BLESSEDMENAGERIE

I am in the final hours of my 71rst year. 

It has been a year like no other. Retirement, a mountain of medical catch up work, a cultural shift not easy to describe, and an often debilitating condition (advanced spinal stenosis) I had not planned for. Do we ever plan for them? No, of course not.

Only a few weeks ago I was in a bad way. The power of inertia is no small thing. I was stuck and  found it difficult to even leave my bed, drive to the store, or go to church.

Scripture is packed with stories of angels and emissaries that intervene, but look nothing like seraphim and cherubim of lore. Unbeknownst to them my blessed menagerie reached into the darkness, grabbed my hand, and said, ‘Come on. Let’s go.’ And in effect brought me through the liminal into a new and frankly exciting place of conversation, spiritual connection and mindfulness previously unknown to me.

You angels know who you are.  Thanks.

And some of you will be angels unaware today.  it may end up being the most important work of your day, perhaps your life.

Come on. Let’s go.

NEW STUFF

For the few of you who still look in on Road Notes from time to time, go to:

https://john-christie-8vkb.squarespace.com/

Check it out and let me know what you think.

John

jcbludevil8306@gmail.com

MEDIA NOTES

A few observations about stuff on television and elsewhere.

SCANDAL (ABC). Ridiculous. Unbelievable. Consistently over-the-top. Totally fun.

AMERICAN HORROR STORY (FX). Leads the league in OMG and ICFBWIJS moments. The story is okay and makes us want to come back for more each week, but the scenes with Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, and Angela Bassett are staggeringly rich and ripe and juicy and make up for whatever failings are found elsewhere.

BROADCHURCH (BBC). For what they lack in tasty food and good dental care, the Brits make up with tense, well-written, highly watchable and beautifully produced short television series.

MARVEL’S AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. (ABC). Can’t figure out why this one isn’t better than it is.

THE BRIDGE (FX). Requires some effort and commitment at first, but soon enmeshes the viewer with a deft combo of plot twists, solid writing, and great acting. Dark and engrossing. And Ted Levine.

BLACKLIST (NBC). If you enjoy watching James Spader chew up the scenery half as much as I do, this is your show.

THE WALKING DEAD (AMC). This amazing show is about zombies in the same way that Moby Dick is about whaling and Breaking Bad is about crystal meth. It is really about who we are and may become when the verities and certainties of our world and our mythology crumble and burn. If you like your existential angst served up in a casserole of over-the-top zombie violence, don’t miss a minute of this masterpiece.

GOLDEN OLDIES. I never go anywhere without a generous helping of The X-Files, Battlestar Galactica, and Alias. This stuff satisfies and intrigues over and over and over again.

BREAKING BAD (AMC). Stop reading this and start watching. Now. Especially if you have in whatever ways large or small broken bad yourself.

WHERE AM I?

I drove by an old freight yard in Irving TX yesterday, the same yard where I picked up my first truck when I was driving for Harold Ives back in the day.  It was a 1995 T-600 Kenworth. Although it was only four years old, I and the driver who transported me down there from Stuttgart drove past it several times hunting for it. We didn’t notice right away it because it was so dirty and beat up it looked like one of the many abandoned rigs on the lot that had not yet been hauled off to the scrapyard.

But it was mine and after some TLC and a couple of trips to the shop and the Blue Beacon, it looked okay and ran great. It was equipped with an Eaton Super-10 and a 475 Caterpillar which the shop turned up after my probationary period was over. It has a flattop sleeper and enough shelving and cabinetry for the little bit of stuff I carried with me in those days.

But no sound.  No AM-FM radio. No cassette deck. No CD player. No nothing. Silence. Except for a few gauges the dash was, to say the least, spare. Eventually I commandeered a cheap battery operated boom box that sounded so meager and distorted in the loud ambience of a diesel rig that I kept it turned off most of the time.

At first it was not all that noticeable to me because I was so heavily focused on getting into the groove of a new and strange job.  I had wanted to truck since I was a kid but really had no clue about what it was really like, so anxiety and novelty made the silence less of an issue.

But after a couple of round trips to Los Angeles and one to Houlton, Maine where I almost collided with a moose during a whiteout, I was able to lay my hands on enough cash to purchase a Sony AM-FM cassette deck and have it installed at a store in a new national electronics chain called Best Buy. I think this one was in Ohio somewhere, maybe Dayton. I bought a tape called ‘Favorite Jock Jams’ and played it almost continuously for three months before it gave up the ghost.

Now I drive that truck’s grandson, a 2013 T-660 Kenworth. All leather. Quiet and clean (relatively speaking). A dashboard whose instrumentation by comparison looks like the control panel of a space shuttle. It is to trucking what an iPhone 5 is to telecommunications. Not a day passes that doesn’t find me marveling at the difference between the sophisticated advanced electronics in this truck and the barebones display in my first truck. I’m pretty Gomer Pyle about it.

No more boom box.  No more slow, shitty, expensive public internet connections. No more 13” portable TV-VHS combos.  Two laptops, a Wi-Fi hotspot that delivers a 4G connection to the web nearly anywhere in the country, a smartphone, an iPod Touch, an iPod classic, an iPod Nano, an iPad, Bluetooth everything. Satellite radio. I can listen to Michael Smerconish interviewing Alan Dershowitz about his new book on POTUS radio (Sirius Channel 124) and can buy it, download it and be listening to it two minutes later. Nearly every NCAA and NFL football game. An entire NCAA hoops season without missing a Duke game. Art Bell. NPR. Morning Joe. The Walking Dead, American Horror Story, Breaking Bad hours after new episodes air on cable.

Goooolly, Sargent Carter!!!

In the middle of it all is a Navistar GPS system with a nice, big clear 6” screen. Admittedly I usually know where I am going in advance of each trip, but the GPS is handy for calculating mileages and ETAs and alternate routes.  In dense fog it shows me where to turn and where to exit when I can’t see 50 feet in front of me. I don’t have to slow down to 3 MPH to read street signs on moonless nights. I can more easily trip plan and stay in compliance with the hours of service regulations that run a trucker’s life these days.

