Category Archives: Uncategorized

Stevie Wonder and the Blind

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Remember Stevie Wonder’s song that lifted our spirits and brought tears to our eyes? Click We are the World.

There’s a choice we’re making
We’re saving our own lives
It’s true we’ll make a better day
Just you and me

Stevie Wonder got it then, and he gets it now. He’s made a choice to help save lives.

He has announced that he will no longer appear in the state of Florida. He’s boycotting Florida and every other place with “Stand Your Ground” laws in the wake of the Trayvon Martin jury verdict.

The acquittal of George Zimmermann brings to the fore once more gun violence, race, and the Stand Your Ground laws that move the right to defend one’s home without retreat into the streets.

The dark sun glasses are a trademark of the performer who cannot see, but he sees some things very clearly. This is one time the blind need to follow the blind man who sees. “Once I was blind, but now I see,” wrote John Newton, the captain of a slave-trade ship, after he came to his senses and refused to participate any longer in the evil of the slave trade.

It’s choices like Stevie Wonder’s that help us to save our own lives. Decisions like Stevie’s shine a light on the blindness of a society whose laws in Florida and elsewhere turn back the clock to the old days of vigilante violence.

Someday hence it will be said that America suffered years of temporary blindness – that we forgot that we are the world – and that a blind man named Stevie led America in singing with joy the hymn of the old slave ship captain: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…I once was blind, but now I see.”

Click We are the World.

The Fight in the 7th Grade

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Two boys I did not know
were to meet after school
in a park just two blocks
away. We all went to see…
…
The girl they were fighting for,
or over, was surrounded
by other girls from her class.
…
The first boyfriend stood
in an open space
looking down the street.
…
Boy number two
was pushed by friends
into the ring
made by classmates.
…
There were thuds,
then a headlock,
a bloody nose, and
tears from the boy
left on the ground.
…
His girl ran past
the victor and fell
to hug and wipe away
the blood, dirt, and tears
of the boy she had
just learned she loved.

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, July 20, 2013

Time

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My son once asked me “What is time?”

I answered, “I don’t know. It’s a perennial question of philosophers and theologians. But, so far as I can tell, time is what we have.”

Some people think that time isn’t real. It’s a human construct and only eternity is real. They think of time and place as the prison of the soul, the antithesis of, or the prelude to, eternal life.

It always seemed a bit strange to me. Like the imaginary friends children make up because they’re afraid of being alone in the dark. I could never understand.

“Time is what we have.”

The animals know what time is. They also know eternity. They wake and sleep with the rhythms of the sun – rising and setting daily – the markers of what we call time. They know nothing about clock time or the names of days, months, seasons or years, but they live in the reality of time.

Time is what we have between birth and death. Eternity is the depth of time, the Mystery beneath, within, and beyond the limits of time. We participate in the eternal, but we are not eternal. To think otherwise is to consider ourselves the exception to nature itself.

The illusion of superiority to nature – the idea that the human species is nature’s singular exception – is a fabrication peculiar to the species that considers itself conscious. The imaginary friend of eternal life may help us sleep better at night, but it leads to slaughter and, eventually, to species suicide.

Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death) saw the denial of death as bedrock to American culture. The denial of death – the refusal to acknowledge it as real; the flight from the knowledge of our mortality – not only deprecates life here and now; it takes into its hands the life and death of those different from ourselves. It builds towers to itself that reach toward the heavens while it plunders an earth it considers too lowly for its aspirations.

Time is our friend and time is our limit. We are meant for this. “Grace and pride never lived in the same place,” says an old Scottish proverb, for pride always seeks to exceed what is given (grace).

Time is what we have. Time is a participation in the glory of God. If there’s more, it will only by grace.

Someone really died?

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Verse – “We All Used to be Equal Under the Shroud”

About half way through my life
(I am now 3-score and 10)
funerals became the new
thing, “Celebrations of Life,”
with friends (no enemies would come)
saying fine or funny things
about the very special one
who sadly couldn’t be there then
because the ashes were still stored
at the crematorium
and might not ever be picked up,
or buried (unless family had
a plot already bought and paid for,
then a private internment
might for seven very short
minutes remind a few folks
that someone was dead.)

