My Dog’s Happy Hour

Posted on October 4, 2018 by Gordon C. Stewart

Barclay smiling in the car

There’d been no intention of a Happy Hour yesterday when I decided to go to Target for a short errand. “Barclay,” I asked, “wanna go for a ride in the car?” Barclay cocked his head, ran for the door to the underground garage, and leaped for joy. We drove to Target. I cracked open the windows, left Barclay in the car. In the parking lot, I see my friend Chuck, whom I’d been with an hour earlier on a business matter where I’d asked whether he’d ever been to Ike’s. He hadn’t. “Why do you ask? Is it good?” “I don’t know. I’ve never been there,” I’d said. “My neighbor Michael tells me it has the best Martini in town — not one of those tiny Martinis you get at most places around here. It’s big, and they give you the shaker, too.”

Inside Target, Chuck and I take our places in the line for picking up prescriptions. The line is long. Neither of us is good at waiting. We decide, on the spur of the moment, to go to Ike’s Happy Hour for a different prescription. We leave Target and join Barclay for the trip to Ike’s. At Ike’s I again leave Barclay in the car, opening all four windows a little more than I had at Target. As he always does, Barclay smiles. He knows the routine. He lies down on the driver’s seat.

Sitting at the bar for our nonprescription drugs, we notice the wind has come up and it’s pouring rain outside. “Do you think Barclay’s okay?” asks Chuck. “He’ll be fine,” I say, “nothing flusters him. He’s not afraid of storms.” The Martini is everything Michael had said it would be. So is the Happy Hour food he’d recommended: two mouth-watering beef tenderloin sliders with grilled onions and horseradish sauce, one on pumpernickel, the other on sourdough, for $7.50. We love this place!

We pay the tab and head back to the car. Barclay is calm until Chuck opens the passenger door. Barclay sits up, smothers Chuck with kisses, and says, “I was worried about you guys!” Both seats are partially wet from the storm. Barclay is dry. We are not.

Barclay

We leave Ike’s parking lot and drive back to Target where Chuck had left his car. Chuck goes in for his prescription. Barclay and I call it a day and head home. Safe at home in the underground garage, Barclay stays put like a petulant child. “Dad, why can’t I stay in the car? I love Happy Hour!”

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, October 4, 2018

A Responsible Electorate

Posted on October 3, 2018 by Gordon C. Stewart

256px-Jeff_Flake,_official_portrait,_113th_Congress

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ)

During last Sunday’s “60 Minutes” interview, Sen. Jeff Flake was asked if he could have done what he did last week in the Supreme Court confirmation process if her were running for re-election. He was quick to respond. “No!” He and his colleague from the other side of aisle, Chris Coons, confirmed what many Americans have come to lament: the tar and feathering of compromise — the art on which a democratic republic depends.

In the simplified mindset of good versus evil, there is no room for compromise. The Judiciary hearing room was a room like that. But the behavior we saw in the hearing room wasn’t really about good versus evil. Jeff Flake’s “No” tore off the mask. It’s about money — the ability of candidates to secure financing for their campaigns on both sides of the aisle. Any candidate running for election in 2018 would be foolish to reach across the aisle, even though conscience might lead to do so. Sen. Mitch McConnell later put it bluntly: any Republican who votes not to confirm Kavanaugh will no longer receive campaign money. The Republican National Committee (RNC) will turn off the faucet.

Meanwhile, RNC money and dark money pours into the race in Minnesota’s 3rd Congressional District. I’ve waded through mud many times over the years, but this is the dirtiest campaign I’ve ever experienced. Yesterday’s snail mail, for example, contained TWO slick negative ads funded by the Republican National Committee, slandering the Democratic candidate. These same ads leap out from my computer monitor whenever I open a YouTube video. Someone has mastered cyber analytics, and it’s not the Russians. The RNC-sponsored, complete with “I [Erik Paulsen] approve this message,” approved by Erik paint Dean Phillips, as a monster, A hypocrite. They twist facts. The real message? Erik is the “good guy”; Dean is the “bad guy”.

Yet only Dean Phillips refuses to accept money from the PACs, special interests, and lobbyists that elects partisan loyalists who surrender conscience and the courage to compromise. The “good guy” refused to join the “bad guy” in that pledge. The money is pouring into the 3rd District from outside Minnesota — like fire trucks and rescue squads responding to a 5-alarm fire. The hoses spew mud.

It’s the responsibility of the electorate to slog through the mud and take off our waders before entering the voting booth.

Gordon C. Stewart, Minnesota 3rd Congressional District, October 3, 2018.

The Two Parts of Wisdom

Posted on October 2, 2018 by Gordon C. Stewart

A Facebook comment led me to recall the words of a 16th century theologian most people today regard as an old fuddy-duddy. First the old fuddy-duddy:

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.

