I Can't Breathe....

If Love is the answer, Justice is the measure."

 - The Rev. Eric Ovid Donaldson

Several years ago, I took my sons to the rally in memory of Trayvon Martin in downtown Newark - and posted our "hoodie" profile picture on FB - because I wanted to teach them what I considered to be an important lesson: that citizenship is an active - and indeed proactive - privilege and responsibility.  As much as they had been fortunate to lead (relatively) privileged lives, they owed it to themselves and, more broadly, to their community to be engaged in helping to shape the contours within which we all live.  I wanted them to understand that the response to injustice is protest and concerted action/advocacy thereafter ... and now I can't breathe (again)....

The list is too long - starting even before Trayvon and now extending to Alton Sterling and Philando Castille - and my heart is too heavy now: I can't breathe....

I can't breathe because I realize that I can't protect my sons from the police and that even a supposedly routine occurrence - in Mr. Castille's case, a traffic stop for a busted taillight - can be lethal for them ... and I wonder what kind of world and American society has evolved on my/our watch and am now too weary and wounded to be angry anymore.  It's almost enervating.  Almost.  But I realize that if it has to change, I, too, am going to have to summon the emotional energy and commitment to help change it ... and to enlist my sons in this effort, too.

I can't breathe because I am absolutely devastated by the post-mortem press conferences - or, in Mr. Castille's case, the livestream of the incident on FaceBook - that evidence the decimation of families and loved ones for whom the loss if felt most acutely.  My prayers extend to them, but they deserve more: they deserve my individual - and our collective - action.

(And if you're tempted to think that prayers are enough, just remember how hollow and angry you feel when the members of our do-nothing Congress offer their prayers to the victims of the gun violence that they refuse to act to curtail and/or prevent.)

I can't breathe because I'm flabbergasted at the blithe unawareness and/or unconcern on the part of so many of my white friends and colleagues.  It reminds me that Privilege has many guises, including/especially the ability to be indifferent to that which doesn't affect you personally.  As MLK reminded us a half-century ago, what we/history will remember is not the acts of the bad people but the disengagement of the self-considered good ones....

(Seriously, does any one of us believe that if the situation were reversed - that if whites were routinely killed by African-American police officers - we'd be in a similar position?  Can you even conceive of such a situation?  I thought not....)

I can't breathe because I can't explain to myself or my sons how Black life, especially in its young male incarnation, has become so cheaply valued.  Actually, I weep because this isn't exactly true: I and we have always known that Black life was cheaply valued, but what's new is the cell phone and other videos that show us this reality in such stark relief ... and then we have to connect our current tragedies to a long historical record of tens of thousands of unreported and unrecorded 'race killings' that are as old as our Republic.  As the FaceBook meme rightly points out, the violence isn't new, the videos of it are ... and our visceral awareness of this continuing injustice hurts all the more because we can't escape it.  It's real, not theoretical or removed.  I and we have seen Alton Sterling murdered by the police like Tamir Rice and Walter Scott and _______ (fill in the blank) before him and Philando Castille and _______ (be ready to fill in the blank) after him.  The ghost of Emmett Till has arisen anew and we are haunted yet again....

I can't breathe because as I age I get more sensitive, not less.  Because I'm more aware of the possibilities for life and thus feel more deeply its pains and tragedies.  And because I have to fight disillusionment even harder: weren't we supposed to be better than our parents and the other generations that came before?  If so, then why is this still happening at such an alarming rate and on such a massive scale - 559 African-Americans killed by police and counting so far this year alone!?! - and it's now just another unfortunate component of our collective existence.  As a friend pointed out so powerfully earlier this morning in a FaceBook post, THIS IS NOT NORMAL!!!  Unless we allow it to be....

So what can I and we do to catch our breath and regain our sense of well-being?  The first thing is to vote.  It's the most powerful form of protest available to us.  We underutilize it to our peril, as is abundantly clear in these instances of police killings and the accompanying slaughter of innocents that have also become routine (as President Obama has described them repeatedly and with a heavy heart).  I will hold my elected officials accountable - both locally and nationally - to making the police protect and serve us rather than occupy and terrorize us and to having the hard conversations about addressing our violence problem and taking systemic actions to address it.  Further, I will engage my sons (and daughters) in their civic duty to participate and advocate.  After all, it's their chance to help us improve the world that they're inheriting.  And, finally, I will educate - especially those who are insulated by choice from this ongoing tragedy - so that we can see this for what it really is: beyond race, this is a humanity problem.

For those of us of faith, if we truly believe that we're all Children of God, then we have to act this way by actively loving our fellow humans - be they of the same or different nationality, religion, gender, sexual orientation, race, etc. - and by seeking to create a world in which their individual and our collective humanity is affirmed, valued and encouraged by the ways in which we live.

That sounds like a noble, ethereal goal, but it's not.  It starts very simply: every day, my African-American children (and especially my sons) should feel and be free to pursue happiness in our country and our world as should your children and other loved ones be.  And when we realize that this will only happen because of our collective empathy and engagement, starting with addressing and eradicating our suicidal cultural propensity toward violence.  In three words, our goal should be, as a friend pointed out, "No More Hashtags."

And when this day comes, I will be able to breathe again....

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Man never is, but always to be blessed:

The soul, uneasy and confined from home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

– Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Man" (1734)

Spiritual Freedom: The Gift of the Personal Path....

If there be therefore any consolation in Christ,

if any comfort of love,

if any fellowship of the Spirit,

if any bowels and mercies,

Fulfil ye my joy,

that ye be likeminded,

having the same love,

being of one accord,

of one mind.

Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory;

but in lowliness of mind

let each esteem other better than themselves.

Look not every man on his own things,

but every man also on the things of others.

Let this mind be in you,

which was also in Christ Jesus:

Who, being in the form of God,

thought it not robbery to be equal with God:

But made himself of no reputation,

and took upon him the form of a servant,

and was made in the likeness of men:

And being found in fashion as a man,

he humbled himself,

and became obedient unto death,

even the death of the cross.

- Philippians 2:1-8 (KJV)

Each first Sunday during my teenage years, I would stand near the pulpit of Metropolitan Baptist Church in my hometown of Detroit, Michigan, and recite this passage.  As an altar boy (or, more correctly put, as a member of the altar boy team), this was my sacred duty.  Occasionally I would reflect on the words that were so seared into my consciousness then that I can recite them even now, some four decades later.  Thankfully, time has afforded me greater insights into the ageless wisdom that they both reflect and offer.

Today, as a reader at my adult home church, St. Luke's Episcopal in Montclair, New Jersey, I was asked again to recite a part of this passage, which proved difficult: so ingrained is the King James Version of my Baptist youth that it was hard for me to read the New Revised Standard Version of my adult faith.  Somehow the latter seemed less magisterial, less worthy of the Word of God.  And yet, if you ask me which version do I read and find more compelling now, it would be the NRSV.  Something about the limitations and imperfections of the KJV, as I've come to learn its history, has left me cold to it, flowery prose appreciated nonetheless.

And that's what hit me this morning: that I was tied by history and habit to a less fulfilling version of my faith because of the florid and ornate beauty of its phrasing, but my adult faith is so much deeper and less rooted in The Word, per se.  And I began to wonder if these two realities were related, the deepening of my faith and its untethering from the Bible....

It's funny, but I know the Bible much more and better in my adulthood than I did in my youth even though I studied it then, too.  One of the many benefits of religious schooling - in my case both Lutheran and Catholic versions thereof - is that one is 'gifted' with biblical instruction (and which, of course, actually feels like more of a burden at the time).  Now I study the Bible - and even read it occasionally - for my own edification, so I'm free of anyone else's rules about how I must do it and what I must glean from the exercise.  'Must' is the operative word here: I now feel truly free to use the Bible - and any religious/spiritual insight or experience, for that matter - as I see fit, and this has truly been a liberating experience.

