Category: Main Blog

The late William Strauss is best known as the co-founder and director of the Capitol Steps, a satirical theatre troupe originally made up of congressional staffers with over 40 albums and a long list of appearances on PBS and NPR. I suspect they are finding it hard to come up with material that tops real life these days. In fact, their last album, “Orange in the New Barack,” came out three years ago.

Few realize that Strauss was also an author and theorist, In fact, he had three degrees from Harvard, a Bachelor’s from the College, a J.D. From the Law School, and a Master’s in Public Policy from the Kennedy School, where he was part of the first graduating class. Along with Neil Howe, he developed what is sometimes called Strauss-Howe generational theory, sometimes called Fourth Turning theory. The details may be for another day, another sermon.

I mention the theory primarily because, at least for me, it is more accurate than others. Any division of generations is arbitrary, but those that place me in the Baby Boom clearly get it wrong. I am way more “Breakfast Club” than “Rebel Without a Cause,” Gen X in my mind and according to Strauss-Howe. And while I already loved great literature and poetry, many younger members of Gen X were introduced to the power of the written word through the character of John Keating in Peter Weir’s 1989 film “Dead Poets Society.” Ironically, the movie is set in 1959, squarely in the Baby Boom. Keating, brilliantly played by the late Robin Williams, challenges his students, fans the flames of youthful rebellion and individuality. At one point, he pushes a shy new student, played by a young Ethan Hawke, to issue a barbaric yawp, a reference to Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Continue reading “Dead Poets: Easter 2020”

My undergraduate degree was a double major, one half of it being in English, with a concentration in Medieval to Renaissance British Literature. This meant, among other things, a whole bunch of Shakespeare. Even so, I slipped in several courses in other areas, including Black and Post-Colonial Literature, James Joyce, and Poetry, American and Contemporary. It was in one of my poetry courses that I first heard a professor declare that a poem was only good if it had meaning independent of the poet, that is, one should be able to confront the poem on its own and get meaning without knowing anything about the poet and his or her context. The image that comes to mind is poem as feral beast, run amuck, with leaves and twigs in its hair.

Certainly great literature has an ability to transcend time and place. While our lives are nothing like that of King David, we can see in him a mirror of humanity, if not our own, a humanity we have experienced in others. The same is true for a King Lear. But as a completely unorthodox Shakespearean, one who has been challenged to direct some of those four century old texts for the stage, I’d also say that they do not all stand the test of time, and that the idolatrous worship of some supposed version of Shakespeare’s texts is disastrous. Anyone who has studied how the texts were assembled, for we have no script from Shakespeare himself, knows that there is much uncertainty in what we have.

The antisemitism of The Merchant of Venice cannot be excused away, nor can the misogyny at the heart of The Taming of the Shrew. If the audience cannot understand half a soliloquy, packed as it might be with words no longer familiar to English speakers, then it fails to entertain, to move. The shrewd director, and here is where I am a heretic to some, will make those minor alterations and revisions necessary to make the play work for the audience, for if the audience is not moved, then the play is not the thing at all.

One does not need to know that the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Theodore Roethke grew up on a Michigan nursery, the business of a family that had once served as gardeners to the Kaiser. A poem like “Child on Top of a Greenhouse” works perfectly well as a feral poem, but it doesn’t hurt to know that this isn’t some any child in some any place, but is in fact young Ted, and the place is Michigan, a climate not unlike our own. We can almost see that greenhouse, that child, that partly cloudy sky and sun fall bright and beamed. The volume in which the poem originally appeared contained an entire section about this childhood, powerful and sensual, enough that you can almost smell the root cellar and that hard working poppa, soap, sweat, and soil. Continue reading “On a Greenhouse: Palm Sunday 2020”

In the March 26th issue of the New York Review of Books, reviewer Helen Epstein, considering two new works, begins with this statement: “The United States is in the throes of a colossal health crisis.”

Ms. Epstein was not writing about the Covid-19 pandemic. I suspect it wasn’t even on her radar when she wrote the piece some time before publication, and that well before the cover date. Sure, the Senate Intelligence Committee knew by then, as did other elected officials. Some epidemiologists and public health experts understood the likelihood of what has, in fact, occurred, saw the runaway train and told our leaders what they needed to do, but they were largely ignored. And there is the long-term problem of our health system, less free-market than perverted-market, for abstract ideas of supply and demand fail completely when it comes to the value we place on our own lives and on the lives of those we love. I’m not willing to offer my mother’s life nor sacrifice my own to prop up the value of shares in Boeing. I bet you’re not either. Continue reading “Bones: March 29, 2020”

[This was the last service we recorded in the Sanctuary, with no worshipers present.]

Siobhan Dowd had only published two novels for children before she died of breast cancer in 2006. Two other works were close enough to done to be published posthumously. But her greatest success was no more than an idea when she died, an outline really, for a work about a boy coming to terms with his mother’s terminal illness. Fellow author Patrick Ness took it up, completing “A Monster Calls” in 2011. It went on to win top British awards for both the writing and for Jim Kay’s illustrations, the first work to capture both awards in more than fifty years. Five years later, it would become a feature film.

