I'm Afraid

I humbly acknowledge that what began as an introspective examination of the meaning of “home” digressed into a self-indulgent retrospective of my first five years of life. As a corrective, I need to refocus upon why those first five years are so critical in any human’s life. Fear was a relative unknown. I remember being terrified by water draining from the bathtub (this probably explains more about me than all the words preceding) because I had no idea where it was going or why I would not suffer the same fate. All three synoptic gospels contain passages similar to this one from Mark 10:14: He said to them, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” Young children are innocent, placing their wholehearted faith in their mother, then their father, and so on. Fear is of the unknown, and the unknown is kept at bay by the familiar. But as we mature, a gnawing awareness of the reality of evil begins to corrode the innocence. Research has proven that to deny a newborn the opportunity to bond with its mother in the first moments of life can impact that person for the rest of his or her life. It is one thing to be afraid of the unknown, but it is an altogether different thing to experience the void of evil. With the dawning realization that all is not love and roses comes a kind of cynical resignation that manifests itself as a debate over which is more powerful, good or evil. The challenge of instilling and cultivating hope in such a creature is to communicate that “stronger than the wrong, the right; stronger than the dark, the light.”

Wednesday

A friend needed to talk during lunch today. That's why I don't have my usual lunch hour offering; a small price to pay.

One Day Later

Mary and I were blessed by a happy anniversary that this year coincided with a holiday weekend. We went to see Lewis Black perform after we dined at the Mirage Buffet (we hadn’t been to a buffet in I don’t know how long), and marveled at how we still want to be around each other after these thirty-nine years (there were fifteen months before we got married). I thought that one of our Memorial Day activities was quite meaningful. We bought birthday and graduation cards. It was a nice way of remembering that ones we love.

I don’t know of any of my family ever being killed in the line of duty. That’s rather remarkable when one considers history. The only person I knew who was in the Navy when he was killed was Mickey Fitch, an iconic sixties nerd that I knew through church. There was some sort of accident involving ordinance, and his mother was never the same afterward. I’m sure that there were classmates killed in Viet Nam, but the Class of 68 Wildcats was not one to “keep in touch”, at least with me.

I have very mixed feelings about the holiday we’ve just observed. Certainly those who have given their lives in the service of their country need to be remembered, and in so doing, thanked. But there have been many who have made comparable sacrifices that were not in the military, and I am not convinced that it contributes to our progress as a country, or a species, to glorify war. My prayer is that some day we will memorialize those who make the ultimate sacrifice for love and peace, sort of like we used to do with Jesus before we made him a Republican warrior.

Perhaps of Interest...

Subject: Tell Defense Secretary Gates to hold Halliburton war profiteers accountable

Dear Friend,

The Department of Defense just gave $80 million in bonuses to KBR, a former subsidiary of Halliburton, for electrical wiring contracts in Iraq. But in a dramatic Senate hearing, the DoD's own documents revealed that U.S. soldiers have died via electrocution as a direct result of KBR's shoddy and substandard work.

Evidence revealed this week has shown that eighteen U.S. soldiers have died as a result of KBR's work -- including a decorated Green Beret whose death was classified by the U.S. Army Criminal Investigations Division as a "negligent homicide."

I just signed a petition asking Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to rescind the KBR bonuses, pursue criminal charges against the officials responsible for the electrocution deaths of U,S. soldiers, and stop awarding defense contracts to KBR & Halliburton. I hope you will, too. Please have a look and take action.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/kbr/?r_by=4145-1164500-f8TB5dx&rc=paste

Perhaps of Interest...

http://blog.sojo.net/2009/05/21/discovering-common-ground/

More Anniversary Stuff

Although I enjoy wordsmithing as much as anything else I do, I don’t think that I’ll ever find the words to adequately describe the beautiful joy that came into my life when I met Mary. Having longingly watched her from a distance, it seemed much too good to be true when she accepted my invitation to the Valentine’s Day Dance. I had dated girls/women who belonged to my caste, but to reach out for this beauty was truly exceeding my grasp. And then to learn that she actually liked me, loved me, was beyond my wildest imagination. There was never any question in my mind that this was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, and even though there were those who thought we were rushing into marriage after having dated for a little over a year, we knew that it was right for us. Dad, as the condition for officiating at our wedding, sent us to a counselor who pronounced that our marriage would never last. If he’s still alive these thirty-eight years later, I’d like to show him how very wrong his educated opinion turned out to be. The experience did teach me, however, when I myself counseled couples wanting to get married, to never be so arrogant as to judge whether a relationship was going to succeed or not. The truth is that such is not even the purpose of meaningful counseling, but I digress. On Saturday, my best friend, my significant other, my soul mate, my wife and I will enjoy an evening with Lewis Black. Neither of us dreamed that our thirty-eighth anniversary would be spent in Las Vegas, anymore than we knew that we would parent two beautiful daughters. The only thing we’ve known for sure these many years is that we love each other, and that God has richly blessed our union.

