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.

For people AT HOME in Boston today

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Areas of Greater Boston are in lock-down this morning because of the madness that lit the fires of hate and violence, whatever the reason(s) behind the bombings at the Boston Marathon. In times like this, I often turn to deeper sources for strength, hope, and peace. Veni Creator Spiritus is one of them. The second and third stanzas of the lyrics, attributed to Rabanus Maurus in the 9th Century C.E, become in 2013 a prayer for the people locked in their homes in Boston:

Thy blessed unction from above
is comfort, life, and fire of love.
Enable with perpetual light
the dullness of our blinded sight

Anoint and cheer our soiled face
with the abundance of thy grace.
Keep far our foes, give peace at home:
where thou art guide, no ill can come.

To hear the plainsong, beginning with the ringing of a bell, Click Come, Holy Spirit, Our Souls Inspire.

Gabbie Giffords: “they looked over their shoulders”

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“I will not rest until we have righted the wrong these senators have done,” Giffords wrote. “… I am asking every reasonable American to help me tell the truth about the cowardice these senators demonstrated. … I’m asking citizens to go to their offices and say, ‘You’ve disappointed me, and there will be consequences.'”

The former Congresswoman (AZ) is still recovering from the assassination attempt that left her with serious brain injuries and caused her to vacate her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The quote above is from her Op Ed piece in the New York Times. Click “A Senate in the Gun Lobby’s Grip” to read the entire piece. Here’s a further excerpt:

They looked at these most benign and practical of solutions, offered by moderates from each party, and then they looked over their shoulder at the powerful, shadowy gun lobby — and brought shame on themselves and our government itself by choosing to do nothing.

They will try to hide their decision behind grand talk, behind willfully false accounts of what the bill might have done — trust me, I know how politicians talk when they want to distract you — but their decision was based on a misplaced sense of self-interest. I say misplaced, because to preserve their dignity and their legacy, they should have heeded the voices of their constituents. They should have honored the legacy of the thousands of victims of gun violence and their families, who have begged for action, not because it would bring their loved ones back, but so that others might be spared their agony.

A prescription for spiritual health

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A sermon on forgiveness as releasing or letting go preached at Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska, MN April 7, 2013. The sermon is indebted to Professor Robert Kegan, neo-Piagetian psychologist at Harvard University and Professor Mona Gustafson Affinito, Southern Connecticut State University Professor Emerita and author of Forgiving One Page at a Time and other books on the theology and psychology of forgiveness.

Interview with Chief Albert Naquin tomorrow

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Isle de Jean Charles Band

Isle de Jean Charles Band

Tomorrow morning Chief Albert Naquin of the Isle de Jean Charles Band, coastal Louisiana, will spend several hours at our home here in Chaska.

The Chief is one his way to Duluth with Kris Peterson, a mutual friend and environmental activist pastor and researcher with the University of New Orleans Center for Hazard Assessment, Response, and Technology. Kris and her husband, Dick Krajeski, were guest speakers at First Tuesday Dialogues, a community program of Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church, following the explosion of Deep Water Horizon.

Return here for a post later tomorrow on the interview with Chief Naquin re: the current state of affairs on Isle de Jean Charles three years after Deep Water Horizon.

Bullying and Cowardice in the Senate

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Yesterday’s vote in the U.S. Senate comes down to this: cowardice in the face of gun-lobby bullying.

How did they bully?

A well-funded misinformation campaign by the NRA, gun-manufacturer’s lobby, and FOX alleging – although the bill itself explicitly prohibits it – that the moderate compromise proposal would mean a “national registry” of gun owners and erosion of the Second Amendment. The fact that the bill’s co-sponsors had “A” ratings by the NRA made no difference. What makes a difference is money and profits. And the difference they make is fear.

Why were the Senators cowards?

They put their campaign financing ahead of moral principle. According to President Obama, speaking to the American people yesterday, NOT ONE of the Senators could give him or Vice President Biden a reason for opposing the legislation…other than “politics“. Not one.

90% of Democrats voted in favor. 90% of Republicans voted against it.

Polls show that 90% of the American people SUPPORT universal background checks and limiting the size of magazines.

Democrat Senators Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Mark Begich (D-Alaska), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) broke ranks with their Party by voting against.

Republican Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine), Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) broke ranks with their Party to vote in favor.

BREAKING NEWS: Last night former Republican Presidential Candidate Senator John McCain, joined by Senators Collins, Kirk, and Toomey, invited the other caucus members of the Grand Old Party (GOP) – “the party of Abraham Lincoln” – to join them for an evening at Ford’s Theater for a private showing of the film “Lincoln” and discussion of how he and the children and teachers of Sandy Hook Elementary School died.

Views from the Edge re-published today

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Thanks to Sojourners for publishing “After Boston – Above and Beyond“, published earlier on Views from the Edge.

