Apple CEO Tim Cook acted with courage yesterday. Click Tim Cook Speaks Up to read his October 30, 2014 letter in BloombergBusinessweek.
Every parent of a gay child, every gay person, every relative or friend should give an apple to the Apple teacher whose inspirations are Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy.
Political folks just repeat
…and repeat,
Keep saying it over
…to win that great seat,
But I have a limit,
My ears just can’t hear it,
When words from that goat’s
mouth become one more BLEAT!
– Steve Shoemaker, October 28, 2014
BTW, Don’t forget to vote next Tuesday! May the best goat win.
“Hello. NSA?” “Hello, CIA.“ “Hello, Homeland Security.” “Hello, whoever you are, listening in on my phone conversations.”
I’m on the phone with the Church Administrator of the little church I serve. A loud whining noise suddenly over-rides her voice. I try to talk with her; she keeps talking as though everything is fine. I hang up and call again. She wonders what happened. I tell her. “It’s the NSA,” she says. We both laugh.
But it’s no laughing matter.
The timing of the unexplained noise on the phone coincided with arrival of an email from a JFK assassination researcher who is providing overnight lodging for another critic of the Warren Commission Report, Judyth Vary Baker. Judyth is Lee Harvey Oswald’s former lover, controversial author of Me and Lee: How I Came to Love and Lose Lee Harvey Oswald. Ms. Baker makes the case that President Kennedy was assassinated by a right-wing, anti-Castro, Mafia-linked group within the CIA.
Judyth is in town this week promoting her latest book, David Ferrie: Mafia Pilot, Participant in Anti-Castro Bioweapon Plot, Friend of Lee Harvey Oswald and Key to the JFK Assassination. David Ferrie is the shadowy figure with whom Judyth worked in 1963 in a New Orleans cancer research lab she claims was a covert project of the CIA.
At the request of her publisher, my friend here in Chaska approached several bookstores, a church, and a senior citizens center. One of the bookstores, one of America’s largest, originally said yes, but the next day reported back that “it wouldn’t work out.” An event at a church was scheduled, but was cancelled at the last minute because of a scheduling conflict.
“Hello, NSA.” “Hello, CIA.” Hello, somebody. Someone is listening in. Someone who doesn’t want the rest of us listening to the likes of Judyth Vary Baker or reading the allegations about David Ferrie and the connection between the anti-Castro, Mafia-linked cabal within the CIA.
Or maybe no one is listening in and my friend and I are making it all up. Maybe there is some other reason for the noise I’d never heard before on my phone. It’s just a strange coincidence that the noise happened while the email was arriving on my MacBook Air. It’s coincidence that the phones of people I called the rest of the day did not ring but showed as voicemails without messages, a new wrinkle in their experience and mine. It’s coincidence that my computer and those of several others I had emailed or phoned began to behave as though they needed the Geek Squad or Prozac.
Although I’ve never asked to see it, I’m confident that the FBI has a file on me, and, if they do, I’m rather proud of it. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., a group in Decatur, Illinois identifies a picture of King’s alleged assassin as the man who’d shown up out-of-the-blue while a crowd of youth was still on the church parking lot following the dismissal of that night’s youth outreach program.
The FBI shows each of us three photographs, asking if we can identify the man we met. Each of us, interviewed separately, identifies one of the three. The picture matches the photograph of James Earl Ray on the cover of Life magazine.
A cub reporter who gets wind of the story publishes a column in The Decatur Herald. The Chicago Sun-Times publishes a story on its front page. Right-hand column. Right there in black and white. The headline reads something like “King Assassin Spotted in Decatur, Illinois.” Several of us are quoted in both articles.
Years later, researchers search the files of the Decatur Herald and the Chicago Sun-Times for the stories. They’re not there. There is no evidence that the stories were ever published.
“Good night, NSA.” “Good night, CIA.” “Good night, FBI.” “Good night, Judyth.”
“Hello, Patriot Act.”
“Good-bye Constitution; good-bye Republic.”
“Kyrie Eleison!”
The window at the back
of our new car
in 1952 was for the rear-
view mirror our father
used to see so far
behind us as we drove.
But I could peer
up to the sky while on
the shelf, supine,
(although I did not know
the word for years)
that seemed made for a child
above, behind,
the back seat where my young
brother in tears
would yowl it was his turn.:
It felt like I
was still, while up above
the leaves of fall
with colors red and gold
went rushing by.
(It was before Dutch Elm
Disease befell
our Midwest town.) The tree
tunnel would go,
and even little brother,
too, would grow…
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, Illinois, October 25, 2014. Sent following his University of Illinois football team (previously 0-3 in the Big Ten) beat the University of Minnesota (previously 3-0 in the Big Ten) on a cheap fumble!