Now I am free to choose how I interpret the Scriptures, both in their legitimacy and their insight ... and this has made all the difference.  I still am influenced by many Biblical scholars - Bishop John Shelby Spong, the late Marcus Borg and the members of the Jesus Seminar foremost among them - but I am free to choose what resonates with me and why, what informs and elevates my faith and what is left out of/aside from it.  I suspect that it's this sense of freedom that has led me on a passionate and winding spiritual journey throughout my adult life, no doubt influenced by the reality that I've found a version of the Christian faith in particular - Episcopalianism - and an appreciation for other/all religious systems in general - especially, in my case, the tenets of Buddhism and Taoism - that work for me.  So journey on as an Episcopalian Follower of Jesus I do, finding inspiration in Eastern perspectives on the Ultimate Mystery as I go.

And yet I'm not totally free: there are many times when I feel the return of the youthful guilt that I was taught along with the KJV.  I no longer find sexual expression sinful (at least when conducted in a truly loving way), which was something that I had to overcome because of what I was taught long before I had any personal experience with it.  And I no longer subscribe to the guilt-inducing concepts that dominated - and for me littered - my religious education like the Great Fall, the Substitutionary Atonement, the (physical) Resurrection, etc.  I now see sin as a separation from God (which, for me, means from the Divinity-in-Humanity that is my Source and all of ours), Jesus as the exemplar of a human life fully lived (in keeping with the insights of St. Irenaeus and Bishop Spong) and the Resurrection as a powerful spiritual reality (as Jesus' life and example continue to influence and guide my own two millennia later), etc.  But sometimes I catch myself slipping back into that youthful guilt and I have to remind myself to be present in the moment and to keep living as fully and lovingly as I can, a reflection of my unique Christian-Buddhist-Taoist mix of an adult faith.

And living without guilt is great, not only because it's freeing emotionally, but also because it's powerfully so spiritually as well.  Now that I no longer believe in Christianity's supremacy/exclusivity as the sole/"one true" path to God, I'm free to find God in other ways, through other experiences and along other paths ... and this is what has brought me to such a profoundly deeper spiritual place.

And yet I'll always be a Christian - or, in my preferred conception of it as guided by the incomparable Rev. Dr. Obery Hendricks, a Follower of Jesus - at base/first.  It's my foundational faith, but does not constitute the entirety of it in my adulthood, which is itself a radically freeing reality and experience.  Because I can still be cool with (read = in deep, loving relationship with) God if I see and experience Him/Her/It differently than 'traditional' or institutional Christianity taught me, I've gained a greater appreciation for the Divine in general and in particular in how He/She/It is immanent and ever-present and -manifest in (my and all) daily life.  I can be present in each moment and 'know' God (read = feel Him/Her/It as my Source, in the indescribable and ineffable depths of my soul), even on my most hectic and/or challenging days (when it's admittedly harder, to be sure).

And I can disdain, set a contrasting example and endeavor mightily to respond lovingly to so much of what is falsely claimed as Christian belief and practice today, seemingly virtually completely antithetical as it is to our Patron's example.

And I can be illumined, persuaded and elevated by the wisdom of the East, especially in its Buddhist and Taoist versions, all without having to feel like I'm 'cheating' on my native Christianity.  Spiritual freedom, which I believe to be one of God's greatest gifts to humans, is a wonderful experience indeed.

Which brings me to one final thought on religious and spiritual freedom: what is being done in its name in modern America and elsewhere is an abomination.  That so many would presume to use God, the Ultimate Source of Life, as a justification to diminish and demean (the God-given Humanity and life of) others is inconceivable to me.  How can we claim that God created the world and yet see only some (i.e., those who believe and/or appear to be like Us) as Children of God but not all?  Where do we get the temerity to define where God's love stops along with our own?  How can we presume to assert our religious or spiritual freedom in ways that limit others' rights and ability to do likewise?  It's this with which I struggle in the arena of public faith and spirituality today.

And yet I remain thankful for the opportunity to retreat to and be healed and uplifted by my personal/private faith today, that idiosyncratic mix of traditions that speaks to me most deeply and uniquely in a truly enlivening way.  It's this that I wish for all fellow humans, this sense of freedom and encouragement to find God and/or your best self in ways that are unique - and uniquely fulfilling - to you.  And I accept that you may choose a different path than I do, which doesn't separate us as much as offer us an opportunity to dialogue with and learn from each other while also supporting each other along our respective paths (and our collective one).

I don't know one true path to God.  I know my own.  And I pray that yours be as profoundly fulfilling and elevating as mine has.  Namaste.

My path is not a better path, it is simply a different path.

- Donald L. Hicks, Look into the Stillness

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

- Rumi

Make a gift of your life and lift all mankind by being kind, considerate, forgiving, and compassionate at all times, in all places, and under all conditions, with everyone as well as yourself. This is the greatest gift anyone can give.

- David R. Hawkins

What Christmas Means to Me: An Historical-Familial Perspective....

Christmas is the day that holds all time together.

- Alexander Smith

Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it.  And blessings and tidings of great joy to those of you who do not.  If you'll both indulge me for a moment, I'd like to reflect on what Christmas means to me, in both the historical and metaphorical senses.  Along the way, I hope that I can share something that brings you a sense of hope and joy, which I think are the true 'reasons for the season'....

I am a Christian both by upbringing and, now as an adult, by choice.  Hence, in my youth, mine was a typical Christian Christmas experience: we celebrated the birth of our Savior by being rewarded by Santa Claus.  Now, having developed into a bit of an idiosyncratic Christian(-Buddhist-Taoist), my experience of Christmas is, well, anything but typical, I suspect.  But I digress....

As a child, Christmas was my favorite day of the year ... and I loved the holiday season, too.  It always began with a joyful celebration of Thanksgiving with my father's side of the family, the Bookers (and usually somewhere in or around the family seat in West Medford, Massachusetts).  The Bookers were a typical (African-)American family in many respects - for example, most clung tightly to the lower rungs of the middle class in largely well-paying and often union blue collar jobs - and were also in many ways, I came to learn, quite unique: for one thing, they were extraordinarily close and though this proximity usually leads to friction from time to time, there were few if any conflicts and they were unfailingly genuinely loving toward one another.

(By contrast, in my mother's more prosperous, largely white collar side of the family, though they did love each other, there was typically a feud going on - usually between two or three of my great aunts - and my mother had to play the role of peacemaker because she was seemingly the one relative to whom everyone spoke irrespective of whatever calumny was then extant.  From them, I learned that the Shivers clan loved each other very much but often couldn't get along.  Mostly that made me sad for my relatives who chose to isolate themselves from each other but it also made me appreciate the Bookers that much more.)

After Thanksgiving came my birthday a couple of weeks later and, for the most part, I avoided the dreaded pitfall that affects many of us with December birthdays: the exasperating 'two-fer' gift - you know, where a well-meaning but misguided (or just plain cheap) relative or friend sends you a gift that arrives by your birthday but carries with it an admonition to wait until Christmas to open it.  And an understanding of a universal rule about such two-fers was soon visited upon me: the ones that you have to wait for invariably suck ... I mean, are disappointing (read = really, really suck).  :-) 

About two weeks after my birthday, Christmas would arrive.  When I was quite young - say, in the single digit years - we celebrated Christmas Day far more than its Eve.  As I aged, Christmas Eve became a more meaningful occasion, including because my beloved mother would cook a new dish and/or cuisine for dinner.  She was such a good cook that I can only remember two of these meals: most were so good as to be unremarkable - she was always such a skilled and joyful cook that great meals were the norm - but two were not.  The first such misadventure involved Red Snapper that was prepared while my father was off skiing that day.  I haven't eaten that particular type of fish since (though at this point in my life I could easily become a pescatarian ... as long as sushi counts, too)  :-).  The other unfortunate foray was Cioppino - effectively an Italian variation of Bouillabaisse - from a recipe that she'd discovered on a plane flight back from visiting her parents earlier that year.  For months she savored the Christmas Eve feast to come - and paid an inordinate share of our household budget to acquire the very best/freshest of its numerous seafood components - for what turned out to be a real dud.  Even she thought so, though my father and I had been too kind to say anything as we sat there forcing it down.  When she finally suggested that we stop - she was truly a humanitarian - we were all relieved and the colossal failure entered the annals of family lore.  Until she died, at Christmas we would rarely fail to share a laugh about the "Great Cioppino Disaster of '78" (though, truthfully, I don't remember the year exactly, nor does this matter...).