John Calvin (1504-1564) was no more a Calvinist than Jesus was a Christian. You can’t follow yourself. He didn’t. He sought wisdom. Many times his search led him to disconcerting conclusions, and actions that trouble me. But the quotation from the very first paragraph of the first page of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion is pure gold. It’s stayed with me as priceless. They could have come from Carl Jung!

The return of the prodigal son – Rembrandt drawing

Recognition of the inseparable connection between the knowledge of self and the knowledge of God is as old as philosophy and theology themselves. Augustine of Hippo wrote about coming to the knowledge of God through the knowledge of himself. “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee,” wrote St. Augustine after leading an unsavory life like the one portrayed in Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son. Only by delving into the self that was deeper than his squandering was Augustine able to write his Confessions and The City of God. The search for knowledge of himself and for the knowledge of God were of one piece.

Anticipating the FBI’s expanded background check of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, I began to wonder what we’re seeing and how we’re seeing it in light of the two kinds of knowledge that give birth to “the true and solid Wisdom.” Then, almost by accident, I stumbled across a remarkable personal reflection on sexual abuse and sexuality on Facebook. I’d never heard of the writer until this morning. But I do know his mother, a ministerial colleague, who appears to have raised him to search for two parts of wisdom.

With the writer’s permission, we share here the LINK to the personal reflection on Facebook. It’s long, but well worth the read.

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, October 1, 2018.

Find your Fire

Posted on October 1, 2018 by Gordon C. Stewart

Fire, in this case, is passion. If you want to be a successful blogger, find your fire.

The advice comes from The Art of Blogging. I wish I’d read that before launching Views from the Edge years ago. But, hey, it’s never too late, right?

Thanks to fellow-blogger Marilyn Armstrong for the photo. I’m musing on the lily pad!

So, what, I’m asking myself, is my passion? What’s the fire in my belly? The thing that makes me tick? The thing that makes me come alive? It’s a simple question. A clarifying question. But the answer’s not so simple. Not so clear.

Writing that last incomplete sentence led me to my fire, my life passion: To see more clearly!

Life is strange. Truth is almost always strange, sometimes stranger than fiction (Lord Byron). Searching for what’s real — cutting through the appearances, illusions, shams, and socially acceptable convictions and beliefs — has always been my fire. I am naturally skeptical of things that seem normal and claims that call for my allegiance.

garden fish pond

Since the day I plunged to the bottom of Dickie Tinsley’s fish pond after Mrs. Thomas told our Vacation Bible School kindergarten class that Peter could walk on water because he had faith, my fire has been a quest to get to what is real — to see more clearly.

I used to be a preacher man. Now I’m a blogger. According to The Art of Blogging, anyone who wants to be a successful blogger needs to pay as much attention to a post’s ending as to its beginning. I need to end not with a preacher’s declaration but with a philosopher’s query that invites readers to engage and respond from their own experience. So here’s the question that invites your response:

What’s your fire? What’s your passion?

Gordon, Chaska, MN, September 30, 2018.

The Leap from the Wall

Posted on September 29, 2018 by Gordon C. Stewart

Mutter Erde photo of “thinking nude boy” at the entrance of Friedrich-Paulsen-Gymnasium, Berlin-Steglitz, Gritznerstr uploaded from Wikimedia Commons.

A childhood memory flashed to mind watching the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings this week.

I’m seven years old again. My mother is screaming. She has gone down to the cellar to do the laundry. A rat stared at her from the huge hole in the cellar wall that connects our home to the open cistern. My mother is terrified.

My father grabs the shotgun he’d borrowed for just such an occasion. Dad goes down the stairs to the cellar. I follow him. It’s scary, but it’s exciting. What if the rat leaps at my father before my father shoots? Filled with fear, I watch from the bottom step.

The rat is staring from the wall, his beady yellow eyes shining in the dimly lit cellar. My father is perhaps eight feet away. He takes aim and fires the shot. The rat leaps through the air for my father’s jugular. My father ducks. The rat died. My father cements shut the hole and the cistern.

256px-Amy_Klobuchar,_official_portrait,_113th_Congress

Sen. Amy Klobuchar official portrait

Yesterday Sen. Amy Klobuchar fired the question at Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The Judge leaped for her jugular. Amy ducked. Senator Klobuchar survives. The nominee is alive on the floor, but badly wounded.

I’ll always be a “thinking nude boy” trying to make sense of life.

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, September 29, 2018.

Elijah gets an alignment

Posted on September 27, 2018 by Gordon C. Stewart

Elijah and Bumpa

Bumpa, I’m 16 today!

Elijah, I’m so proud of you on your 16th birthday.

Me, too, Bumpa. Let’s go get my driver’s permit! I’m tired of my carseat!

No, you’re 16 months old, not 16 years old, and yesterday you had a meltdown at Target.

