In the aftermath of Robin Williams’ death I turned to author Frederick Buechner who has reached me in the dark times of my life. Fred here preaches on Thomas, the Twin, whom he identifies as his twin, my twin, your twin. Like Anne Lamott’s piece posted on Views from the Edge last week, this is the life of faith at its best. Peace!
Click the link below for the best thing I’ve read since Robin Williams’ death. Anne Lamott’s hastily written words about her dear friend are in a class by themselves. Anne and Robin grew up in the same place, suffered in similar ways, and have brought great pleasure and meaning to so many.
august brings blooms to the midwest
prairies, some restored to the time
prior to when the settlers came:
blazing star and the false boneset,
compass plant and black-eyed susan,
white and purple prairie clover,
flowering spurge and pale coneflower,
prairie dock and hoary vervain.
present prairies are productive:
in the i-states: indiana,
illinois, and then iowa,
field corn, soybeans, are pervasive.
checkerboards are green and golden,
maize from native american.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, August 16, 2014
Under the Knife
14 times in 71 years
1. In the 1940s
little boys
all were circumcised.
No waiting for day eight,
purely for health,
snip–did I mind?
Who knows. Now?
I still like
the little fellow.
2. Most kids then
had their tonsils out.
About two, I spoke little:
the promised ice cream
I called “hobledy,”
but my throat hurt
too much to eat it.
3. At seminary, married,
worked a summer on
construction, needed
hernia repair. Kind doc
charged only what
insurance paid.
Two days in hospital then:
passed out trying to pee.
It took three nurses to get me
from floor to bed.
4. More grad school,
second hernia repair,
used the bedpan.
5. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
Back to home town,
middle-age: back surgery,
heart surgery, belly button
hernia repair, remove malignant
polyp from colon,
remove cyst on inside
of eardrum, prostate biopsy
that led to sepsis.
11, 12, 13. Old age:
right knee replacement,
cataracts removed
from both eyes,
14. Coming up:
remove two polyps
from nostrils.
Not counting
colonoscopies…
-Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, August 15, 2014
“Hands up. Don’t shoot!” Ferguson, Missouri is not new.
Think Detroit 1967. Think riot police, National Guard. Think Chicago 1968 Democratic Convention. Think The Kerner Commission Report on police violence. Think armored vehicles. Think tanks. Think guns on tripods. Think Afghanistan. Think Iraq. Think occupation. Think race. Think black. Think white. Think guns. Think Trayvon Martin. Think militarization. Think occupation. It’s all a replay.
Think… America.
I’m working this morning on the familiar spiritual of Jacob’s Ladder, trying to unpack why it is so meaningful to people at different life stages and in all sorts of circumstances. I’m looking back now over 72 years of singing it or – or shunning it at one point along the way. I didn’t like the “soldier” part.
We are climbing Jacob’s ladder
We are climbing Jacob’s ladder
We are climbing Jacob’s ladder,
Soldiers of the cross.
We are climbing higher, higher….
Why did it mean so much to me as a teenager “climbing higher, higher”? It was a spiritual journey, a confusing one that tried to connect the war-torn, racist world of Earth with heaven, and the call to climb higher, higher to close the gap. But I suspect psychologically it also gave me some assurance about the challenges of growing up, getting wiser perhaps, more independent, climbing into adulthood. The journey was a struggle that made me feel sometimes like a soldier inside my own skin and the world around me.
But long before I sang it in church camp, it was sung by American slaves. It expressed the faith and hope of liberation from chattel slavery. They sang without apology as “soldiers of the cross” (beaten, tortured and crucified like Jesus), on their way up “every rung” going higher, higher (farther north) to a land that lured them like heaven itself.
I go to YouTube and find Pete Seeger’s wonderful, cheerful rendition that replaces the original “soldier of the cross” with “brothers, sisters, all” and remember that I, too, have joined him in feeling the need to eliminate the military language. “Soldier” and “cross” are oxymoronic. It was the soldiers who did the crucifying, and it was the soldiers of the white militias who terrorized the slaves’ hopes.
