Category Archives: Journal

We Wait

We wait for return to a job and a paycheck.
We wait for a normal workday at our healthcare jobs.
We wait for the library to open.
We wait for food.
We wait for worship with our friends singing and praying beside us.
We wait for help with our mortgage payment.
We wait for a haircut.
We wait to have our teeth fixed.
We wait for the surgery that keeps being delayed.
We wait for schools to start.

Who knew we have been taking so much for granted?

Lord, please help us learn from this waiting, so that we will take better care of the things that really matter.

That Road to Emmaus

Two disciples of Jesus had business in Emmaus, a town out a little ways from Jerusalem. They were in deep despair,—no deepest despair.

Their teacher Jesus now was dead, crucified by the Romans. Wonderful, shining hope that Jesus was the Messiah, sent to set up the kingdom of God, were dashed. And for three days, continuing despair.

True, some women claimed the tomb where Jesus’ body had been placed was empty. Something also about angels around the tomb. But they were just women, no doubt in some kind of hysteria over all that had happened.

Well, life had to go on. They had business in the town of Emmaus, out from Jerusalem.

Then this stranger suddenly showed up and started talking to them as they walked.
Even then, they were slow to understand.

When they stopped at Emmaus, the stranger made as though to keep going. When they suggested he stop and eat with them, he agreed.

God, after all, doesn’t force himself on us. We have to invite him in.

Jesus had to break bread with them, before a—what—quiet gesture of bread breaking, life breaking—startled them. Suddenly, like that—finally—they knew.

And they were never the same again and neither was the world.

Viral Awakening

We might consider Covid-19 as a wake up call. Or as a another kind of New Years Day. An opportunity for change.

The virus suggests a different set of values than we’re used to living by. What’s important now?

Family and friends, of course.

A safe place to shelter, not housing as investment.

Food and grocery stores.

Care givers for the sick and the elderly and the young. Those who rescue and protect.

The workers who perform tasks that must go on if civilized society is to continue: sanitation workers, farmers, grocery store clerks, janitors.

A reshuffling of our values might prod us toward a society which better rewards care givers and child care workers. Perhaps we might revisit our penchant for seeing housing as investment and instead see it as a universal need.

We could, in addition, build places of refuge and growth for the mentally ill and for those crushed by addiction.

We could revisit the ways we use our country’s wealth. Higher wages for the ordinary worker? Housing they can afford to live in? Affordable medical care? Education and job training?

Happy New Year!

Political Righteousness

When I lived in Saudi Arabia in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, some American citizens living and working in that country enjoyed raising their children there. Drugs and crime were much less than in the States. Of course, religious gatherings of Christians and any religion other than Islam were forbidden and had to be carried out discretely.

X-rated movies weren’t allowed, but neither were films like depictions of the Narnia tales or The Lion King or Charlotte’s Web.

Pornography might be punished by flogging, but one who dared criticize the country’s rulers risked the same punishment.

Richer citizens could escape the publicly strict moral code by paying smugglers to bring in whatever they wanted—liquor, x-rated movies, even maids to abuse. The religious/political alliance that ruled the country often led to outward piety, pleasing the religious, but encouraging corruption among the elites.

In this country, the recent marriage between the Trump presidency and the anti-abortion cause illustrates the danger of a religion hitching its wagon to a particular political movement for the sake of one cause. In this case, it risks supporting a political establishment that might commit killing small or unborn children in other ways.

The political powers might suggest, for example, beginning a war against Iran with the potential to kill thousands, including pregnant mothers and small children.

Or decreasing funds for healthcare for American children.

Or supporting a war in Yemen leading to starvation and disease that kills still other children.

A close alliance with any political power risks being coopted by that power for its own selfish goals.

The Black Stallion

A series of books about a boy and a horse enlivened my childhood. The horse was a black stallion out of Arabia, featured in a series by Walter Farley. I was not particularly drawn to horses themselves, as some children are, but the stories intrigued me, especially the second in the series, The Black Stallion Returns.

