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.

Texas Flood, Ted Cruz, and Zombie games

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The other night a professional baseball game was played during a torrential downpour at Target Field in Minnesota. Meanwhile down in Texas, historic level floods were rising.

Senator Ted Cruz, the climate change denier who opposed the bill providing disaster relief to the Northeast following Hurricane Sandy in 2013, was shouting for urgent federal assistance above and beyond ordinary disaster relief.

Back in 2013 when the victims of Sandy were in New York and New Jersey, the Senator from Texas opposed the federal government “wasting” tax payers’ money.

“This bill,” he said, “is symptomatic of a larger problem in Washington—an addiction to spending money we do not have. The United States Senate should not be in the business of exploiting victims of natural disasters to fund pork projects that further expand our debt.”

Now that the scene of the disaster has shifted to Texas, he says, “At a time of tragedy, I think it’s wrong to try to politicize a natural disaster.”

“Amen” to that!

But, then again, according to The Daily Beast on May 28,

At the moment, Cruz is playing “Plants vs. Zombies,” a game where users collect sunlight points to feed plants who fight off waves of zombies; “Candy Crush,” the puzzle game where he claims he’s in the 217th level; and “The Creeps!,” a tower defense game.

One can almost hear the voice of Senator Cruz’s predecessor, Senator Lyndon B. Johnson (D), crying from the grave, wondering how the zombies took over his beloved Texas.

Senator, please join the rest of us in fighting for the plants against the zombie Climate Change denier obstructionists. What’s happened in New York and New Jersey, and what’s happening now in Minnesota, Texas and Oklahoma is not a video game. “Let’s play ball!”

– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN 55318

JKF’s Birthday and Champagne

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It’s normal for a mother to think her newborn child sets the moon. But few, if any, look at their children and say that one day they’ll be President of the United States.

One is left to wonder how it was 98 years ago today in Brookline, Massachusetts when Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy gave birth to her second-born child, John. Rose and her husband Joe were Irish Catholic in a country whose political class was blue-blood Protestant. No Roman Catholic had ever run for the Presidency by the time Rose gave birth to John.

But some mothers and fathers have a way. Welcoming their children into the world with unconditional love, they also encourage great expectations. Love and excellence are not opposites; they go together like the soil in Champagne, and the coveted grapes the soil produces.

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born to Rose and Joseph Kennedy 98 years ago. They could not have imagined their second-born son would grow up to become the 35th President of the United States of America. But he did.

Few, if any, mothers expect their child to become President of the United States of America. But if unconditional love and great expectations greet a newborn child, almost anything can happen, and, whatever it turns out to be, it will all be good.

– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, May 29, 2015.

The Paradox of Pentecost — Presence and Absence

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A stranger than strange text for today’s Feast of Pentecost, the day the Church celebrates the coming of the Spirit, the Advocate, reads:

“I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you…” [Gospel according to John 16:7].

It is Jesus in John’s Gospel who speaks these words to his disciples. They scratch their heads, like confused children being dropped off at camp against their will. They already sense the homesickness that will come. The thought of being abandoned brings anguish, the foreboding of oncoming forlornness.

The experience of absence, endemic to the human condition, is essential to faith. The feeling of anguished forlornness builds courage, and faith, of one sort or another, with or without an advocate.

Enter Jean-Paul Sartre’s reflections on anguish and forlornness. Fully conscious without religious crutches, I experience the anguish of my responsibility for myself and others, and the forlornness that realizes that I am alone in my decision-making. The decisions are mine along. No one but I am responsible.

Like the disciples, we want it to be otherwise. Some of us pray as though the feelings were a hoax, the Devil’s trickery or God’s pre-ordaining, as though our course were charted by another decision-maker disbelieved by Sartre. But regardless of our faith or faith denials, the truth is that to be human is to know this sense of anguish and forlornness.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the brilliant theologian imprisoned and executed by the Third Reich, caught the sense of it in a letter he wrote from a prison cell.

“The only way to be honest is to recognize that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur. And this is just what we do see — before God! So our coming of age forces us to a true recognition of our situation visa a vis God. God is teaching us that we must live as [people] who can get along very well without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). God who makes us live in the world without using him as a working hypothesis is the God before whom we are ever standing. Before God and with him we live without God. God allows himself to be edged out of the world and onto the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, which is exactly the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us. Mark 8:17 makes it crystal clear that it is not by his omnipotence that Christ helps us, but by his weakness and his suffering.” [Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, pp 219-220, McMillan Company, 1953, translated from German by Reginald H. Fuller.]

