“We are nature; nature is us. We are NOT the exception to nature.” Rev. Gordon Stewart looks at basic religious assumptions of Western culture and the need to reinterpret the stories that got us here. He looks at the stories of creation, Cain and Abel, and the Wise Men who “departed by another way” as holding clues to the change in consciousness that is required in our time.
My country ‘tis of thee,
Sweet land of baronry,
Of thee I sing.Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrim’s pride,
On every mountainside,
Let freedom ring!
Tuesday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision for McCutcheon in McCutcheon et. al. v. Federal Election Commission makes very clear the view of the Court that is remaking America.
Freedom of speech is protected; it’s just that a few of us have a whole lot more of it than the rest of us. We all are “equally” protected by the Constitution no matter how unequal we are economically.
Most of us understand that money is not speech. Money is purchasing power. Money comes from our pockets; speech comes from our mouths. Those who represent us in Congress and in state legislatures do not represent us so long as their campaigns are funded by the “free speech” that comes from the pockets of the robber barons.
The sweet land of liberty is the land of barony.
“My country ’twas of thee.”
Only the most sweeping legislation to remove this unequal purchasing power from the electoral process can restore what we thought we had. But even if the miracle were to occur, this 5-4 Court will strike it down on the basis of its skewed interpretation of the First Amendment right to free speech.
My inbox is stacked up with funding solicitations. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. It depresses me. I don’t have the money, and, even if I had more, I would still have the sense that I would be throwing money into the wind. So I write. I speak. I throw into the wind words and sentences and paragraphs believing that ultimately the Wind is with us, the people. It’s my way of praying for the miracle that will give us back our country. I use what little free speech the Court has protected to effect the day when we will sing “America” that way it should be sung.
In the meantime I gain courage from the joyful spirit of the late Pete Seeger. I imagine Pete standing with his banjo outside the U.S. Supreme Court singing “God’s counting on me; God’s counting on you.”
Once upon a time a pompous nobleman paid a call to the English Embassy in St. Petersburg, Russia. He walked into the office and demanded to see the ambassador immediately. “Pray, take a chair,” said the young attaché, “the ambassador will be here soon.”
The visitor took exception to the off-hand way he had been treated. “Young man, do you know who I am?” he demanded, and recited a list of his many titles and appointments.
The lowly attaché listened, paused and said, “Well then take two chairs.”
Pride, vanity, greed, self-deception, and grandiose illusion are part of the human condition…except, of course, for me.
We are creatures of the wilderness, wanderers and sojourners in time who have here no lasting city to dwell in. And so, as in the legend of the Genesis 11, we come upon the Plain of Shinar…or some other place to settle down and rid ourselves of anxiety…and we settle there as though we could build something permanent that would be a fortress against the uncertainties of the wilderness and the knowledge of ultimate vulnerability and ultimate dependence. We build our own cities and towers of Babel.
Yet there is something about us that still loves a wilderness. Something in us that knows that refusing the nomadic wilderness –“ and as they journeyed, they came upon the Plain of Shinar, and settled there” – is fraught with greater danger and social peril. Something in us knows better than to settle down on the Plain of Shinar to build something impervious to the dangers of the wilderness and time. Something in us knows that the brick and mortar will crumble, that the projects of pride, vanity, and greed will fall of their own weight, and that the high towers we build with the little boxes for God at the top of them are little more than signs of a vast illusion, the vain acts of species grandiosity. For in the Hebrew tale of the tower of Babel with its “top in the heavens,” God has to come down to see their high tower.
Every society and culture has its own version of the city and the tower of Babel. In every society there is at least the memory of the wilderness, a sense of call to recover our deeper selves as mortals who keep traveling beyond the politics and religiosity of pride, vanity, greed, self-deception, and grandiose illusions.
Perhaps that is why John the Baptist heads out to the wilderness – “the voice of one crying in the wilderness” –away from delusions and distractions of the city of Babel. And the people also went out to the wilderness and the Jordan River to go under the muddy Jordan waters to rise to the hope of a fresh beginning on the other side of the formative influences of Babel.
After the authorities have imprisoned John, Jesus asks the crowds what had drawn them to John in the wilderness. “What did you go out to see,” he asks them, “a reed shaken by the wind? A man clothed in soft raiment? No. Those who wear soft clothing live in kings’ houses. What then, did you go out to see?”