In the first book, The Black Stallion, Alec Ramsey, a boy on his way home to the United States from visiting his uncle in India, is shipwrecked. He is saved by a black stallion, also being shipped on the boat. Alec is able to hold onto a rope around the horse and is pulled to dry land.

By the time they are rescued, Alec and the stallion have become friends. Alec begins training him and enters a race.

However, The Black Stallion Returns was my favorite of the series. The supposed owner of the horse (an Arabian chieftain) appears, claims the animal as his own and takes him away to Saudi Arabia. Eventually, Alec follows them to that country to reclaim his horse.

This strange country intrigued me. Who knows—it may have contributed to my choice of Saudi Arabia for two of my assignments in the U.S. Foreign Service.

Books can be powerful influences, especially on children.

I would have missed much in my fortunate life if I had lacked public schools and public libraries and parents and teachers who cared.

Why was the Christmas Eve service so meaningful this year?

I have been to many such services in my life in all sorts of different places and times of life. So, as my husband and I walked the short distance to our church this year, perhaps it was more out of habit than hope.

But the familiar message—I’ve heard it enough to have it memorized—helpless babe in a manager, come into a hate-filled world full of hurting people.

But this year, tears glistened in my eyes, evidence this time of the message going deeper.

Why? Perhaps because this year, this end of 2019, the times appear especially hopeless, and we are desperate. We’ve been through a deluge of hate-filled, hurting words. Homeless men, women, and children are everywhere. Some have become so desperate that our birth rate is falling and the death rate of young and middle aged people has been hastened by overdoses and suicides.

And, we are told, 2020 will not be any better, maybe worse: impeachment trial, bitterly fought elections, a world with almost daily evidence of climate change affecting millions with droughts and floods.

Yet, in that way grace has of coming at the oddest moments, the message, the familiar carols, struck deeper, became beacons of hope for this time.

Somebody loved us and came to us, then preached love that has affected people mightily since that time: death didn’t stop him: His weak, sinful people have been transformed time and time again, overcoming even their own misreading of his message.

Slavery was abolished and racism, though still strong, is challenged. Women have entered public life. Young people are concerned about climate change.

When the times are right, those touched by this season’s message have always found pathways to counter the worship of wealth, power, and greed.

Waiting in a Troubled Time

“The furred magnolia buds we bring to warmth
here in the heated room soon bloom and sicken;
the tree without keeps its own secret time.”
         (Jane Tyson Clement; “Out of a Difficult and Troubled Season”)

Sometimes patient waiting is our best choice. Not idle waiting, but rather a recharging kind of waiting.

Maybe we touch base again with family and friends. Maybe we read poetry. Maybe we use a winter’s day to ponder while watching flames of a small fire in our fireplace or the rain spattering on our windows.

We do the necessary tasks, but we admit our limitations. We look for ways to appreciate those with whom we disagree.

We turn off the shouting and the tweeting. We go slowly, thoughtfully for a while. We wait patiently for the turning.

The quaint art of conversation and reading with your children

We often discussed ideas at the dinner table when I was growing up. My parents read a lot.

It had nothing to do with the level of their education. My mother had no schooling beyond high school. My father didn’t even finish high school because of the need to support his parents and younger siblings when he was a teenager.

My lower middle class parents were readers who loved to learn for its own sake, then discuss their ideas with each other and their children. Reading became as natural to my brother and me as walking.

According to several reports, including one in The New York Times, an inexpensive child rearing technique to help you raise responsible children is to read to them. (“Reading aloud to young children has benefits for behavior and attention,” 16 April 2018)

Parent to child reading not only encourages intellectual growth, studies show, but also tends to curb aggressive behavior and other troublesome activities.

The first years of a child’s life are the most important for a child’s development. Spending time with them, including talking with them and reading to them, costs little in the way of money.

Downton Abbey as Fairy Tale

So here I am enjoying the latest Downton Abbey venture.

Is it a great movie? No.