But there are times when the navigation system flounders. When the database is not current or when the satellite uplink is corrupt for one reason or another or when the system cannot acquire a good signal, I’d rather have the boom box.  It gets lost and cannot figure out where it is. And a GPS that doesn’t know where it is and cannot get its bearings is attractive but useless. Best not to throw out the atlas just yet. Don’t quit reading traffic and street signs.

If you don’t know where you are you cannot even begin to get where you want to go.

In the days and weeks following the reelection of Barack Obama in 2012, Republican leadership staggered around the country like a GPS system without a satellite signal. It was difficult for them to fathom what had just happened in the general election. They spluttered and stammered and blamed each other. They preached about the degeneracy of the electorate. They tightened the screws on voting rights and gerrymandered a few more precincts. As outrageous as this stuff is, none of it will come close to producing the results they seek.

If you don’t know where you are you cannot even begin to get where you want to go.

Whatever the Republican Party is now, it is decidedly not the bastion of American political conservatism. It looks and acts more like the Kyle character on the new season of American Horror Story -  a poorly-stitched, pieced-together monstrosity, helpless and uncommunicative, without any idea of who and what and where it is, unable to find itself in a bewildering new world. A few may still call the GOP the guardian of conservative political ideology in our country, but in reality it has become the teary-eyed, pot-bellied nostalgic former high school jock, many years past his heyday, but still longing for the good ole days when he was strong and fast and quick and heroic. It ruins and tears down and obstructs without adding anything substantive to the commonwealth.

If you don’t know where you are you cannot even begin to get where you want to go.

You reckon the database is not current?

As much as many of us would like to return to a different and perhaps more pleasant time, nostalgia never makes for good politics or good policy. Ozzie and Harriet was a great television show, not a national destiny. The culture and climate of post-WWII American is, and maybe always was, a figment – a figment whose decline and absence produces fury and outrage and avalanches of ain’t-it-awfulism and makes Sarah Palin a millionaire.

I miss those days. I grew up in them and was a beneficiary of them. But I can’t go back no matter how badly I miss them. They just aren’t there anymore whether I like it or not.  There are days when I wake up in the bunk of my truck and don’t know where I am, but I can figure it out and get on the right road to get me where I need to be.  Once you get a handle on where you are you can find your path.

CALIBRATION

Permit me an indelicate story and a related observation.

Nowadays it is the rare public restroom facility that is not equipped with automatic sinks, toilets, soap and paper towel dispensers. These are controlled by electronic sensors – the urinal ‘knows’ you are standing in front of it doing your business, and when you are no longer standing in front of it having concluded your business it will, most of the time, flush or release of stream of fresh water into the urinal to rinse out of offending material.

In order for this type of equipment to work properly the sensors have to be rightly calibrated – that is to say, the sink has to know when you are standing before it with your hands outstretched and it has to know when you are done. The soap dispenser has to know when you are in need of a hand cleanser. The toilet has to sense when you rise from the throne to exit the stall having successfully completed your task.

At the tender age of fourteen I saw my first bidet at a luxury hotel in Europe. I didn’t know what it was, and at that age I was not about to be so uncool as to ask someone what the extra bowl in the bathroom was. I thought perhaps it was a foot washer, or that there was a special type of biological function I was not yet familiar with. I used it to wash my feet.

A few days ago at a truck stop in Texas I had the misfortune of an encounter with an appurtenance that was not well calibrated. While atop the throne, this toilet evidently thought I was leaving the stall every 10-12 seconds. Although I was far from done, it sent a ferocious spray of water onto my backside every time I made the slightest motion. Completion of one’s toilet without motion is not possible, I don’t t think, but I nevertheless tried - unsuccessfully. I was soaked, hoping to high heaven no one was beyond the stall door. I could not think of an explanation that did not sound ridiculous.

I had used my first Texas bidet.

I thought about trying to explain the problem to someone in management, but the logistics of this escaped me and I couldn’t think of a way to relate the story that didn’t make me sound like an idiot.

Sound calibration is essential and not just in public facilities. If the instrumentation with which we live our lives and conduct our relationships and make our decisions is not properly adjusted, we are likely to have some big problems. Uncalibrated ears may turn an affirmation into an insult. Uncalibrated eyes may mistake a friend for an enemy or vice versa. Uncalibrated hearts will invariably fail to measure the huge stores of grace available to us daily. Uncalibrated minds fail to practice wisdom, overlooking horseshit by glibly asserting that ‘everyone has a right to their own opinion.’ Uncalibrated souls will fail to notice the sublime dance of the Holy Spirit God stages for us daily.

Fortunately we are given a means of calibration which might keep us from getting soaked and might also enable us to move about in our world with sharper senses and a keener awareness.

In the Christian tradition, we call it prayer.

BREAKING BAD:  ORIGINAL SIN, ORIGINALLY DONE

In his definition of sin, Frederick Buechner gets quickly and gracefully to the heart of the matter:  “The power of sin is centrifugal. When at work in a human life, it tends to push everything out toward the periphery.  Bits and pieces go flying off until only the core is left. Eventually bits and pieces of the core itself go flying off until in the end nothing at all is left.” (Beyond Words, Harper Collins, 2004, p. 368-369)

“What’s so original about sin?” my old friend Dee Edwards used to ask. Nothing really. Sin is old stuff. It has been around a long time. Sin and its centrifugal power to scatter and decimate lives, communities, churches, families and nations is the oldest story there is. Its telling and retelling is the heart of much of our art and literature, though many would prefer to call it something else. Hubris, perhaps. Or amoral greed. Maybe unbridled ambition or the lust for power run amok. Fine.