Bonhoeffer’s writing acknowledges the anguish and forlornness that precede the disappearance of the divine usurper of human freedom and responsibility. In place of the bad-faith God who keeps her children in diapers, there comes the advantage of Christ’s going away — the arrival of the Advocate who brings the unexpected joy of coming of age.

“I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” [Gospel according to John 16:7].

– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, May 24, 2015 – Feast of Pentecost.

Two Line Verse

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Verse – Soul Food

Flowers in soil
Feed the soul

Soul Food Flowers

Soul Food Flowers

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL May 24, 2015.

 

The Movement Made the Man (MLK)

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Martin Luther King, Jr. did not make the civil rights movement. As Elizabeth Myer Boulton reminds us, it was the movement that made the man. Without the movement there would have been no “I Have a Dream Speech”.

Elizabeth (Liz) Myer Boulton’s spouse, Matthew Myer Boulton, President of Christian Theological Seminary, hosted five McCormick Theological Seminary classmates this past week, including Steve Shoemaker and me.

I returned from Indianapolis and found Liz’s powerful sermon. It reminded me of Kay and my month in Saint Augustine.  It was the unsung local heroes who built the movement, paid the price, and drove the buses to the Poor People’s March on Washington. Martin represented them all.

– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, May 23, 2015.

Daily Riches: Your Enemy the Savage (Thomas Merton, Martin Niemöller and Richard Rohr)

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“It took me a long time to learn that God is not the enemy of my enemies. He is not even the enemy of His enemies.” Martin Niemöller

Today, if African American protests turn into riots, the offenders are often referred to as “animals.” In the early American West, native Americans were called “savages”, and wartime slurs dehumanized Jews, Germans, and Japanese. Richard Rohr reminds us that we all have a viewpoint, and that each viewpoint is “a view from a point.” Consequently, he says “…we need to critique our own perspective if we are to see and follow the full truth.” To love our enemies, as Jesus commands, and to escape our own unconscious biases, we will need such a critique.

“Do not be too quick to assume your enemy is a savage just because he is your enemy. Perhaps he is your enemy because he thinks you are…

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Bible a key to murder case

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A friend called to tell me about the murder of his friend Earl Olander soon after it happened. Hollis knew the victim, 90 year-old Earl Olander, mercilessly beaten in his Carver County farm house.

Why would anyone would do this [i.e., tie him up, beat him with a shotgun, ransack his farm house, leave him half-dead] to a sweet-spirited old man like Earl?

A new use for the Bible appeared as the lead headline on the front page of this morning’s StarTribune:

“Stolen Bible leads police to suspects in death of 90 year-old Carver County man: After 90 year-old man was beaten to death, his stolen Bible led police to two suspects.” – StarTribune

Though a suspect is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, charges have been brought against the two suspects based, in part, on the discovery of the victim’s large European Bible containing two savings bonds a cleaning agent found in a vacated apartment in Saint Paul, MN.

The Bible has many uses. It speaks of grace, of sin, of homicide, of betrayal, brutality, denial, mercy, and more. Now, in the murder of 90 year-old Earl Olander that defies explanation, it serves as the primary piece of evidence in a court of law.

“Before the attackers fled,” says the StarTribune, “they ransacked Olander’s home and stole the Bible, as well as coins, old silverware, and two-dollar bills.

“[A neighbor of Olander] said he found it ‘quite ironic that it was the Bible’ that helped investigators make the arrests. ‘Think about that.'” [Star Tribune story]

“The book to read is not the book that thinks of you, but the one that makes you think.  No book in the world equals the Bible for that. – Harper Lee, author, To Kill a Mockingbird

– Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, May 14, 2015.

Verse – Annals of Aging #12

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There was an old man with weak prostate,
Who overnight could not stay prostrate
For more than two hours
Without golden showers
In porcelain towers. His poor mate

Could never reach REM sleep all night,
And so every morning they’d fight
Till each took a bedroom
With a private bathroom,
And now everything is all right.

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 14, 2015

Just In – Classic Motorcycle for Sale

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Classic Motorcycle ad

Classic Motorcycle ad

Quote of the day; Stories . . .

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Scroll down to read Day Parker’s quote about stories. Anthony de Mello was an Indian Jesuit priest who died of a heart attack at the age of 55. His writings were of some controversy, such that Joseph Ratzinger (who later became Pope Benedict XVI) investigated de Mello’s views 11 years after his death, concluding that some of his writings were “inconsistent with the teachings” of the Faith. The Indian magazine Outlook claimed it was an attempt by Rome to undermine the clergy in Asia and indicative of widening fissures between Rome and the Eastern Church. Like Elie Wiesel, Father de Mello knew that stories, not investigations and pronouncements, are the (appropriate) currency of human contact.