Christmas was especially wonderful in my single digits because I was an only child.  There are few feelings as purely joyful as entering the living room, observing Santa's beneficence and screaming to yourself that "It's all mine!"  (Of course I couldn't express this verbally 'cause my mother raised me better than that.)  :-)  Though I never wished for a brother and sister - after all, I had one of each in Paul "Bobby" Thompson and Maria Woodruff, who are a cousin and family friend, respectively, who were so close when we were growing up that we still consider each other siblings to this day though we are technically only children - I was especially thankful for not having them when harvesting Santa's bounty.  This embarrasses me now - my mother raised me not to covet also - but I can say that it's one of the most indelible experiences of pure joy that I've ever had in life.  In fact, I wish that everyone could have that feeling ... and then get even more joy from giving a bounty to loved ones as I do now....

As I grew older and - Spoiler Alert! - discovered that my parents were Santa Claus - which I began to suspect at age 6 when I noticed that Santa's thank you note to me in appreciation for the milk and cookies was written in handwriting that looked quite similar to my Dad's :-) - our celebratory focus shifted to Christmas Eve over its following day.  Truth be told, this saddened me - no "It's all mine!" epiphany to come - including because Santa's 'passing' took some of the magic out of how I understood Christmas then.  It was just us, my parents and me ... and as a teenager, even though I loved and appreciated my parents, I always wanted something more - truthfully to recapture that youthful 'receiving epiphany' experience.  Now that both have long since left me physically, of course, I would give anything to have it be 'just us' again ... which is further proof that youth is wasted on the young and that wisdom comes at a meaningful - and often painful - cost.  But I digress....

The rest of the Christmas day ritual stayed the same for the dozen years or so from ages five to seventeen: after reveling in the fruits of having been an especially good boy during the preceding year, and after Christmas brunch with my parents, I would head down to my best friend Michael Coble's house and we would compare our bounties while trying to avoid his older brothers who were generally nice guys but loved messing with us.  Many joyful hours were spent playing with our new Hot Wheels sets and/or our electric race car sets and/or the latest board game or, when I was thirteen, my new air hockey table ... or imagining how much fun it would be when the Michigan winter passed so that we could ride our new bikes, etc.

After this purely playful and joyful interlude, it would be time to get cleaned up and go to some relative's house for Christmas dinner with my mother's side of the family, most of whom also lived in Detroit.  Truth be told, in my double digit years, my mother hosted a disproportionate share of these joyful gatherings because she was such as good cook, as did my (and her) cousin Paul Thompson (Jr., Bobby's father) and her best friend Vera (Champion) Woodruff.  Paul was a gourmand and fantastic chef, so gatherings in his home were about some adventurous twist on a Christmas meal staple and his wife's/my cousin Sandy's bubbly hostessing.  No one left the Thompsons without the -itis and a bellyache from laughing.  Dinner at Ms. Woodruff's was also a joyful celebration, though it tended to start a little more formally - she favored Handel's Messiah over the Thompsons' non-seasonal predilection for The Fifth Dimension - and usually ended with some fantastic dessert in addition to all of the tasty staples that one would normally expect.  Even now, my heart warms as I think of sitting alone in her living room listening to Handel's majestic music (and occasionally some Wagner) as the women of the family cooked in the kitchen and the men told stories 'n' lies - OK, if you prefer, very tall tales - in the den nearby.

The decade before, the hosts of these feasts had been members of the previous generation, and most often the matriarch of the family, my maternal grandmother's eldest sister, Bertha.  Aunt Bert was something: warm and loving ... and alternatively scary, especially when she was shooing you away from her fresh-out-of-the-oven rolls.  Ah, Aunt Bert's rolls ... they are truly one of the Top 5 food experiences of my life.  So much so, in fact, that one of my few regrets in life is that I couldn't duplicate them for my own children as they were growing up.  I have tried her ancient recipe a few times, but, honestly, other than my sister Maria, no one in my generation has her baking gift.  To conclude this memory, I will simply share an analogy: Aunt Bert's rolls are indelibly recorded in my soul because, I would come to realize, they were my greatest childhood food orgasm.  They were so light, so fluffy, so wonderfully tasty in their buttery deliciousness that we would literally squeal with delight as we devoured them and repeatedly and graciously thanked the elderly lady who feigned being scary but would always cook an extra tray of rolls just so she could sit back with a wide smile on her face and watch us kids could go crazy gorging ourselves on Christmas....

And then I went to college, so Christmas meant one of the four or so annual trips home to visit with my parents, who, I noticed, began to age after I moved away as well as to be less celebratory of holidays in general.  Christmas Eve was always a nice, quiet dinner with the three of us, though after that Cioppino debacle my mother rarely ventured from the classics for this special meal.  We'd exchange gifts, go to bed and then I would awake early like that wide-eyed five-year-old but have no bounty to survey and explore.  I decided then that Christmas as an adult was decidedly less fun though I have to admit that my lucrative post-college professional career afforded me an inkling of what was to come: in my 20s, Christmas became an opportunity for me to return the favor and spoil my parents for one day a year.  Even though I missed the more robust celebrations of my youth, I can say that watching the delight in their eyes as they opened the handful of gifts that they each received made my long, stressful hours at work totally worth it.  In my Top 10 pantheon of the gifts that I've given, being able to buy my mother a fur jacket from Jacobsen's with my very first bonus check ranks up there.  She was positively giddy and wore that jacket proudly until her death a decade later.

(It's funny, but after he retired while I was in college, my father began to recede from life and atrophy, so it became a real challenge to figure out a meaningful gift to give him.  What I remember most about our last decade - from when I went to college until my late 20s - is that we would sit together and talk.   Well, not talk actually - he wasn't that kind of guy, really - but we would listen to the tapes of my college radio show that I had sent him.  It always made me chuckle that this was so meaningful to him, so I would sit there and listen as he supplied the play-by-play and color commentary for each show - to which it was clear that he had listened many, many times - as if I weren't familiar with them.  Truthfully, it makes me a bit wistful now: my father and I had a difficult relationship for most of my young adult life - truth be told because he was a difficult man, haunted by his demons but too forceful in his approach to me in the attempt to protect me from what he feared would be my downfall, too - but listening to those tapes of my radio show were some of the sweetest moments that we ever shared....)

In my 20s, I didn't come home every year because I got married for the first time.  Suffice it to say that this initial union only lasted a couple of years, so there were few happy memories for me, but the Christmas celebrations were one of these.  (And also taught me an important lesson: don't ever sit in the front row at a comedy show with your in-laws, unless you want to be compared to the cast of the movie Cocoon.  For those of you who are too young to remember this flick, let's just say that the implication was that we were a bunch of old-looking fogies.)