I guess there is something a little distasteful in talking about sin, or, more precisely put, original sin. The power and relevance of the term gets lost in tides of shaming Sunday school lessons, stiff-collared pulpit rants, glad-handing character assassinations of our evangelical neighbors next door, and the tortuous brow beating of the life-killing Calvinist peckerwoods in white socks.

A much cooler and hipper version of the tale is found in AMC’s Breaking Bad whose fifth season finale launches here in a couple of weeks. Millions of us have watched the centrifugal meltdown of Walter White over the past four years, and it’s been hard for us to take our eyes off it. To say that it is compelling doesn't even capture the half of it. Perhaps mesmerizing is a better term to describe it.

The emergence of Heisenberg out of the ashes of Walter White provokes an interesting issue: Has this character lost himself or found himself? Has he become the real Walter White by shedding his vestiges, or has someone altogether different walked out of the fire? Has he evolved or devolved? Aberration or self-realization? Is the Emergent Walter White an unnatural monster or some sort or the recovery of his true nature?

The theologians of the Reformation coined the term ‘original’ in their consideration of presence and power of sin in the human condition, not to trap it in and endless and stupid debate about spiritual DNA, but to say simply, this crap goes deep. Whether it is present at the time of our conception and birth is not so much the issue. No matter how great our nurture, how loving our home, our instructive our religious training, how disciplined our moral instructions, how nice our disposition, how positive our role-modeling, we will more than likely, given half a chance, ‘centrifigate.’  Our spinout will probably not be on scale with Walter’s, but it may leave us asking, “Is this who I really am, or do I need to return to who I really am?”

Discuss.

Dear Andrew

Andrew,

You did a great job preaching a couple of weeks ago.  I think your sermon was well-crafted and well-delivered.  You were convincing and authentic and effective and engaging.  You seem relaxed and confident in your message to us.

I hated it.

Forgive my obliqueness. I ‘enjoyed’ it – for whatever that really means.  But the sermon, combined with Beth’s sermon the week before on Amos’ call for justice, placed me, as would have been said in earlier years, ‘under conviction.’ It doesn’t feel good to be under conviction. It makes me feel itchy and squirmy and uneasy – spiritually sweaty.

The upshot is this: To get serious about following Jesus I am called to look at the presence or absence of justice in my outlook and in my life.  I have been doing this and I am coming up short.

The first challenge in moving toward a just life is coming to grips with prejudice, and prejudice is about perception.  How clearly do I see? How accurate is my discernment? Do I see others as they truly are, or are my perception shaped by decisions I have already made about who and what they are?

I guess I didn’t hate your sermon as much as I hate the answers to these questions.

I have such a long way to go, and, clearly, we all do, some more than others. My prejudice seems to have ‘levels’ to it. 

The first level is a conscious rejection of the politics of hate. For most of us this is not a huge feat. To affirm that ‘all men [sic] are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights…’ is an affirmation most of us can and do make without much pain. So we support equal pay for equal work legislation and quit using words like nigger, kike, slope, and cracker to describe those whose ethnicity differs from ours. We encourage our daughters to be firefighters, cops, and truckers, if that’s what they want, and our sons to cook, clean, paint and sew. We vote African-American political candidates into office and even celebrate their success. We hire the handicapped. We  join the majority and come around eventually to supporting gay marriage.

Then there is the next level – the level to which we are brought, for example, by the Zimmerman trial. This level is usually hidden from our conscious notice, which makes us much more likely to deny its presence. It is visceral and deeply embedded in the places that fundamentally effect our perceptions, particularly our perceptions when under threat or stress. It, I think, is primitive and tribal. The guy who would never use the n-word in conversation walks sheepishly to the other side of the street when he seems the Trayvon-hoodie-wearing-kid coming the other way.  We lock our car doors when driving across the tracks. We scream ethnically-charged epithets in traffic that, when they spring out of our mouths, surprise and embarrass us even when there is no one around to hear them. Our churches are the most segregated places in the culture - still. We make snap judgments about folks when we see their clothes, their cars, and their dental work. Our ‘enlightenment’ does seem to have much effect on the social strata that shape our daily lives. We have no objection to interracial marriage but are quite relieved our child is not in one. Try as we may we can’t seem to fully accept the mixed ethnicity of our president and so subject him to absurd judgments. We claim that some of our best friends are gay.

I can’t make out who others are because of the filters through which I see them even though I ‘know better’ – filters that are known by another name: Prejudice. Premature judgments. I know who you are before I know who you are.

And now my preachers are telling me that my walk with Jesus demands that I face this and deal with it? Is this perhaps where justice begins? Is this lingering, visceral, second-level prejudice ungodly?

I will have to pray about this. Keep up the good work.

UNFRIENDLINESS

Dear ______________ ,

As soon as I finish this note to you, I am going to ‘unfriend’ you on Facebook.  Although I can do this surreptitiously, I wanted to be clear about my reasons for doing so.

I know you are politically and socially conservative. I knew that long before we became reliant about social media to maintain our friendship networks. And I have no problem with your positions on the avalanche of issues that seem to bury the American public daily, and may even find of few of them compelling, although I usually am to the left of center on most things.

And I know, too, that you don’t care for the president. Although Barack Obama came into office long after you and I ceased having daily personal face-to-face contact, I could have guessed you would respond this way to his election. Even though he has taken some very moderate positions which have enraged his original base of support, nothing he does or says seems reasonable or acceptable to you.

Okay. I get that. You don’t like the guy. You are not alone.

You are the object of my first ever ‘unfriending’ because of the tone of your posts. They are remarkably racist and irrational.  I am surprised daily. I have plenty of trouble dealing with my own prejudices, most of which are not racial in nature, and it makes me squirm to deal with yours every morning, noon and night. When you sent your friend request several months ago you warned me that you would be posting quite a bit, and I told you to post away. I did not anticipate that these postings would include Obama in cartoon caricature as a monkey and Martin Luther King being described as a ‘race baiter', and a celebration of Trayvon Martin's death.

