it's good enough, as Ann says, merely, 'to be,' (as it was for Kevin Costner at the end of Bull Durham) and for someone else like me, who used to run a shelter, but feels guilty he's given it up.

All Creatures Great and Max

I note it's a Saturday, like any other, except, today, there's an edge.

Wife's out of town at a convention. I need to find an urn for Max.

I head downtown to gain my bearings.

First stop, the library, once an elementary school, still echoing the sounds of a century of use. An old friend who I haven't seen for 34 years, Persig, lays on a dusty shelf, while his proteges, the courtyard hoboes, type away on laptops.

To the East, the Running Buffalo Trading Company levitates over Main Street - feathers, flutes and drums for sale. A clay pot offered by the proprietress as Max's eternal home isn't right for the one who burrowed under any close blanket.

Farther east, urns notwithstanding, Riverby Books beckons. A cry through the open door asks "hey, where've you've been? You've got no credit, bring us more books!"

Who could resist? (And so I complied, a week later, earning $24 in credit, immediately gambled away on the Fitzgerald Odyssey, complimenting the Classic Comics Illustrated Iliad, issues 1-8, minus 6, I've been slowly devouring for months.)

The demure cashier laughs charmingly when she writes on the receipt, "The Heavenly City of the 18th Century Philosophers," saying goodbye in her own way to a obscure tome she instinctively knows by the look of the buyer has found a place at last on shelves holding dozens of other oddities.

Flagging, I'm at, coincidentally only, The Blarney Stone, where promises of Guinness easily tempt tiring passers-by. Swapping horror-builder stories with the bartender: him 4, us 4, on the same job; his, months not weeks, us, 6 weeks going on 4 months with no end in sight; a Waitsian crustacean reads attempted assassination stories from the paper aloud; an unemployed new father swears he'll tend bar but never bus tables - this might as well be Mulligans, Temple Bar, Dublin, and I, a real writer, harvesting essay fodder.

Truding West, a bit soggy in mind now, and avoiding, at first, as too obvious, Dog Krazy. Now, it's my last best hope.

Even at the specialists, the urn I'm seeking isn't easily found, so I avail myself of expert assistance, finding with her help: a silver treat jar embossed by a paw print (Max's signature greeting on birthday cards he mailed to family); a stiff standing bag painted with scenes of Min-Pins cavorting at the seashore (on his final, only, visit to the beach, Max stood stoically, gazing far into the distance, steadfastly sinking in the wet sand); and a story, offered for free, of how she was mis-diagnosed with cancer, nearly took chemo which would have killed her instantly, but just in the nick of time discovered it was only a skin disease so she lost 300 pounds and sold her convertible.

With the end-table shrine erected, the lawn mowed, and few clothes washed, I was unusually restless.

Finding myself at Borders, drinking dark coffee, listening to a French chanteuse singing "I'll be Seeing You," scribbling furiously away at notes which I might or might not be able to decipher in the morning, Persig's Zen Classical/Romantic dichotomy occurs in that while most of us find comfort on the Christmas village Main Street, there's another cross-street, where complimentarily, the jazzbeat of a cool Borders evening allows time for the contemplation of small town sentimentalities, propelling their essence onto wilder rides of rhythmic mathematical expression.

The Buddha is in both.

I miss Max.

Positively Job-like, Part 4

I note this Sunday morning, the Adult Sunday School of St. Margaret's Episcopal, Lake Ridge, Virginia, covered Chapter 2(A), Pages 37-42, of Brennan Manning's, The Importance of Being Foolish: Transparency.

Manning uses St. Francis as an exemplar of a transparent Christ-like personality, and then asks us about our capacities for contagious joy, enthusiasm, gratitude and forgiveness. Manning maintains preoccupations with security, pleasure and power (what I shorten to SP&P acronymically) block our way.

In the interests of transparency, I immediately confessed to preoccupations with SP; not so much '&P.'

Focusing on &P, I marked the 5% theory on the easel contrasted against the MTM ideal.

All my theories initially assume I'm average (though maybe a little stranger than an absolute mean, I'll grant) in that if I think about something, or not, or do something, or not, than most other folks have probably thought or done the same, or not.

Over the past thirty years then, as a bureaucrat, and in military service, I reckon there's been only two in which I toiled under an exceptional leader - the one you'd follow to hell and back. If that's, indeed, average, it means that for most of us, we've had that privilege 5% of the time over our careers.

The ideal against which that falls short, MTM, refers to the WJM newsroom where Mary, Murray and Ted, working for Lou, seemed happy as much as 60% of the time.

A quick class poll produced a range of workplace happiness responses, i.e., 0%, to reasonably content, most of the time.

Manning posits that if your attention is continuously focused on SP&P the results are 'worry, frustration, suspicion, anger, jealousy, fear and resentment, keeping us from transparency, dimming the light, and obscuring the glory of God in the face of Christ,' and I'd add, keeping us in a bloody miserable state indeed.

