Author Archives: Gordon C. Stewart

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About Gordon C. Stewart

I've always liked quiet. And, like most people, I've experienced the world's madness. "Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness" (Wipf and Stock Publishers, Jan. 2017) distills 47 years of experiencing stillness and madness as a campus minister and Presbyterian pastor (IL, WI, NY, OH, and MN), poverty criminal law firm executive director, and social commentator. Our cat Lady Barclay reminds me to calm down and be much more still than I would be without her.

A Picture of God

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A Kindergarten teacher observed the children drawing pictures in her classroom. As she walked around the room, one little girl was totally absorbed in her drawing when the teacher asked what she was drawing.

“I’m drawing God!”

“But no one knows what God looks like,” said the teacher.

The girl kept drawing. Without a hitch and without looking up, she replied, “They will in a minute.”

As part of their research, psychologists have asked children to draw pictures of God looking for correspondences between the children see their parents and how they imagine God.

“God the Father” of trinitarian Christian theology was of particular interest. The children’s drawings turn out to be vastly different, depending upon positive or negative experiences with their fathers. Some drew God as kind and loving; others drew God as fearful and violent.

Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Ludwig Feuerbach would not be surprised. Each in his own way saw ‘God’ as a human projection, not a Divine reality. Yet there is something about even the most disbelieving of us that is still drawn to try to draw God.

Maybe the little girl in the kindergarten class had heard in church the line that “No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us” (I John 4:12). Maybe she was drawing Love.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Nov. 5, 2015.

Verse – “He was just a railroad man”

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Trains are steel and men are flesh–
When they meet some men will die.
He lay crushed, those passing by,
“He was just a railroad man.”

The dispatcher heard them talk–
He told his friends down at the Y.
Cleveland built a Railroad Y
Welcomed all the working men.

Nineteen hundred eleven
Saw two hundred railroad Y’s
Eat some chow, get some shut-eye,
Read a book–a healthy man.

Railroads paid for about half–
Workers gave to help their life.
Dignity, respect, human:
Yes, he was a railroad MAN.

  • Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, Oct. 19, 2015
St. Louis Railroad YMCA, now a Drury Inn

St. Louis Railroad YMCA, now a Drury Inn

A Papal Education by Daniel A. Wagner – Project Syndicate

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In September, the UN and Pope Francis both called on the international community to fight poverty and preserve the environment. At the center of these efforts will be education – particularly one goal on which the world is still falling short: literacy.

Source: A Papal Education by Daniel A. Wagner – Project Syndicate

Daniel (“Dan”) Wagner is UNESCO Chair in Learning and Literacy, Professor of Education, and Director of the International Literacy Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, and a long-time friend.

Thanks to Dan’s spouse, Mary Eno, a Ph.D. practicing psychologist in private practice and friend of Kay Stewart since junior high school, for bringing Dan’s article to our attention.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

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Vivinfrance’s Blog posts interesting thoughts of a writer named Viv who lives in France. Today’s post is about weapons and creativity.

How could I write a poem about weapons
without swearing or weeping?
It is my deeply held view that
makers, sellers, buyers of weapons
are as guilty of murder
as those who use them.

***
Transform the energy from good food
into breathing, walking, running.
Transform scraps of this and that
into a meal, a sculpture, a quilt, a poem.
Practise living a healthy, creative life
in kindness and beauty.

Here in the U.S. we’re fighting over who’s responsible for all the violence. “It’s people who kill, not guns,” say some opponents of gun control, defenders of a skewed rendering of the Second Amendment. But it’s also the guns, the bombs, the drones, the land mines, the missiles – the weapons manufacturers who kill and maim.  There’s nothing in the Second Amendment about the right to kill and maim.

More importantly and too often missing from the public discussion, the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence starts with certain “unalienable Rights, among which are the Right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

In that trinity of unalienable rights and values liberty means nothing unless it supports the right to life and the pursuit of happiness. Otherwise, it serves the purposes of death and sorrow. As Viv reminds us from France,

makers, sellers, buyers of weapons
are as guilty of murder
as those who use them.

Until we the people demand that liberty be returned to its rightful place, the weapons manufacturers will continue to make a killing on killing at home a abroad.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Sunday morning, reflection, Chaska, MN, October 18, 2015.

Verse – The Memorial Service

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The day we remember
at the Memorial Service
a friend of 55 years, some
will say he was a human
having a spiritual experience,
looking to the skies for the
one who’s “passed on”.

Others of us remember
the face, the smile, the stride,
the fitness, the speech
and mannerisms during
walks in the mountain woods
of a real human having a
spiritual experience.

Are we flesh and blood,
living on the eternal’s shore
turned back to dust?
Or are we stardust that
never dies, immortals
experiencing mortality
before returning to the sky?

Has he died or passed on?
Are the ashes and memories
of Phil what remain of him
or were his smile, his walk
and talk just time-bound
expressions of a spiritual
being locked in a cage?

I hear no bird singing but
the funeral dirge and hymn
reminding us to think
less of ourselves and our
not-so exceptional species
of flesh and blood, dust and
ashes left in cemetery urns.

“O God, our help in ages
past, our hope for years to
come, we fly forgotten as
a dream dies at the opening
day. Be Thou our guide
while life shall last and
our eternal home.”

Today our tears again will
fall, as do all creatures
great and small when
time’s short river returns
to the eternal ebb and flow
whence we came and to
which all soon return, with
sobs of humility and praise.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, October 17, 2015, written in anticipation of today’s Memorial Service for college and seminary classmate and friend Philip Conner Brown. At the same time as the Memorial Service today at White Bear Lake United Methodist Church, he will be remembered in a Chapel service for Maryville College alumni who died during the last year.

