Category Archives: story

Impressions of Paris 1

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We arrived @ Charles de Gaulle Airport (CDG) Friday morning @8:30 a.m. Paris time. These are some first impressions.

Unlike the airports in Germany re-built out of the rubble of WWII, CDG is showing wear. It has none of the aesthetic pizzazz one expects from French culture. The driver we’ve hired through a Paris travel agent is nowhere to be found. An hour later we connect. What would we do without Tim’s cellphone and saved phone numbers?

Our driver is very professional, kind, and courteous. He’s dressed in a business suit. Transportation is his business.

Traffic is nuts! Like bumper cars. Motorcycles and scooters zip between the lanes of traffic ignoring the lines between lanes — and it’s legal! Traffic is bumper-to-bumper or slow, except for the motorcycles and motorbikes who speed past us in the small spaces between the cars in the traffic lanes. Good thing we haven’t rented a car in Paris! I can see the headline, “Conducteur de la voiture Américaine stupide tue cycliste Français! Chauffeur parlant non- Français arrêté pour conduite imprudente et d’homicide.”  [Stupid American driver kills French cyclist. Non-French-speaking driver arrested for reckless driving and homicide.]

As we come to a complete stop on a busy highway into Paris, an Arab woman carrying a screaming child approaches our van. She comes to the front passenger window, looks at Sasha, our driver, and begs for money. Sasha gently shakes his head no. The woman persists; the child screams louder. Sasha shakes his head again and looks away from the woman. “Syrian?” I ask. “No,”  he says,“Gypsy, from Romania.”

Liberté, égalité, fraternité

Within the city bicycles go every which way, cutting and turning in front of cars, and cars in front of them. Traffic feels like anarchy. Fraternité is absent on the streets. Liberté is everywhere.

Walking to a restaurant Friday afternoon, soldiers carrying machine guns across their chests patrol the avenue in threes. In the doorways, families sit or lie with bedrolls. Are these gypsies to whom Europe is accustomed or are they newly arrived Syrian refugees?

We enjoy dinner at a small local restaurant known as a non-tourist neighborhood fixture with great food. Wonderful experience in every way – so accommodating to the butchers of the French language, explaining the menu to us as best he can in our native tongue.

Fraternité and égalité fill the the restaurants, cafes, and brasseries. Laughter and easy conversations are shared over wine and food. Faces smile. Joi de vivre lives indoors in Paris.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Paris, France, posted June 6, 2016, D-Day.

 

The Gift and Memory of Snoopy

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For the past two weeks an uninvited memory has surfaced during my sleep and during the early morning hours when I’m unsure whether I’m awake or still asleep, that twilight zone when the brain does whatever the brain does to move the soul toward healing the broken pieces of the past.

The memory is of Snoopy, the pet hamster who brought such joy to everyone in the family. He was a special creature — a lovely white tan, like a palomino horse, who very quickly learned to please us all. At dinner I’d bring Snoopy up from my bedroom in the basement and sit him on my shoulder, or my Dad’s, the way Twinkle the parakeet used to do in an earlier iteration of pets we humans thought we owned. Even my mother, who loved birds but was the first one up on a chair whenever a mouse appeared, fell in love with Snoopy and our love for him.

Until the week I moved from the basement bedroom to the one on the second floor after Jeanine moved out of our home. Snoopy stayed in the basement. I have no idea now why I forgot him — or why the family didn’t miss him — but the next time I saw Snoopy he had starved to death. I’d forgotten to feed him. The picture of Snoopy lying on his back with his mouth open has returned repeatedly, a message, perhaps, about paying attention to when and where I am.

I was maybe 14 at the time. The hormones were raging back then. Not so much anymore at 73, but I easily find distractions from responsibility toward the likes of Snoopy — family who in some way deserve or need the sustenance I’m still in position to provide: Kay, John, Doug, Kristin, Andrew, and Christopher, my brothers Don and Bob, and old dogs hanging on to the pack while the clock runs out on us one by one.

And then there is the need for confession, for repentance, and for forgiveness that will never come from those I’ve hurt, ignored, forgotten, betrayed, denied—and animals I’ve killed, like Snoopy.