Perhaps that is why Jesus begins his ministry in the wilderness. After submitting to John’s baptism, the Spirit grasped him and called him into it – “drove him into the wilderness” – away and apart from all distractions and illusions – back to the place where humankind lives before it “settles” to build the political-economic-religious tower, the impervious fortress and monuments to itsel fn the Plain of Shinar.
Those who wish to follow Jesus and those who would learn the lesson of the legend of the people who settled too early on the Plain of Shinar are called to go out into the wilderness to restart the long spiritual journey that stopped too early.
For the fact we deny is that underneath all our steel, glass, and technology, we are still animals – mortals subject to the most primitive yearnings, vulnerable creatures who possess nothing.
In his poem “The Wilderness” American poet laureate Carl Sandberg realized a great truth long before it came into vogue.
There s a wolf in me … fangs pointed for tearing gashes … a red tongue for raw meat … and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.
There is a fox in me … a silver-gray fox … I sniff and guess … I pick things out of the wind and air … I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers … I circle and loop and double-cross.
There is a hog in me … a snout and a belly … a machinery for eating and grunting … a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.
There is a fish in me … I know I came from salt blue water-gates … I scurried with shoals of herring … I blew waterspouts with porpoises … before land was … before the water went down … before Noah … before the first chapter of Genesis.
There is a baboon in me … clambering-clawed … dog-faced … yawping a galoot’s hunger … hairy under the armpits … here are the hawk-eyed hankering men … here are the blond and blue-eyed women … here they hide curled asleep waiting … ready to snarl and kill … ready to sing and give milk … waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.
There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird … and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want … and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.
O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where; it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.
Jesus walked in our wilderness to live authentically and faithfully as a human being with all the beasts that were part of his nature and are part of our nature. When in the wilderness of John he had gone down into the waters of the Jordan and the voice from heaven declared him “my beloved Son in whom I take pleasure,” immediately the spirit drove him into the wilderness. And he was there for forty days among the wild beasts, and angels ministered to him.
By God’s grace and power, may it be so also with us.
This brief film from the University of California at Berkley posted by upworthy.com is as clear as it gets re: poverty, wealth, and government welfare. Well worth a watch.
Everyone today lives on credit. You might even say we’ve all become credit slaves, according to ex-slave Fountain Hughes, whose grandfather had been a slave of Thomas Jefferson. Fountain Hughes was 101 years old when he was interviewed about his life. The year was 1949. The complete interview is available HERE from the Voices from the Days of Slavery project of the Library of Congress.
Don’t want everything somebody else has got. Whatever you get, if its yours be satisfied. And don’t spend your money till you get it. So many people get in debt. Well, that all was so cheap when I bought it. You spend your money before you get it because you’re going in debt for what you want. When you want something, wait until you get the money and pay for it cash. That’s the way I’ve done. If I’ve wanted anything, I’d wait until I got the money and I paid for it cash. I never bought nothing on time in my life.
Now plenty people if they want a suit of clothes, they go to work and they’ll buy them on time. Well they say they was cheap. They cheap. If you got the money you can buy them cheaper. They want something for, for waiting on you for, uh, till you get ready to pay them. And if you got the money you can go where you choose and buy it when you go, when you want it. You see? Don’t buy it because somebody else go down and run a debt and run a bill or, I’m going to run it too. Don’t do that. I never done it. Now, I’m a hundred years old and I don’t owe nobody five cents, and I ain’t got no money either. And I’m happy, just as happy as somebody that’s oh, got million. Nothing worries me. I’m not, my head ain’t even white. I, nothing in the world worries me. I can sit here in this house at night, nobody can come and say, “Mr. Hughes, you owe me a quarter, you owe me a dollar, you owe me five cents.” No you can’t. I don’t owe you nothing. Why? I never made no bills in my life. And I’m living too. And I’m a hundred years old. And if you take my advice today, you’ll never make a bill. Because what you want, give your money, pay them cash, and then the rest of the money is yours. But if you run a bill they, well, so much and so much and you don’t have to pay. Nothing down it’s, it’s all when you come to pay. It’s all, you don’t have to pay no more. But they, they’ll, they’ll charge you more. They getting something or other or else they wouldn’t trust you. But I can’t just say what they getting. But they getting something or other else they wouldn’t want your credit. Now I tell you that