 

A Limerick for World’s Greatest Cubs Fan

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Map to Wrigley Field from Urbana, IL

Map to Wrigley Field from Urbana, IL

For the Cubs 1-0-7 long years
Crying No-Series-Winner sad tears.
Yes, I live far away,
But soon on that great day
Baby Bruins will sure hear my cheers!

– Steve Shoemaker, Cubs fan writing 154 miles from Wrigley Field in honor of Harry Lee Strong, world’s greatest Cubs fan.

Steve and Harry are lifelong, long-suffering “Baby Bruins” fans hoping the sports heavens are about to open after the 107 year drought since the Cubs last won the World Series. Harry, pictured below in his tux, and his dog with the Cubs tie, have been “dressing for success” in Harry’s “Cubs cave” farther away in AZ.

Harry Strong holding picture with Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks and Cubs memorabilia.

Harry Strong holding picture with Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks and Cubs memorabilia.

 

 

 

 

Shabbat Bereishit – The Sound of Your Brothers’ Bloods Cry Out to Me From the Earth

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Rabbi Eric Gurvis’s post on Cain and Abel and the debate about guns and mental health came to our attention this morning after posting “Non-Verbal Communication: Cain Looking at Us”.

Source: Shabbat Bereishit – The Sound of Your Brothers’ Bloods Cry Out to Me From the Earth

Non-verbal Communication: Cain looking at us

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Cain and Abel – the mythical story of the first two children of humanity – in the Book of Genesis (Genesis 4:1-16) is about something that never happened way back when but about what is always happening with us: the inexplicable violence to which humankind turns against itself. It’s about the yawning abyss of violence into which we plunge when we can’t make sense out of life or when things don’t go our way.

Yesterday’s brief post on Via Lucis Photography of Religious Architecture focuses on a capital of Cain and Abel in a Romanesque church.

Photograph by Dennis Aubrey of Via Lucis Photography of Religious Architecture

Photograph by Dennis Aubrey of Via Lucis Photography of Religious Architecture

Like the Genesis writer, the Medieval artist whose hand crafted the story in stone many centuries later was doing theology and anthropology. The biblical author told the story with words; the Medieval sculptor told it with non-verbal communication.

The face of Cain on Via Lucis held my attention long after I’d gone on with the day. It kept returning to mind.

Cain’s head isn’t turned toward Abel whom he is pummeling to death with his stave. He’s looking away from Cain at someone or something else, as if to say the viewer, “So, you think I’m cruel. You think I’m different. You’re looking in the mirror.”

In the biblical story God tells Cain, “sin is crouching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” The Medieval sculptor’s art seems to be saying it in stone. Cain’s head is cocked, his eyes looking at us. At you. At me.  And, perhaps, at God, to whose failure to rescue Abel he shifts responsibility: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  The capital seems to say Cain knows he owns us and the endless history of violence in which the blood of the silent victims cries out from the ground, unless and until we – persons, groups, religions, races, cultures, nations, a species – master the sin that’s forever crouching at our door.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, October 16, 2015

 

Verse – Why do you fly a kite?

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Steve's kite

Steve’s kite

Why Do You Fly Kites?

You kid of 72,
Reliving your childhood?
Child-like, or childish?

Prairie winds are strong,
Annoying to some.
I choose to revel in them,
Let the wind lift my spirits,
Carry kite and me skyward.

But you can no longer run,
Cannot pull the kite aloft,
Cannot even trot…

A delta kite lifts itself
In even a mild breeze.
When high above,
I tie the line to a stake,
And sit with beer in hand,
And look up.

  • Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, Oct. 26, 2015

The Presidential Debate

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The pundits focused on Hillary and Bernie. They ignored a third candidate on the stage who fared well. His name is Martin O’Malley. He didn’t hit the home run the gurus said was required to bring him into the race, but he represented his record clearly with poise and with the dignity the American people have a right to expect of the person in the Oval Office. He had the stature of a President.

The Bernie-Hillary show was a media creation, a script which, to his great credit, Moderator Anderson Cooper did not follow. Cooper asked hard questions to every candidate with the first questions of the evening. Cooper was a professional journalist, working for the American people to flush out the inconsistencies and push for the truth of what a candidate really stands for. Bernie danced a jig on his poor record on gun control and his votes on the Brady Bill; Hillary danced on the email controversy, her Iraq War vote, and her change of opinion on the TPP trade agreement. Cooper was the consummate moderator, insisting that candidates answer the question they were asked, but respectful and fair.

Jim Webb and Lincoln Chafee were like minor leaguers on a Major League field in the early playoffs. There were five candidates on stage but only three major leaguers.

Webb performed poorly as the most conservative candidate who suffered from a shirt collar that made him look tight as a tic. He looked like the kid whose parents dressed him in a tux for the senior prom – very unnatural, ill at ease, unable to be his winsome self.  Chafee  stood by his progressive voting record and admirable credentials as a former U.S. Senator and Governor of Rhode Island, but his facial eccentricities and persona do not help his candidacy. Although he might make a great president, he’d be very hard to watch for four full years.

O’Malley, on the other hand, looked and sounded the part of a presidential candidate. Or, perhaps, Vice-Presidential. Like Joe Biden, O’Malley is both smart and tough, seasoned and fresh, just the kind of running mate Hillary or Bernie might choose, if either of them wins the Democratic Party nomination. The problem, of course, is that O’Malley is another Easterner, which all but eliminates him according to the prevailing wisdom that the best ticket is geographically balanced.

But, if in the debates ahead, Bernie and Hillary should falter, Martin O’Malley is someone to watch. If I were Bernie or Hillary, I’d sleep with one eye open. Remember the tortoise and the hare.

  • Gordon C. Stewart (Bernie supporter), Chaska, MN, October 14, 2015.