In my 30s and early 40s, I had remarried and had children, so Christmas focused around playing Santa and delighting my children.  My favorite memory of this time involves a playhouse that was so large that it had to be brought into our living room in the box and assembled - over the course of more than four challenging hours long past midnight - in which the kids played for about 10 minutes on Christmas morning.  A few weeks later, the playhouse had to be disassembled to get it out of the (double doors of our) living room and was then reassembled in their play area in the basement (which only took three hours this time) ... whereupon they literally never played in it for a single minute ever again (and, a half-dozen year later when we were divorcing, the disassembly and donation of the playhouse became a point of contention in the contention-filled proceedings).  After that, assembling the go kart was easy, though I remember being thoroughly put out by being informed at 3 or 4 in the morning on Christmas about a drum set that needed to be assembled and about which I concluded that I was purposely kept in the dark until zero hour.  Those damn drums led to my first - and only - Christmas all-nighter ... and then the appalling hours of joyful, atonal banging that they provided my children have only salved this wound a bit....

And during this time, Christmas dinners were usually spent with my then-in-laws and the kids, so I remember them less as mini-reunions and more as in-group gatherings that, while joyful, were also familiar in a less than fulfilling way.  To put it differently (and perhaps to clarify the point a bit), I began to miss the larger family gatherings of my youth and realized that one of the 'costs' of our mainstream success was that we were geographically separated from our relatives that relegated the whole-family holiday gatherings of old to history....

And so, a decade since, Christmas has ironically become an even more joyful celebration for me, though, truth be told, it's also become a more difficult one.  One of the unavoidable outcomes of divorce is 'kid-sharing,' so holidays become split: one year you're with your kids on Christmas Eve and the next on Christmas Day, which inevitably means that one of these occasions is a bit lonely.  And if you have a 'Brady Bunch' family as my new wife and I now do, it gets even harder: you have to coordinate these on-off alternations so that you can have all of the kids together for at least one of these celebrations ... which means that inevitably one or the other is cut short as the stepsiblings have to be shuttled off to their other parents.  This is certainly a bummer, but it also forces me to savor the few undisturbed moments with our children that we do have.

Christmas will never be a 'double holiday' again - our respective divorces insured that they will be forever split - so this makes it all the more imperative that we celebrate as fully and joyfully as we can in whatever time we have with our children during the holidays.  This year is a perfect example: thanks to the never-ending struggle with my ex-, I saw my sons for only four hours on Christmas Eve ... and my youngest stepdaughter was able to share this with us but was then picked up on Christmas Day.  Now we have our eldest with us, a twenty-something (understandably) primarily focused on catching up with her longtime friends, but the reality is that, our joint celebration now concluded, she's in and out of the house at her whim.  Guess my Beloved and I will have to focus on an impromptu Christmas Date Night....

So what does Christmas mean to me now?  From a familial perspective, it means that I have to cherish the few(er) moments that I have with my children on either its Eve or its Day and also  that any celebrating I get to do with my extended family happens on other holidays.  (At least the Bookers still gather on Thanksgiving....)

It means that I may only get a few hours to revel in the shared memories that are such an important part of the familial bond, whether those be historical ones that we share with a newly expanded 'nuclear' family or new ones that we create through various new traditions like our annual family pajama unveiling.  Many years from now, I'm sure that our grandchildren will be regaled with tales of how their father/uncle Max always complained about having to get into costume, so to speak, whether the design was cool - the Elf costume of 2014 (with matching Elf movie hat, of course!) was such a hit that several folks attending the Knicks game were photographed in theirs (sans the hats but nonetheless to Max's grudging approval) - and this year's imitation of the ubiquitous Ugly Christmas Sweater - complete with FaLaLa-themed pants - are proving quite comfy and may even be worn again, out in public and not on Christmas Day....  :-)

It means that Christmas is more internal now because it is abbreviated.  Accordingly, I'm forced to savor the memories and carry them with me as I no longer have the luxury of time in which to create them.

And it means that, as I/we age, another stage approaches: for now our children are all single and childless, so we're still hosting Christmas ... but that era approaches when we'll be present-bearing guests more often than hosts, so we have to prepare for this.  It'll be a bittersweet joy, I suspect: while we'll be enjoying our revenge as we watch our own children deal with the chaotic wonderment that their children will inevitably produce - especially as we bear sugar-laden gifts that encourage, er, activity :-) - we'll also have to hold back the wistful memories of long ago when they were driving us crazy and we were loving every minute of it.

What Christmas means to me now is simple: it's a few hours and possibly a day to let go, love wastefully and revel in every moment with those whom we treasure most.  But I can't help wondering why every day can't be Christmas Day ... or at least be approached in this same expansive way....

Christmas, my child, is love in action.

Every time we love, every time we give,

it's Christmas.

- Dale Evans

(It's Not About Islam...) It's About Extremism, Stupid....

"Suffering is a gift.  In it is hidden mercy."

- Sufi poet Rumi

Some years ago, a mantra was associated with Bill Clinton's initial campaign for the presidency: It's the economy, Stupid!  As I've reflected on this latest round of man's inhumanity to man - in Paris (which most fascinates and focuses the Western word), in Beirut, in Kenya, etc. - this saying has come back to me in an altered form: It's not about Islam (as so many seem to want to make it to be), it's about extremism, Stupid.  Here's why I think so:

(Mistakenly, it turns out...)  Many in the Western world believe that the word "Islam" means "peace."  And most of its more than a billion adherents at present practice it that way, as a peaceful pursuit of the path to God (or, in Islamic terms, Allah).  Yet, particularly in this century, we are more aware of a fringe element of Muslims whose theory and praxis of this religion looks nothing at all like the vast majority's approach.

In other words, relatively recently, we in the Western world have become much more aware of (though not particularly learned about) Islamic Extremism.  Of course, there are many variants thereof - including perhaps the best-known, Wahhabism, that is primarily Saudi Arabian in provenance - but there are plenty of other lesser known ones, too.  At present, the most significant of these lesser known variants is ISIL/ISIS and thanks to its virulent and violent practices, we are hearing about ISIL/ISIS a lot more lately (though seemingly not learning much about it).  This being said, whether its that 'old foe,' al-Qaeda, or the new one, ISIL/ISIS, the net result is the same: we are struggling to comprehend the terrorism that claims Islam as its basis.

Some are quick to point out that the Qur'an has many passages that incite violence - including in its holy war version of jihad - and that this therefore makes the terrorism al-Qaeda and ISIL/ISIS practice emblematic of Islam as a violent religion.  Without getting into it too deeply here, I would suggest that those who've done so (or are tempted to do so) re-read (or read) the Bible.  Suffice it to say that few books contain that much violence, however righteous its proponents may claim it to be.  (And for good measure, do some additional research and learn of what scholars of both texts have concluded: that the Bible is actually more violent than the Qur'an.)

Others bemoan the lack of a response from 'institutional' Islam condemning such fringe atrocity.  Fair enough ... except many (if not most) of them don't realize that Islam is a far more decentralized/distributed religion than, say, Christianity.  Hence, there's no equivalent of the Catholic pope in Islam to serve as a spokesperson (and lightning rod) for the religion.  In fact, Islam is not monolithic, but 'splintered' - like Christianity - with two major sects, the Sunni and the Shia (the former comprising between 80%-90% of all adherents) and smaller variants like the mystical Sufis, too.   Continuing to dig a little deeper, one will find condemnations from highly influential Muslim leaders of its various sects (and, for good measure, a few 'atta-boys' from some of its more extreme leaders, as it true of all groups/religions).

But the point is that the lethality and violence that is committed in the name of Islam today is no more authentically - or, perhaps, more correctly put, representatively - Muslim than the modern insanity of the Westboro Church is representatively Christian.  Most Christians abhor Westboro and can't for the life of them recognize any semblance of Christianity in their behavior - though a few misguided pseudo-Christian 'leaders' encourage their insanity, of course - and would not want the entire religion judged on the misguided and extreme views of this fringe group.  So, too, with the majority of Muslims relative to their extremist 'relatives'....