North Shore driftwood
The first half is much bigger
than the second shorter half
green, naive, sprouting,
climbing, reaching, chasing
after stars we cannot yet see
but believe are there
in timeless skies that shine
and tease the imagination
of twinkling immortality that
halts when illness strikes
or death intrudes to put the
lights out in the sky
and remind us to look down
as well as up, at our mortality
this flesh and blood we are,
this dust and ash we cannot
shed no matter how we try
or imagine otherwise and
if we’re lucky or blessed,
we understand in the second
shorter wiser, browner, wilting
falling, losing, finding second
shorter half of life the calm
that comes in golden years.
– Gordon C. Stewart, Oct. 25, 2014
Moving on is hard and joyful at the same time.
Fourteen (14) days to retirement. Joyful announcement yesterday introducing Dean Seal, the next pastor of Shepherd of the Hill in Chaska. Dean is Executive Director and Founder of Spirit in the House and Forgiveness 360. A stand-up comedian, actor, director, producer, and event organizer, Dean is an ordained Presbyterian minister who teaches religion as part-time adjunct faculty at Augsburg College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Wonderful choice. I’m moving on more easily knowing that Dean is coming to Shepherd of the Hill.
This sermon was preached the week following guest preacher Tabitha Isner’s sermon that began with her singing and asking, “Church. What’s it good for?”
Please leave your story of terror and fascination here, if you care to share. Thanks for coming by Views from the Edge.
Fifteen days from today I officially retire.
The new pastor has been appointed to the office that has provided definition, boundaries, routines, anchors, and the vocational sense of purpose and meaning that come from a job and being part of a team.
I’m saying to myself what poor Alice said to herself in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
“‘But it’s no use now,‘ thought poor Alice, `to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!…for it might end, you know,‘ said Alice to herself, `in my going out altogether, like a candle.‘”
Whenever retirement happens, it raises big questions – scary questions. About whether and how we will manage to live on reduced income, for instance, but, more profoundly, about what one’s life will be without the roles that have partially defined us. Who are we without the roles? What gives life meaning? Why are we here? For what do we exist? Existential questions.
There are moments when the pending retirement – the next chapter to which I’m looking forward – feels like jumping off a cliff into an abyss. I n those moments, the question becomes whether there is life over the cliff. Is what feels like a leap into oblivion a leap into nothingness, or is it a leap onto a trampoline we didn’t know was there before we leaped? Don’t know. Haven’t done it. As my dear retired friend in the memory care center said last Friday about my pending retirement, “You’re going to love it and you’re going to hate it. But eventually,” she assured me, “You’re going to love it!”
Worries about finances and can quickly turn me into Alice, plunging down the rabbit hole. Anxiety. Fear. But money isn’t really what’s unsettling.
Walking Barclay along the lovely wooded paths of the Jonathan Association yesterday, I remembered seeing a mole several years ago while walking our dogsMaggie and Sebastian (since deceased). The blind little mole seemed to be waddling aimlessly along the side of a dark tunnel. It was alone and kind of putzing along, oblivious to our presence, going who-knows-where for who-know-what reason. Fear feels like that. I sometimes feel like that. But the real fear underneath it all is death. For death is the obliteration of the self as we have come to know ourselves (the masks, the roles, the social networks, the reasons for living that come from outside ourselves).
Retirement is not death. It’s a precursor to death, but it is not the end of life. It’s a new chapter, a chance to finally BE and do what we want to be: the one and only person we have always been.
Aging doesn’t stop. It keeps going. Health is not forever. It declines. So, in part, the questions for me are what we want to do, what we “should” do (i.e., service to others and making a difference in this world), and what we can do to age gracefully, meaningfully, and joyfully.
In the year ahead my vocation will take the form of writing. Addressing the deeper questions. The existential questions. The faith questions. What Chaim Potok once called “the 4:00 in the morning questions”. But even more, I pray, retirement will bring a greater appreciation and enjoyment of the wonder of it all. As William Sloan Coffin put it at the end of his book Credo, I want to live “less intentionally and more attentionally.”
So, in 15 days I turn the keys over to Dean, a wonderfully gifted colleague in ministry, confident that Shepherd of the Hill won’t skip a beat, and that Shepherd of the Hill, Dean, Kay and I are each and all in the good Hands of the unseen Trampoline just over the cliff.
We do not get to see God face-to-face. None of us does. But we do see God’s back.
When Moses makes the request to see God, the Book of Exodus writer puts it this way:
But, God said, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.”
And the LORD continued, “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.”
We see God [YHWH – the Breath – “I am Who I am”/ “I will be Who I will be”] from the cleft in the rock. Rudolf Otto said it differently. We experience the Divine as the mysterium tremendum et fasciinans, Latin for the fearful and fascinating mystery.
