IN PURSUIT

I’M NOT SAYING that the pursuit of peace is insignificant or unworthy, just slipping toward insincere, or so it seems; but vital and essential.

Cynicism has always been in the battered bag of things that I allow to trip me up. Accelerating age seems to deepen and thicken it, along with my anger over prescription medicine advertisements on TV.

Still, I remain hopeful that peace in our hearts, in our families, and in our relationships will grow and grow. I would like to be optimisic about world peace but that nagging cynicism won't let me go there; particularly when the Pursuit of Peace is stamped official by being screenprinted on a backdrop behind high-positioned folk. So it seems the mission is handed over to those in pursuit of other things like power, domination, supremacy, or whatever satisfies their base hunger and lusts. All that just seems contrary to peace pursuance.

There are some things that some people may be ill-suited for, or maybe they're being dishonest with themselves, or maybe they are dishonest and just nearly-to-completely self-serving--their narcissism has killed any seed of imagination. Maybe, for example, someone wants a medal for peace-making so badly that they will cook up a crock of drama, masquerading as the greatest maker of peace of all the peace-makers ever.

It would be sort of like putting me in charge of guarding a cooling batch of no-bake cookies. I may boast of being a cookie guardian, but when it comes to keeping my hand out of the cookie jar, I'm weak, insatiable and lacking any moral backbone whatsoever. And there's a darker corner in here that makes me apathetic about whether anyone else gets a cookie or not.

Every single day I wear a Peace Sign pendant. I know all the words to John Lennon's song "Give Peace A Chance". One of my favorite passages is from the book of First Peter, chapter 3:

“Whoever wants to embrace life and see the day fill up with good, Here’s what you do: Say nothing evil or hurtful; Snub evil and cultivate good; run after peace for all you’re worth.”

— 1 Peter 3:10-11. The Message.

My favorite of the Beatitudes is #7: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. --Matthew 5:9

Does all that make me a peace-maker? Not any more than wearing a badge that says, "ICE: International Cookie Enforcer" and telling people that I love cookies even more than Cookie Monster himself makes me a worthy guardian of the no-back cookies cookie jar.

Some may sense a tinge of hypocracy here: me acting like a peacenik while throwing little rocks at those who have the power to end conflicts but don't. Guilty your honor(s).

So how does one become a maker, sustainer, propagator and keeper of peace?

The wisdom seems to be in that verse: "Say nothing evil or hurtful; Snub evil and cultivate good; run after peace for all you're worth." After all; who doesn't want to "embrace life and see the day fill up with good"?

Here's a shot of Our Grands, last Christmastime, that season when we sing and remember the story about "Peace On Earth"! [Trying to pass my belief in the goodness, truth and beauty of PEACE on to the next generation.]

PEACE to you and yours.

Christmas Cards

CHRISTMAS CARDS ARE IMPORTANT. I’m just sentimental enough to believe that traditions are important. The keeping of traditions is one of the things I like best about the holiday season. But Christmas cards; they’re special, at least to me, because they are one of the last bastions of congeniality. Remember when people used to write letters, notes and cards? Just last night, following a magnificent performance by one of our Grand-Girls in the school Christmas musical, I returned to the car to find a hand-written note on my windshield. It was a note of encouragement, telling me I should do a better job of parking next time.

It takes a certain human intentionality and connectedness to sit down and write a note, put in an envelope, address it, lick the flap, apply the stamp and drop it in the mail. Now we text, email, send birthday greetings on Facebook, etc. This season I’ve received a few virtual Christmas cards via email. Next time save yourself the trouble, I’m not buying the sincerity.

MANY CARD-SENDING SEASONS AGO, I was looking through an assortment of boxed, pre-printed, Christmas cards at a bookstore: “I like this one, but I wish it said this… This one is cool except for that creepy angelic creature lurking among the clouds. Surely Gabriel didn’t resemble that!” and so my mind went; on and on. And, then, I thought, “Why not design a Christmas card of our own?!”

There have been several of these homemade, bespoke card designs over as many years now. BTW: If you don’t get one in the mail, don’t despair. Your Christmas will be full and complete without one.

Several times, I’ve collaborated with other designers and artists for the card design. These are my favorites. My all time favorite was with an amazing Japanese/American artist named Julie Robertson, aka: Juuri. Julie and her husband Eric are very dear friends and special people to us.

For the collaboration, I gave Julie a poem I had written and asked her if she would do a watercolor to go along with the poem. The front of the card looked like this—

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Copyright 2010. Juuri & Dave

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The inside of the card looked like this—

Copyright 2010. Juuri & Dave

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Julie is, among other things, an amazing mural artist. She has painted murals around the world, literally.

Julie at work.

Work in progress.

DONE!

I invite you to visit Julie’s website juuriart.com to see more of her work. Good news—if you would like to have one of her works, you don’t have to have a giant wall for a mural. She has smaller works as well. And, even prints.