A question as to whether class members had ever personally encountered anyone transparent in a Christ-like way yielded few positive replies, but led, otherwise, to rephrasing the question more basically, then, as to how would you define Christ-like?

Those responses:

do unto others;
patient, upset, passionate but in a non-relativistic way;
love one another;
forgiving, accepting;
love, Corinthians-style;
submission as expressed in the Lord's Prayer;
everything that is good (submitted by our resident wonderfully precocious 10-year old in a non-intentional but wonderfully Greek sort-of-philosphical way).

I brought up once again that old personal bugagoo, materialism, while wearing the $7 shirt I bought at Wal-mart yesterday, which while admittedly providing a sense of security and pleasure, only seems to instill a too-fleetng high which is satisfying only until the next fix.

As is almost always the case, the Gospel reading today about the fruits of the Spirit, in concordance with yet another sermon challenging the congregation to give more of themselves, mysteriously completed the class - but we're not finished yet.

During coffee hour, we heard two Five Talents representatives provide an update on their international micro-loan program, particularly, in the Dominican Republic and Peru. As printed in the prospectus, one DR participant plans to buy 18 pairs of pants and 24 pair of underwear for re-sale with her loan.

I have more than 18 pairs of pants hanging in the closet and own as many pair of boxer shorts. The poverty spoken of today is unimaginable. At St. Margaret's, we don't just want to donate money, we want to feel a connection.

Unlike our lovely ladies, some of us, especially me, are aging (I was thinking during the presentation, if I went on a 5 Talents mission trip, would I be able to still take my twelve daily med's?) - but as discussed in the class, and in Kate's sermon, if we make an effort, we think, and I hope most of all, Jesus loves us for trying.

Out of Control

I note this week while some folks mistake a laid-back attitude for comatose, there are times of genuine rage.

One was yesterday.

But before we get to that, years ago, new at managing, I, the younger, and as of yet, only erstwhile comatose, erupted when an employee tried to reverse a decision by appealing to another supervisor. Intense, then, recalling it now, fifteen years later, who cares?

The second comatose-ignitus flashed against a Hollywood backdrop of mistaken identity - can you imagine, a person who bought the Mrs. a Fisher-Price digital camera last Christmas, a paparazzo?

The conflagaration was lit, when suddently, at 3 p.m., chairs and sofas were removed from the lobby and ordinary paying guests of the Bevery Hilton were abruptly ordered to go to their rooms to make way for an Oscars-week function.

Caught up in the frenzy, rebelling against the phony authority, and aching to glimpse real live movie stars (Jack Lemon driving up in his Rolls, Billy Wilder in the passenger seat, stands out) - the fireworks flew after what I'm told is a typically arrogant off-duty LA rent-a-cop took exception to my clicking away from a vantage position behind a potted plant.

Yesterday's incident lies closer to home.

You must first understand how tight commuter train cliques become. Some are harmlessly benign - lots of laughs, camaderie, Friday evening happy hours - all in good fun.

Other cliques emerge terriorial and mean.

Driven by inane conversations too loud for 5:15 a.m., we sought peace in another car, only to encounter something more disturbing.

Living 65 miles south of the City, up at 3:10, in the parking lot at 4, on the platform at 4:30, first on the train at 4:50, a person earns rights to a seat of their choice.

By God, I've earned it, don't you agree?

Yet when a self-privileged clique pack boarded en masse, and one harpie in particular, face scrunched like a dried apple, took a seat opposite, spewing, glowering and mumbling, my usual peaceful mood, fortified so far by only one hurried cup of coffee, cracked and fissured under the strain of four straight days of harrassment. I'll grant you, a whispered aside to the wife, louder than I thought, was uncalled for, yet volcanic ash rages uncontrollably once the lava starts to flow.

Friend Jill senses an instinctive avoidance in me to situations which can't be tightly tucked at all four corners. Air travel, for example, where there's an intimidating security point, a wait for a flight which might be delayed so you miss a connection while your luggage doesn't, turbulence, the whole airlines megillah, is excruciating, until I'm channel surfing for HBO in a hotel room lying on a downy posture-pedic bed.

I note in the past week, however, two more serious occurences, brought to my attention, and not situationally-borne like those above, but long-simmering, where people accomodate themselves to a quiet daily rage which can erupt, but is, for the most part, suppressed.

There's the daughter of a friend, half African-American, half-Latina, who in High School, displayed a scientific brillance, and was surrounded by multi-cultural friends of a similar nature. As a college freshman, on her own, she was lost. While the campus sponsors associations for both her heritages, there is nothing for the blend of identities, nothing to support someone so special, and now we know, so fragile.

In the office, a dear friend, half-African American, half Phillipino, came over to show pictures of her trip to the South Pacific. On Guam, she met a fella of similar dual background. She'd finally discovered the like companion she'd never known and relished the experience.