Rudolf Otto is best known for his work The Idea of the Holy, first published in German in 1917, translated into English 1923, in which he analyzes the human experience that underlies all religion. He calls this experience the “numinous,” (from the Greek work “pneuma” (i.e. spirit), which has three components.
First and always, it is mysterium.- beyond human grasp, control, or knowing. It is, he says, Wholly Other. It elicits a tremble. It is powerful beyond human power, experienced as an overwhelming power, the likes of which we glimpse in the terrifying explosion of an hydrogen bomb. We experience it as mysterium tremendum. At the same time, the numinous evokes a fascination the way a magnet draws iron to itself. Something in us knows we belong to it. The “it”, according to Otto, is the divine mystery’s mercifulness and graciousness.
We can only come at it through the back door, by hints and suggestions and stories that suggest its presence in daily life.
Consider, for instance, Steve Shoemaker’s verse posted earlier on Views from the Edge.
Driving Blind
The highway is straight
and smooth, only one lane
in each direction…
no barrier in the center,
no guard rails on the sides…
nighttime, no white lines
mark the edges of the road…
no streetlights…
all that can be seen
is the oval puddle of light
from the headlights
of my speeding car.
I jerk awake as I feel
the left tires bounce
on the shoulder of the road…
I have crossed
the wrong lane…I know
my wife is beside me, but
I cannot open my eyes…
I cry out, but her seat belt
holds her too tightly
for her to reach the wheel…
my eyes open for one second,
then all is dark again…
I cannot stay awake…
I whimper and shudder.
The terror remains
even after I realize
we are in our own bed
and I have been dreaming.
A reader responds to the posting:
I’ve been there. Only in my dreams I’m in the back seat of a speeding driverless car and can’t get to the front, not even to press the brake.
Another reader, Carolyn, a dear friend since kindergarten, writes:
Try having something similar happen when you are awake with your eyes open! A big contributor to my retirement at the time I retired.
Carolyn goes on to describe her problem with double-vision – seeing two on-coming cars and four lanes when there were two, having to decide which was real and which was a product of her double-vision. A near accident on a winding road in Gulf Mills, a road with which I am well familiar, helped her make the decision to retire.
Mysterium tremendous et facinans.
I’m retiring. Two more sermons at Shepherd of the Hill and I’m done. Any misgivings I might have had about the decision to retire were quickly set aside by watching the YouTube video of Tabitha Isner’s sermon the Sunday I was out of town. So alive, so young, so wise, so full of energy and creativity! It reminded me what my mother kept telling my father about the need to retire. He was getting stale.
Mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
Then, I’m thinking of my father when a phone call comes from San Francisco asking if I am the son of the Chaplain on Saipan during World War II.
I am. He’s doing research for the past three years on the 330th Army Air Corps based on Saipan. Googling my father’s name – Kenneth Campbell Stewart – up popped the Views from the Edge post about the Cincinnati cop who threatened to arrest me for hitch-hiking on the Interstate at 3:00 A.M. before he learned I was the son of his chaplain on Saipan, “Red Stewart”. I was like a chicken waiting for its head to get cut off before mercy struck.
Mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
I know very little about that chapter of my father’s life. I’ve always wondered. The caller wants to hear any stories and see any pictures or papers I might have. I dig back through the briefcase containing the packed away photos. The caller sends photos of Dad preaching from an ammunitions box on the freshly-cut cane fields following the invasion of Saipan. I shudder and wonder how he could preached the gospel from a Bible on a cartridge box.
Mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
The next day I serve as a chauffeur for a an aging friend going shopping for a recliner for his ailing wife now in memory care at a retirement facility. I provide the wheels. He does the shopping for the right chair that will help his wife recline and rise to a near standing position at the push of a button. We come back to visit with her in the memory care center. She greets us both warmly, as she always has. I tell her I’m retiring. She responds: “You’re going to love it; and you’re going to hate it.”
Mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
Life does both things. It makes us tremble; and it draws us to itself. The Mystery beyond all controlling inspires both trembling and ultimate attraction.
We’re all driving blind. We are all, like Moses, peering out from the cleft in the rock. We do not get to see God face-to-face. We see God’s glory from the back, and that’s good enough for me.
For a poem to sing
must it be in a song?:
Is a melody needed
beyond a mere drone?
Can the words on a page
create true harmony?
Are duets possible
realistically?
I cannot write
a round, a round.
A canon cannot
make one sound.
Each syllable makes just one note:
no melisma in poet’s throat…
to find one’s voice
amid the cacophony
of post-industrial, technological
society (with advertisements
POPPING UP everywhere)
is difficult enough without
hoping to be the J.S. Bach
of modern literature
One line at a time,
No need for a rhyme:
One chirp from a bird
is worth being heard.
Go to a concert for
polyphony.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, Oct. 19, 2014
Views from the Edge 