Time Out!

Many of you will be relieved to learn that there are certain occasions which warrant my straying from the tedious story of my life. Today is certainly such an occasion as heartfelt congratulations are extended to Rachel and Steve upon their third wedding anniversary. Talk about Zeitgeist! My noon reading TIME (get it? it’s classic!) included All but the Ring: Why Some Couples Don’t Wed by Lisa Selin Davis. Never mind that the title online is different than the one in print, because the “social norms” article explains how very abnormal Rachel and Steve are. It also serves to explain why I at times feel terribly old. What will probably never be outdated is the commitment derived from genuine love, whatever form it takes. This is what I find so inspiring and hopeful about my daughter and son (in law). That was the other coincidence today (or was it?) as I listened to the Beatles singing what Rachel and Steve used as the recessional at their wedding: All You Need Is Love. I’m exceptionally proud of these two outstanding human beings, happy to have been united with our larger family created by their marriage, and excited by the prospect of exploring new dimensions of just what home can mean. Happy Anniversary, you two, with wishes for many, many more.

Night Visions

I can still see it clearly in my mind’s eye. In the dark of night, a multicolored apparition glowed silently by my bedroom closet. It was both frightening and fascinating, but the fear quickly outweighed my curiosity. I sensed its presence but could not identify its intentions. Finally, I mustered a yell (scream?) for Mom and Dad. Of course there was nothing in the room by the time they arrived, and I was introduced to the concept of nightmares. I haven’t had a nightmare for quite a while. The last I can recall was of Rebecca being swept down a storm drain and my being absolutely helpless. But nightmares are dreams, and that long ago apparition in Platteville wasn’t. There was a second such appearance when I was several years older, although this little, bald-headed creature at the foot of my bed at least looked human. In the most conventional sense, home is where it’s safe, where it’s secure, and now I was experiencing phenomena quite capable of undetected intrusion. I was beginning to learn that reality consists of more than what the five senses can detect.

Shedding Light on the Dark Side

In a way, I was born into Eden. Mom and Dad were there from the beginning, friendly grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins hovered around us, and a dog and sister—in that order—complemented a perfectly wonderful existence. The death of Bobbo and Uncle John, however, foreshadowed a side of life not to be trusted, to be avoided. I heard talk of a place called Korea, and that Kim was not Kimberly because of that. Dad suffered an appendicitis attack that hospitalized him, Mom was hospitalized twice including Kim’s birth, and death took parishioners and unknown distant family. There was talk of a man named Jesus and his horrible crucifixion (although he apparently recovered nicely). There was good, but there was also bad. There was right, but there was also wrong. I don’t remember too many spankings, but one that stands out in my mind was for talking to a hitchhiker on the west side of the church building next to the highway. I had been told not to do that, but I did, and there were consequences. Home is about safety and security, and as the mind develops it begins to understand that the antitheses of those are danger and insecurity. Looming in the silent background was the War that had ended not that long ago, a human drama that apparently affected every being on the planet, somehow a challenge to the notion that God is love, that God is good.

Perhaps of Interest

People can talk about their understanding of God until the cows come home, but nothing really changes until they translate their understanding of God into their prayers.