I have noticed something in the advent of electronic social networking.  We seem much more likely to express ideas and opinions through keyboards and touchscreens about which we used to be mute. There are restraints and inhibitors in face-to-face social networks that restrict us from saying stuff that ordinarily would be left unsaid via the unspoken requirements of group cohesion.  In earlier days, I would have viewed these strictures as repressive and censorial - now I am not so sure. Those restraints and inhibitors have shrunk, and, in some cases, vanished altogether. We say impulsively whatever comes to mind like Mel Gibson during a traffic stop, and what comes out is not pretty - nor do they do a thing for the common good.

I have a mental image of you as I am writing this.  I see you standing in the middle of your den vociferously defending your right to free speech and casting aspersions on me for being fearful and sheepish as I knuckle under to, and become another shill for, the left wing media establishment. I guess I have plenty of shortcomings so I will take this into consideration. But in a world in which we seem to have less and less control over what drifts our way on computer screens and airwaves, decisions about what we ingest and digest are vital to our dwindling autonomy and our moral health.

So I am taking your crap off my plate.

My best to the wife and kids …

FOR YOUR TRAVELS

I reckon a few of you will be taking to the roads this summer and I wanted to pass on to you some audiobook recommendations.  I live and breathe audiobooks and the offerings of Audible.com have helped me pass endless hours cruising the highways and byways.

Anything by Jo Nesbo, James Lee Burke, and Stephen King.  These guys are not only successful, prolific, and literate authors, but also their works translate unusually well to a spoken word format.  Nesbo is the Scandinavian creator of Inspector Harry Hole and, as far as I’m concerned, his work surpasses that of Stieg Larsson.  Most of his books are read by Robin Sachs who is Harry Hole. Burke as many of you know is the creator of Iberia Parish flatfoot Dave Robicheaux and his colorful partner Clete Purcell as well as attorney and former Texas Ranger Billy Bob Holland and his uncle Sherriff Hackberry Holland. To classify Burke’s work as mystery writing is like saying Herman Melville wrote about whaling.  I read a review of one of his novels in which the reviewer described JLB’s writing as “muscular-“I am not sure exactly what that means but I completely agree.  His characters are flawed and incomplete and prone to astonishingly bad choices; his villains are among the most vile anywhere.  Will Patton reads most of Burke’s stuff and there is none better in the business – none. King writes voluminously, and in spite of the thematic threads that run throughout all his works, manages somehow to be original and compelling in each of his new works. If you are as yet uninitiated into the Weird World of King, you might want to start with 11/23/63 or The Shining. It, Under the Dome, The Stand, and even the more benign Stand by Me are scary, fascinating, and a lot of fun. And long. Very long.  I finished Joyland a couple of weeks ago, and think it was as fine a book as King has written. And shorter. Much shorter.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  The majesty and brilliance of TGG is sorely wasted on many a secondary school literature student. Many have tried to render this American classic into film and spoken word but with limited success.  I haven’t yet seen Baz Luhrman’s 3D adaptation, but Jake Gyllenhaal’s vocal interpretation knocks it out of the park.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter. I think I acquired this one as a result of something I saw on the NPR website. I downloaded it and it sat in my ipod for several weeks before I actually starting listening – I was an instant captive.  Well-written and well-read, Walter’s work is the archetype of a great summer beach book.

World War Z by Max Brooks. Be advised not to blow this off as yet another offering in the blood-and-guts-zombie-apocalypse genre. This is a dazzling exercise in fictional oral tradition, and a huge multi-voice cast delivers convincingly. Who would have thought the progeny of Mel Brooks would have come up with this?

I am currently midway through George  R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series. Fantasy writing does not always make for good listening, but this is fine stuff. I did not not include it above because of its ponderous length and I would guess that most of you do not spend as much time in the driver's seat as me.

I welcome your recommendations. Safe travels!

FATHERS DAY 2013

In another month my father will have been dead for 20 years.  In that time much has happened and many unanticipated turns in the road have been negotiated.  I have wanted and needed him badly through all this and long even now for his counsel and his courage and his unsentimental kind of deep paternal affection.

Those of us who have had larger-than-life fathers know something about living with lore.  There is a kind of oral tradition that springs up around these men, and it is tempting to allow it to replace real memory as the years file by.  In the days following Daddy’s death we heard numerous tales of his restrained and subtle spirit. 

Three older guys from the spit-and-whittle club of the local lumberyard showed up at the memorial service in clothes noticeably less expensive than most of the attendees wore, and told me with some incredulity that they thought Daddy was a cabinet maker and knew nothing about all this ‘teaching stuff.’  Former students related recollections of calming words of wisdom in times of personal turmoil which were touching to hear but in no way surprising.  Old friends told of his calm, fierce loyalty.

I have hundreds of memories of Francis Christie. One however consistently rises to the surface.  I spoke about in once extemporaneously in sermon and got embarrassingly choked up and never mentioned it again.  Yet I think about it weekly even now.  Be warned:  This is a sports story.  I know some of you think of these as archaic and sexist throwbacks.  Oh well …

I was a sophomore Wampus Cat and found myself to be one of three sophomore starters on our football team.  In the final game of our 1970 season we played Pine Bluff Dollarway for the district title and a ticket to the state AA playoffs (yes, Conway was MUCH smaller than it is now).  It was a home game for us and in those days our home field was Estes Stadium at what in now the University of Central Arkansas.  The weather was and had been terrible, and, by that time in late November,  the turf at Estes had turned into a mud bowl.  It was very cold and the wind was blowing very hard.  Within seconds of gameplay all the warriors on the field were covered with a thick coat of mud.  The public address announcer gave up midway through the first half because he couldn’t make out jersey numbers.

I don’t remember his name, but Dollarway had a fullback with the speed of Hermes and the strength of Hercules and his pistoning knees battered my face and chest all night. An offensive tackle who went on to be a record-holding national shot putter clobbered me at will all night as he would do months later in track and field competition.  He whipped my ass but good.  I was double-teamed most of the night and those guys hit hard.

