The editor of this page is a clergyperson whose
recent sermons
are available on the Web at
the Sermons Page of the Wheat Ridge
Congregation of the United Church
of Christ.
Reber [Johnson; a violinist] also got off another one, after I'd played over the Second Violin Sonata for him—that harmless piece. "After stuff like that"—he said—"if you consider that music, and like it, how can you like Brahms or any good music?" That is a very common attitude among almost all the well known lilies. They take it [i.e., that attitude] for granted—a kind of self-evident axiom, a settled-for-life matter, ipso facto, admitting of no argument. The classical is good for all time, the modern is bad for all time—so if you like one, you can't like the other.
Bernard Loomer's father was a sea captain. He was acquainted with his small place in an
uncontrollable nature. In a talk in 1974 Loomer described his father's instructions about the
uses of a baseball glove. The father had just overheard his son's sandlot complaints about the
thinness of a glove inherited from his older brothers. When his father asked him what a
baseball glove was for, young Loomer had said that it was to protect the hand. In the words
of Bernard Loomer in his sixties, his father replied:
Son, I never have played baseball, but it seems to me you ought to be able to catch the ball bare-handed. The way I look at it, you use a glove not to protect your hand, but to give you a bigger hand to help catch balls that are more difficult to reach. I assume that in this as in all walks of life there are tricks to the trade. I suggest you learn how to catch with that glove for two reasons. First, because you are not going to get another one, and second, because you don't need protection from life. You need a glove to give you a bigger hand to catch baseballs you might otherwise miss.As the decade of the 1970s progressed, Loomer reflected increasingly on the fact that what you might otherwise miss [in theology] was irrational, even evil, but [that it] must be caught anyway. Loomer grew increasingly dissatisfied with those who seemed to restrict their reach—even Whitehead was faulted. And increasingly it appeared that Christian theology was the theology Loomer had—that he was not going to get another one—and so, although it was thin in places, he attempted to use the one theology he had, to catch all he could.
It is my conviction, and in this I think I concur with both James and Whitehead, that we participate in this Creative Passage as bodily event at a depth and fullness not manageable at the cognitive level. . . . In all of [life] there are depths of awareness accompanying the bodily event of living and experience that yield conditions of knowing which language may not convey, or, for that matter, cannot convey. Whitehead expressed this point in those memorable words, "Mothers can ponder many things in their hearts which their lips cannot express." [Cf. Luke 2:51.]
It's no use raising a shout.
No, Honey, you can cut that right out.
I don't want any more hugs;
Make me some fresh tea, fetch me some rugs.
Here am I, here are you:
But what does it mean? What are we going to do?
A long time ago I told my mother
I was leaving home to find another:
I never answered her letter
But I never found a better.
Here am I, here are you:
But what does it mean? What are we going to do?
In my spine there was a base;
And I knew the general's face:
But they've severed all the wires,
And I can't tell what the general desires.
Here am I, here are you:
But what does it mean? What are we going to do?
In my veins there is a wish,
And a memory of fish:
When I lie crying on the floor,
It says, "You've often done this before."
Here am I, here are you:
But what does it mean? What are we going to do?
A bird used to visit this shore:
It isn't going to come any more.
I've come a very long way to prove
No land, no water, and no love.
Here am I, here are you:
But what does it mean? What are we going to do?
W.H. Auden {rel}, 1907-1973
"Put off that mask of burning gold
The Mask
With emerald eyes."
"O no, my dear, you make so bold
To find if hearts be wild and wise,
And yet not cold.""I would but find what's there to find,
Love or deceit."
"It was the mask engaged your mind,
And after set your heart to beat, Not what's behind.""But lest you are my enemy,
I must enquire."
"O no, my dear, let all that be,
What matter, so there is but fire
In you, in me?"
William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939
They wanted me to tell the truth,
What They Wanted
so I said I'd lived among them
for years, a spy,
but all that I wanted was love.
They said they couldn't love a spy.
Couldn't I tell them other truths?
I said I was emotionally bankrupt,
would turn any of them in for a kiss.
I told them how a kiss feels
when it's especially undeserved;
I thought they'd understand.
They wanted me to say I was sorry,
so I told them I was sorry.
They didn't like it that I laughed.
They asked what I'd seen them do,
and what I do with what I know.
I told them: find out who you are
before you die.
Tell us, they insisted, what you saw.
I saw the hawk kill a smaller bird.
I said life is one long leave-taking.
They wanted me to speak
like a journalist. I'll try, I said.
I told them I could depict the end
of the world, and my hand wouldn't tremble.
I said nothing's serious except destruction.
They wanted to help me then.
They wanted me to share with them,
that was the word they used, share.
