From Illinois to Topsail Island
The sea has been calm and the wind has been light,
The beach house is perfect, the families all right.
We saw dolphins swimming,
The Cubs have been winning,
But the kids all keep asking, “Just where is your kite?”
Steve’s kite on Topsail Island
Leonard Bernstein’s “Simple Song” from the Bernstein Mass describes the kind of purity of heart of which Jesus speaks in the Sermon on the Mount. It is a simplicity in accord with Views from the Edge‘s earlier post “America – In Search of Wisdom“: a singleness of heart that refuses double-minded or dualistic thinking and practice. “God is the simplest of all.”
A tenor soloist from the Knox Choir sang it at the 1983 worship service that officially installed me to the office of Senior Minister of Knox Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, which blessed me with its music for 11 years. The song, the soloist, and Knox Church will remain with me always.
Though we Americans disagree profoundly on many profound matters, we are often united by a deeper conviction regarding good and evil.
Today in America we’re taking sides. Left-Right. Democrat-Republican. Christian-non-christian. Religious-nonreligious. good-evil. All of the splits have something to do with perceptions of the dichotomy of good and evil, the good guys and the bad guys.
Wisdom is always the victim. Wisdom is crucified by the race to goodness. It sits in the middle of dichotomous thinking, a way of life that Danish Philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1838), who was anything but a joiner, called double-mindedness.
In the Bible wisdom is personified as female. In the Book of Proverbs Wisdom is like a concerned mother calling to her children who prefer simpleness to insight:
“You that are simple, turn in here!” To those without sense she says,
“Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed.
“Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.” Provers 9:4-6
Wisdom is maternal. Wisdom calls her wayward children – the simple ones — to “turn in here” to her house. “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Wisdom’ children are mature.
Could it be that the beatitude of Jesus “blessed are the pure in heart” is a call to return to Wisdom’s house of insight where the unity of all things is unbroken, instead of a call to simpleness? Simplicity of heart, then, is not simplicity of mind but rather to will one thing only: the goodness of wisdom (unity), as described by D. Anthony Storm‘s comments on Kierkegaard’s Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing Only:
God is presented as “simple”. I use this term in the same sense as Aquinas. God is singular of nature, and is not divided or contrary in any way. By this, I do not refer to unitarian versus trinitarian theology, but simply that Kierkegaard sees God as a unity of thought, will, and being. The nature of God is changeless (see The Changelessness of God). Man, on the other hand, is divided by nature. [Italics edited for purposes of emphasis]
Wisdom holds all things together, honoring the unity already present in the nature of reality itself. It seeks the simpleness or singleness with is God, not the simple-mindedness of the warring children of light and darkness, joining the right “side” in a battle of good versus evil. The heart of Wisdom recognizes and celebrates goodness, justice, and truth in whatever venue they appear.
“You that are simple – those without sense, you that are immature – turn in here!”
I’m going to speak very clearly now Gordon, in the form of a single question.
How in the name of God can you claim to be a Christian and a Democrat in the same breath?
I don’t know the person who put the question. We’re complete strangers. We’ve never met. We live in different worlds. Our understandings are foreign to each other, so strange that suspicion and name-calling, or the fear that the other is calling the other “a nut job”, undermines the possibility of real discussion.
I … read a few of your other posts, needless to say; everything I read merely confirmed my original “understanding” of who you are. In other words Gordon, (and I say this with both respect and disdain) You do not fool me, I knew you from your first words, your Credentials simply confirmed what was obvious from the start. Take that as you will.
At this point, I’m pretty sure that you are convinced that I am some sort of zealot or just another “right-wing nut job”, but in truth I am just another American. A Christian American.
I’m going to speak very clearly now Gordon, in the form of a single question.
How in the name of God can you claim to be a Christian and a Democrat in the same breath?
The writer was responding to Views from the Edge‘s post of Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama’s speech on Hiroshima Day, 2006. Nothing in that post would lead a reader to assume, or to conclude, knowledge of my political party affiliation.
I asked myself how to respond. I pondered not replying at all. I chose to respond in writing as best I could, assuring the writer that I don’t call people right-wing nut jobs, and addressing other sections of the comment. After an exchange of blog comments and an email inviting a phone conversation, we shared some of the milk of human kindness over the phone long distance.
In further reflection I realized that the writer’s question articulates a point of view that rarely speaks so clearly. It assumes that Christian faith and the Democratic Party are polar opposites. Others on the left assume a Christian cannot be a Republican. Parts of America we are living in two separate worlds – on two different sides without much clear speaking. It’s not surprising that the “Nones” – those who now declare no religious affiliation in national polls – are growing in America.