                                                                                                                                  --John Shelby Spong

Normal Abnormality

One attempt to define home is that which is normal. We’re born into a normal world, because we have nothing to differentiate from. A child born into the impoverishment of the Sudan knows nothing else, and so for her or him it is normal. Children born to a single parent family don’t comprehend that to be any different than does the child born into a two parent family, be those parents homosexual or heterosexual. That into which we are born is normal for as long as we don’t exercise the ability to compare and contrast. Some of this differentiation is natural to the physiological development of the species, but I’m guessing that even more of it is cultural—and that doesn’t happen automatically just by growing older. Thus, a child born into a relatively static cultural environment is not going to need to make the distinctions that are required in a more dynamic one. We’re back to the old relativity thing again. As I grew in wisdom and in stature (forgive me if this comparison to Jesus seems heretical to some) I began to notice things. No one else in Platteville lived in the house next to the Methodist church. No one else’s dad was in the pulpit every Sunday. No one else was the Methodist preacher’s kid. Every one of these things was abnormal as far as the larger population was concerned, but were perfectly normal to me because that is what I knew, what I experienced. I’m discovering that this journey home upon which I’ve embarked is one of stating the painfully obvious. Everyone already knows what I’m saying. But not everyone seems to remember. The discernment between normal and abnormal too often results in judgment, and worse, prejudice. Wise are the prophets who proclaim that judgment is for God alone, at least when it comes to deciding who’s normal and who’s not.

Let the Nostalgia Begin

I’m staying in Platteville longer than I had expected, reinforcing that school of thought that the critical years of human development are between three and five. I could have been anywhere during those formative years, but Platteville it was. We had no television. Mom and Dad knew some people who did. When we were visiting the Swan family in Denver once, their children invited me to watch this little round screen with them. As I already mentioned, Bobbo and Grannie had a television, and I suppose that Grandma and Grandpa did too, although I don’t remember them having one until Grandpa bought a color television so that Grandma could watch the Rose Parade. Radio was the medium. Dad marked the spot on the console dial in the living room so that I could tune in Aunt Dottie from Fort Collins and listen to episodes of Sparky and Bozo the Clown. Mom and I would listen to Jack Benny on Saturday nights as we folded the bulletins to be used in worship the next morning. Occasionally, Dad would need to visit someone hospitalized in Denver and Mom and I would listen to Dragnet on the car radio as we waited. Grandma and Grandpa always had KOA tuned in to Pete Smythe’s show as breakfast was being prepared. The fascination of radio was that it stimulated visions to accompany what one was hearing, which was very entertaining (although it was often a rude awakening to ever see a picture of what that voice on the radio actually looked like). I guess I’ve earned the right to look back to those as simpler times, and to wonder what childhood must be like for the kids today who are bombarded by media. We boomers were born on the cusp of technology, perhaps slightly better equipped to ask the psalmist’s question, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?” (Psalm 8:4, KJV)

Home Is Where Mom Is

Congratulate me upon articulating the absolutely obvious. My blogging calendar is a couple of days slow but homage to mothers is still in order. The dominant figure in those early years I’ve been recalling is unquestionably Mom. Over the years I’ve had interesting discussions/arguments with women about the superiority of females with regard to the relationship they have with their children. We may be at the technological dawn of heretofore unimaginable means of human reproduction, but for the millennia of human history to this point, mothers carry, bear and nurture the human infant. The male does his initial part, and has the choice of his degree of involvement with the parenting process after the birth, but only the female has that firsthand experience of giving birth and bonding. Dad is certainly in many, if not most, of the memories I have of Erie and Platteville, but it is always in a secondary role. Now I can understand that it was because he was out earning the livelihood that kept house and home together, but at the time he was simply a significant figure who was sometimes present and at other times disappeared. It was Mom who taught me how to read, to write, to pray, to sing, to tie my shoes, to skip…the list goes on ad infinitum. In looking back, the interesting twist is that my hope in learning all the lessons Mom taught me was to impress Dad with them. Children are sometimes said to be blessed by simplicity, but the process of developing, maturing and evolving is anything but.

Just What Am I Doing?

One of the nice things about blogging is that I don’t have to have a good reason for what I choose to blog about. Since Incite is obviously not-for-profit, I don’t even have to answer to advertisers. Still, I feel a keen responsibility for those few who take the time to read my thoughts, and it is in this spirit that I am realizing the need to offer a little more explanation for what I’m hoping to communicate through the “going home” theme. Like all other human beings, mine is the only firsthand experience I have. All else is secondhand. Due to the human mind’s propensity for reason, even firsthand experience cannot be considered objective because it is subject to perception and interpretation. Nonetheless, it is the best that any of us has to work with. So, as I continue to introspect, it is not with the illusion of thinking that my readers are going to find such personal minutiae to be utterly fascinating, but rather might be moved by the example to your own introspection. How have you become who you are? Why do you think what you do? Why do you believe what you do? If everyone were to sincerely seek the answers to such questions, I cannot help but believe that a genuine ethic of mutual reciprocity would emerge as humans begin to sympathize and empathize one with another. Yes, my life is unique. But so is yours. And when we understand that about each other we begin to harmonize.