Then, during the run-up to the week when six seminary friends will gather in Chicago to focus on the Hebrew prophets, I remember a poem of Yuli Daniel, written from a Soviet labor camp published in Rabbi Jonathan Magonet‘s Returning: Exercises in Repentance in the chapter CHESHBON HANEFESH — Self-Judgment.

When your life is tumbling downhill head over heels,
Thrashing and foaming like an epileptic,
Don’ pray and offer up repentance,
Don’t be afraid of jail or ruin.

Study your past with concentration,
Evaluate your days without self-flattery,
Grind the fag* ends of illusion underfoot,
But open up to all that’s bright and clear.

Don’t surrender to impotence and bitterness,
Don’t give in to disbelief and lies,
Not everyone’s a cringing bastard,
Not everyone’s a bigot who informs.

And while you walk along the alien roads
To lands that do not figure on your maps,
Count out the names of all your friends
As you would do with pearls on prayer-beads.

Be on the look-out, cheerful and ferocious
And you’ll manage to stand up, yes, stand up
Under your many-layered load of misery,
Under the burden of your being right.

*i.e., unwelcome work.

Yuli Markovich Daniel was a heroic figure who bore the burden of being right. I bear the burden of being wrong. Yuri stood up. I sat down, or stayed upstairs, ignoring the basement and the attic where the work needs to be done “without self-flattery” at age 73.

My mind isn’t what it used to be. The synapses are shrinking. The short-term memory is fading. But the longer-term memory of the likes of Snoopy is a call from Beyond to pay attention to and give thanks for this moment within the Eternal Now.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, May 21, 2016

Verse – Teenagers at the State Park, 1959

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Chigger_biteThe spring ground no longer was frozen.
We made out on a blanket we’d chosen.
Chiggers bit where elastic
Her Mom thought it fantastic:
“Well, at least you kept some of your clothes on!”

  • Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, April 29, 2016

Startled and Startling

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The deer is lost – out of place – in the civilized world of pavement and traffic beyond the woods. It runs past us at break-neck speed, capturing the attention of customers in the coffee shop.

Such primal fear invokes a hush. Everyone is standing at attention now, hoping against hope that the beautiful frightened animal will make it across the bridge over the divided highway to the woods on the other side.

As it reaches the overpass, a car approaches from the opposite direction, startling the deer. With high wire fences on each side of the overpass, it races toward the car and then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it jumps 10 to 15 feet into the air, over the fence, plunging headlong to the berm of the highway 30 feet below. It gathers itself for a moment, wobbling up the hill to its right, and collapses on the entrance ramp like a lump of warm putty.

Fear is a deadly thing. The deer had lost its bearings in the man-made world where natural landmarks get displaced by bridges, and unnatural cliffs take the place of natural terrain.

The picture is etched in my mind. It wake me up early this morning thinking about mortality. The mortal vulnerability of a thing so beautiful and precious as a deer — the beauty and preciousness of all mortal life.

Death is the limit that binds together the viewers in the coffee shop with all other creatures. Fear is the acolyte of death – the unconscious or unconscious knowledge of our fragility, our ultimate dependence, our vulnerability to forces we cannot control, the reminder of our own ticking clocks, our time-bound nature within nature itself.
I’m sad for the deer. Sad for a civilized world that displaced it, confused it, frightened it to death. Sad over the sight of something so beautiful leaping so gracefully into the air, leaping into open space into the nothingness of death. Sad that something so lovely experiences such terror. Sad that it not know better; sad it did not take a breath and think before letting fear control its course.

Something in all of us at the coffee shop stood still for a moment at the Caribou — made us put down our coffee and touch this deeper place of vulnerability, watching this pantomime of our own inner lives, the too real to face reality of our struggles with anxiety, with fear, with death, with sudden and final extinction.

When the dear leaped from the overpass, Katie, my adult stepdaughter, put her face in her hands. Others of us could not take our eyes away, too stunned not to watch, staring in stunned silence in hope, at first, that the poor thing would get up and walk away from it all, that it hadn’t happened the way we’d seen it, plunged into the reality that the deer couldn’t just get up and walk away to safety.

Wendell Berry reminds us that we Americans are the descendants of the road builders — the placeless people who cut the forests, leveled the trees, and bulldozed their way to their ideas of what the world should be. says Wendell Berry in “The Native Hill.” Our European ancestors fled their familiar places to escape them. To build something better. Something freer perhaps, less restricted not only by law and custom but, more fundamentally, by the limits of creaturely life: time and space. They landed on the soil of the path walkers, the indigenous people whose foot paths wound their way harmlessly following the contours of the hills, rivers, streams and valleys.