The writer’s comments repeatedly refer to “the real war” in heaven and on earth, spiritual warfare between Satan and God. Until “the real war” is over, the argument goes, there will be cruelty and wars because of the fallenness of human nature, and there’s nothing we can do to change. In the midst of time we must chose which “side” we are on.
Views from the Edge’s first Hiroshima Day piece and the one that followed it had called attention to the hubris of all claims (Japanese or American) to national exceptionalism.
The writer therefore, as best I can tell, concluded I must be a Democrat, i.e. someone who doesn’t love his country, someone who thinks that America is not a Christian nation. Someone who might be a …. “You don’t fool me.”
The commenter was right that I’m a Christian but mistaken in assuming I’m a Democrat. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are, in my view, the left wing and the right wing of a single American party. Both wings belong to Wall Street. They march in parades on Main Street at election time, but the parades are funded by Wall Street and America’s wealthiest 1%. We do not live in a democratic republic. We are living under an oligarchy.
Jesus has a few things to say about that. J.J. Von Allmen (A Companion to the Bible, Oxford University Press, 1958) makes a powerful case that Jesus’s teaching about money is original to him. He is the first to call money “Mammon”: “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon” (Matthew 6:24). Jesus choice to personify wealth stands out as an exception to his normal way of speaking. Mammon and its distribution are at the heart of Jesus’s preaching and teaching. There is the Kingdom of God and there is the Kingdom of Mammon. One cannot serve both.
Had the commenter’s question been “How can you be a Christian and a socialist?” the answer would have been easy.
…Fear, expecting a disaster,
dread…are all too strong.
The family reunion may be fun,
friendly, peaceful, but the people
coming delete relatives’ posts
on FaceBook, some hate Obama,
some named their babies Malia
and Sasha.
…Some smoke, where will they put
cigarettes? Some drink too much,
will they get sloppy? Will talkers
ever shut up? Will there be enough food?
…The beach house is huge, but if it rains
for three days, cabin fever will boil over.
Who will get sick, who will get hurt?
…Eyes are wary, tones are overly polite.
Cousins are circling. In-laws are doubtful.
Brothers and sisters are staying close.
Spouses exchange knowing looks.
The young kids run to the beach.
Published with apologies to Steve for substituting …s for indentations.
slipping
one toe out
tentatively
bring it
back
shame
leap forward
fear
cower coward
SUCCESS
temporarily
start over
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 12, 2015,
Verse — Remembering Burning Man
After a Year at age 72
Experience it, don’t observe it.
Participate, give gifts to others–
nothing is for sale. An empty desert
is the frame, the canvas, the gallery–
see art appear out of the blowing
Nevada playa dust. Huge temporary
sculptures, many that will blaze with flames
to the skies, paid for by previous fees
to attend, and gifts of time, and effort.
70,000 people last year brought costumes,
creativity, music, dancing, humor (yes,
alcohol & other drugs), but although
there were over 900 bars giving away
free shots and cocktails & wine & beer,
I saw no fights, no violence, no sexual
harassment. Art cars glide slowly past–
a huge dragon breathing flames
with 50 folks on board,
An Amish horse and buggy
powered by solar batteries,
a bicycle rider pulling a wagon carrying
a sousaphone: he stops, plays, flames
shoot out the huge brass bell…
The week of Labor Day, every year
for the last 30. Some folks have gotten rich,
others spend more than they can afford
to buy entrance tickets, travel from around
the world, live in tents & ride bikes & walk
for hours in this modern garden of earthy
delights, or depravity–your choice.
A temporary utopia? or first-world narcissism?
Don’t analyze, dance with 4,000 souls
under the moon to the same song.
Hear others a mile away hearing you.
The broken tooth hurt only when I would
breathe in. The air across the exposed nerve
sent electricity up to my head.
My wife of fifty years asked, “Do you have
some chewing gum? Use it to cover up
the hole until the Dentist calls you back.”
It worked. I took two aspirin with a cup
of water (warm, because she said the shock
of cold would make me scream.) Then I
could breathe,
inhale, and feel no pain. I snuck into
the kitchen and found that I could leave
the gum in place and eat ice cream. (When you
Grater’s ice cream
have lost half of your own Sweet Tooth and still
cannot resist more sugar–you’re in hell.)
She may have been my father’s mistress, but
I’ll never know. “I’ve given all that up,”
was all he’d ever say until we put
him in the ground. He helped our mother up
and down the stairs for years with her bad knees,
and washed their clothes, perhaps in penitence.
But forty years before, in innocence,
I wrote about her beauty in a verse
for high school English class. I showed my Dad,
he said, “Why’d you choose her?” “I see her three
times every week in Church!” I said, “and she
is the best looking woman there…” He had
no more to say. Was it coincidence
she and her husband left our Baptist Church?