Teaching Adult Sunday School last week, engrossed in the usual expression of obscure theology, a lady yelled out suddenly, "are you Jewish?"

Jill responded, "he used to be."

I guess it shows.

Growing up in New York, aged 3 months to 12 years, I thought everyone was Jewish. Moving to pre-Disney Florida, I didn't think anyone was but me. Hearing someone say "Jew him down," for the first time, turned my stomach. Already possessing an insular personality, my own company became increasingly sufficient; the world of comics, sports magazines, and books, a comforting retreat.

Moving to the exurbs of a Southern city containing a small Jewish presence, but one lacking eccumenical influence, I gravitated towards another available faith, one effectively active in local service ministry, After Baptism, ironically, I chaired philantrophic boards driven by mission statements exclusively Christian (which I tried to alter but to no effect). Nevertheless, there was no other way to build homeless shelters here.

The Virginia Episcopal parish I joined a decade ago is now split in two by the consecration of a gay bishop in New Hampshire. Fully emeshed in the inclusive remnant, it is the only place outside of immediate family, I've ever felt at home - yet this surviving half-a-parish isn't an exclusive clique, and until the split, the unified church never appeared as such (or else I was blind to it).

Our members defy any evolutionary instinct to shun intruders; each character, original or newcomer, has his or her own place, even those like myself, born of another faith entirely, and let's face it, a bit strange.

St. Margaret's Episcopal is the club to join that would have someone like me as a member.

This piece is an act of contrition. I confess and apologize for calling that woman on the train an old witch loud enough so she could hear. My personal apology was rebuffed so I present it at the foot of the Cross to Him who forgives everything offered by a contrite heart.

Will there be another regrettable out-of-control beserker?

I hope not. The hangover is brutal.

Positively Job-like, Part 3

I note this Sunday, in St. Margaret's Episcopal Church, Lake Ridge, Virginia, we covered Chapter 1, pages 28-36, The Blessing, of Brennan Manning's The Importance of Being Foolish.

By way of introduction, I marked, "You don't bring me flowers anymore - or Do you?" on the easel, explaining when I stand on the train platform after work holding flowers, at least one wag, maybe several, inevitablity say, "in trouble?"

Manning opens by declaring Matthew 5:3: Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven "was never intended to moralize or threaten. On the contrary, the beatitude is a glad tiding, the great good news that the messianic era has erupted into history, the proclamation that the long-awaited day of salvation has finally arrived."

Manning further identifies two categories of blessed:

Per, Matthew 18 - Unless you become like children, you will never enter the Kingdom, referring to the absence of Youth Sundays in olden times, indeed, the young were just as scorned and marginalized as the poor. In fancy language, "the mercy of the Lord flowed to them wholly and entirely from unmerited grace and divine preference," or, as I can imagine Rich Mullins singing, just because God likes kids and wants to give them a present (in the same way I bring home flowers for no other reason once in a while than I love my wife).

The second, per Mark 2:17 - It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners. Again, Manning writes about sinners, who though they haven't done anything to merit salvation, open themselves to gifts offered them.

My question for the class in this light was what are they thinking when they approach the table for the gift of the Eucharist.

Under a heading called Communion-Think, I listed three possibilities: (a) I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy; (b) I'm Miss Goody Two-Shoes, so gimme my due; (c) I'm Mr. Roboto - isn't this where I'm supposed to be after they pass the collection plate?

Responses:

I need it for next week (not for solace, but strength);

it's symbolic of the greatest gift, His Son;

the KISS principle - keeps it simple, focused;

reflects a strong relationship with God;

remembrance;

it's a reality check - a moment's assurance that God loves me; and in lawyerly fashion, this is a form of assurance which requires no recompense;

holiness;

an outward invisible sign of inward grace.

As further reinforcement, Manning refers to Matthew 20:12-15, where the guys who show up for work at 4 p.m. get the same pay as those who'd been working 9 to 5.

Reactions were mixed, some angry, mostly mine, which was indiginant to the injustice, as opposed to most, who said they could rise above and counsel co-workers the same (though it was mentioned, in my defence, there's a difference, especially within the Beltway, between a for-profit business than a Government workplace which incorporates an inherent sense of entitlement).

Manning states, and there is no disagreement here, that "This is the very heart of the gospel and the fundamental theme of the beatitudes - the non value of the beneficiaries."

My take on all this is that when Jesus says in Matthew 5:48, Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect, it's a perfection which can only be achieved by acknowledging our imperfections, since we do not possess an ability to acheive perfection, other than through the grace of the One who calls us to this imperfect perfection.

When I was asked what I thought when I approached the table, I originally answered, "I'm Mr. Roboto." But then it hit me during Communion. It's not just performing the rite, it's taking part in the Eucharist with these people in this parish - with my beloved bride by my side, with my sister Jill, with my Godson - with all this congregation in this church. When Manning concludes, "the Christian's basic orientation is one of joy and gratitude," I know what he means.