We lost, and my teammates and I got brutalized. Dollarway was faster, bigger and stronger than us. And better.  The final margin was better than two touchdowns.

Ordinarily fellow students, cheerleaders, Wampusettes, band members, parents and townspeople would surround us at game’s end, win or lose, and fete us with congratulations and encouragements.  What girl would walk what guy off the field was a Big Deal.  However, on that night in November, the weather was so inclement that everyone cleared out the stands and headed pell-mell for warmth and shelter. Even at fifteen-years old the sense of desolation was remarkable, and it is difficult to remember a time in my own life when I felt more discouraged and alone and defeated and tired – that, I would venture, is saying something.  After some sort of half-assed pep talk or prayer at midfield I picked up my helmet and began the long slog to the team bus.

Dad appeared almost out of nowhere.  He was wearing newish, light-colored winter overcoat, a Lou Hoffman’s special.  I uttered some sort of protest about getting his coat filthy, but he made no response.  He just walked slowly and silently with me, his arm across my shoulder, his heart broken even more than mine. His presence was powerful, his love unconditional and masculine. Even at those times in my life when my struggles took on their most hideous self-pitying forms, I never questioned or for a moment doubted his indefatigable love for me after that night in November of 1970.

In my subsequent years of life as a clergyman, I found my counsel to panicked and despondent fathers to echo these themes: Shut up and be there.  Don’t be afraid to get a little mud on you.  Try to be strong instead of harsh, the kind of strong that comes through being vulnerable.  Walk with your troubled kid all the way to the bus. You don’t have to be smart and have all the answers, but you do have to show up, especially when everyone else is gone.  I have tried to embody these simple principles in my own role as a father – my success or failure at them is not mine to judge. But I have tried, and will continue to do so.

So God bless you fathers out there, and the memories you have of your fathers.  We don’t have to get all of it right, but we do have to be there when the lights go off and the party is over and everyone else is running for cover.

THE HOLY MAN’S WAND

Yesterday Stephen Coburn posed a general question on Facebook and it lead to a brief stroll down Memory Lane:  What is the most practical life lesson ever shared with you and who shared it?

The summer of 1975 was memorable for several reasons.  I would be married for the first time in mid-August. I was the summer youth director at First United Methodist Church of Russellville, Arkansas.  I lived in a dorm room on the campus of Arkansas Tech with a handful of Wonder Boy football players doing summer school to shore up their academic standings.

The senior pastor at the church was the venerable Charles Ramsay.  He was very generous with me.  He allowed me to lead worship, to preach a couple of times, and even to wear his second-hand pulpit robe when doing so.  He seemed interested in me and in what I was doing with the kids which largely consisted of hanging out with them in my little office while listening to Earth, Wind & Fire’s That’s the Way of the World. I also took them to Opryland that summer.  It was fun.

In the last week of my time there and a little over a week away from my wedding, Charles shambled into my office very early on a Sunday morning – a highly unusual event since his sermon prep time was almost exclusively restricted to the early morning hours of our Protestant Sabbath and we all knew to not disturb him.  He genially inquired of my welfare and my feelings about the huge changes ahead of me.  Then he gave me a piece of unsolicited advice I have not to date forgotten.

“Be careful, John.  There are a lot of women who would like to get hold of a holy man’s wand.” He grinned and leered at me, the thick lenses of his glasses magnifying his beady eyes.

I was shocked enough that I have no recollection of what was said next or who said it.  Even after we became clergy colleagues we never discussed it and I doubt he would have even recalled having said it. But its memory intrigues me.  Was he talking about himself and his own experiences?  Was this a whimsical reflection of some kind about a path he had walked or come dangerously close to walking?  Had he seen something in me, prophetically it turns out, that lead him to issue this humorous and gentle warning? Had his association with me that summer led him to look back over his younger years through the lens of “If I had only known then what I know now…”? Sadly I was not curious about this until many years after Charles’ death.

Like almost all the counsel offered me in the first forty years of my life, I blew it off.  I wish I hadn’t. For those of us wired in a certain way, the best advice is nearly always unheeded.

BIRTHDAY

Twenty-nine years ago today and almost to the hour, I was privileged to witness the arrival of Jacob Douglas Christie into the world.  That year in Harrison, Arkansas it was indeed ‘a cold winter’s night that was so deep,’ one of the snowiest and coldest Decembers in Arkansas that I can remember.  Jacob’s first ride in an automobile was in a Jeep CJ8 with the four-wheel drive locked in as we headed back to the parsonage at Cotter on the bluffs of the White River a couple of days later.

That December I found myself on the bottom side of a steep learning curve.  I don’t think I had ever even held a baby outside a baptism, much less changed a diaper or made a two a.m. feeding or tried to jam an impossibly tiny body into one of those cute little sleeper things with the feet and the ass flap.

But I think the greatest lesson had little to do with my crash course in baby-raising.  It had to do with the coincidence of Jacob’s birth with Christmas in 1983 as I struggled to assemble some thoughts for Christmas morning homily a few days later.

I couldn't get the birthing room at the Boone County Hospital out of my mind.  Pam was bone-tired – it was a long and sometimes difficult labor.  I was scared – I had done my best at the helpful husband routine, but even Mr. Rogers can’t stem the pain of contractions and childbirth.  I was standing on foreign soil, wide-eyed and gape-mouthed, seeing and feeling things brand new to me, clueless about what to do next.

Yet the others attending Jacob’s arrival were not nearly as carried away.  One of the two nurses held her stomach tightly and swore she had acquired food poisoning from the turkey at the ward Christmas party the previous evening.  The other nurse complained bitterly that she had to work the third-shift and so-close to Christmas in spite of numerous requests to management for some well-deserved time off for the Holidays.  The doctor slumped half-asleep against the wall perhaps overindulged a bit in Christmas cheer.  It was as if, to them, nothing unusual or out of the ordinary was happening. 