Is it realistic?

Certainly not in the sense we think of realism today. Stories that don’t always end right but lead us to see ourselves as we are, and perhaps to change, may be more realistic.

But fairy tales have their place. That’s why they’ve been around since people first told stories around a campfire.

Interesting that Downton, a nod to a vanished era, has been so successful when Britain and the United States appear to be falling apart.

But perhaps that’s the reason for its success.

Few of us want a class-based society as Britain used to be or a racist, gilded-age America as existed in the early twentieth century. Yet we sense that much in our long history is worth keeping.

Beyond the racism and wars and other abominable sins, we hunt for the promise of purer things: a sense of family, the carrying out of duty, simple caring—when those values are threatened.

Yes, fairy tales do have a place.

The Cost of Learning

John Thornton, a Baptist pastor in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, writes: “Spending on consumer goods has not driven people into debt. Rather the rising cost of fixed goods like housing, healthcare, and education combined with stagnant wages have.” (Plough, Winter, 2019)

Thornton has incurred a large debt for his education. He lauded the schools he attended as successful in instilling in him the character he needed in his career.

It also, however, left him with a monetary debt. That debt influenced him in the choices he had to make to pay it off.

Choices in education increasingly have to do with what fields are more economically rewarding. They have less to do with equipping someone to serve or to explore knowledge. Choosing education has become a “consumer decision.”

Given this outlook, we may produce less teachers and scientists and more computer engineers and CEO’s of finance. We may neglect service careers as well as the “why” careers, the ones seeking knowledge and meaning.

Creating faster computer chips and working ever more efficiencies into our economic machines are not evil in themselves. Good things result: better medical diagnostic tools, for example, or more efficient energy systems.

But our technology also has provided new ways to spread hatred and to kill. We have also improved our economic machines at the expense of the average men and women who maintain them. The underclass that resulted is riddled with growing suicide rates and drug overdoses.

For kindness and meaning and a reason to live, we need thinkers and teachers and healers and spiritual leaders.

We need more of our resources underwriting the basics mentioned by John Thornton: housing, healthcare, and education. Cheaper basics make it easier for the less materially rewarded, including, perhaps, thinkers and teachers and healers and spiritual leaders.

Community Falling and Rising

My son, nieces, and a niece’s fiancé visited to celebrate my birthday this week.

It was a lovely few days, crowded with activities. We met airport shuttles (one at 1:30 a.m.), hiked hills in the island’s wooded preserves, and ate my favorite dessert, lemon icebox pie. (The family knows I prefer this over birthday cake.)

We shared during meals and discussed the directions we are taking and retold family legends. I met the fiancé for the first time and was delighted to discover he is an Arkansas boy who talks like me.

Another group I belonged to, formed several years ago to share our lives, provided my husband and me with wonderful friends. However, as members gradually died or moved away, the group chose not to meet any longer.

Indeed, aging’s natural process means most groups die. The exceptions are groups renewing themselves with the young.

Families and religious groups are built through this youth renewal. Renewal depends on birth, but also on adoption. In the case of families, the adoption can be of a child or of an in-law. Spiritual adoption may include the ones left out of other groups, the strangers and the needy.

Gone wrong, families and religions cause enormous harm. Done right, they renew us and give us meaning and purpose and strength for tough changes.

They are, I suspect, our ultimate hope.

Begin with Thee and Me

We have different ideas about refugees and immigrants. Some welcome them with open arms. Some shun them as freeloaders and criminals. Some feel sympathy but worry about being overwhelmed by their numbers.

Recently I realized how I can’t get these people out of my mind.

From the little I know about my own ancestors, most came to this country before the American Revolution. I don’t know if they were refugees from wars in Ireland or England or France or if they were drawn simply by promises of a better life. Some of them appear to have been poor, a few more well off.

For all I know, my ancestral tree may include native Americans and black slaves as well as Europeans, but certainly the family benefitted from white privilege. We also benefitted from immigrating at the right time.