The “monster” of the novel, the one that visits and intrudes into the life of the boy, Conor, is a giant anthropomorphic tree. Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien would recognize the monster as much like an “ent,” a species of sentient and mobile tree-creatures in that author’s imaginary world of Middle Earth.

Our trees do not walk, but it turns out they do talk. It has been over twenty years since ecologist Suzanne Simard discovered that trees were communicating with an assist from latticed fungi in the soil. Through this forest-wide web, if you will, they are able to communicate their needs and swap nutrients. Simard is clear that a forest is a cooperative system. All of those stories and myths about “the great mother tree” or “the great father tree,” found in indigenous cultures and science fiction, turn out to be more true than not. Continue reading “Forest and Trees: March 22, 2020”

Patrick O’Brian wrote his first novel when he was twelve years old and saw it published three years later, making him a bit of a literary wunderkind. Today, no one knows him for that novel, and few know of his many other works, for all other works have been dwarfed by the immensity of his Aubrey-Maturin series, the 21st volume unfinished at the time of his death in January 2000. That series was somewhat summarized in a single film that combined the titles of two of the books, “Master and Commander: Far Side of the World,” though few films can capture a single novel, much less twenty plus.

On one level, the novels are about espionage and naval warfare at the turn of the 19th century, mostly though not exclusively focused on the conflict between England and Napoleon. On another level, it is the tale of a remarkable friendship, Jack Aubrey, an officer in His Majesty’s Royal Navy, and his friend and “ship’s surgeon,” Stephen Maturin. The latter is a polymath, a naturalist forerunner to Darwin on the HMS Beagle.

Stephen Maturin is also a spy. He is particularly useful in this role because he is not British, but is instead the son of an Irish officer who served in the Spanish Army and a Catalan woman. This location, as a person at the margins of two marginalized peoples, sometimes creates tension with his friend Jack. In one scene, captured in the film, the captain has reluctantly ordered that a man be flogged, a man who had behaved courageously in a crisis, but who later became insubordinate while drunk. A heated exchange takes place in Jack’s cabin after the flogging, with Stephen arguing for mercy, and for tipping the ship’s grog over the side, while Jack insists that discipline and order are necessary on a ship, a “wooden world” in his words, that must be kept afloat. The conversation ends when Jack says to his friend of many years, “You’ve come to the wrong shop for anarchy, brother.” Continue reading “Anarchy, Brother: March 15, 2020”

You can find 3:16 on water towers, Tim Tebow’s eye black, and tattoos, in a country song by Keith Urban. It is possibly the best known passage in Christian Scripture, this verse from the Gospel traditionally attributed to John, considered by many to summarize the heart of Christian belief, God’s love, and the Son of God’s redemptive work.

It is this very familiarity that can also be a problem, for this story of an interaction between Jesus and a prominent Hebrew religious leader is packed with meaning and complexity, all too often mistranslated and misunderstood.

Take, for example, a bit of word play that makes sense in the Koine Greek in which the gospel was written, but that doesn’t work in English. The same word, various forms of “anothen,” can mean “again” and “from above,” so that while Jesus speaks of being born from above, born of spirit, Nicodemus hears “born again,” a physical impossibility, his misunderstanding. This double meaning and the back and forth between Jesus and the Pharisee would have been obvious to the gospel’s original audience, but not to us, whether we use the King James or the New Revised Standard Version, or any modern day translation for that matter. We hear so much about “born again Christians,” when it seems “born from above Christians” or “born of the Spirit Christians” are both more consistent with what Jesus is actually saying. And, of course, it is unlikely that Jesus was speaking Greek, and we have no record of how this interaction might have played out in Aramaic. Continue reading “Tebow and Water Towers: March 8, 2020”

On December 10, 1968, the body of Father Louis was found in the cottage where he was staying while attending a monastic conference near Bangkok. A short circuited Hitachi fan lay across his chest, but some observers felt the wound on the back of his head was not consistent with a fall, due to either electrocution or heart attack, possible natural causes of death, leading many, including the theologian Matthew Fox, to suspect that he had been assassinated by the CIA, that the scene discovered there at that Red Cross conference center was staged. I’m not a huge fan of conspiracy theories, but the CIA did that sort of thing a lot back then, though they were less brazen than the Russian, North Korean, and Saudi assassination squads that ply their trade around the globe today.