The most astonishing event of my life was no big deal.  The miraculous hidden within the commonplace.  The extraordinary masquerading as the mundane.  Probably not much different from the first Christmas.

Who could have seen what was really going on right under their noses?  An annoyed motel clerk?  A crew of farmhands in their greasy John Deere caps and manure-grimed Ropers?  A young father anxious for the life and health of his child-bride and already beginning to worry about how this new mouth was to be fed?  Clueless each one that they and their world has just been unalterably changed.

And redeemed.

And thus we remain – the mostly numb, but occasionally amazed, Company of the Clueless, somnambulant even with the Excelsis in Deo on our lips.

So Happy Birthday, Jacob.  And Happy Birthday, Jesus.  And may we all be alert to the Holy lurking right under our noses.

STATESMAN

I was saddened to hear this week of the death of Charles McDonald.  Charles was a clergy leader of distinction for many years in Arkansas United Methodism, having served in both administrative and pastoral roles.

The poignancy of his death for me does not actually have to do with the dying itself – after all, Charles was 86 and under Hospice care, and, from what I understand, died peacefully with the benefit of good care and the presence of family. 

And I am saddened sympathetically for his children, especially his son Tom with whom I was at one time quite close – I know from experience that losing a father of considerable stature is a trial of some challenge.

Plus there is a nostalgia in this that links to my two summers many, many years ago as resident counselor at Shoal Creek Camp in the old Fort Smith District of the North Arkansas Annual Conference where I was privileged to spend a lot of time with men and women who became heroes for me over the years – Charles McDonald, Charles Casteel, Max Whitefield, Hillman Byram, Pryor Cruce, Allan Hilliard, just to name a few.

My deeper sadness comes from a trend I have observed for some time but only shared in private with Beth.  I make this observation from afar, having been out of the stream of Arkansas United Methodism for some considerable time.  Charles McDonald’s death for me throws into high relief the continual erosion of statesmanship in the denomination.

There was a time when the leaders in the church were not known for gang affiliations and  theological identities, but for their winsomeness and their effectiveness and their courage.  Their leadership did not seem to be held hostage to theo-political opinions about human sexuality and a host of other distractions, but seemed to move relentlessly toward the greater good and advancement of the body of Christ - in other words, they were unapologetic Wesleyans. 

These statesmen seemed to operate with a sense of benevolent pragmatism with which the minor points of theological judgment were not allowed to interfere.  They were wise and pastoral and pretty smart most of the time.  Their expedience was not brutal.  They did not question an opponent’s  right to call him- or herself a Christian.  They did not let callousness masquerade as conviction.  To them grace was serious business, not a footnote.  They practiced inclusiveness on many levels, but without calling it that.

Today I hold Charles McDonald and his family in my heart, gratefully for the hand he played in the shaping of the church which in turn has shaped the lives of so very many - me especially.

Train Wreck

The church at Corinth was a train wreck. Instead of hearing “Amen” and “Praise the Lord,” one would more likely hear “Screw you, buddy!” and “Oh, yeah? You and whose army?” Not exactly filled with the love of the Lord and the unity that comes with it most of the time, the Corinthian Christians were itching for a fight, not with the world outside their community, but with each other. Food fights at the communion rail, shoving matches at the elders meetings, and partisan-fueled gridlock at the program council were the order of the day. It was not unusual to see worshipers leaving church on Sunday morning with bloody noses and black eyes, rather than peace and love in their hearts.

In spite of workshops, sermons and a specialized Sunday School curriculum, the Task Force on Congregational Unity had gotten nowhere … in fact things seemed to be worse in the wake of their efforts rather than better. After six weeks of trying everything in his trick bag, one consultant left town in the middle of the night after he emailed the lay leader that, for whatever reason, the intramural conflicts at Corinth, rather than obstructing the mission of the church, seemed to actually be the mission of the church. “The churches that have a vital witness to the world,” he wrote, “consist of Christians who are continually amazed by the grace of God and power of the Holy Spirit. These folks, it seems, need the hatred generated by their division to support their existence.” When this missive was read in worship, the factional leaders began catcalling their opponents across the aisle with taunts of “Did you hear that, you moron?” and “You tell ‘em, preacher!” and “That’s just exactly what they needed to hear!”

In the middle of the brawl was a guy named Paul, a self-proclaimed apostle, formerly the infamous Saul of Tarsus. A prickly man with what seemed to be a huge ego, Paul was a lightning rod for the kind of skirmishing upon which the Corinthians thrived. Hanging with black-hatted boys at the temple on one day and having coffee with truckers at the Flying Jehovah the next and seen sipping a gin-and-tonic with the girls at the Paper Moon the next, his scandalous and erratic behavior made Newt Gingrich look like Dwight Eisenhower. “Whose side was he on, after all?” asked the baffled and contentious Corinthians.

So in his follow up correspondence that is collected and edited in our bibles as First and Second Corinthians, Paul spends the bulk of his efforts not only in defense of his authority but also explaining the method to his madness. “I did what it took,” he wrote, “to let the world know what amazing things God is up to in the world these days. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.” Take a look-see for yourself.

We Corinthians in the twenty-first century have no way of knowing how effective Paul’s correspondence was in unifying the church at Corinth – I suspect not very. Centuries later, his writings are still largely irrelevant to us. The divisions we create for ourselves and the fortresses within which we find security and identity and our various reasons for being are perhaps more vicious and pronounced than ever before, all cloaked in the nobility of words like “patriotism,” “family values,” and “doctrinal fidelity.”

But one thing is certain. Those outside the walls of church life in America look at us and how we do our business and say, “What a joke.” They also say, “No thanks. Not for me. I have enough troubles of my own. Save the drama for your mama.” Perhaps we should simply be mindful of this the next time we are tempted to self-medicate on how right we are and how wrong the other guys are. The world sees what we are and what we have, and there are fewer and fewer takers.

Pragmatism is not a sin ... at least it wasn't for Paul.