I said it's bad taste
to want to agree with many people.
I told them I've tried to give
as often as I've betrayed.
They wanted to know my superiors,
to whom did I report?
I told them I accounted to no one,
that each of us is his own punishment.
If I love you, one of them cried out,
what would you give up?
There were others before you,
I wanted to say, and you'd be the one
before someone else. Everything, I said.
Stephen Dunn {bsf}, Landscape at the End of the Century, 1991
Now I am not joining in the hue and cry again the dramatist's picturization or against the arts
of our time. This theme [evil] often makes very good theater, but what makes good theater
does not necessarily make for a good life. I think Macbeth is great, but I am not eager
to be the Macbeths' house guest.
Even if teenage children aren't making a sound, it's quieter when they
are gone.
John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent, 1961
The fundamentally romantic idea that the rock or the stone lives alone, while man lives in a
collective, in close unison with his equals, is not only wrong, but in its very essence quite the
opposite of the truth. The rock lives in the close unison of its molecules. It is a kind of
invisible unity of billions upon billions of parts that make up one whole. But the farther we
go from the stone and the closer we get to man, the more clearly the necessary and
immutalbe differentiation appears. How surprisingly alive are false ideas! They even have
their own evolution. At first that are highfalutin "truths," then humdrum "laws," and finally
supersititions. The concept of immortality belongs, too, to the class of supersititions. Who
needs immortality? Who, having lost the ability to change himself, wants to prevent others
from changing? Indeed, what is immortality? We are told that that which does not die is
immortal. But precisely what in nature does not die? Only that which multiplies by
dividing. The amoeba is immortal because it is halved when it multiplies, and thus, in a
manner of speaking, it lives eternally. But we, who multiply through sex, die and cannot be
immortal, because we do not divide.
"This land was a little Hell," said a ragged, brown, and grave faced man to me. We were
seated near a roadside blacksmith shop, and behind was the bare ruin of some master's home.
"I've seen niggers drop dead in the furrow, but they were kicked aside, and the plough never
stopped. And down in the guardhouse, there's where the blood ran."
With such foundations a kingdom must in time sway and fall. The masters moved to Macon
and Augusta, and left only the irresponsible overseers on the land. And the result is such ruin
as this, the Lloyd "home-place":—great waving oaks, a spread of lawn, myrtles and
chestnuts, all ragged and wild; a solitary gate-post standing where once was a castle entrance;
an old rusty anvil lying amid rotting bellows and wood in the ruins of a blacksmith shop; a
wide rambling old mansion, brown and dingy, filled now with the grandchildren of the slaves
who once waited on its tables; while the family of the master has dwindled to two lone
women, who live in Macon and feed hungrily off the remnants of an earldom. . . .
This was indeed the Egypt of the Confederacy,—the rich granary whence potatoes and
corn and cotton poured out to the famished and ragged Confederate troops as they battled for
a cause lost long before 1861. . . . Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to
tell. The red-clay sub-soil already had begun to peer above the loam. The harder the slaves
were driven the more careless and fatal was their farming. . . .
A young black fellow greets us. He is twenty-two, and just married. Until last year he had
good luck renting; then cotton fell, and the sheriff seized and sold all he had. So he moved
here, where the rent is higher, the land poorer, and the owner inflexible; he rents a
forty-dollar mule for twenty dollars a year. Poor lad! —a slave at twnety-two. . . . No
wonder that Luke Black, slow, dull, and discouraged, shuffles to our carriage and talks
hopelessly. Why should he strive? Every year finds him deeper in debt. How strange that
Georgia, the world-heralded refuge of poor debtors [from Europe], should bind her own to
sloth and misfortune as ruthlessly as ever England did. The poor land groans with its
birth-pains, and brings forth scarcely a hundred pounds of cotton to the acre, where fifty years
ago it yielded eight times as much. Of this meagre yield the tenant pays from a quarter to a
third in rent, and most of the rest in interest on food and supplies bought on credit.
God said, Abraham! Kill me your son.
Abe said, Man you must be puttin' me on.
God said No, and Abe said What?
God said, You can do what you want, Abe, but
When you see a comin' man, you better run.
Abe said, Where you want this killin' done?