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, July 8, 2013

The Pine Grove

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Thrice happy he, who by some shady grove,
Far from the clamorous world, doth live his own;
Though solitary, who is not alone,
But doth converse with that eternal love.

– William Drummond, Urania

Next to the big barn attached to the big house on the big hill in South Paris, Maine was my favorite place: the pine grove.

It was a quiet place. The pine trees reached up to the sky, so tall that I wondered whether their tops could touch the blue sky and the white clouds I would watch floating over them through the filtered light of the trees, lying on the pine needles of the pine grove floor.

Sometimes Annie went with me to the pine grove. She lived just behind Grandpa’s and Grandma’s big house on the hill.

Annie liked my grandmother’s sugar cookies almost as much as I did…and the gingerbread cookies and the toll-house cookies, but mostly the big white sugar cookies my grandmother made every day because she knew we liked them best. We would settle on the granite steps outside the pantry with big glasses of fresh milk from real returnable glass milk bottles brought that morning by the milk man, and eat the cookies and drink our milk. Then a cookie or two would go with us into the pine grove.

We would lie there and look up…without talking…smelling the aroma of the pines. It was a sacred place of solitude and quiet – God’s greatest gift – where I could forget that my father was somewhere far away on the other side of some great big ocean in a great big war against a great big monster. I would retreat to the pine grove to get away from the radio broadcasts we listened to that might tell us whether my father was alive or dead.

There was no war in the pine grove. There were no people there. Just the great big pine trees that didn’t seem to care about the war. They just kept reaching up to the sky.

After we moved far away to Pennsylvania following my father’s return from the war, we returned to South Paris annually for vacation. Every year those pine trees were there waiting for my return.

During the 10 hour drive to South Paris, I looked forward to lying on the floor of the pine grove with a fresh-baked sugar cookie. As we drove up the road from Gray and rounded the bend by the Fair Grounds, the anticipation grew. I could almost smell the scent of the pines of the pine grove.

Until the year I looked up to see a franchise submarine sandwich shop standing where the pine grove had stood. The pine grove was gone. Clear cut. All the trees. All the pine needles. And the hill had been leveled to street level.

Someone had declared war on the pine grove, and the trees couldn’t fight back. Trees don’t fight. I sobbed like a baby.

The inward being and the secret heart

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I’ve been silent for awhile, absorbed in preparing a manuscript for submission, and the site will remain pretty silent over the next three weeks.

Between now and then, this sermon on YouTube was preached last Sunday at Shepherd of the Hill, the wonderful congregation I’m privileged to serve in Chaska, MN.

It is based on the 51st Psalm (selected) and sees the psalm in light of a rite for the cleansing of a leper in the Book of Leviticus in which the leper presents two birds.

1 Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy
blot out my transgressions.
2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin.

3 For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
4 Against you, you alone, have I sinned,
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified in your sentence
and blameless when you pass judgment.
…

6 You desire truth in the inward being;
therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
8 Let me hear joy and gladness;
let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.
9 Hide your face from my sins,
and blot out all my iniquities.

10 Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
11 Do not cast me away from your presence,
and do not take your holy spirit from me.
12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation,
and sustain in me a willing spirit.

13 Then I will teach transgressors your ways,
and sinners will return to you.
14 Deliver me from bloodshed, O God,
O God of my salvation,
and my tongue will sing aloud of your deliverance.

15 O Lord, open my lips,
and my mouth will declare your praise.
16 For you have no delight in sacrifice;
if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.
17 The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

MinnPost published Deep Water Horizon effects today

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Deepwater Horizon fire

Deepwater Horizon fire

Chief Albert Naquin

Chief Albert Naquin

Thanks to MinnPost for publishing this piece today. Click the title for the link to the conversation with Albert Naquin, Chief of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of the vanishing island of Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana.

Deep Water Horizon: Three Years After

The Secret Heart and the Inner Being

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Nathan accusing David

Nathan accusing David

“Behold, You seek truth in the inward being;
therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.” (Psalm 51:6)

What is the secret heart?

Is it the deepest place in us, the place where God is: the equivalent or synonym for “the inward being” – a poetic parallelism of Hebrew poetry?