The reality is that Extremism works: the terror committed by the very few affects the great many, which is why it occurs.  It also tends to provoke a violent response, which is then used by the original terrorists as proof of its foes' hatred and justification for more of its own cravenness.  There is power in this inviting provocation to enter a doom loop: terrorists kill and then we respond violently which justifies - in their minds only - their continued 'right' to kill.  The logic is perverse and wrong, of course, because that's what Extremism is, the severely wrong-headed perversion of some doctrine/set of beliefs/etc.

(In the colloquial, there's a more succinct and yet totally appropriate term that describes the nature of this aberration perfectly: crazy.  What we're really fighting against is various strains of crazy in its most virulent [and pseudo-religious] forms.)

And Extremism is about power: by all estimates, there are fewer than 250,000 ISIL/ISIS fighters - though the estimates range from 15,000 on the low end to 250,000 or so on the high end, evidencing just how little we know about this adversary  - but their influence is exponentially outsized: though they represent less than four hundred-thousandths (or four thousandths of a percent) of the world's population - <.000004 - everyone in the world is focused on them right now.  Yes, Extremism works....

So, then, how do we deal with Extremism and, ostensibly, stop its threat to human life?  The answer is as simple to suggest as it is difficult to effect: we must learn as much as possible about our self-declared adversaries and then respond as specifically as possible to them.  In other words, in the present case of Islamic extremism, we can't condemn Muslims generally or their religion, but we can and should respond forcefully to the various fringe groups that claim Islam, each in its own specific way.

For example, whereas "al Qaeda has always portrayed itself more as a militant group comprised of highly trained operational masterminds whose successful attacks on America and Europe would ultimately gain them enough key followers to form a global movement of Muslims and detain the onslaught of the West," by contrast, ISIL/ISIS seeks the creation of a (local/regional) Muslim state now: "The Islamic State — also known as ISIS, ISIL and, to the group's disdain, "daesh" — has adopted virtually the opposite approach (to al-Qaeda) to consolidating power across the Middle East and beyond." (Bertrand, Business Insider, 5/21/15) (In fact, if ISIL/ISIS does prove to be behind the attacks in Paris, this would represent a major change in strategy for them, as their focus until now has been to try to create an Islamic state in the Middle East by conquering territory there.)

So, the approach to al-Qaeda will of necessity be very different than that to ISIL/ISIS (unless the latter does in fact switch and/or broaden its strategy to include 'foreign' terrorism).  And that's the point: this isn't about Islam in general, it's about two (and, actually, more) identifiably different fringe groups who claim it (and yet whose practice of it contrasts virtually completely with that of the majority of its adherents) and the very specific/targeted/customized responses that are likely to be most effective against them.

Thus, it behooves us to remember that just like Westboro's not like the vast majority of Christianity, ISIL/ISIS isn't like the vast majority of Islam.  So our response isn't to condemn the latter generally, but to address the former specifically.  And if we can do this, we can bring our Muslim brothers and sisters - let us not forget that before they are religious adherents they are first fellow Children of God/human beings  - closer to us in this present effort - to eradicate murderous extremism - and to an even more meaningful one - to live peacefully on this planet irrespective of how we see God (or don't).

"People see God every day.  They just don't recognize him."

- Pearl Bailey

Between the World and Me....

I love America more than any other country

in this world, and, exactly for this reason,

I insist on the right to criticize her

perpetually.

- James Baldwin, Collected Essays

Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me is an modern classic, a distillation of a singular African-American life relayed in breathtaking prose and indelible images ... and (too often for my taste) just f--cking depressing.  In part it's depressing because of its author's seemingly relentless chronicling of the impact of race on his life.  (As in, it's true that he's a Black Man in Modern America but it seems that his life has been almost exclusively defined by this and that the times when this was not the primary shaper of his experience were few at best and clearly far between.)  And it's depressing in part because it's so true, so real, so pathetically profound and so absolutely and outrageously unknown to far too many of our fellow citizens, especially those who "think that they are" or "consider themselves white."  (In a very beneficial way, perhaps this book's status as a New York Times best seller will address this latter reality.)

And, whether he likes it or not, he is very much a spiritual successor to Baldwin (if not the one...).  Both use the English language so beautifully and provocatively that, at times, the reader is breathless and disoriented.  I found myself re-reading whole passages because I couldn't believe how exquisitely Coates had turned a phrase or captured a feeling or moment, just as I often did with Mr. Baldwin's writing when I delved into it seriously a decade ago or more.  I'm still healing from finishing this book two weeks ago - and I know that a number of its most powerful images and/or passages will never leave me - but I am thankful for this legacy: despite the pain, the experience was exquisite, if for no other reason than I was reminded of how powerful and beautiful the written word could be ... even as I was reminded of how harrowing life can be as a Black Man in Modern America....

With greater detail and consideration, I've written a review on Goodreads.com
(https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1340424520), so I won't recap that here.  I'd rather explore a few of the lessons that I've learned as a result of this book, albeit briefly....

The first thing that I would say is that I've been more fortunate, apparently, than Mr. Coates because, even as a fellow Black Man in Modern America, I've enjoyed the luxury of having less of my life experience affected - and, seemingly, proscribed and defined - by race.  In other words, it seems that I've had more meaningful experiences and moments in life in which I was simply another human being transfixed by the transcendence of life.  To wit, though I nod knowingly at virtually all of the 'bitter fruit' experiences Coates relates - as in I, too, have experienced Driving While Black police stops with guns drawn (for absolutely no reason, of course) and the bewilderingly paternalistic racism both of those who have meant well and those who have not, etc. - I have not allowed them to dominate my worldview as they seemingly do his.  Oh, yes, I know that I'm Black - senior corporate executive though I may have been for most of my adult life, none of my white colleagues have ever been asked to be served by a guest at a function that they're hosting or been told ni--er jokes over the phone by a business associate (who had yet to meet me in person), or been asked to take their golf clubs to the first tee, etc. - it's just that this is not all that I am, or, alternatively stated, this informs but does not rule my world as much as it seems to do for Mr. Coates.

And I am thankful for this, truly, truly thankful ... 'cause bein' a Black Man in Modern America is a burden to be sure, whether one suffers its afflictions as a victim of the pre-school-to-prison pipeline or the less life-threatening assaults of being "the only one in the room" for most of one's adult life (as I have been).  And I was prepared for this life by my parents, especially my forward-looking teacher-mother, who worked overtime to pay for my private school tuition and exposed me to 'non-traditional' (read = mainstream white American) activities like skiing and the orchestra and the theater and....

In fact, I have spent my adult life swimming in the (upper) American Mainstream, valuing my Blackness because it both made me special and because it never let me forget that I was different and thus get too comfortable and 'forget my place.'  Because of this, it has not defined me as often, so it has been less of a burden for me than for all but a few.  And therein lies the huge value of Mr. Coates' book: it doesn't let any of us - African-Americans or our white counterparts - forget this difference, either.  Even though it has defined my life less than his, I have still been Black my entire life and everywhere that I've gone, Persian-carpeted though those places may have been of late.  And there have always been subtle reminders for and to me lest I be tempted to forget (which is something that I have rarely done).  This is the Black Burden that Mr. Coates chronicles so movingly ... and its absence is the White Privilege that so many of its beneficiaries dispute and/or deny....

I am further thankful that when I have written letters to my children over the years, while they have been necessarily parentally prescriptive, they have not been overly dominated by race.  My children, too, have grown up in the (upper) American Mainstream, so their experience of race is both different than mine (having grown up in the African-American enclave of inner-city Detroit in the '60s and '70s) and, truth be told, less than mine.  So, too, with Mr. Coates' son (to whom this book is ostensibly addressed).  His son's experience is not of growing up in Black inner-city Baltimore in the '80s, but in cosmopolitan New York City, which, though it's still a dangerous place, is much less so than the Charm City of his father's youth.  So my letters to my children don't read as depressingly as Mr. Coates' ... and I'm thankful for that, too.