No sooner do I listen to Peter’s rendition than I listen to Paul Robson who found no reason to eliminate the “soldiers of the cross” – perhaps because Robson knew that he and we are engaged in a kind of combat and the strange pairing of soldier and cross carries its own power and meaning. Robson, as you may know, was a Communist who would have seen every rung going higher, higher the way Pete saw it – steps on the upward course of human progress toward a kind of heaven conceived as classless society, a kinder world. “Thy kingdom come on earth, as it is in heaven.”
I have been in all of these places a thousand times. Youthful, hopeful, visionary, climbing. But now I concentrate on things I missed in the earlier stages of youth, building a career, rising higher and higher on the professional and economic ladders of “success” or imagining and hoping the world was getting better.
I notice now as never before that the biblical text of Jacob’s dream is not of Jacob’s upward climb. Jacob never steps on the ladder. Angels (messengers) do, ascending to the heavens and descending to where he is in a kind of no-man’s land where everything he has ever known is at risk, the way I am in an in-between time between the today’s earthly beauty and climate departure, the scorching of the planet. Like Jacob, I have an “Aha!” moment: “Surely YHWH (the un-pronounable Hebrew name for G-d) is in this place, and I did not know it!”
So I’m reflecting now on the importance of this temporary, mortal, finite “place” in time where YHWH (the Breath of Life) is already present, and the need to surrender the idea that I need to climb to somewhere else.
Why do parks calm and refresh,
Backyards give a sense of peace,
Beaches, mountains, forests, plains,
Even deserts give a rush
Of pure pleasure? Oxygen
May be part of the answer:
Leave stale air in house or car,
Stand near trees and blow out pain,
Breathe in health, escape the walls,
Fences, ceilings, chemicals,
Television, motor sound,
Hear your own breath, look around…
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, August 14, 2014
This sermon at Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska, Minnesota focuses on what is commonly known as Jacob’s Ladder, Jacob’s dream of a ladder set up between heaven and earth, ending with his exclamation “Surely God was in this place and I did not know it.”
Perhaps I’ve had it all my life,
(you’d have to ask my kids, my wife,
my mother, sibs, kids in the band,
my teachers–school and Sunday School),
but if they knew, they never said,
(I know at least I never heard
or recall one word mean or cruel),
but when I came to middle age
and could not work in manic phase,
or more precisely, when depressed,
wrung out, unable to get dressed,
only a good psychiatrist
could find the meds to slow me down
when high so I could get around
(But then I found I was not bright–
I could not think, I could not write–
and so I had to fire the shrink…)
(After the suicide of Robin Williams, comedian extraordinaire)
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, August 13, 2014
NOTE: This morning MinnPost published yesterday’s Views from the Edge brief commentary on “Robin Williams and Us” as a Letter to the Editor.
Few people made so many laugh or cry as Robin Williams. Today we’re not laughing. We’re crying.
What Robin’s world inside his own skin was like no one else really knows. His sudden death strikes us with an equally sudden sadness. It punctures a hole in our perceptions, brings to a screeching halt the presumption of dailyness and the ordered worlds in which we wrap ourselves in a society whose madness Robin himself helped us to transcend.
We are not among the few who knew him intimately. As in the aftermath of Michael Jackson’s death, we are left to pause and pray for his family and closest friends and to consider again the greater tragedy of violent social order where reason and kindness are as alien as Mork was to this strange world.
The stories in the next days will feed public curiosity, appealing to the need for some cause on which to pin the tragedy, like pinning the tail on the donkey, some manageable explanation for why a man so funny and gifted would apparently take his own life. We will hear that it was clinical depression or bi-polar disorder or drugs or alcohol or some other diagnosis that explains his death.
But will they address the bigger human question to which Robin gave his life in comedy and in drama: why is the world so in love with death? Why is the world we have built for ourselves so cruel? Why does it take an alien named Mork with an innocent young woman named Mindy to deliver us from the love affair with a collective madness for which there seems to be no cure? And how do we, when we bump up against an inexplicable death like Robin’s, pause appropriately in his honor to give thanks for him in both his laughter and his tears?
Views from the Edge 