After Boston: Above and Beyond

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"Above and Beyond" - National Veterans Art Museum, Chciago

“Above and Beyond” – National Veterans Art Museum, Chciago


The National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago has an unusual work of art.

When visitors first enter the museum, they hear a sound like wind chimes coming from above them. Their attention is drawn upward 24 feet to the ceiling of the two-story high atrium.

The metal dog tags of the more than 58,000 service men and women who died in the Vietnam War move and chime with shifting air currents. The 10-by-40-foot sculpture, entitled “Above and Beyond” was designed by Ned Broderick and Richard Steinbock.

Family and friends locate the exact dog tag of a loved one as a museum employee uses a laser to point to the tag with the name imprinted on the dog tag, now part of a chorus of wind chimes.

After the horror and tragedy in Boston, our heads have been down. This work of art serves as a reminder to look up to hear the sound of the spirit of goodness, compassion, and creativity that can turn tragedy and death into wind chimes played in silence by the air.

The word for “Spirit” in Hebrew Scripture is “ruach” (“wind”). “When God began to create the heavens and the earth – the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water – God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light” (Genesis 1 – 3, translation from the Hebrew by Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut in The Torah: a Modern Commentary (Union of American Hebrew Congregations, New York, 1981).

Click HERE for a YouTube video of an interview with a National Veterans Art Museum volunteer Joe Fornelli.

End the Violence

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Today’s Sojourners’ blog posted End the Violence .

After reading this article, I submitted this comment about the “comments”:

I am continually amazed and dismayed by the character and content of comments on articles like this. I have the sense that Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have told their listeners, “Go on Jim Wallis’ blog and take him down!” Lines like “liberal Christian drivel,” “a law that restricts a persons (sic) ability to fulfill their divine obligation to protect their home and family” (the legislation does NOT restrict it, and there is no such “divine mandate” except in the NRA Bible), and “what are these faith leaders doing about abortion?” (when the issue here is violence with guns and the allegation is that religious leaders must choose between the two) – these comments do not engage the issue.

There is an anti-legislation, anti-democratic, anti-government streak in so many of these comments. The comments are political in the worst sense, demeaning the integrity of the writers and stereotyping their views into predetermined conclusions.

This seems to be the nature of the blogosphere, but it is especially distressing to see it here on Sojourners where readers mostly profess Christ and have attempted to take to heart The Epistle of James, “So the tongue is a little member and boats of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!” The tongue is “a restless evil, full of deadly poison. WITH IT WE BLESS THE LORD AND FATHER, AND WITH IT WE CURSE OTHERS, WHO ARE MAD IN THE LIKENESS OF GOD. FROM THE SAME SOURCE COME BLESSING AND CURSING. Brothers, this ought not to be so. (James 3:5-10).

As a writer and a blogger, I am grateful that the comments on Views from the Edge are respectful and thoughtful. Those of you who choose to comment engage the substance of what this blog posts. Such is not the case with the Sojourners blog with Jim Wallis. Jim Wallis is a progressive evangelical Christian, author of “God’s Politics: How the Left Doesn’t Get It, and the Right Gets It Wrong” and subsequent books on American values, economics, religion, and politics. Glenn Beck has publicly targeted him as a Social Gospel liberal (i.e.) a socialist disguising himself as a Christian.

Space to Breathe and Grow

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Verse – “Pruning”

Even under insulating cones,
roses in the Midwest winter die
back and turn brown from the tips of canes
almost to the ground. It’s time for my
pruning shears to clip away the dead
wood and give the living plant some air–
space to breathe and grow. The thorns are red,
black or brown, but still sharp so I wear
gloves of thick cowhide to carry all
cuttings to the backyard burn pile. Fire
turns them all to ashes which I pile
at the foot of every rose bush. There
fertilizer, water, and bonemeal
grow the blooms that make it all worthwhile.

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, April 15, 2013

Lady of Liberty and the Mother of Shame

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As Washington takes up immigration reform, this piece is worth a read.

This was written in 1982 when McKinley Presbyterian Church, Champaign, Illinois (where Steve Shoemaker was Pastor) joined with five other local churches as part of the national “Sanctuary Movement“–providing help for undocumented residents fleeing oppresive regimes in Central America.

A NEW INSCRIPTION FOR THE STATUE OF LIBERTY

The lamp once was a beacon. Now the hand
holds high a searchlight, torch, a burning flame
exposing all the exiles, all who came
unasked in search of liberty. Our land
is full, our steel gate closed. Those who demand
a chance to live in freedom now will name
our border guard lady Mother of Shame:
the rich protected, refugees are banned.
“No sanctuary here, no room,” she cries
with rigid lips. “No welcome at our door
for homeless masses struggling to rise
above the hunger, pain, disease and war
in lands where they were born. Compassion dies.
I send the poor back to El Salvador.”

[Published in The Presbyterian Outlook,
August 18-25, 1986.]