That’s why I can’t get those refugees, like the ones on our southern border, out of my mind. They’re my people several generations back.

Whatever choices we make in immigration reform—and we certainly need reform—perhaps we can act from the understanding that these immigrants and refugees are us. Wisdom we need, but hatred and disparagement we don’t.

The numbers may be large, but our policies, if we are not to be judged by a higher power, must come from compassion—toward them as well as the countries they come from.

Building Up the Land to Restore the Future

When I was growing up, my father used to spread the leaves gathered each fall from our trees into a small plot at the back of our yard, rather than burn them. He used the rich humus produced by the leaves over the years to enrich soil for our plants.

This kind of activity is practiced on a larger scale by an organization called “Plant with Purpose.” This group works with farmers in Mexico, Haiti, and other countries to merge economic and environmental renewal with spiritual renewal.

Much of the land in poorer countries has been depleted through years of deforestation and over-farming. Unable to produce a good living from the land, young men emigrate to cities, sometimes returning later addicted to alcohol or drugs and drawn to criminal gangs practicing violence.

“For those living in rural villages, the answer to emigration is often simple: Restore the land to restore the future.” (“Better Than a Wall,” Sojourners, August 2017)

Such groups promote sustainable agricultural practices, including “cover crops, organic compost, and natural soil erosion barriers to revive farmland.”

Better agricultural practices on one farm in Mexico included planting to maximize this particular plot of land. Food crops were planted on parts of the hilly land, then trees above the crops. Runoff water was used for irrigation. Grass during the dry season fed animals.

The soil gradually was replenished and produced better crops, leading to more food and a higher income. As neighbors were drawn to reproduce the process, immigration lessened. Fewer young men migrated northward.

The World’s Last Night

Even if the world does not end today, time will end for some of us today.

In an essay entitled “The World’s Last Night” (Fern-seed and Elephants), C.S. Lewis wrote about our tasks that stop, finished or not, when time ends—for us or the world.

“For what comes is judgment; happy are those whom it finds labouring in their vocations, whether they were merely going out to feed the pigs or laying good plans to deliver humanity a hundred years from now from some great evil. The curtain is indeed now fallen. Those pigs will never in fact be fed, the great campaign against white slavery or governmental tyranny will never in fact proceed to victory. No matter; you were in fact at your post when the inspection came.”

Few of us complete great deeds or find the success we intended when we began. It is enough, I think, that we are engaged in what we are called to do and follow it to the end.

Small Fires and Internet Slander

“How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire.”

After this quote from Christian scriptures (James 3:5), Marilynne Robinson continues an essay on “Slander” in her book, What Are We Doing Here?

Both Christian and Hebrew scriptures emphasize the power of the tongue to harm. Robinson writes: “ . . malicious speech ranks among the gravest transgressions.” As an example of grievous harm by slanderers, she points out the slurs against Jews during the Middle Ages, paving the way for the Holocaust centuries later.

It’s not surprising that Robinson calls many of the stories circulating on the internet a modern version of slander.

Two final quotes from Robinson’s book:

“Many people now think in terms of a Manichaean struggle between secularism and all we hold dear. On these grounds they have launched an attack on American civil society, formally a famous strength, which they see as secular because it is nonsectarian. . .

“If we are to continue as a democracy, we must find a way to stabilize the language and temper of our debates and disputes.”

Working Forward

I keep a file I call “life purposes” and add to it from time to time. About once a month, I pull something out of it to reread. I’ve had the file for many years.

“Thoughts from a foreign correspondent” is the title of an article I saved from the March 14, 1987, issue of Editor & Publisher.

The author of this particular article is a lifelong journalist, Georgie Anne Geyer, born in 1935 and still writing, according to my current internet search.

In the 1987 article, Geyer said she loved and cared about other cultures, languages, and history. She wanted to be one of those “couriers between cultures.”

She persevered in an era when women journalists were mostly relegated to the society sections of newspapers. Nevertheless, she managed to become the Latin American correspondent for the Chicago Daily News in 1964 and never looked back.