Or is it, perhaps, the secret place where we hide from God: the hiding place where we go off to a different heart than the Divine heart?

Or could it be both synonym and antonym at the same time?
_______

Psalm 51 is a prayer attributed to David. It is not a quiet prayer. It is a wrenching, sobbing prayer, the words tumbling from David’s mouth in halting phrases and stammers with tears flooding his eyes and streaming down his face like rivers.

David’s secret heart is dirty and he knows it. He cannot wash the stain of blood from his hands. Nathan has exposed his sin. Nathan’s story-telling has seduced David into the trap where his secret is exposed to his inner being. Nathan has baited David with a story that has aroused David’s anger. “As the LORD lives,” said David to Nathan, ” the man who has done this deserves to die!” And Nathan then said to David, “YOU are the man.”

“Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,” cries out David in Psalm 51, “and cleanse from my sin! For I know my transgressions, and my sin is every before me.”

It is a scene straight from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

“Out, damn spot! OUT, I say…. all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!”

_____

Hebrew Psalms are like that. The are not sanitized. They plunge the reader into the conflict between the reader’s own inmost being, the true secret heart, you might say – the heart that pumps life into us – and the secret heart of our own flight from truth and goodness, the heart of deception and self-deception.

Why is David crying out? What has he done? What is the sin that is ever before him, the blood he can’t wash from his own hands?

Psalm 51 comes in response to an accusation that has exposed the bloody behavior his secret heart heart has produced. It is Nathan, David’s commander on the battlefront, who confronts him with the truth.

Nathan, relying on a fresh report from the front line of battle, tells David that Uriah, the King’s next door neighbor, a man of valor and impeccable loyalty to King David, whom David had sent off to war to secure Uriah’s wife Bathsheba for himself, is dead! His blood is on David! Nathan has spoken the truth to power. And the way that Nathan has spoken it to the King has taken him into the deepest parts that are at war within himself.

There is no wisdom in David’s secret heart. There is only treachery.

“Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from Your presence,
and take not Your Holy Spirit from me.”

“Purge me!” cries David. Imagine Richard Burton at his most dramatic. “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me and I shall be whiter than snow!”

_____

What’s hyssop?

Hyssop is the foliage of an aromatic plant named in the Passover story (Exodus 12:21-27) and used in the cleansing of a healing and cleansing of a leper (Leviticus 4:51).

The rite of cleansing involves centers on two small birds. One bird is killed. The other bird is washed in the blood of the other under the flow of water and the sweetness of hyssop. The one bird dies. The second bird lives.

“Thus he (the priest) shall cleanse the house with the blood of the bird, and with the running water, and with the living bird, and with the cedarwood and hyssop and the scarlet stuff; and he shall let the living bird go out of the city into the open field; so he shall make atonement for the house, and it shall be clean.” (Lev. 14:52-53)

“Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, the God of my salvation” cries Uriah’s killer curled up in a ball, hoping against all hope, “and my tongue will sing aloud of Your deliverance.”

_____

David in Psalm 51 is both birds.

He is the one who deserves to die. Yet he is also the one who lives. He lives not because of the heart that had conspired against Uriah and betrayed his own inward being – “Against You (God) only have I sinned…” (Ps. 51:4). He lives because there is more mercy in God (the inward being) than there is sin in him.

“The sacrifice acceptable to God,” he concludes, the tears still streaming down his face, but calmer now, “is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.”

His body quivers as he imagines himself as the bird released into the open field by mercy alone, “according to Your steadfast love; according to Your abundant mercy.” (Ps. 51:1) The inner being – his Deeper Being – has taught his released him for wisdom.

Male and Female Fantasy

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This was sent by email at 1:51 A.M. today. 🙂

“AWAKE”

How do dreams of females differ
from the dreams of males? Is there less
violence, sex, and guilt? Or far more
children, infants, nursing? How does
pure biology control our
fantasy? Can Internet ads,
TV, product placement, billboards,
radio commercials sour
and infiltrate midnight madness?
Maybe it was just the pickles…

– June 13, 201 – Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL

Baby Elephant first day at the beach

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If only we were all this playful. This joyful. This unselfconscious. This thankful for the Ocean.