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, August 5, 2015
Like a child piling blocks
Your words construct new dreams,
Towering poet.
Gentle and strong, as trees
Bend gracefully in wind,
You stand – and I bow.
One of the great pleasures in life has been the unexpected friendship with Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama.
Ko, as his friends called him with great affection, and his wife Lois, a native Minnesotan, came to Minneapolis following retirement from a distinguished teaching position at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. I knew him only by reputation: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Professor of World Christianity Emeritus; cutting edge Asian liberation theologian and leader in Thailand, Singapore, New Zealand, and the United States; author of Water Buffalo Theology, No Handle on the Cross, Three Mile an Hour God, Mt. Fuji and Mt. Sinai, among others; pioneer in Buddhist-Christian intersection and inter-religious dialogue; spell-binding keynote speaker at the Fifth Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Nairobi, Kenya.
The friendship that developed, if friendship can be defined to include mentors and those they mentor, great minds and ordinary ones, people of stature and those who look up to them, the wise and the less wise, was particularly impactful because my father had been an Army Air Force Chaplain in the South Pacific in World War II.
During the March, 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, the planes came from my father’s air base. Though my father rarely spoke about the war, there was a certain sullenness that would come over him whenever I would ask him for stories. Now, after my father’s passing, I was learning from Ko what the war had meant to the 15 year-old Japanese boy being baptized in Tokyo while the bombs dropped all around his church.
The pastor who baptized him instructed him. “Kosuke, you are a disciple of Jesus Christ. You must love your neighbors…even the Americans.”
For the rest of his life Ko pursued the daunting question of what neighbor love means. Who is the enemy? Who is the neighbor? Are they one and the same? Late in his life, before he and Lois moved from Minneapolis to live with their son in Massachusetts, he had come to the conclusion that there is only one sin: exceptionalism. At first it struck me as strange. Can one really reduce the meaning and scope of sin to exceptionalism? What is exceptionalism, and why is it sinful?
At the time of our discussion, the phrase “American exceptionalism” – the claim that the United States is exceptional among the nations – was making the news. It was this view that led to the invasions and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – the unexamined belief that the Afghanis and the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms as liberators – that captured in a phrase the previously largely unspoken popular conviction that America is exceptional.
In this American belligerence Ko heard the latest form of an old claim that had brought such devastation on his people and the people of the world. The voices from the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Defense, though they spoke English, sounded all too familiar, impervious to criticism and restraint on the nation’s military and economic adventures.
Nine years ago today, on Hiroshima Day, 2006 he spoke to a small crowd at the Peace Garden in Minneapolis at the exact hour the bomb incinerated Hiroshima. His voice rang with a quiet authority that only comes from the depths of experience. Here’s an excerpt from that speech:
“During the war (1941-45) the Japanese people were bombarded by the official propaganda that Japan is the divine nation, for the emperor is divine. The word ‘Divine’ was profusely used.This was Japanese wartime ‘dishonest religion’, or shall we call it ‘mendacious theology’? This ‘god-talk’ presented an immature god who spoke only Japanese and was undereducated about other cultures and international relations. Trusting in this parochial god, Japan destroyed itself. “
“Then,” he said to make his point to his American listeners, “dear friends, do not trust a god who speaks only English, and has no understanding of Arabic or islamic culture and history. If you follow such a small town god you may be infected with the poison of exceptionalism: ‘I am ok. You are not ok.’ For the last 5,000 years the self-righteous passion of ‘I am ok. You are not ok’ has perpetuated war and destruction. War ’has never been and it will never be’ able to solve international conflicts, says Pope John Paul II.”
Two paragraphs later, Koyama spoke in terms that speak to the policy of drones and other advanced military technology:
“In spite of the remarkable advances humanity has made in science/technological [sic], our moral and spiritual growth has been stunted. Humankind seems addicted to destruction even with nuclear weapons and biological weapons. Today there are 639 million small arms actively present in the world (National Catholic Reporter, June 30, 2006).Fear propaganda always kills Hope. Violence is called sacrifice. Children killed in war are cruelly called a part of the ‘collateral damage’.”
Today, Hiroshima Day, 2015 I wish I could break bread with Ko and my father to discuss the meaning of it all, and share with Dad the haiku poems published in The New York Times following Ko’s death, written in his honor by his colleague at Union, Peggy Shriver, testaments to hope in belligerent times:
Smiling East-West spirit,
You move with sun and Son,
Shining Peace on us.
+++++
Like a child piling blocks
Your words construct new dreams,
Towering poet.
+++++
Gentle and strong, as trees
Bend gracefully in wind,
You stand – and I bow.
Views from the Edge 