Category: Main Blog

In this time when we are speaking so much about China and disease, I’d like to turn the dial back to before Covid-19, to ancient China, at least to ancient China as understood through the very Western eyes of Benjamin Hoff and mapped onto a classic literary character in the 1982 bestseller “The Tao of Pooh.” Well into that book, we find this paragraph:

A saying from the art of Chinese medicine would be appropriate to mention here: “One disease, long life; no disease, short life.” In other words, those who know what is wrong with them and take care of themselves accordingly will tend to live a lot longer than those who consider themselves perfectly healthy and neglect their weaknesses. So, in that sense, at least, a Weakness of some sort can do you a big favor, if you acknowledge that it’s there. The same goes for one’s limitations, whether Tigger knows it or not – and Tiggers usually don’t. That’s the trouble with Tiggers, you know: they can do everything. Very unhealthy.

There is another whole sermon in that last bit, about Tiggers, and possibly politicians, who don’t know their own limitations, a homily about hubris and humility. But we’re going to focus on that ancient Chinese saying about disease and attention, for in the end, it is attention that makes the difference. The person who is aware of their vulnerability pays more attention. Continue reading “Foundation: May 10, 2020”

There is a scene early in the 1987 vampire comedy classic “The Lost Boys” when the two teen boys, moving into their grandfather’s house with their newly divorced mother, can’t find the television. They do, however, find the “TV Guide.” Grandpa’s response? “Read the TV Guide, you don’t need a TV.”

I sometimes feel like that when I am reading book reviews, in the Times or the Post, so many books reviewed that I will never actually read. As it is, I buy books faster than I read them. So it was that I read in a recent issue of “The New York Review of Books” Cass Sunstein’s piece about a biography that there is exactly zero chance I will ever purchase, borrow, or read, for it is a new biography of one of my favorite villains, and sadly, not the fictional kind. Continue reading “Got the TV Guide: May 3, 2020”

The post-resurrection appearances of Jesus are more than a little confusing. Before we dive deep into today’s reading, let us take a moment to review them.

There is no post-resurrection appearance in the original ending of Mark, the earliest of the three synoptic gospels. We end that story with the female disciples fleeing the tomb in fear and amazement and telling no one what they had experienced. Finding this dissatisfying and not consistent with the kerygma, or proclamation of the faith, second-century authors added what are now known as the shorter and longer endings. While Jesus appears in the latter of these, there are few details.

The authors of Matthew and the physician Luke use Mark as one source for their gospels, and add a lost source scholars call Q. In Matthew, Jesus appears to the women on Easter morning, and they take hold of his feet. He speaks to the male disciples later in Galilee. Continue reading “We waste the hours with talking: April 26, 2020”

Colin Ford has great hair. He had great hair as a little boy actor in “Dog Days of Summer,” a forgettable film that opens at an Edenton Steamers game, the summer league team in the small town next to my mom’s, and yes, I’m wearing their ball cap right now though, if you are like me, you might be wondering about a clam as a mascot. Not exactly swift around the base path…

Colin Ford had great hair in a film you might have actually seen, “We Bought a Zoo” with Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson. He had some pretty memorable scenes too, holding his own with actors with decades more experience.

Colin Ford has great hair in the recent Netflix series “Daybreak.” And that’s where the problem comes in. See, “Daybreak” is one of those post-apocalyptic series that has been in vogue for the last decade or so, and set in Southern California, where a biological weapon has turned most adults into something like zombies, and apparently has erased all of the small children, leaving a world controlled by gangs of teenagers, who are, of course, played mostly by actors who look nothing like teenagers. By the time the series opens, it has been months since the attack, since the collapse of civilization as we know it. Yet, Colin Ford has great hair, as do all of the other supposed teenagers in the series.

Where, you may ask, are they getting their haircuts? Okay, maybe you don’t ask, but I do. I am feeling decidedly shaggy these days, looking more like Daryl Dixon, an antagonist in “The Walking Dead,” than like a SoCal fashion model. This is definitely not a Hollywood apocalypse. Continue reading “Great Hair and Mullets: April 19, 2020”

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”