Not that I haven't had to have 'The Talk' with my two African-American teenage sons (numerous times), imploring them to exercise extra (and, truthfully, deserved but unearned) caution when dealing with members of law enforcement, or had to explain to my eldest what his (white) classmate (whose father worked at Goldman Sachs) meant by using the word "ni--er" when he was in first grade, or....  But the good news is that these incidents, unfortunate though they may be, have been the exception and not the rule, a privilege that I have been sure to illuminate repeatedly and at length for them especially since so few members of their peer group enjoy it.

So while I appreciate Mr. Coates for calling out his true experience of being a Black Man in Modern America, I hope that we can appreciate that his is a representative though not defining one.  If I may critique the book at all, this is one of its few faults in my view: that despite a brief acknowledgement that his son's experience of being Black will be different than his own, he lapses back into being that 'lecturing geezer' whom we all waved off when we were young.  Not that what the elder said didn't make sense - it did, even then - just that we were too busy living our better, freer lives to be constrained (and, conceptually, informed) by his worse, warped one.

I wish that Mr. Coates could have spent a little more time 'doing the translation' in the sense of helping his son (and us other readers) understand how to apply his lessons in this slowly and irregularly improving world in which we all live and in which our own children are growing up.  My sons have grown up in Montclair, New Jersey, not inner-city Detroit when it was known as the "Murder Capital of the World."  Accordingly, my lessons to them are informed by my experience as a youth of their age, but focused on the world in which they live.  Were they not framed in this way, I doubt that they would be heeded as much as they are - which, I'll admit, is not as much as I'd like - and, I fear, lacking this, too many young people who read Mr. Coates' fine book may not heed his wisdom and warnings either.

Further, given that Mr. Coates is now an esteemed member of the mainstream intelligentsia, it's likely that his son's experience will reflect this, too.  Should this prove to be the case, while it is a triumphant gift to chronicle the past, wouldn't it be even better to encourage his son to envision a different - and ostensibly better - future?  Instead, Mr. Coates cautions against the very hope that his own life and experience represent.  While it's true that his son will have to continue The Struggle - given the realities of our world, it's unlikely that racism (or any of our other -isms) will disappear any time soon (or, at least, in his son's lifetime) - it's also true that he will likely be less defined by it, both by inclination and by experience.  I suspect that Mr. Coates values his success in some meaningful part precisely because it affords his son a different and likely better experience, so his prescription against hope strikes me as unnecessarily nihilistic.

This being said, I accept that we are all to some extent prisoners of our own experiences and pasts.  I will forever be more conscious of my Blackness than my sons are or will be because it has been a much larger part - and, earlier in my life, a more defining part - of my experience.  I'm happy that my struggles and (modest) contributions to The Struggle have helped it to be so, at least in the sense that Blackness is less of a burden for more of us, the fortunate few.  And The Struggle now mostly revolves around making this the case for the majority of us.

And Mr. Coates' book will help greatly to educate those who read it, especially those who are not African-American, and thus to help them understand the realities of the (structural) inequity that remains.  No, they won't find innovative policy prescriptions in its pages - it's a memoir after all - but they will find an undeniable recounting of the reality of being a Black Man in Modern America ... which is actually the story of one of the few and most fortunate of them.  Simply put, if it's this hard for one of the fortunate few like Mr. Coates, imagine how hard it is for an average (likely inner-city) African-American....

And yet, in an unexpected way, the book gives me hope, that thing against which its author counsels.  The greatest source thereof is in the writing, as it is truly a tour de force and a work of art.  Few I've read have moved me as much as Mr. Coates, as his gift for and use of the English language are often breathtaking in their effect and, for this reason, inspiring.  After reading Mr. Coates, it's hard not to be inspired by his soaring prose, damning though it may be in content.

For example, in commemorating and mourning his slain college friend he observes,

There are people whom we do not fully know, and yet they live

in a warm place within us, and when they are plundered, when they

lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place become a wound.

Further reflecting on his friend's loved ones' grief, he continues,

Prince Jones was the superlative of all of my fears.  And if he, good

Christian, scion of the striving class, patron saint of the twice as good,

could be forever bound,who then could not?  And the plunder was not just

of Prince alone.  Think of all the love poured into him. ...

And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and

all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to earth.

And then he both personalizes and universalizes the insight:

Black people love their children with a kind of obsession.

You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.

I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you

killed by the streets that America made.  That is a philosophy of

the disembodied, of a people who control nothing,

who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the

criminals among them but the police who lord over them

with all the moral authority of a protection racket.

It was only after you that I understood this love,

that I understood the grip of my mother's hand.

She knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that

all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy

spilled upon the curb like bum wine.  And no one would be

brought to account for this destruction, because my death

would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some

unfortunate but immutable fact of "race," imposed upon an

innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. ...

This entire episode took me from fear to a rage that burned

in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire

for the rest of my days.  I still had journalism.

My response was, in this moment, to write.

And write he has....

His guidance to his teenage son rings true, even to us suburban African-American dads:

The price of error is higher for you than it is for your

countrymen. and so that America might justify itself,

the story of a black body's destruction must always

begin with his or her error, real or imagined. ...

History is not solely in our hands.  And still you are

called to struggle, not because it assures you victory

but because it assures you an honorable and sane life.

That this comes in response to his re-consideration of his own behavior in a situation in which his young son was pushed by a (white) adult adds to the pathos.  One can't help but feel for both father and son ... and, if you're African-American, understand that this could happen to you, too....

And we are also moved by his shared realization that,

You are going into consciousness, and my wish for you

is that you feel no need to constrict yourself

to make other people comfortable. ...

I would have you be a conscious citizen

of this terrible and beautiful world.

We all want our children to become who they truly are, to find what makes them unique in all the world and live this truth and the life that it engenders to their fullest.  And, as African-American fathers, we want our young men to be aware, aware that they are different, aware that, though some of them have been sheltered from many if not most risks, this protective cocoon can evaporate in a heartbeat ... as it did for Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis and so/too many others.

Truth be told, my white friends will never quite understand the 'extra anguish' that African-American parents feel every time our young people leave the house for the evening to hang out with friends or go to a party.  All parents share a fear of the tragic vagaries of fate like a car accident or some other most unfortunate event.  Those of us of the darker hue have an added anxiety for our children, especially our young men: an interaction - no matter how innocently engendered - with the police.  "Why?" my white friends may be tempted to ask, in their earnest lack of awareness or temporary amnesia.  And then when the names of Trayvon and Jordan and Eric and Walter and... are cited, they fall into a knowing, empathetic and sad silence....

This, too, is part of the still vibrant and potentially lethal burden of being Black in Modern America: that our children are not safe, either from the mean streets of our largely abandoned and crumbling major cities or from the random risks of supposedly safer climes.  To be a Black parent today is to hope more than your counterparts because you have to....

My parents have been gone for years now, but I never told them of my worst experience with The Burden because I didn't want them to worry thereafter.  As too many of these potential tragedies do, it all started innocently: back in the early 1980s, my summer roommates and I rented a car to drive from New York City to Long Island to attend a cookout hosted by friends from college.  Just a few blocks from our rented apartment, the four of us drove under an elevated train pass and soon thereafter saw the flash of lights and heard a blaring siren and a stern command to "Stop the car!"  Of course, we pulled over right away and waited for the officers to approach us and explain why they had done so.  A minute later, one of them walked to the driver's side window and began to question us with an air of officious seriousness.  So far, we were calm and, anticipating the fun to be had at the cookout, jovial.