Shutting Down

I know a few of you still look in on this blog from time to time although I haven't written anything in several months. Thanks for checking in. I started this as a means to a more mentally disciplined life, not to acquire any sort of following - but I appreciate the kind words and the positive feedback.

My employer of the last 12 years is closing its door this Friday. Ronnie Dowdy Inc. has suffered through some tumultuous changes in the trucking industry and in our economy, and has adapted and survived up until now. However, the restrictive nature of bank lending has made it impossible to continue doing business.

I cleaned out my truck yesterday, but not before already receiving two solid job offers - and over the next several days I am sure I will receive several more. So I am not terribly concerned about finding employment. The hard thing for me is turning loose of what has become for me and for many a family.

When I stumbled into the recruiting office at Dowdy twelve years ago today (!) I was close to the end of my rope. Through my own blunders I was living life east of Eden, desperate to find a connection and become a part of something bigger than myself. That bill is filled in the lives of persons in many ways, some healthier and more constructive than others, but for me it was this motley cast of characters in Batesville.

And it is clear that places like this are becoming fewer and fewer, and more and more far between. As the middle class dissipates, so do the family businesses that made up so much of its soul and its life. In the niche that I have occupied the last few years, in is clear that the days of the hard-charging, smokey-dodging 'outlaw trucker' are gone, replaced by electronic monitoring, ridiculously low mileages, huge companies with 2000+ trucks, and, hence, a wage that is often at or only slightly above poverty levels. Some laud this as a great advance in public and highway safety. I don't want to argue about it - but that is patently absurd.

Well, at least your lettuce is still green and your chicken is still fresh and you get pretty good fruit nearly year round. That hasn't been a happy accident.

Ich Bin Ein Weiner

At least three things are fraught with peril: 1) doing risque things when you are an adult 'who knows better' (allegedly); and 2) when caught, trying to explain these risque behaviors in public with less than full candor; and 3) pretending you can go on with your life and your job and your social network as if nothing has happened.

The Incredulous stand off to the side with jaws agape and ask questions at least as unintelligent as your behavior.

Q: What were you thinking?
A: Thinking ... ?

Q: How could a person of your intelligence and ability have been so stupid?
A: It was actually pretty easy ...

Q: Didn't you know what you were risking?
A: Well, at the time, it was obscured and/or irrelevant.

Q: What the hell does that mean?
A: Next question ...

As a veteran of the Catastrophic Misstep, I can say this much: When the house is on fire, it is best to run back in, throw the essentials in a box, run back out, toss the box in the back of the truck, and drive off as fast as you can. Then stop on the outskirts of town and go through the box, salvaging what you absolutely must have and throwing the rest away.

You will soon discover some things that you only suspected before the fire. You will discover that any attempt to explain what happened, however benign and non-defensive and responsible, will only make you sound guiltier, self-justifying, and an even bigger loser than you already are. Beware digging a bigger hole.

You will discover that, while the curious seem to want answers and to understand, they are actually self-medicating on your demise and your misery. This is really disappointing but, hey, there has to be some way to explain the success of tabloid journalism.

You will discover that you, and everybody else, are actually an AINO - an Adult In Name Only - and that the things that really drive your impulsions and compulsions are embarrassingly infantile, difficult to face even in the safe confines of a therapist's office. What you did wasn't a mistake - a mistake is turning right when you should have turned left because you were distracted by a Hooters billboard. It was a bona fide misdeed. And, in spite of the cliche, it didn't happen because you were 'only human' - it happened because you somehow failed to ackowledge that fact.

You will discover that what others think of you, for better or for worse, is not only not within your control but also is none of your damn business. People will say things about you that are deeply unfair, but, if you want justice, you will find it somewhere between jackass and justification in the dictionary. You should get out of the business of trying to get people to understand once and for all.

You will learn in time that you are not The Worst Person in the World, but that it's going to feel that way for a long time.

You will discover that schadenfreude is more than a cool sounding German word.

You will learn that you will turn loose of the guilt and the self-contempt and the bitterness when you are done with them and not a moment before. Your need to hang on to them should make you curious.

You will learn that it's not the end of the world, although that lesson requires a lengthy time in class.

And, finally, you will learn that you can't go back but you can move on.

Change ... Again

Last week I moved my clothes and my stuff out of my rig and accepted my boss' invitation to come off the road and begin work as a fleet manager for the company. My feelings, to say the least, are mixed.

I have been on the road for over eleven years. A trucker's life has always had its challenges, but the industry has undergone tremendous changes in the last few years which have made this decision much easier than it would have been previously. The chaos in the national economy, the 'de-professionlization' of drivers, the growing, uninformed hostility of the public, and the upcoming onslaught of crushing and hopelessly ineffective safety regulations are causing older and more mature drivers to hang up their keys in droves. We have been living in a world that hates us deeply and needs us badly, and many of us have grown weary of it.

And I am really not getting any younger.

On a more personal level, I feel okay, I guess. I will miss the relatively high degree of independence and autonomy I have enjoyed. I will miss the peacefulness of the long moonlit drives across nighttime deserts. I will miss the serendipity of that stray food cart which serves life-changing tacos and breakfast burritos, and the near-angelic presence of a truckstop waitress. I will miss the satisfaction of tasks completed without ambiguity and uncertainty and loose ends. I will miss the analgesic rhythms of the road. I will miss the solitude I did not afford myself for most of my life.

But, on the other hand, I will be in church on Sundays. I will see family and friends regularly. I will attend sporting events. I will cook and I will go the gym and I will lose the unhealthy extra pounds I put on behind the wheel. I will actually read books instead of just listening to them on the ipod. I will enjoy media on a television set rather than a laptop screen. I will learn to sleep without the hum of a diesel engine in my ears.

There are adjustments ahead, and I am up to them. Details will be faced and handled; furniture will be moved and deposits will be made; decisions will be made when they need to be made.

