For Sunday, March 27, 2016. Easter.

DON'T GET ME WRONG, I love autumn: the turning leaves, the cool, crisp air, the Pumpkin Spice Latte. But, I can’t imagine Easter in any other season but spring. Can you?

How can we fully appreciate life beyond the grave without the imagery and poetry of spring flowers and colors, trees budding, and longer days, newness breaking forth?

Do those in the Southern Hemisphere dye their eggs in deep reds, oranges, and golds? Does their Easter Bunny wear a sweater? Probably not. But happy Easter and happy autumn to all our brothers and sisters Down Under anyway.

Springtime with Nora

Recollections

rec·ol·lec·tion |ˌrekəˈlekSH(ə)n| noun

the action or faculty of remembering something.
“to the best of my recollection no one ever had a bad word to say about him”
a thing recollected; a memory.

As I write, I’m listening to a song called “Recollections” by Miles Davis and band. It’s 19 minutes of free jazz and one of my favorites. I tend to be mindful of having a soundtrack to life.

This week I roadtripped to Nashville. I prepared for the trip emotionally and spiritually by listening several times to Loretta Lynn’s new record, “Full Circle”. The trip represented a sort of full circle for me. I was visiting Floyd and Ann Craig at their beautiful home in Nashville, AKA, The No-Agenda Retreat Center. Riding shotgun was my dear friend and mentor Doug Manning. Driving up from Atlanta to join us was my “brother” Gene Chapman.

For me this was a re-collection of people who have been there in some of the most pivotal times of my life. We spent hours recollecting and remembering the past better than it was. (As we’re apt to do.)

Back in the early 70s I was going through a crisis of faith and calling. Floyd was my go-to guy during this and he introduced me to Doug. If you’re interested in more of that story, I’ve told a bit of it in a post last year about this time. Gene and I met a few years later as I was seeking to live out my calling on the other side of the crisis. I've always felt I could be completely real with Gene.

Hopefully you get a sense of how important these guys are to me, as are the recollections that have rushed in through being with them again.

photo by Krystal Brauchi

I also hope that in the midst of the bunnies and eggs and chocolate and ham this weekend, you will re-collect your friends and families and that there will be good times of story-telling and recollecting.

Most of all I hope for a time of anamnesis for all of us.

anamnesis |ˌanəmˈnēsis| noun
(from the Greek word ἀνάμνησις meaning reminiscence and/or memorial sacrifice), in Christianity is a liturgical statement in which the Church refers to the memorial character of the Eucharist and/or to the Passion, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ. It has its origin in Jesus’ words at the Last Supper, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me”, (Luke 22:19, 1 Corinthians 11:24-25).  -- Wikipedia

Anamnesis is just a fancy word for recollecting, for remembering, but that is powerful stuff. I heard a doctor speak one time about remembering. He explained that when someone loses an appendage, let’s say a finger, it is called “dismembered”. He said that when it is reattached it should be called “re-membered”.

That’s what happens when we remember: we reengage, we reconnect, we re-member and we recollect. That’s why families and friends gather and stories are told; to re-member.

At our No-Agenda Retreat in Nashville, we all gathered around a table for lunch in a restaurant. Floyd asked, “Do you all remember the way Grady Nutt used to say the blessing before a meal?” Grady Nutt was a special guy to all of us there. Grady, unfortunately died in a plane crash many years ago, but we remember him.

So Floyd led us in the blessing, just as Grady would have done. We all joined hands and Floyd said exuberantly in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “He’s done it again!!!!”

What a beautiful acknowledgement of the provision of God. It was so wonderful to re-collect and recollect.
 

If I Had A Hammer

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

That’s one of my favorite “proverbs”. I’ve used it for years and always attributed it to Abraham Maslow. But, have I been correct in doing so? Wiktionary to the rescue:

From the book Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham H. Maslow (1962):

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

Similar concept by Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science, (1964):

“I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”

This blog post is about tools and utility and reductionism and throwing away some of life’s wonders like so much ephemera.

One of the frustrations of aging is losing your tools, not your physical tools like your screwdriver or tape measure, but finding you don’t hear as well as you once could, or see, or smell, and that wonderful tool of memory, where did I put that? Years ago a guy named Stephen Covey reduced the concept of being “highly effective” to seven habits. Number 7 was, “Sharpen the Saw”. Sometimes these days I can’t even remember where my saw is, much less how to sharpen it.

But even more tragic than losing tools through aging, is when we recklessly throw out tools—reducing the options in our toolbox by seeking simple, quick solutions—casting aside the tools of wonder, creativity, inquiry, spiritual quests, and in their place adding dogma, doctrine, principles, processes—tools that certainly have their time and purpose, but ugly and dangerous when they become the only tools we have.