It might have made sense for the CIA to take out Brother Louis, for under his given name, Thomas Merton, he was one of the most influential Catholic thinkers in America at the time, a committed pacifist in a time of war, a supporter of interfaith dialogue, and a Catholic friend to Buddhist leaders, including the Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama, the temporal and spiritual leader of free Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism. Vietnam was burning hot in 1969, not just from the napalm we were dropping from the sky, not just because of the struggle between the Chinese-backed Communist north and the very corrupt US-backed south, but also because of the struggle between Catholics and Buddhists within the south, the former group considered the elite who had collaborated with the former colonial power, France. Yet here was Merton, a Catholic friend to Buddhists, traveling in the region. Continue reading “Father Louis: March 1, 2020”

You may or may not believe in the virgin birth. It isn’t a box you have to check to be in this place. You might explain away the appearance of walking on water, the feeding of the five thousand, the acts of healing and exorcism, even the ways in which the disciples experienced Jesus as still present after they had seen him executed. There is no reasonable way to explain away the story of the Transfiguration, today’s gospel text from Matthew. It is possibly the least probable of the miracle stories, not the glowing white part, not even the voice of God part, but the appearance of Moses and Elijah, one dead for twelve centuries, the other for seven. If we grant this one, we might as well go all in on the miracles, water into wine and passing through locked doors and the whole shebang, and we are way too sophisticated for that sort of thing, right?

But even if we discount the historicity of the lesson, the physical reality of Moses and Elijah joining Jesus on a mountain-top, we must not discount the importance of the story. Even as the pious fiction it probably is, it tells us something about how the early Christian communities understood themselves in relation to the Pharisaic movement, the dominant form of Hebrew religious practice that would become Rabbinic Judaism, and how they understood Jesus, the Jewish reformer they followed. Those early Christians were taking the raw stuff of their experience of Jesus as being more than, being extraordinary, and cooking it up into a religion, and we are the distant heirs to that tradition, keepers of one version of that family recipe, so we are called to look past the creative and imaginative bits where we might stumble, look past them to the meaning, for the meaning is the treasure. Continue reading “Giannis is Giannis: February 23, 2020”

Video: https://vimeo.com/391926665

In the beginning was mystery. What am I? Why does the earth shake? Why does the rain fall sometimes, and not at other times? What happens when the body is no more? So the amazing fearful creative bipedal primate with opposable thumbs made up stories, projecting on to the universe the map of its own mind, stories of magical forces and gods that looked and acted like things they knew, mostly like themselves, though sometimes they would stretch, posit gods who were other, better, beyond.

This premodern world of stories gave meaning and structure to their lives, and they had discovered that structure was necessary, that the efficiencies of civilization, mutuality, led to thriving. The stories were not perfect, but neither were they.

This premodern way of interacting with the world would not disappear as new ways developed. It would simply become one dimension, one axis, and we still inhabit that space. We trivialize story, call it entertainment, but the great stories still speak of ultimate truth and mystery, of the power of love, of the struggle between good and evil, Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen, Hamlet and Krishna, our other selves, working out the wheres and whats of the world.

But human knowledge mostly adds rather than replaces, and as we came to understand more, to record more, to build a critical mass of learned and recorded knowledge, we started to see natural patterns. We convinced ourselves that with careful observation that we could understand everything, absolutely everything, and so the great Enlightenment project, modernity, was born. We test and measure and dissect, answered many of those great questions asked by our ancestors, the whats and whys of earlier ages. Meteorologists explain the flood and drought, the surging seas and raging fires, even if the rapacious powers deny what has been discovered, documented. Continue reading “Choices: February 16, 2020”

It has been a heck of a week. At least no one shot up an elementary school, movie theater, or synagogue in the United States, at least as far as I know, so I’m going to score that as a win, though there was the shopping mall in Thailand. Everything else felt very much too much, the chaos in the Iowa Democratic caucuses, enough to fuel conspiracy theories on the right and on the left for years to come, the trauma of impeachment and retribution, neither of which I’m going to touch, a pastoral third rail sure to leave someone burned, probably me..

It started Sunday night. I confess to having watched the Super Bowl. It was the first time in years. My concerns about the devastating injuries on the field and the long term effects of brain damage off the field have not changed, and I’m not sure it is a problem that can be fixed. Nor has there been any movement on the systemic racism in the National Football League, from the hateful name of the Washington franchise to the notion that billionaire white owners can be political, but millionaire black players cannot. Still, I love the sport, one of only two team sports I’ve ever played, and the Super Bowl is as much a cultural event as it is a sporting event.

I was also on my laptop, which may be why I didn’t quite get everything that was going on in the halftime performance. I was thrilled that two powerful Latinx women were the stars of the show, that the Puerto Rican flag made an appearance with a blunt reminder that the territory is part of the United States and its people are our people. I was less thrilled with the bumping and grinding and general sexual acting out in what should be an inter-generational space, but then again, I’m an old prude who doesn’t like that sort of behavior when it happens in Pride parades either, and I am told in every case that I’m not culturally sensitive nor am I a good feminist when I suggest a little more discretion, from Shakira or Mick Jagger.

I totally didn’t get the children in cages thing that was going on until I read about the harsh clap back from white nationalists, who insist that only their politics are acceptable in the secular religious space of sports capitalism. Continue reading “City on a Hill: February 9, 2020”