My 2017 Lenten Preparation

Fellowship Gone Awry Rightly

Written by the Panhandling Philosopher

 

            There is a prayer in my circle which goes “do thou O merciful God, confirm and strengthen us; that as we grow in age, we may grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.” Sometimes we imagine God answering such a prayer. We imagine a gently rising road before us wherein we walk always moving forward and uphill. In our imaginations there are no real obstacles, just mercy and grace and growing in grace as we gracefully age without sickness or trial or tribulation. In fact when the slope is no longer a gradual incline but increasingly steep foothills that must be walked up and then includes valleys to walk down and instead of aging gracefully there are life threatening diseases and heartaches in job setbacks, family failures, church splits and commotions we begin to wonder, “Lord where have you gone?” Sometimes the Lord’s presence is easier to see even though it remains a humbling experience.

            A couple of weeks ago I went to a conference. I hadn’t been to a conference for a long time. It was a blessed time. If you are like me, conferences include a lot of information and you walk away realizing you have heard so much that could be applicable to life. But in reality we aren’t usually all that good at multi-tasking. So the more we try to take on, the more we end up discouraged in a short time so that maybe no long range change comes from all that information at the conference. But for me, this conference didn’t do that to me. There was a thought shared by one of the speakers about how so much of what is presented to the Christian in our day is presented to one who is a habitual juvenile. One of the differences between a juvenile growing up and an adult life experience is the juvenile is as a child moving from interest to interest, often learning by playing. A large part of the wisdom of parenting is the parent learning when a child needs to simply be allowed to play, and when a child needs to be taught and shaped by structure in life. The adult settles down in life taking on responsibilities. It is a beautiful thing for a child to be able to be a child; it is a sad thing when the adult hasn’t learned to be an adult.

            An example is perhaps in order for how juvenile we can be in our Christian culture. We sometimes accept as truisms that God wants us to pray from the heart. Then when we get at what that means what we are talking about is that God enjoys our spontaneity. He loves when we instinctively react to a moment in life and cry out “Abba Father.” That is wonderfully true! But there is more to giving God our heart isn’t there? Carefulness, diligence, ordering our thoughts before God, reflecting on our day to see if there is any hurtful way in us are all ways in which we deal with God from our hearts. If all I offer God is my prayers of spontaneity I haven’t yet learned much about praying to God from my heart. To imagine spontaneity the whole of praying from one’s heart is really juvenile and not adult. In my job, my boss doesn’t evaluate me on the basis of my spontaneity. He does evaluate me on how I show up on time, do the duties I am assigned, and make an effort to be a team player. The one thing that I realized at the conference is that my prayer life had become juvenile. I prayed when I felt a spontaneous urge, which in truth wasn’t often lately. So it was time to adult up. It was time to pull the prayer book from the table top and begin using it to pray in a diligent methodical manner, to read the Scriptures assigned from the lectionary readings. If you are from another Christian tradition you might relate by when you need to pay really close attention to if you are keeping the ACTS of prayer (Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication) and are doing your readings to get you through the Bible in a year. We realize we have to be intentional, to plan, to prepare, to see to it that our prayers are more than spontaneous, that they are full and are leading us to take everything to God in prayer.

            I was thus experiencing a season of growth, especially in keeping to the forms of prayer. I was experiencing that walk up the slightly inclining hill. Then there was the Saturday morning Bible study with a small group of church members. We were talking and then out of nowhere I said something careless. No, it wasn’t out of nowhere. It was rooted in my personal bias for one sort of spirituality over another; the imagined cerebral over the way another spiritual tradition is structured. An older Christian sitting next to me took exception with a bit of fervency to what I said. He took me to task. I didn’t want to hear it. Somehow I managed to listen. I had spoken careless words. I had painted a different Christian spiritual tradition with a broad and overly critical brush. It was a tradition which had aided him in a season of great doubt. He had experienced a time when he could not recite the creeds in church and then visited a church from the spiritual tradition I had just carelessly maligned. The believers there were welcoming, and even insisted on his joining them for a meal after their service. These were the kind of people I was carelessly maligning. I listened to the reproof and before the end of the breakfast I was thanking him for giving me that nudge that I needed when I was out of line. My bias was showing. My tendency towards looking down on others by my mountain top experience was showing. I was experiencing a high that came crashing down with a single statement.