And I am again filled with gratitude for the grace, the truly amazing grace, that runs in and through and around our seemingly mundane lives - the grace that lets us say "goodbye" and "hello" and "thank you" and "wow!"

Anticlimax

If you were ever curious about the meaning of the term 'anticlimax,' you saw a spectacular illustration of it a couple of days ago when President Obama released incontrovertible proof of his American birth and citizenship.

I wonder why this felt more like a defeat than a victory?

Maybe it didn't feel like a victory because it wasn't - because the real enemy remains as undeterred and virulent as ever. Moments after the long form certificate of live birth - moments - a new line of attack was introduced into the public arena, this one regarding the legitimacy of Obama's academic background. And, rest assured, when this new line of crap is put to bed, something else will immediately be introduced calling the President's credentials into question.

When Obama was elected in 2008, we felt that perhaps the racism so deeply embedded in our culture and social structures was vanishing. And that may still be the case. But its remnants have been recharged and thrown into high relief. It is connected like a cancer to the tissue of the American body.

On a micro level, I find its vestiges in myself which I try to disguise in various ways, just as the Idiot Right has tried to disguise its prejudice as patriotism. I am not proud of it, but the only hope I have of ridding myself of it is in calling it what it is and not deluding myself into think that it is something it's not.

First, You Win

I haven't seen it yet, and might not have the temperament to sit through it when I have the chance. It is a sports documentary produced primarily by Jalen Rose of ESPN, who, along with Chris Weber, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King and Ray Jackson made up Michigan's famous 'Fab 5.' The Fab 5 (self-titled) represented one of the best recruiting classes in the history of NCAA basketball, if not the best.

Their fame came in large part from the way their respective styles influenced the game. They credit themselves with the advent of baggy shorts, trash-talking, shaved heads, black socks, hip-hop music in the locker room, and an air of indifference to their coaching. They were the self-appointed and self-anointed 'bad boys' of college hoops.

Of course, you can't be a bad ass bad boy unless you are calling someone a 'bitch' or an 'Uncle Tom', which is precisely what Rose did in the lead up interviews to the airing of the film. The targets for his assault were, naturally, the Duke players the Fab 5 faced in the early nineties, in particular, Christian Laettner, Bobby Hurley and Grant Hill. I have always had a problem with Duke Haters who know almost nothing about college basketball, but an even bigger problem with those who try to settle athletic contests verbally, as well as those who engage in 'blacker-than-thou' arguments. So Krzyzewski didn't recruit in the urban areas? Wrong again: Coach K does not suffer punks and jerks. If you aren't coachable, you don't get to play at Cameron Indoor Stadium.

Unlike their counterparts from Michigan, the Duke players held their tongues, and proceeded to kick the asses of the Fab 5, not once, not twice, but three times, the sweetest of which was a 71-51 shellacking for the national title in 1992. The following year, Chris Weber (who evidently had the good sense to distance himself from the documentary) committed what was possibly the most bone-headed mistake in March Madness history, costing himself and his team another national title in a contest against North Carolina.

I can't help but wonder about the relationship of the Self-congratulating Bad Boys of Michigan to a more recent image of Lebron James and his teammates weeping in the Miami Heat locker room after a fifth straight loss weeks after they threw themselves a victory celebration before the season began and had even played a game.

Call me old-fashioned but I do miss the days where the rule of thumb was "shut up, play hard, win, and,when you cut down the nets, talk all you want."

Home to Roost at NPR

Despite an occasional ear to Car Talk, Prairie Home Companion, and Fresh Air, I stopped listening to National Public Radio several years ago. I quit because I was ... offended, something not easy to accomplish with me.

I was just south of Washington D.C. in one of Harold Ives' Mack trucks listening to All Things Considered. That day ATC had Janet Huckabee on as a guest when the Huckabees were still the first family of Arkansas. The topic under discussion was the triple-wide trailer placed on the lawn of the Governor's Mansion while renovations where underway inside the house.

I can handle heavy doses of sarcasm and irony, but the preening condescension of the interviewer was too much. Within seconds of the start of the interview, Mrs. Huckabee knew that she had been trapped in a conversation intended to humiliate and embarrass her with the meanest of intentions, as well as to poke fun of Arkansans in general and to depict us as redneck trailerpark trash. The snobbery dripped off the radio. Although no fan of the Huckabees, I thought this was one of cruelest 'gotchas' I had ever witnessed.

For most of my life I wondered why my parents, both natives of rural Arkansas, would let me see James Bond movies but forbid me from watching The Beverly Hillbillies (we lived in Ohio at the time of the show's debut). Their unusual restriction came into clear focus.

Racism is only one face of prejudice in this country.

My sensitivity to this came in large part because through some cataclysmic changes in my life and my circumstances I got to see both sides of a socioeconomic fence that is surprisingly high. I left an insulated white-collar world where I got respect and consideration I perhaps did not deserve and entered a blue-collar world whose minions are treated, for the most parts, as idiots. Those who honored me as a guest in their homes and at their tables and in their pulpits were the same who would now scarcely even notice my existence unless the lettuce at the salad bar was not as fresh as it was last week or the chicken looked a little brownish at Fresh Market.

Juan Williams forsook the narrative for a few moments of candor and got fired from NPR. The great Bob Edwards was dismissed for reasons that perhaps are similar. Ron Schiller got his walking papers when he became the victim of another piece of gotcha journalism for espousing the kind of prejudice NPR is supposed to stand against - he kind of 'outprejudiced the prejudiced.' Vivian Schiller read the tea leaves and skedaddled.

I don't know what energizes the Tea Party although I hear all the talk about personal liberty, smaller government, blah, blah, blah ... . I suspect a great part of their impetus is far more visceral and much less political than it seems - there are a whole bunch of people in our society that are tired of being treated like fools because of their jobs, their neighborhoods and housing, and where (or whether) they went to school.

In spite of my personal problems with it, I am vehemently opposed to defunding National Public Radio. But condescension is a real pisser, and, in this case, the chickens are coming home to roost.