Today is Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday, the day after the deer leaped into the air to its death, and the day Jesus walked the road-builders road in humility on a donkey. The liturgy reminds the worshipers that the grandest leaps — personal or collective —lead to tragic ends, but an essential goodness greater than ourselves surrounds every leap and every plunge.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, March 19, 2016

Pernicious Predatory Political Practices

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An 85 year-old friend calls with a bit of panic in his voice. “I think I’ve gotten myself into something in Washington,” he said. He’s getting mailings that look he’s part of a lawsuit.

We meet for coffee to look over the mailings. He shows me the piece that worries him. It’s a law suit. It strikes him as very official. [See the return address in the top envelope below: Congressman Trey Goudy and my friend’s name  v. President Barack Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Homeland Security Secretary Johnson]. It has a case number: 584-9760 US.

Trey Goudy

Trey Goudy (R-SC) is Chair of the Congressional Committee on Benghazi, the one who was criticized by the next-in-line to be Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), because the committee was driven by a partisan political agenda. The letter speaks with urgency and asks for money to prosecute the case.

Next He pulls from his satchel a long tube from The National Campaign to Guarantee Social Security “warning” him of cuts to his Social Security benefits and possible elimination of Social Security. Only near the end of the three page letter does the campaign identify liberals as the enemies of Social Security. The letter solicits a sum of $200 before March 10 when the National Campaign to Guarantee Social Security’s creditors expect them to pay past bills.

National Campaign - SS

Most of the mailings have the same return address:  1600 Diagonal Road, Suite 600, Alexandria, VA, the offices of the Federation of Responsible Citizens.

A search of the Federation of Responsible Citizens and other mail solicitors that target seniors led us to this podcast and article aired by Minnesota Pubic Radio in Dec., 2013.

http://www.mprnews.org/story/2013/01/03/news/mediscare-fundraising-mailers

My friend and I consulted with the MN Attorney General’s Office. We were told to tear up any such mailings. “Just throw them away. You’ll see this slow down or stop after the election.” But what about the millions of seniors who at one time made a small contribution to some such mailing, believing it was in their best interest to do so? Is there a lawsuit out there to stop this pernicious predatory political practice? Someone please say yes.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Feb. 26, 2016

What does God look like?

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As a child, I wondered what God was like. I was told God was like Jesus. But I couldn’t see Jesus; neither could the artists who painted God and Jesus. They just made up what they looked like. I never got an answer to what God looks like, or what God sounds like.

All these years later young children ask me the same questions:

“What does God look like? What language does God speak? How do we know it’s God?”

Recently a kind of answer came while speaking with a neurosurgeon at a hospital in Ukraine.

Imagine you’re a fly on the wall in the neurosurgery floor of a hospital. All the patients have had, or will soon have, brain surgery. You observe the neurosurgeon make his daily rounds, going from room to room – just as you would expect anywhere in the world.

But this isn’t anywhere in the world. Something’s different here. This hospital is an embattled region on the eastern border of Ukraine… and the patients under this doctor’s care aren’t just any patients. Some of them are enemy soldiers. The patients are from both sides of the war.

One Russian soldier with a bullet still in his head occupies Room 401. Next door in Room 403 is a Ukrainian soldier, recovering from surgery. One speaks only Russian; the other speaks Russian and Ukrainian.

Like many other citizens in this city in the Donbass Region of Ukraine, the neurosurgeon speaks fluent Russian and Ukrainian. He communicates equally well with the Russian and Ukrainian enemy soldiers.

The surgeon walks into the Russian soldier’s room. He greets him in Russian: “Dobroye utro [Good morning], Vladimir, how are you feeling this morning?”

“Khorosho” [Good], says Vladimir.

He goes next door to Room 403. He greets Alexei in Ukrainian: “Dobroho ranku, [Good morning] Alexei. How’s the headache this morning?”

“Ne take dobre!” [Not so good], says Alexei.

Both the Russian and Ukrainian soldiers trust that the doctor lives by a different code than the geopolitical code of conduct that has landed them – two former enemy combatants – in the same hospital next door to each other.