            This morning I turned to my prayer book again. I still need to adult up in having daily devotions that are structured and not left to the chance nature of human spontaneity. The collect (a prayer) for this week’s devotions said this if modernized: “O LORD, who has taught us that all our doings without love are worth nothing; send your Holy Spirit, and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of love, the very bond of peace and of all virtues, without which whosoever lives is counted as dead before you. Grant this for your only Son Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.” The Old Testament lesson focused on showing love to the stranger who by nature is from a different background than ours. The New Testament reading was from I Corinthians 13, the chapter on love. The Gospel lesson was about the blind man making a commotion when Jesus was coming by. Everyone around him was trying to keep him from making a spectacle of himself; hollering out to Jesus as he passed by. From yesterday morning’s breakfast I would likely have been counselling the man to be reasonable rather than being a spectacle that happened to embarrass me. I might have missed the whole lesson this morning in my self-satisfaction. But an older believer had pointed out the wrongness of my careless manner. The Scripture readings and the prayers for the Sunday before Lent had shown me a greater need than to contain my careless speech. We can sometimes get professional in our use of our speech around people. We learn to say less and less things that are not politically correct. But that is not the measure. My careless speech was wrong not because I said it. It was wrong because I had not learned love so well that such thoughts were not yet foreign to me. My careless speech can perhaps be avoided, but that is not the goal – the goal is to love in such a manner that the thought I expressed would have been made unthinkable by the concern of love that Christ was teaching me to have for others.

            There are certain seasons when we decide to focus on learning something. Many a person around New Year’s Day makes resolutions or decides upon the one word theme for the year. Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the day which is the beginning of the Lenten season for some of us. The Lenten season is a time especially devoted to enter the discipline of the Lord and to seek to repent of our known sins. This year I have a theme. With the Gospel’s penitent I will pray “Lord Jesus, be merciful to me, the sinner.” “Lord Jesus, teach me to love.” An older gentleman at a breakfast was the presence of Jesus I needed to show me my hurtful way.

A sickness poem

“In Sickness and in Health”

D a y   a f t e r   D a y
A comforting order
Something praised
As divinely ordered

 But today I am sick
My body in disorder
I sit running into a stool
Hurling breakfast into a bucket
Order is cast aside for odor

 I prefer that natural order
With my familiar routines
But bodies and the body politik
Seek in sickness to restore health

 On my stool embracing my bucket
I come anew to remember
We belong to one another
In sickness as in health
Still this redeeming odor is
Not always pleasant to sniff

The Lost - reviewed

A Review of:

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn

Reviewed by Dan McDonald

 

            I have finished reading one of the best books I’ve ever read. Daniel Mendelsohn’s book The Lost captured my attention from the opening page to its final words, which is an accomplishment for a book a little over 650 pages long. The book begins by telling us of a boy listening attentively to his grandfather’s stories of distant places and people in the old country. The grandfather’s stories began and finished where the grandfather intended, but between beginning and end they took in a number of features and remembrances on their way to their finish. There was a story that didn’t fit the tendency of having additions. There was a story almost always cut short and filled with pain. The boy’s grandfather had a brother, Uncle Schmiel. Uncle Schmiel had a wife, and as the story goes “four beautiful daughters” in the old country in Bolechow. They were lost to the holocaust. The actual words that summed up the Grandfather’s story in a single sentence is something I felt had more of an impact on me because I read them the first time from the book. As tempting as it is to simply quote them I hope many of you learn the words in the often enough repeated sentence I am describing around those words rather than with them. A man, his wife, and their four daughters – they were the lost family of six from among a lost population of six million. There was something about the briefness of his grandfather’s stories about this family of six which inspired and haunted the boy who as an adult searched for clues wherever he could find them so he could know more about the story of Uncle Schmiel’s family. This book written by the adult version of Daniel Mendelsohn, the boy who heard the stories, is the story in part of Uncle Schmiel and his family but also a memoir of Daniel Mendelsohn’s search for clues about how this now lost family had lived, what they were like, and what were the details as horrible as they might be of their deaths.