So, that was our card in 2010. Now it’s 2018. I struggled more with the design of the 2018 card than I have with any other design. That’s largely because of the inner struggle I am having with the twisting and distorting that I believe is being done to the nature and beauty and truth of Jesus by the religious right. Compared to the card Julie and I did for 2010, the 2018 card may seem like I just threw something together—it’s black and white, looks cheap, and cynical.

That verse though… the one from the Gospel of John… about the Incarnation… It doesn’t need adorning or beautifying. It just needs to be wrestled with. So I’ve been searching my soul and my world for evidence of that mysterious, mind-blowing, heart-changing, soul-searching thing called Incarnation.

In case your copy of the card was lost in the mail, here’s the front—

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And here’s the inside—

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Where can we find and pay homage to the newborn King of the Jews? We observed a star in the eastern sky that signaled his birth. We’re on pilgrimage to worship him. —Matthew 2:2

Follow that star. Merry Christmas.

70 Times 7

I FIRMLY BELIEVE that there are spiritual realities that are beyond human understanding. Here, here’s an example: “…God’s peace, which is far more wonderful than the human mind can understand…” [from Philipians 4:6 The Living Bible]

Of course that doesn’t stop us from trying to understand, to seek meaning, to boil it all down to an unequivocal absolute. The danger there is that we might strip away the beauty, the mystery and the wonder. We’re left with someone’s interpretation, and in our desire to comprehend the incomprehensible, we settle for the opinion or worldview of another; for better or worse.

Forgiveness. That’s a tough one. In my sixty-some years of Sunday school, sermons, and scripture reading; not to mention prayers for wisdom and simple answers, I still don’t understand Forgiveness. I believe it is right up there with Peace in being “far more wonderful than the human mind can understand.”

Jesus was pretty clear on the subject, at least regarding the relentlessness of Forgiveness.

Then Peter came to him and asked, “Lord, how often should I forgive someone who sins against me? Seven times?”

“No, not seven times,” Jesus replied, “but seventy times seven!
—Matthew 18:21-22 New Living Translation

So, what is it? Exoneration, making amends, mercy, absolution, forgetting about it? Let’s just say it’s complicated. Here’s an example:

One of my favorite singer/songwriters is Brandi Carlile. I have all her albums except for her newest which is to be released on February 16. I have heard the album and it is amazing. It’s called, “By The Way, I Forgive You”.

In learning more about the album, I’ve learned more about Brandi. As a part of the album’s release, she and a couple of her bandmates decided to talk about their forgiveness stories and encourage others to do so as well, even going so far as to use social media and the hastag #ByTheWayIForgiveYou to provide a forum of sorts for sharing.

One of the stories from the Twitter thread was in video form, a young lady granting forgiveness posthumously to her father who died of alcoholism when she was only eleven. It is all extremely moving and affirms the fact that the process of forgiving and being forgiven is deeper than our understanding.

It all caused me to think about my personal encounters with the concept. Without a doubt, if the thing is a dichotomy with Forgiving on one end and Being Forgiven on the other, by far I have been on the Need-to-be-Forgiven end than I have the Need-to-Forgive side. 

Back to Brandi Carlile and her story of the gnarly, knotty, beautiful, spiritual affair of Forgiveness. Her story rang so true and relevant for me. Here, in her words:

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I would like to forgive Pastor Tim.

I forgive you for deciding not to baptize me when I was a teenager for being gay.

It was not so much that you wouldn’t or couldn’t do it because of the tenets put in place by the baptist rules and traditions, but because you waited until all my family and friends were present and waiting in the pews for the ceremony.

I don’t believe you did it to humiliate me - I think you struggled with the decision and simply ran out of time... I think you probably still do struggle with it.

I’d like you to know that I still love you and that I understand we’re all on a journey together, trying our best to walk through the world with honor and dignity - but what I want you to know most of all is that you did not damage my faith. Not in god, not in humanity and not in myself.

The experience inspired me to help other gay kids and my spiritual LGBTQ brothers and sisters come to terms with the disappointments they’ve endured on the rugged road to peace and acceptance. I think you’d appreciate that process.

You’ve helped far more people than you’ve hurt and you helped me too.

Thank you

xobc

#bythewayiforgiveyou

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I don’t know Pastor Tim, but I do know “Pastor Tim” in the sense that he could be so many other well-meaning, God-fearing humans making human messes in God’s name. I would love to visit with him to see how he feels all these years later about that day, about Brandi’s amazing grace-full statement of forgiveness. I hope he feels somewhat healed by it and that he can hear her saying that she is somehow healed by it too.

Notice that she seems to have come to terms with the understanding that he might have made the decision based on doctrine, dogma, or reductionist religion, but the thing that hurt her most was waiting until the moment she was to take a step of spiritual obedience into the waters, with her family and friends gathered to celebrate with her, before he said, No. Not now, not like this.

And then her words, baptized with grace, “I’d like you to know that I still love you and that I understand we’re all on a journey together, trying our best to walk through the world with honor and dignity…”

Maybe that’s what forgiveness is: understanding. understanding we’re all on a journey. a journey together. trying our best.

#bythewaypleaseforgiveme

because like Jesus affirmed to his Father while on the cross, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

For more on Brandi’s project click here.

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.