I have wrestled through the night after a packed church gave voice to highly charged emotions and views of guns in America. I’m asking how in the world we move forward…together…and confess: I don’t know. I just know that we have to try. But I’m weary this morning. I have no answers. This poem could not have arrived at a better time.
The blues struck this week. A sense of longing. You might even say a kind of fainting.
Psalm 84 leaped up for attention, quite by accident. It’s a psalm of enormous contrasts, almost bi-polar in its highs and lows. Joy and longing sit right beside each other like first-born and second-born twins. No sooner is Praise born (“How lovely is Thy dwelling place!”) than faith’s twin, Longing, is born – the longing, the sense of estrangement that yearns to be united with the lovely dwelling place: “My soul longs, yea, faints for the courts of the LORD….” It is this Psalm that inspired Johannes Brahms’ Requiem, sung here by a combined choir in a lovely place in Atlanta, Georgia. Bring the blues to the music of the Psalm and see what happens.
Thanks to the editor of The Chaska Herald for this piece on the series on “Gun Violence in America” that begin next, Tuesday, Feb. 5 at Shepherd of the Hill Church in Chaska.
Walter Rauschenbusch (1861 – 1918), “father of the Social Gospel Movement”
“All human goodness is social goodness. Man is fundamentally gregarious and his morality consists in being a good member of his community.”
“The chief purpose of the Christian Church in the past has been the salvation of individuals. But the most pressing task of the present is not individualistic. Our business is to make over an antiquated and immoral economic system….”
The Rev. Walter Rauschenbusch had a profound impact on Christian theology and activism that led to the end of child labor and to legislation that protected worker rights in the early 20th Century. The man whose theology was shaped by his ministry with the poorest of the poor in the “Hell’s Kitchen” of New York City is the man from whose “Social Gospel” Glenn Beck now urges church members to flee for their lives.
“You’re not abandoned. God provides minimum protection – maximum support.”
William Sloane Coffin, Jr.(June 1, 1924 – April 12, 2006) was bigger than life. He had a way about him. He was a great preacher who packed the Chapel at Yale and the Riverside Church in New York City, one of the nation’s greatest pulpit dating back to Harry Emerson Fosdick. Once a promising candidate for a career as a concert pianist, Coffin chose the ministry instead, but he carried his musicality into the cadences of his speech and the power and beauty of his language. A former member of the CIA, he became fiercely committed to peace, a leader in the civil rights, peace, and nuclear freeze and disarmament movements.
After many years of watching from afar, our paths crossed while serving as Pastor to The College of Wooster in Wooster, OH and Pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church, the College congregation-in-residence. The night of his arrival on campus, a handful of professors gathered in a home into the late hours of the night. I was spell-bound not only by his stories but by the quick repartee and personal interest in the lives of the strangers in the room. For the rest of the week Bill roused the campus with his passionate faith and wisdom.
Years later PBS broadcast Bill Moyers’ interview with him. Bill had suffered a stroke three years before, recovered his speech through persistent therapy, and was now reflecting with Bill Moyers about the recent news that he would be dead by the end of the year. It was vintage Bill Coffin. Realistic, cheerful, life-affirming, humorous, bold, loving, enjoying every moment of the conversation.
It led me to tears. “I have to call him,” I thought. “I have to tell him how important he’s been to so many of us – his close friends and distant admirers such as I.” After some searching, I learned that he was living in Vermont and dialed the number.
Randy, Bill’s wife, answered the phone. “You don’t know me,” I said, “but I saw Bill’s interview with Bill Moyers last night on PBS. I just felt I had to call. He’s not likely to remember me but I had to call. This is Gordon Stewart calling from Minnes…” “O my, how good of you to call. Let me get Bill. I know he’ll want to talk with you… Bill…Bill….”. “Gordon!” boomed out the familiar New York baritone voice. “We’ve thought about you many times. So good to hear from you! How the hell are you? What’s happening out there in Minnesota?”
William Sloane Coffin was not a personal friend. He was a heroic figure I had admired and had put on a pedestal. There are many reasons he deserved to be emulated, foremost perhaps, was that he really loved people and never forgot them. He lived freely at the end when death was knocking at his door because he believed, as he said,
“The abyss of God’s love is deeper than the abyss of death. And she who overcomes her fear of death lives as though death were a past and not a future experience.”
“Dog Strikes Back at Cyberspace” brought this reply, or so I thought, from good friend Steve Shoemaker (aka “Shoe” ) in Urbana, Illinois. He seemed to have taken Sebastian’s side in the Shoe War.
Verse — “Heal”
I taught my dog to heel,
not so she’d be a slave,
but so she’d always be
safe to walk alongside of me.
…
When first I used a lead,
a leash and collar, she
would pull and jerk and try
to run away. She thought that I
…
was cruel and mean to make
her suffer so. But now
she leaves her pen with glee
as we, a team, explore the world.
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, January 26, 2012
NOTE: The word “my” was not bolded or italicized in the Steve’s email. “Views from Edge” bolded and italicized “my” on the assumption that the Verse’s author was holding himself up as a man of virtue in contrast to the bad dog owner who hadn’t trained his dog properly. It turns out that “Dog Strikes Back at Cyberspace” wasn’t anywhere near his radar screen when he penned his Verse. Follow-up email from Steve: “Stop being so self-centered–I was not thinking of you and your sodden shoe at all when I wrote this. I wrote this for ___________” (who had asked him for a poem on healing in preparation for a sermon). 🙂
I think I’ll take a trip to Urbana for training… as a dog trainer…and healing.
Edward Everett Hale was asked if he prayed for the Senators. He replied:
“No. I look at the Senators and pray for the country.”
The Reverend Mr. Edward Everett Hale (1822 – 1909) served as Chaplain to the U.S. Senate. He was appointed to the position because of his outstanding public ministry as Minister of South Congregational (Unitarian) Church in Boston. He proposed a public retirement pension system for both women and men long before there was Social Security.
First Church Boston’s website provides this account of his ministry.
Thanks to Caroll Bryant for capturing our attention with her blog’s publication of the witticisms famous historical figures.
Stan Musial, one of baseball’s greatest players of all time, died last Saturday at the age of 92. He was also a great human being. I grew up a Philadelphia Phillies fan. Robin Roberts, the great Phillies pitcher, was a boyhood hero. Roberts is quoted in this tribute to the late Stan Musial, popularly know, as the story tells, as “Stan the Man”.
The line of Tuesday’s reflection on a nearly disastrous Martin Luther King Day celebration fell on the ears of a parishioner in hospice care yesterday during a pastoral visit. Lorraine is sitting in her chair. She can no longer see. But she can hear when the visitor speaks clearly with some volume, and she is fully alert and ready for more than entertainment or platitudes. The text was written by English poet and hymn-writer William Cowper in 1774. They give voice to faith’s trust in providence…without denying the clouds.
“Wonderful,” she said with a smile at the end of the reading. “I really like that.” Turn the volume up and see what you feel and think.
Views from the Edge 