This all changed fifteen seconds later when the second officer got out of the squad car and approached our vehicle.  One of my friends turned his head and noticed something that he whispered immediately and softly yet forcefully enough for us to comprehend: the second officer had his gun drawn and was pointing it at us!?!  Suddenly, a routine traffic stop had turned potentially lethal.  Our good humor turned to adrenaline, dread and the early pangs of fear.  Why on earth would were we being detained at gunpoint?!?

To make a long and harrowing story short, we were eventually released by the officers after we were given a ticket for running a red light.  (To this day, I'll tell you that this wasn't true - the light, though partially obscured by the overpass, was indeed green - but, of course, this fact meant precious little in the moment or now.)  Yet three things have never left me since:

First, I will never forget the arrogance with which the first officer treated us.  He was the very stereotype of a white NYC cop drunk on his power.  To say that he was dismissive would be too kind; he was a true jackass and a purposely menacing and threatening one at that.  If he were convinced that we had actually run a red light, why were we threatened with arrest, with the search and seizure of the car "because you probably have drugs on you," etc.?  Because he held the power and we were just four scared Black dudes pulled over on an almost empty block in Harlem, that's why....

Second, I will never forget the youth and fear of the second officer, the one pointing the gun at us.  After the situation was diffused, we studied him carefully: he was probably our age or, possibly, a year or two our junior.  Further, it's hard to believe that he felt threatened enough to draw and aim his gun without permission and/or direction from his partner.  And, we concluded, he appeared to be Hispanic, a cruel irony that we processed angrily thereafter.  We could very well have been his cousins or friends or classmates from high school....

Third, I will never forget how very randomly Black I felt at that moment.  I was just one of four "Black youths" in a car in Spanish Harlem, I could hear the news reports saying.  Never mind that we were four Ivy Leaguers, the least educated of whom - a Harvard junior - was me: one of my friends had just graduated from Yale and would receive both his MBA and law degrees from Harvard a few years thereafter before becoming a successful private equity investor (and whose early-career mentor was Michael Bloomberg ... yes, that Michael Bloomberg); another of our number had also just graduated from Yale and was entering Howard University's dental school en route to a distinguished career as an orthodontist; and the driver was a rising senior at Harvard who would go on to win a Rhodes scholarship later that academic year and study at Oxford before going on to graduate from Boalt Law School and enjoy a distinguished career in business and the law.  Between us, we would eventually earn seven Ivy League degrees ... but that evening we were just four potential suspects on the side of the road (or, to put it more bluntly and accurately as one of our group did, "four ni--ers chosen at random who fit the profile").

Suffice it to say that we were shaken by our brush with fate (and, possibly, death), so much so that we rehashed the incomprehensible incident over and over and over again as we drove to our cookout, at which we arrived sufficiently subdued to elicit a hearty "What the hell's wrong with you guys?" from our as yet unsuspecting host (who spent the rest of the evening consoling us and assuring us that this wouldn't recur).

Though everyone now sees me as a pillar and leader of the community and a successful executive and family man, I've been that ni--er by the side of the road ... and I pray every time that my sons go out for the evening that they never will be....

This is The (continuing) Burden.  This is the (continuing) reason for The Struggle.  This is the reality of being a Black Man in Modern America.  This is Ta-Nehisi Coates' fear for his son (as it was James Baldwin's for his nephew a half-century before) ... and it is also mine.  This is what is Between the World and Me, too....

This must seem strange to you.  We live in a "goal-

oriented" era.  Our media vocabulary is full of hot

takes, big ideas, and grand theories of everything.

But some time ago I rejected magic in all of its forms.

This rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who

never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and

were skeptical of preordained American glory.  In

accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my

total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wish to

live - specifically, how do I live free in this black body?

It is a profound question because America understands

itself as God's handiwork, but the black body is the

clearest evidence that America is the work of men.

Staying Christian....

The last thing we discover in composing a work

is what to put down first.

 

- Blaise Pascal

So much has happened since I last wrote ... and I'm still not quite sure why I haven't written.  The topics were fertile ground, ranging from the weird and yet significant (Rachel Dolezal) to the truly historic (the SCOTUS decision on marriage equality) to the heartrending (Emanuel AME) to the inspiring (the demise of the Confederate flag at the South Carolina State Capitol) ... and yet I still haven't written.  Along the way my eldest graduated from high school, a joyous occasion if there ever was one ... and yet I didn't write.  Hmmm....

Some of this not writing, I suspect, has to do with fatigue: I've been working exceedingly hard at my new job for over a month now, which has taught me, among other things, that I'm human: apparently I no longer have endless supplies of energy and focus.  (Is it true that crossing the half-century mark really changes things or am I just out of practice relative to driving so hard for so long that it'll come back to me, kinda like riding a bicycle?  BTW, for those of you who haven't ridden a bicycle in a while, a warning: it doesn't just come back to you and you could really hurt yourself....)

And I've had a full complement of kids - actually, mostly, young adults - around, so this, too, can inspire observations and assessments ... and yet, no prose....

I suspect, too, that some of my not writing has to do with being more circumspect, wanting to experience and live life fully without the need to reflect upon it or record it ... but this runs counter to the reality that in the recording the living is appreciated anew....

So why haven't I written?

Because writing is hard sometimes, just like life.  Because getting it just right in print is a sometimes arduous and seemingly impossible though loving task.  Because I'm often so emotionally and spiritually drained by the sickness in our world that I don't want to deal with it anymore, especially by having to assess it closely, peer beyond it and try to make sense of it so that I can keep going forward.  Because I know what I want to say but often find myself without the energy to say it (as distraught as I often am at the mess that we've made of our world and as partially restored as I am in those moments of serendipitous, eternal beauty that heal and steel the soul and beckon me forward...).

Because, because, because....

And yet life enjoins me again (and again and again and....) ... so I write....

 

Since I began that last sentence, my computer decided to do a forced reboot and I had my 'not writing but trying to write' vibe disturbed.  ("Thanks, HP!", I say completely facetiously.)  And yet perhaps this involuntary interlude is a blessing.  During this interim, I picked up the tome that my reading group - The Spiritual Explorers Book Club - is enjoying this month, the excellent, powerful and provocative The Politics of Jesus by the Rev. Dr. Obery Hendricks and began to appreciate it anew.  And so now I've found my topic: the Lord/the Universe/Life truly does work in mysterious ways, doesn't He/She/It?

 

It so happens that I'm early in the book - re-reading it for a fourth time, as it's one of my all-time favorites - when Professor Hendricks is elucidating the Hebrew people's adherence to the principle of malkuth shamayim, or the "sole sovereignty of God," to explain their desire during the period of the judges for temporary rather than permanent leadership (i.e., judges vs. a king).  Centuries later, as we know, under increased pressure from powerful external enemies, the Jewish people asked for a king, and the results thereafter were mixed (to put it kindly).  What struck me, though, were three realities that Professor Hendricks illumines: first, that the original leadership ethos of we Christians' founding belief system was egalitarian rather than hierarchical; second, that the term messiah, meaning "anointed leader" really referred more to an earthly ruler than a spiritual one; and third, that, as Rev. Dr. Hendricks puts it,

 

The Gospels portray malkuth shamayim, rendered in its Greek forms basileia ton ournanon ("kingdom of heaven") and basileia tou Theou ("kingdom of God"), as Jesus' central proclamation. ... In fact, the vast majority of Jesus' pronouncements in the Gospels characterize the kingdom of God as an entirely earthly reality.