            The book tells us of how the young man in search of the story of his grandfather’s brother’s family set up a method to his seeking the truth about the family. He would interview people who knew something of the family or knew some of the family members personally. There was a race against time for the lost family’s lives had ended more than fifty years earlier. People who actually knew them and could remember them had to be at least seventy years and older. Many had already passed away and some were losing their memories if not their lives, and in a few years all would be gone. So if he heard of someone who might have known them or had information about their lives he went and sought their permission to be interviewed and recorded. He found many who were willing. For some it was horribly painful to remember but they spoke. Maybe they spoke because they wanted to tell the story since it was getting late in life and not much longer would they be able to speak about that time. He wanted the stories to be authentic, so with each person he tried not to let information slip about what others before them had said about incidents, or things they had heard, or of what they had seen so long before that might no longer be remembered with as much clarity as if they had told the stories closer to those original days. It would be difficult to get a full story but in a few years it would be impossible to get anything of the story. With urgency the author began his search.

            In addition to discovering a story of Uncle Schmiel’s family, the village where the author’s maternal grandfather had originated became in the book the context for so many people with memories, the place where it all happened. If the Jager family had attention focused to it, then Bolechow became the unforgettable setting at the center of the story. Bolechow was a small town, along the borders of Eastern European national boundaries. It was a town where someone might be born in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, go to school in Poland, get married in Germany, go to work in the Soviet Union, and retire in Ukraine. A person could do this without ever taking a step outside of the small town of Bolechow. It had been a place where for nearly three centuries, Polish, Ukrainians, and Jews lived in equality under the law. All that ended with the coming of the Second World War.

            We are given the chance through this book of being invited on a virtual global exploration for hints at the story of Bolechow and Uncle Schmiel’s family. There are stories in Bolechow. There are stories in Scandinavia, in Denmark, Australia, Israel, and in an apartment in upper Manhattan. When the story seems to have reached a point where nothing more will be learned then a new lead emerges promising fresh information. Slowly a story of the years of the lost family and the painful era emerges. Can everything be known? No, somethings remain uncertain. If we could know everything, there would still be the emptiness of knowing that what we really crave when we hear of lost lives is that we could meet the persons living in their own human bodies, seeking simply to be themselves in front of us. History is the craving for stories of the lost that reaches a place where we can rejoice in finding something new and find sorrow in that we are not the ones who can breathe life into the dead bones.

            When Daniel Mendelsohn traveled to discover the stories, he took others with him. He credits his accompanying people with helping the search to succeed better than if he had gone alone. Some of his fellow travelers asked questions of people he hadn’t thought to ask. Sometimes his accompanying travelers would press people in ways the author would not. Perhaps something is to be learned. Search for a lost family, for meaning, for any number of things while so obviously personal is almost always better done with other travelers sharing the journey.

            One feature of the way the book’s chapters and stories are presented is an interesting parallel story within the story. The author tells the story with stories he draws from the Book of Genesis. The Genesis stories are presented with brief comments from Raschi, a Medieval Jewish commenter or Friedman, a more modern Jewish commenter. The stories from Genesis are not used to give authoritative credence to the story being developed by Mendelsohn, but are simply tapestries of human testimony and experience that seem to give a parallel décor to the story being told. We have the story of holocaust seen in the background of Noah’s flood, not necessarily a parallel message, but a story describing whole populations swept away except for a few fortunate hidden survivors. There is the story of wandering seen in Abraham, or looking back seen in Lot’s wife. It is like seeing the story with a parallel but separate story that touches on but does not equate the story the book is telling. Perhaps this is how we see times and places in history, whether family, national or global speaking to us. There is the family story, the national story, the specific time history seen in relationship to a history progressing either randomly or with purpose from the ancient lost civilizations to the yet unfolding future.