Target Corporation Logo

Yeah, Grandma had to take me out of the store and walk me around outside Target to calm me down. She was crying, too. I couldn’t tell why. I was too busy screaming. But I saw tears in her eyes. I love Grandma!

I’m so sorry, Elijah. Grandma loves you too. And you have the best Mom in the world!

I know. But it was two o’clock, Bumpa! I was tired. We’d been out since 7:00 A.M. We’d been out all day getting Mom new tires, new brakes and an alignment, then lunch at Panera, and then shopping at Target. I was really good until a half hour tromping around Target. We should have gone home right after the alignment. I needed a nap. I want my own car!

At your age that’s a long time to be good. It was time to hit the brakes.

Mom and Grandma thought so, too, before I grabbed that thing off the shelf and didn’t let go and wouldn’t stop screaming when they tried to take it away.

I’m so sorry you didn’t get your nap. You’re only 16 months old. You need your naps.

I love you, Bumpa! You understand better than Mom and Grandma! They don’t take a LONG nap every day like you and me. You’re 76. I’m only 16. We get an alignment every afternoon at one o’clock, right Bumpa?

Right, Elijah. Sometimes our wheels get out of alignment. Sometimes we need new tires. And when the tires get worn, we need an alignment. Nothing aligns a person better than a nap! A good nap is a good brake.

Gordon C. Stewart, “Bumpa”, September 27, 2018.

Grandpa’s car is 15 years old. Grandpa’s car got an alignment yesterday.

The Kavanaugh Nomination and the Founders’ Hope

Posted on September 26, 2018 by Gordon C. Stewart

Most deeply at stake in the decision regarding Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation is the further erosion of public trust in the institutions on which this democratic republic was founded. The Supreme Court was the one institution intended to do its work high above the cock fights of special interest, prevailing winds, and partisanship.

Democratic republics are built on trust. The American people’s trust in the republic’s institutions was the bedrock on which the U.S. Constitution was framed and adopted. The genesis of American independence and sovereignty lay in a hope yet to be tested: whether the American experiment would meet the test of being a nation “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” The experiment would depend on the American people’s readiness to trust — and the trustworthiness of those institutions.

No institution of government was more important than the U.S. Supreme Court. While the legislative and executive branches are blown by the winds of the American electorate, the Supreme Court was to more objective, above the influence of partisan agendas and popular winds. The Supreme Court was the guardian of the Constitution, the final decision-maker of cases of that came to it from disputed cases in the lower courts.

In previous eras of the American republic, the justices of the Supreme Court worked behind the screen of public scrutiny. As America morphed into an entertainment culture, the justices’ personal lives and views came out from behind the screen of the legal holy of holies onto the stage of public scrutiny. They made speeches. They heard applause. They became either heros or villains. Like the Wizard of Oz, their humanity frailty came was eposed. A sacred hope — the trust in the Court to stand above the cockfights down the in the valley — died.

Tomorrow (Thursday) the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing will be at the top of the news. One of the three women who accuse Judge Kavanaugh of sexual assault or abuse will be examined by an prosecuting attorney selected by the ruling party majority. The cameras will then turn to Judge Kavanaugh expected denial, the equivalent of a court rebuttal. Senate Majority Leader McConnell has scheduled a vote Friday morning.

One need not be a partisan to object to the process. One need only think of the bedrocks of the people’s trust in their government’s institutions and our perception of their trust-worthiness. The founders’ hope for the American experiment is at risk because of the very institutions established by the U.S. Constitution.

Hope is IN SPITE OF Troubles!

Posted on September 26, 2018 by Gordon C. Stewart

Kosuke Koyama (1929-2009)

“You have to be hopeful; you have to give them hope.”

“Okay,” I said, “but I can’t give anyone else hope. Hope comes from within.”

Hope seems harder in 2018 than it was when Kosuke Koyama advised the younger preacher to stay positive. Years later, it was to Dr. Koyama that Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness was dedicated for many reasons. Maintaining hope was one of them. His humility was another. His characteristic kindness and compassion reached out when friends were scarce. But nothing became more impactful than the statement he made over lunch: “There is only one sin: exceptionalism.”

Years before his death in 2009, Koyama (“Ko”) had begun to view the environmental crisis through the lens of humankind’s presumption: the mistaken belief that we, the human species, are the exception to Nature. For Ko it was a form of idolatry.

In light of this week’s avalanche of news, I’ve wondered what Ko would say. He still would bless us with his smile. He would encourage us to resist the claim of American exceptionalism, the confusion of nationalism (worship of country) with patriotism (love of one’s country), any border policy that takes children from their parents arms in the name of national security, every energy policy that feeds the coffers of the fossil fuel industry (“God is green,” said Ko), every exaltation of greed, every distortion of truth, every tax policy that keeps the poor poor while lining the pockets of the 1%, and any President and Congress that reminded him of Emperor Hirohito and the cult of national exceptionalism he grew up with in Tokyo. The god of empire, he observed, never says no. The God of the Bible says no: “You are a stiff-necked people!”