 

Taking on the first of these insights, it strikes me how far we're strayed from our roots, so to speak.  True, we don't have kings anymore - at least, in effect, in the western world - but we do have an unnerving reverence for imbuing our leaders with messianic responsibilities (especially, in this country, if they're white and male).  In essence, we seem to want them to save us from ourselves, so we look to them to project an invincibility that belies our declining state (both within our society and with respect to our standing in the world at large) and we urge them to draw the lines clearly between 'us' and 'them' and to 'protect' us from them (as if other fellow human beings are not worthy of becoming/being 'real Americans').

 

Religiously, many Protestant Christians, particularly those of the fundamentalist and/or evangelical stripe, seem abjectly opposed to the principle of "radical egalitarianism" noted by Professor Hendricks.  They seem dedicated to a support of the powerful and a vilification of the oppressed/the dispossessed/the Other/etc. (which stands in clear contradiction to their ostensible Patron's example).  How else can one explain the rampant and defiant opposition to the recent SCOTUS ruling on marriage equality being disproportionately resonant in supposedly Christian communities of faith?

 

With respect to the term 'messiah,' Professor Hendricks' trenchant observations brought home a startling reality that is, it seems, widely underappreciated in modern Christianity: Jesus was a disappointment as a messiah (or, perhaps more correctly put, as the Messiah).  The Jews expected and had long hoped for a King David-like ruler, a powerful military, et. al., leader who would raise them from their subjugation.  Jesus, by contrast, was meek and seemingly unconcerned with formal titles, roles and rules.  Jesus didn't seek to start an overt rebellion against temporal (Roman and Jewish religious) authority - even though He was crucified for just this crime - but to help His followers learn to live differently in the here and now so that they could find liberation within the structures of that oppression, so that they could find God's still-myriad blessings amidst their challenging circumstances, so that they could experience life eternal amidst the crushing temporal.

 

And after He died, the Jews were still subjugated, still the dispossessed of their time, still suffering ... though a few of them and a bunch of Gentiles continued to explore "the Way" and adhere to the spiritual messiah that they believe that they had found in the Nazarene.  So, Jesus didn't liberate the Jews or the Christ-followers physically as they had hoped the Messiah would ... or, for that matter, as the Book of Revelations claims that he would (or will) some day.  Instead, He did so spiritually, as He taught them how to live differently, more abundantly, in a more timeless way during their time-bound lives ... and that lesson seemed largely lost on them then and seems especially lost on us today....

 

As for the third of Rev. Dr. Hendricks' piercing insights - that Jesus' pronouncements suggest that He conceived of the Kingdom of God as a present rather than future reality - as a way to be/live rather than a place to go (i.e., heaven) - this lesson is all but lost in modern Christianity, and to our collective detriment.

 

Were we to try to be Followers of Jesus (to use Professor Hendricks' term) and emulate His example, we would live in a radically different way: we would be collective in focus vs. individually so; we would be loving, kind and generous with others vs. wary, standoffish and selfish; we would be peaceful vs. militaristic; we would be socialistic vs. capitalistic; we would be focused on our higher selves and supporting others in accessing theirs vs. gripped tightly to who we think we are and what we think we want and therefore to who and how others should be and what they should want; etc.  In other words, were we to become true Followers of Jesus, we wouldn't be Christians in the sense that so many understand the term - especially with its fundamental and evangelical overtones - today.

 

And we wouldn't be waiting - patiently or impatiently - for a better next world, but would be advocating fiercely (and yet peacefully and lovingly) for a more abundant, equitable and inclusive one right now.  If Jesus really did conceive of the Kingdom as a present reality, this would have to change our focus and behavior dramatically ... because the world that we live in now is unjust, too, but too many so-called Christians are fighting to perpetuate this inequity and injustice rather than to ameliorate it.

 

In sum, following Professor Hendricks' insights, I'd say that too many Christians have their religion wrong, both in terms of how they conceive it (i.e., focused primarily on heaven and less on this earth) and how they live it (i.e., focused primarily on the individual versus on the communal).  So perhaps Jesus isn't the best patron to follow because His values don't align with those of (too) many who claim to be His followers.  Or perhaps we need to change radically and become true Followers of Jesus ... which, frankly, is so(/too) hard that I suspect that we'll just stay Christians....

 

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor,

either we have to pretend that Jesus was as selfish as we are,

or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us

to love the poor and serve the needy without condition

and then admit that we just don't want to do it.

 

- Stephen Colbert 





 

Well Done, Grasshopper....

To thine own self be true,

and it must follow, as the night the day,

thou canst not then be false to any man.

 

- Polonius, in the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare

 



In the past two days, I've experienced quite a bit of the timeless sacred in the midst of the temporal secular.  Specifically, I've attended the Ordination and first Mass of the (now) Rev. Gerard "Jerry" Racioppi at my church, St. Luke's Episcopal in Montclair.  More profound and important than this, however, is that I've seen (read = experienced) the presence of God in a most humbling and yet elevating way.

 

Jerry Racioppi has served as Seminarian and Deacon - effectively, Priest-in-Training - at St. Luke's for a while now and, in his own understated but effective way has contributed much to the life of our diverse, rambunctious and growing faith community.  (And he followed in the footsteps of another legend, the Rev. Diana Wilcox, who, just a few years ago in our midst, went from Seminarian to Deacon to Priest and Assistant to the Rector before being called to her own parish, Christ Episcopal, just a few miles down the road.)  And now, having been ordained and, today, leading his first official service as a priest, Jerry, too, moves on.  In his case, this means to the Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit just over the hill in his hometown of Verona, where he actually started as Rector just shy of a month ago.

 

So what was so special about these fairly common but meaningful church experiences, that of an ordination and that of a first Mass?  Well, the first clue was at the Ordination: we expected perhaps 125 to 150 people to join us to celebrate Jerry's eternal calling to the priesthood.  300+ attended the ceremony and raucously joyful reception thereafter.  And the Mass?  We had forty people at our 8 o'clock a.m. service - where there are normally half as many on an early summer Sunday - to share the experience of Jerry's inaugural turn as fully official Celebrant and to hear his first sermon.

 

So what was so special about an unexpectedly large consecration ceremony and a well-attended early morning mass?  In a word, the Spirit.  The vibe at both events was truly transformative and blessed.  The Presence and Grace of God were in the room, so to speak.  To say that the events were joyful is a gross understatement.  The buzz at the ordination service was palpable and electric.  Similarly, after Jerry completed his sermon at the mass, there was a spontaneous desire to burst out in applause - scuttled by a collective sense of unease as we all tried to figure out if sermon-induced applause was allowed in (our or any) church - that was finally sated by a hearty round of applause after the service concluded.  When was the last time you were moved to clap during/at a church service?

 

When Jerry smiled, which he does often - or, really, constantly - he lit up the room figuratively and spiritually speaking.  It was not only our shared pride in witnessing the maturation of one of us, his blooming and coming into his own before our very eyes, it was that, just like his mentor and friend the Rev. John A. Mennell (our esteemed Rector and another applause-inducing priest), he demonstrated that he truly has a gift for  reaching, touching and elevating people's spirits.  (Which, if you think about it, is an extremely important - if not the most important - skill for a priest to have, no?)  It was not only that Jerry was good - great, even - in these transitional moments that he made transcendent, but that he was a conduit for the healing, inspiring and elevating Presence of God, an experience all too rare in this too often nightmare of a world in which we live.

 

So this is what I'll remember as Jerry's legacy and gift to me and my fellow parishioners at St. Luke's - the gift of God's Spirit, lovingly and transformatively relayed.  Who knew he had it in him?  Jerry's such a mild-mannered, unassuming guy....  God knew ... and reminded us yesterday and today.

 

And Jerry knew ... because he's chosen a life in which, not only this weekend and with us, he'll show all he meets just what God can do when He/She/It works through us.  Well done, Grasshopper....

 

 

Grace, as it extends to more and more people, brings thanksgiving.

 

- The Rev. Jerry Racioppi