If Kaplan is right about his “law of the instrument”, then I can probably look at my behavior and attitude and learn something. If I’m constantly pounding everything, there’s a good chance that I’ve reduced my toolbox to a hammer. You know what I mean?

So today, I’m taking stock. I’m thinking of my worldview, my politics, my religion, my relationships, my motives, my dreams, and I’m asking myself: what tools do I have in the box?

I read a column in the Washington Post. As I read I thought, I want more hope, that somehow we can collectively see that it’s going to take more than a hammer to pound everything, more than a screwdriver to continue to do what screwdrivers do. The proof is in the opening paragraph of the story:

There is so much anger out there in America: “Anger at Wall Street. Anger at Muslims. Anger at trade deals. Anger at Washington. Anger at police shootings of young black men. Anger at President Obama. Anger at Republican obstructionists. Anger about political correctness. Anger about the role of big money in campaigns. Anger about the poisoned water of Flint. Anger about deportations. Anger about undocumented immigrants. Anger about a career that didn’t go as expected. Anger about a lost way of life. Mob anger at groups of protesters in their midst. Specific anger and undefined anger and even anger about anger.”

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I love poetry. Since our culture tends to reduce the idea of manliness to a caricature that real-men shouldn’t enjoy reading much of anything, especially poetry, I’m including a manly-esque poem, written by John Updike, author of works every guy should read. I share it because it has helped me take the measure of my tools.

Tools
By John Updike

Tell me, how do the manufacturers of tools
turn a profit? I have used the same clawed hammer
for forty years. The screwdriver misted with rust
once slipped into my young hand, a new householder’s.
Obliviously, tools wait to be used: the pliers,
notched mouth agape like a cartoon shark’s; the wrench
with its jaws on a screw; the plane still sharp enough
to take its fragrant, curling bite; the brace and bit
still fit to chew a hole in pine like a patient thought;
the tape rule, its inches unaltered though I have shrunk;
the carpenter’s angle, still absolutely right though I
have strayed; the wooden bubble level from my father’s
meagre horde. Their stubborn shapes pervade the cellar,
enduring with a thrift that shames our wastrel lives.

IF I HAD A HAMMER. Click and listen. Makes me long for the beautiful complexity of the 60s and my first Coming-Of-Age, when my toolbox was full, even though I often tore up more things than I fixed or built. At least I was alive.

WWLVS?

Do you know Lady Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham? If you don’t, then it’s safe to say you didn’t watch Downton Abbey. I’m sorry. You need to know this about her, at least: if having a sharp tongue and just the right words required a license, she would have an “open-carry permit”.

The Dowager Countess of Grantham, Lady Violet Crawley

Every single time she would deliver a wonderfully crafted zinger I would wish I could do that. Sometimes I would picture the person I would say the words to. In one episode she said, “Vulgarity is no substitute for wit.” I thought of Donald Trump. In another episode she said, “Does it ever get cold on the moral high ground?” I thought of Ted Cruz.

Then I thought, maybe it would be fun to list some of the best quotes from the Dowager Countess herself and match them up with the presidential candidate that it best fits. Turns out it was fun—you know in the spirit of laughing to keep from crying. Maybe you would like to give it a try. Here’s the list. Simply put the initials of the candidate that first comes to mind when you read that quote.

__________ “He looks as if he’s waiting for a beating from the headmaster.”

__________ “I wonder your halo doesn’t grow heavy, it must be like wearing a tiara round the clock.”

__________ “I am a woman. I can be as contrary as I choose.”

__________ “Principles are like prayers; noble, of course, but awkward at a party.”

__________ “At my age, one must ration one’s excitement.”

__________ “Does it ever get cold on the moral high ground?”

__________ “I don’t dislike him. I just don’t like him. Which is quite different.”

__________ Mrs. Crawley: “I take that as a compliment.”
Countess Violet: “I must have said it wrong.”

__________ Dr. Clarkson: “You want me to lie?”
Countess Violet: “Lie is so unmusical a word.”

__________ “There’s nothing simpler than avoiding people you don’t like. Avoiding one’s friends, that’s the real test.”

__________ “Don’t be defeatist, dear, it’s very middle class.”

__________ “You are a woman with a brain and reasonable ability. Stop whining and find something to do.”

__________ “Sir Richard, life is a game, where the player must appear ridiculous.”

__________ “We don’t always get our just desserts.”

__________ “All life is a series of problems which we must try and solve.”

__________ Isobel: “How you hate to be wrong.” Countess Violet: “I wouldn’t know, I’m not familiar with the sensation.”

__________ “It always happens when you give these little people power, it goes to their heads like strong drink.”

__________ “I cannot find the words to say how I feel.”

That last one--“I cannot find the words to say how I feel", That's the one that keeps running through my mind every time the topic of the race for the POTUS comes up.