But amid all the issues that deserve our attention, I believe Ko would urge us to keep our eye on the biggest of sin — the mega sin — the sin against Nature that imperils the planet as we know it. His legacy invites us to bow our stiff necks to that which is bigger, longer lasting, and more encompassing than ourselves. Everything less is built on sinking sand.

Ko spoke in metaphors and parables. I believe he would remind us of Jesus’ parable of the wise man who built his house upon the rock versus the foolish one who built his house upon the sand. “And the rains came down, and the floods came up, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.”

NASA satellite photo of clouds created by the exhaust of ship smokestacks.

He would rally behind Bill McKibben’s declaration that “climate change is the single biggest thing that humans have ever done on this planet. The one thing that needs to be bigger is our movement to stop it.” The only way to stop it is to turn from the the mega sin — the idol of human exceptionalism, the worship of ourselves.

“[T]hrough endurance, to feel that life is surrounded by the warm approval of God, will that not be the experience of hope? Hope is in spite of troubles. There is not hope apart from troubles. There is no automatic hope, no easy hope. Hope is hope against all odds.” — Kosuke Koyama, Three Mile an Hour God.

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, September 25, 2018.

Finding Bigfoot

Posted on September 20, 2018 by Gordon C. Stewart

“Americans are the best entertained and least informed people in the world.” – Neil Postman.

I still watch football. I’m sorry — mea culpa — but I do. Always have. But it’s different this season. Though my hopes for my teams have always been subject to injuries, something worse gets injured every two years: truth.

Watching the Gophers (University of Minnesota) and Minnesota Vikings (NFL) last weekend, most of the ads were what we’ve come to expect. They sell us products by entertaining ads that create our appetites for what we don’t need.

But there were other well-placed ads during breaks in the action: “information” ads meant to stir my righteous anger by painting Dean Phillips (D) — the candidate running against Congressman Erik Paulsen (R) in my district (Minnesota’s 3rd Congressional District) — as an immoral hypocrite. It’s not information; it’s carefully crafted disinformation meant to evoke outrage and fear. The campaign season and football season are a lot alike with one big difference: football has penalties. There are referees and umpires.

Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business appeared way back in 1985, years before Citizens United uncorked the tightly secured laboratory vile containing the life-threatening, infectious virus of unaccountable slander, and released the contents into electoral stream of a democratic republic.

We Americans pride ourselves in being a nation “under the rule of Law.” Everyone is equal “under the rule of law.” Citizens United exposed the dirty little secret that we’re not. Slowly over time, the American democratic republic has become an oligarchy. Dark money — big money from unnamed deep-pockets, vested interest sources — was legitimized under the rule of law by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision. The rule of law became more explicitly the rule of oligarchs, who buy presidencies and congresses with their campaign contributions, and who spend big money for ads like the one they hope will keep Rep. Erik Paulsen in the House of Representatives.

Congressman Paulsen represents my district. I know him. Well, I don’t really know him. I’ve never had the opportunity to meet him face-to-face. During his eight year tenure in Congress, he never held a town hall meeting before candidate Dean Phillips made an issue of his inaccessibility to the people who elected him to represent us. While others across the country held town hall forums in their districts, Rep. Paulsen refused to hold one. Finally, after increasingly public criticism, Rep. Paulsen offered an alternative: a telephone conference call. My phone would ring at 7:00 P.M. “Hello, This is Congressman Erik Paulsen inviting you to join me in a live conversation . . . Press 1 to participate….” I couldn’t bring myself to press the button lest I contribute to his claim of accessibility. Finally, after his unwillingness became a bigger issue in the Paulsen-Phillips debate, Erik Paulsen held his first face-to-face town hall meeting in eight years.

Yesterday we shared the ads that interrupt my football watching. The Paulsen ads interrupt far more often than the Phillips ads. There’s a reason for that. Money. The Paulsen campaign is well-funded by the unaccountable deep pockets uncorked by Citizens United. The Paulsen ad we posted yesterday is dark in tone and slanderous in content. The Phillips campaign refuses PAC, special interest, or federal lobbyist money. They too are carefully crafted to tell the truth with humor.

Football couch potatoes in MN District 3 are the best entertained voters in the country.

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, September 20, 2018.

Views from the Edge

To See More Clearly

Category Archives: Uncategorized

My Dog’s Happy Hour

Find your Fire

Elijah gets an alignment

Hope is IN SPITE OF Troubles!

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BEYOND THE FRINGE – Peter Cook Why I’d Rather Be A Judge Than A Miner

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BEYOND THE FRINGE – Peter Cook
Why I’d Rather Be A Judge Than A Miner