anybody that trusts you for two dollars or have a account with them by the month or by the week, store count or any account. They’re getting something out of it. Else they don’t want to accommodate you that much to trust you. Now, if I want, course I ain’t got no clothes, but if I want some clothes, I, I ain’t got no money, I’m going to wait till I get the money to buy them. Indeed I am. I’m not a going to say because I can get them on trust, I go down and get them. I got to pay a dollar more anyhow. But either they charge you more or they say taxes are so much. But if I’ve got the money to pay cash, I’ll pay the taxes and all down in cash, you know. It’s all done with. So many of colored people is head over heels in debt. Trust me trust. I’ll get it on time. They want a set of furniture, go down and pay down so much and the rest on time. You done paid that, you done paid for them then. When you pay down so much and they charge you fifty dollar, hundred dollars for a set and you pay down twenty-five dollars cash, you done paid them. That’s all it was worth, twenty-five dollars, and you pay, now you, I’m seventy-five dollars in debt now. Because I, I have to pay a hundred dollars for that set, and it’s only worth about twenty-five dollar. But you buying it on time. But people ain’t got sense enough to know it. But when you get old like I am, you commence to think, well, I have done wrong. I should have kept my money until I wanted this thing, and when I want it, I take my money and go pay cash for it. Or else I will do without it. That’s supposing you want a new dress. You say, well I’ll, I’ll buy it, but, uh, I don’t need it. But I can get it on time. Well let’s go down the store today and get something on time. Well you go down and get a dress on time. Something else in there, I want that. They’ll sell that to you on time. You won’t have to pay nothing down. But there’s a payday coming. And when that payday comes, they want you come pay them. If you don’t, they can’t get no more. Well, if you never do that, if you don’t start it, you will never end it. I never did buy nothing on time. I must tell you on this, I’m sitting right here now today, and if I’s the last word I’ve got to tell you, I never even much as tried to buy a, a shirt on time. And plenty people go to work, go down to the store and buy uh, three and four dollars for a shirt. Two, three uh, seven, eight dollars for a pair of pants. Course they get them on time. I don’t, no, no, no. I say, I got, I buy something for five dollars. Because I got the five dollars, I’ll pay for it. I’m done with that.
In 2014 we live in a credit economy, a consumer market where instant gratification is too slow. Ouch! Thank you, Mr. Hughes, for the words of wisdom.
101 year old ex-slave Mr. Fountain Hughes’tape-recorded interview is preserved by the Library of Congress. Hermond Norwood interviewed him. Here’s an excerpt:
Hermond Norwood: Do you remember much about the Civil War?
Fountain Hughes: No, I don’t remember much about it.
Hermond Norwood: You were a little young then I guess, huh.
Fountain Hughes: I, uh, I remember when the Yankees come along and took all the good horses and took all the, throwed all the meat and flour and sugar and stuff out in the river and let it go down the river. And they knowed the people wouldn’t have nothing to live on, but they done that. And that’s the reason why I don’t like to talk about it. Them people, and, and if you was cooking anything to eat in there for yourself, and if they, they was hungry, they would go and eat it all up, and we didn’t get nothing. They’d just come in and drink up all your milk, milk. Just do as they please. Sometimes they be passing by all night long, walking, muddy, raining. Oh, they had a terrible time. Colored people that’s free ought to be awful thankful. And some of them is sorry they are free now. Some of them now would rather be slaves.
Hermond Norwood: Which had you rather be Uncle Fountain?
Fountain Hughes: Me? Which I’d rather be ? [Norwood laughs] You know what I’d rather do? If I thought, had any idea, that I’d ever be a slave again, I’d take a gun and just end it all right away. Because you’re nothing but a dog. You’re not a thing but a dog. Night never comed out, you had nothing to do. Time to cut tobacco, if they want you to cut all night long out in the field, you cut. And if they want you to hang all night long, you hang, hang tobacco. It didn’t matter about your tired, being tired. You’re afraid to say you’re tired. They just, well [voice trails off].You wasn’t no more than a dog to some of them in them days. You wasn’t treated as good as they treat dogs now. But still I didn’t like to talk about it. Because it makes, makes people feel bad you know. Uh, I, I could say a whole lot I don’t like to say. And I won’t say a whole lot more.”
In 1959, I was sixteen
and in summer was hired to help a man
who went each day from woman to woman
and sold Fuller Brushes.
……………………………….I’d drive a van
delivering what he had sold. I’d pick
up bags full of the product with the names
and addresses of customers. I’d pack
the van there by the many waiting trains
beside the trailer park.
……………………………….The salesman’s home
was rusty, filled with screaming little kids.
The homes that bought the cleaning gear were from
the poorer parts of town: more kids, and wives
were always home–there was no second car.
The new toilet brush cost just one dollar.
-Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, Feb. 9, 2014
Views from the Edge 