Perhaps of Interest:

Of course, when we say God is personal, we are not describing God; we are describing our experience of God. Since we are persons, we can receive the transcendent power of life, love and being only as "personal." There is nothing wrong with that. To move from these to a statement about what God's being actually is, however, is more than any of us should claim.

I have never known an honest and open theological attempt to probe the mystery of God to be destructive.

– John Shelby Spong

Are Christians Bad for an Empire's Economy? Should They Be? by Julie Clawson

And Mitzi Smiled

I surprise myself with all that I can remember about Platteville…Mrs. Camden and Eleanor…Ruben and Ladean…Rene and Georgia Morgan…the biplane crop duster that dive bombed the field just north of the church…the alfalfa dryer at the grain mill and the steam locomotives that whistled through town…the cemetery on the hill east of town…the telephone office just south of the church where the operator took and placed calls…the rope swing from the tree by the garage. There are many pages to be filled with recollections of young life in the rural town, but that’s not really the purpose of this particular quest. On August 18, 1954, our family was made whole with the birth of my sister, Kim. A father, a mother, a son and a daughter; what could possibly be more normal? There were trips to Burlington, Colorado Springs, and Greeley to visit family, but home was the four of us…plus Mitzi, our Dumb Friends League version of a golden retriever who communicated as clearly as anyone how welcome Kim was to our clan simply by her canine grin.

The Four-tunate Year

The current issue of TIME features the 100 most influential people in the world. As always, it is fascinating to learn more about those who shape life for the rest of us. But, as Uncle Albert demonstrated, everything is relative. The two most influential people in my life are Mom and Dad, and to expand the number to one-hundred would be a simple game of six degrees from them. It is true that this trek home is self-indulgent to the point of being narcissistic, but I keep hoping that I may somehow convey the understanding that my memories are representative of billions more. Every child is born into this world believing that her or his experience is “normal”, which makes the countless other experiences “abnormal” from the personal vantage. As I developed physically and psychologically during those critical early years, I began to realize that being a preacher’s kid wasn’t all that normal. No one else’s father preached from the pulpit each Sunday. No one else lived in the parsonage next door to the church. No one else had the love and devotion of my mother. But it was normal to me because it was all I knew. And without any way of articulating it, I was becoming aware of the spectre of evil from which no home is absolutely safe.

the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away

-- Job 1: 20-21 (KJV)

My memories of Bobbo and Uncle John are few and precious. I can remember crawling up into Bobbo’s lap to watch Red Buttons on television. His laugh made me feel good. Uncle John had a winning smile. Mom can correct me, but I must have been about three years old when the news came to Platteville that Bobbo and Uncle John had been killed in an automobile accident between Denver and Colorado Springs. As James Burke so eloquently details in his book The Day the Universe Changed mine was that day. To that point, life was about just that. Starting with Mom and Dad was an ever-expanding horizon of new faces and new relationships, but on that day I was introduced to death. I had no notion of the Butterfly Effect—I’m still not sure that I understand it—but the death of Mom’s father and brother forever changed the ever-forward progression of time in such a way that no one can ever know how it might have turned out differently had they lived. It was an early introduction to the fragility of life and the irreversibility of death. Things were never quite so normal again.

Ram the father of Amminadab…

My world was Mom and Dad, but they shared their world with others. Each had parents: Grannie and Bobbo were Mom’s; Grandma and Grandpa were Dad’s. Each had brothers and sisters: Uncle John, Uncle Hud, and Aunt Evie were Mom’s; Aunt Esther and Uncle Dale were Dad’s. There were even parents of parents of parents: Great Granddad Hanna was Grandpa’s father, Great Grandad Hettinger was Grandma’s father, and Nana was Grannie’s mother. Aunt Esther was married to Uncle Harold and had two children (I learned that these were cousins), Gary and Dalene. Uncle Dale was married to Aunt Phyllis and had three daughters: Joan, Carol and Linda. Uncle John was married to Aunt Evelyn, and they had no children. Uncle Hud was married to Aunt Margaret and had three sons: Bob, Rod and Doug. I actually attended Aunt Evie’s wedding when she married Uncle Henry, and they eventually had four daughters: Eve, Amy, Roz and Katy. Mom and Dad presented me with a sister, Kim, while we were living in Platteville, and all this simply meant that my home and my world were getting larger.

P.S. Congratulations to the readers who knew they were reading Matthew 1:4 in the title :-)