God said, Out on Highway Sixty-One.Bob Dylan
But Abraham would not and slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe one by one.Wilfred Owen in Benjamin Britten {bsf}, 1913-1976, War Requiem
And tragically, since the onset of the scientific and technological revolution, it has seemingly become all too easy for ultrarational minds to create an elaborate edifice of clockwork efficiency capable of nightmarish cruelty on an industrial scale. The atrocities of Hitler and Stalin, and the mechanical sins of all who helped them, might have been inconceivable except for the separation of facts from values and knowledge from morality. In her study of Adolf Eichmann, who organized the death camp bureaucracy, Hannah Arendt coined the memorable phrase "the banality of evil" to describe the bizarre contrast between the humdrum and ordinary quality of the acts themselves—the thousands of small, routine tasks committed by workaday bureaucrats—and the horrific and satanic quality of their proximate consequences. It was precisely the machinelike efficiency of the system that carried out the genocide which seemed to make it possible for its functionaries to separate the thinking required in their daily work from the moral sensibility for which, because they were human beings, they must have had some capacity. This mysterious, vacant space in their souls, between thinking and feeling, is the suspected site of the inner crime. This barren of the spirit, rendered fallow by the blood of unkept brothers, is the precinct of the disembodied intellect, which knows the way things work but not the way they are.
It is my view that the underlying moral schism that contributed to these extreme
manifestations of evil has also conditioned our civilization to insulate its conscience from any
responsibility for the collective endeavors that invisibly link millions of small, silent, banal
acts and omissions together in a pattern of terrible cause and effect. Today, we
enthusiastically participate in what is in essence a massive and unprecedented experiment with
the natural systems of the global environment, with little regard for the moral consequences.
But for the separation of science and religion, we might not be pumping so much gaseous
chemical waste into the atmosphere and threatening the destruction of the earth's climate
balance. But for the separation of useful technological know-how and the moral judgments to
guide its use, we might not be slashing and burning one football field's worth of rain forest
every second. But for the assumed separation of humankind from nature, we might not be
destroying half the living species on earth in the space of a single lifetime. But for the
separation of thinking and feeling, we might not tolerate the deaths everyday of 37,000
children under the age of five from starvation and preventable diseases made worse by
failures of crops and politics.
I chanced on a wonderful book by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight. . . .
For the newly sighted, vision is pure sensation unencumbered by meaning: "The girl went
through the experience that we all go through and forget, the moment we are born. She saw,
but it did not mean anything but a lot of different kinds of brightness." . . . In general the
newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of color-patches. They are pleased by the sensation of
color, and learn quickly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly difficult. . .
. The mental effort involved . . . proves overwhelming for many patients. It oppresses them to
realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously
conceived of as something touchingly manageable. . . . A disheartening number of them
refuse to use their new vision, continuing to go over objects with their tongues, and lapsing
into apathy and despair. . . . On the other hand, many newly sighted people speak well of the
world, and teach us how dull is our own vision.
The essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of
God and of God's agency in the world. The record is fragmentary, inconsistent, and uncertain.
. . . But there can be no doubt as to what elements in the record have evoked a response from
all that is best in human nature. The Mother, the Child, and the bare manger: the lowly man,
homeless and self-forgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy: the suffering, the
agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair: and the whole with the authority of
supreme victory.
So I asked him to play "Trav'lin' All Alone." That came closer than anything to the way I
felt. And some part of it must have come across. The whole joint quieted down. If someone
had dropped a pin, it would have sounded like a bomb. When I finished, everybody in the
joint was crying in their beer, and I picked thirty-eight bucks up off the floor. . . . When I
showed Mom the money for the rent and told her I had a regular job singing for eighteen
dollars a week, she could hardly believe it.
"Have you done your homework?" my mother would ask.
"I'll do it later."
"You will do it now, young man. I don't want you winding up on the third shift at
Flagg-Utica."
Flagg-Utica was a local textile plant.
Somehow, I never could figure how failing to read three chapters in my geography book
about the various sorts of vegetation to be found in a tropical rain forest had anything to do
with facing a life as a mill hand. But with enough guilt and fear as catalysts, you can read
anything, even geography books and Deuteronomy.
A strong woman is a woman who is straining.
A strong women is a woman standing
on tiptoe and lifting a barbell
while trying to sing Boris Gudonov.
A strong woman is a woman at work
cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,
and while she shovels, she talks about
how she doesn't mind crying, it opens
the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up
develops the stomach muscles, and
she goes on shoveling with tears
in her nose.A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why aren't you feminine, why aren't
you soft, why aren't you quiet, why
aren't you dead?A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way through a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you're so strong.A strong woman is a woman bleeding
inside. A strong woman is a woman making
herself strong every morning while her teeth
loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,
a tooth, midwives used to say, and now
every battle a scar. A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed
when you bump them and memories that get up
in the night and pace in boots to and fro.A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other. Until we are all strong together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.
Marge Piercy {rel} in The Moon Is Always Female
Somewhere, and I can't find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local
missionary priest, "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?"
"No," said the priest, "not if you did not know."
"Then why," asked the Eskimo earnestly, "did you tell me?"
Go to The Schmitt-Conner Web Site.