__________________
What does God look like? What language does God speak?

As Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama noted, God speaks more than one language. God speaks many languages. Maybe God looks and sounds like a multilingual brain surgeon making rounds in the war-zone hospital taking the bullets out of the heads of enemy combatants.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN 55318

 

Somebody has my ashes!

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It’s Ash Wednesday. I put on my ministerial robe 15 minutes before the traditional Service that marks the beginning of Lent with the imposition of ashes and go the drawer of the credenza.

Ash Wednesday“They’re missing! Where are the ashes?!” 

Every year I store the ashes in the credenza in my office. I’ve forgotten that we’d moved the credenza from my office last fall. I rush downstairs to look for it. No credenza anywhere. Then…I remember. We sold it at the Annual Fall Festival!

“Somebody has our ashes!”

What to do with no ashes? Burn some newspapers? Smoke a cigar and use the ashes? No time.

I grab a pitcher and pour water into the baptism font.

We begin the Service with the story of the missing ashes. Smiles break out everywhere. Maybe even with signs of relief. “Instead of the imposition of ashes this year, we will go to the font for the waters of baptism, the waters of the renewal of life.”

We have some fun justifying the change in the Service, focusing on the that part of the Gospel text for the day – the words of Jesus himself. “And when you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen my others….But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret…”(Mt. 6:16-18).

People come to the font, one-by-one, for “the Imposition of … [Water]”. I dip my hand into the font. “Pat, (making the sign of the cross on her forehead), “Dust to dust; ashes to ashes. Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. You are a child of God. Live in this peace.”

After the Service is over, one of the worshipers asks whether anyone has done the same for me. She reaches her hand into the font. “Gordon, dust to dust, ashes to ashes. Remember…You are a child of God…..”

I’ll never forget it. Neither will they. And somewhere in this world a stranger has a credenza with a sack full of ashes. Whoever you are, feel free to keep them. They’re all yours.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Feb. 10, 2016 – a memoir from 2012 at Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska, MN

 

Exercise is BAD for my health!

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Silver Sneakers Logo

Silver Sneakers Logo

So…I wrote earlier today about slowing down. I’m trying. But my doctor and Kay insist I not slow down too fast or I may come to a dead stop. Begrudgingly, I’ve started to take their advice. I joined the health club as a Silver Sneaker or something like that.

This morning Kay and I worked out before going to Costco to get the Prius’s tires rotated, a precautionary move similar to exercise – regular tire rotation will keep the tires from dying before their time.

The tire rotation appointment is for 1:00. It takes 45 minutes. We walk around Costco, get a few groceries, have a bite of lunch, pick up the car, load the groceries, start driving home, and remember we need gas.

It’s after 2:00 p.m. now, past time for my nap with Barclay, but I pull into the gas station, pull up to the pump, stop the car, do the credit card thing, insert the gas hose, and start pumping. Then it occurs to me to check out the windshield for cleaning.

“Are you okay, Sir? Are you okay?” asks the young man who’s come to my aid.

I’m face down feeling old and foolish. “Damn gas hose!” The hose was too high for leg muscles exhausted from working out. I had tripped over the gas hose.

Kay is oblivious to all this, sitting quietly in the passenger seat, her head down, traveling elsewhere in the universe, texting someone not lying on the ground next the car.

“What happened?” she asks as I get back in the car. “I fell. It must have been the exercise. I’ve NEVER tripped like that before. I told you. Exercise is bad for my health!”

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Feb. 5, 2016

The Story of Ed

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Click The End of Exile to read the story of Ed, the beloved Jewish atheist communist in the assisted living facility. The story is memorable, especially for those losing their memories.

Not Lemonade

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“When life gives you lemons… make something else. Tell us about a time you used an object or resolved a tricky situation in an unorthodox way.” – Not Lemonade

The invitation brought to mind an altogether different memory. It’s unorthodox, but not what the Daily Post had in mind.

The memory is “Lemonade-on-the-Lawn” at Knox Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati. During the summer months worshipers gathered on the church lawn at the corner of Observatory and Michigan for conversation over lemonade.

Visitors frequently misunderstood the pulpit announcements to be an invitation to eliminate on the lawn. They were relieved to learn about the lemonade.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, former Pastor, Knox Presbyterian Church, Cincinnati, January 26, 2016.