Geyer’s column is part of what inspired me also to search for that kind of job. The search took many years, but the chance finally came, and I had to decide in the space of a weekend whether to make a momentous change in my life.

I decided to leap and accepted a position with the U.S. Foreign Service. Tours took me to those places in my own dreams of a courier between cultures.

Answers to dreams come in different ways. Holding a dream, even tenaciously, does not mean we will always realize it. Seeing a future beyond our present, however, blesses us with the ability to search and change.

Religion and Writing: Never the Twain Shall Meet?

“So it is conventional among contemporary writers to exclude religion from their work, however religious the writers might in fact be. This reticence seems to be regarded by many as a courtesy, an acknowledgment of the fact that the subject can be painful or private or can stir prejudices or hostilities. Such scruples are respectable, certainly, but they tacitly reinforce the assumption that religion is essentially and inevitably divisive.”
–Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? “Considering the Theological Virtues: Faith”)

Yet, Robinson’s novel Gilead, as well as the two accompanying novels in the series, were critically acclaimed. Gilead, whose main character was a Christian minister, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005.

Humans can be capable of great cruelty, using whatever weapon is at hand, including religion.

A counterweight against cruelty, however, also is provided by religion—ministering to the excluded, for example: lepers, widows and orphans, prisoners, refugees.

Religion, at its best, searches for an inner journey leaving behind the quest for wealth and power fueling so many of our cruelties.

Why Do We Wave at Passing Trains?

Passengers trains—that is, trains for long distance travel, not commuting—remain part of our culture, despite the growth of travel by automobile and airplane. Songs like “Lonesome Whistle” and “John Henry” and “500 Miles’ feature the train as part of the country’s life story.

Anyone riding on a long distance passenger train will notice, as the train enters an urban area, especially a park, the people who stop and wave at the train. Sometimes passengers wave back.

I’m not sure of the reasons, one or many, for why we wave at trains. Perhaps it’s a moment of wishfulness to see new places, to experience a journey. Perhaps it’s also a form of community, drawing the stranger in, if only for a moment.

We wish good journey to the stranger who passes by. Just for a moment we touch.

Slow Food, Slow Travel

We’ve been treated recently to recipes and cookbooks promoting “slow” food. Slow food is a kind of protest against “fast” food. It captures the pleasure of cooking, especially as it promotes fellowship around a dinner table.

Last fall, I enjoyed slow travel. I rode the train between Portland and Seattle. Train travel, properly done, is a civilized way to travel.

As we traveled north, I contemplated river currents and fall colors and the beginnings of Puget Sound. We rode under the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and into the first area of industrial development, as well as suburbs and urban linear parks. Bikers, hikers, and parents pushing strollers looked up as we passed. Some waved.

I caught up on magazines and enjoyed a slow mystery.

Years ago my husband and I traveled by train along the Rhine River in Germany. The scenery looked like West Virginia with castles. Unhindered by constricted seating, we enjoyed conversation, reading, and watching the towns we passed.

Europe, smaller than North America, is ideal for trains. Some trains travel at speeds approaching 200 kilometers per hour or over 100 miles per hour.

One day perhaps the U.S. will develop an effective train system. Trains could connect with airlines—airlines for long distances, but frequent trains covering the areas between. Civilized slow travel.

Parents Teaching Children to Ride Bikes

Parents oversee their children’s first attempts to ride bikes as they oversaw their first attempts to walk. The journey on wheels may begin with tricycles, training wheels, or smaller bikes.

The children take short trips away, but eventually, they will take long trips to lives of their own.

Much of parenthood is teaching children the skills they need to leave home.

Those who become responsible, caring adults often are blessed with caring parents and stable households.

Thankfully, men and women can and do overcome incompetent, even cruel parents, but the resources required to undo the damage can be immense.

Not everyone is called to it, but to those who are, parenthood is literally the job everything else depends on.