            The book presents us with a story that is haunting, painful, and yet in a strange way beautiful. The testimony of the few Jewish people who escaped Bolechow tended to be that things were complicated. It was a time when to collaborate with murderers was to seek security and to give aid to the innocent was to endanger one’s own ability to survive. It was a time when people betrayed their own and when strangers risked the very lives of their own family members in order to hide someone at least for a time until someone’s eyes saw someone bringing food to a house at night and the questions began to be asked. When authorities executed whole extended families for one member’s choice to give comfort to the refugee, it was understood why so few wished to help. It was also seen to be so amazing that some did look at their own family members and determined this is what is right I will help. In the end, the holocaust was something that involved the Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians of Bolechow. There were the Jewish police who hoped that for their service they would receive an escape from the evils of the Nazi regime. There were Poles and Ukrainians more energetic than Germans in carrying out the actions against their Jewish neighbors. But also there were Polish and Ukrainians with nothing to lose who decided to be willing to lose everything to help their neighbor in need. This all emerges from the ordinary lives of ordinary people caught up in a time where the forces of war and injustice swallowed up a village before anyone knew how to prepare a stand against what had come. It is simply spoken one of the best books I have ever read.

Some Problems better than others

Some Problems Are Better than Others

"Immigration Problems"

By me

The Panhandling Philosopher

 

            Some problems are better than others. Illegal immigration is a problem. Not just in the perspective of nationalists who wish to preserve their culture. There are real problems associated with a flood of undocumented immigrants.

            The desire to secure boundaries and protections for cultures is understandable. When American Indians resist a pipeline going through their historic area how much are their protests concerns about big oil spills, and how much are the protests rooted in the frustration of a history full of having land allotments once granted and later taken from them? Their concerns about the pipeline, whether real or hyped, are rooted in their history of having badlands given to them only to have prime lands taken from them. It must be frustrating.

            I came from a Midwestern town that once had a patchwork of various immigrant neighborhoods. Many of the older cities of the northern regions of the United States were once able to be mapped into zones of where immigrant communities lived. New York and Chicago histories are full of such stories. In my smaller Midwest town, Painter’s edition was where the Italians had once lived, Old Number 3 which was named for the number of the shaft which went down to the coal mines was where many Slovaks lived. Old Number 3 was also sometimes called “Goosetown” because many Slovaks and Polish living there had geese they raised and butchered right there on their little lots in town. By the time I was growing up, the immigrants’ ways were disappearing. Still, as long as the older generation still lived the congregations regularly stipulated that priests and ministers should be able to preach a sermon in Polish, Slovak, or Italian. This was because for older people, even if they had lived in America for decades, the language in which they thought was often the language they had known when they had been boys or girls growing up in what they described as “the old country.”

            By the time I was growing up their grandchildren were my friends. By then we were all part of a community. My father had once lived along the edges of “Goosetown”. Later he moved to our small farm seven miles away. Once he had a hickory tree. It was such a sight. It had grown tall and strong along a small creek in our pasture. But the creek was cutting a new channel because even streams live like immigrants changing their places where they live. The old hickory tree was now on a bank being cut away as the stream carved away at old banks and created new ones. The roots of the hickory tree had been uncovered by the stream as if the stream was desirous of letting us see what was beneath the skirt of the beautiful hickory tree. There was a strange beauty of a tree now mostly uprooted and extending away from a bank almost wholly parallel with the stream intent on tearing the soil away from the tree's roots. As the little war was battled between the upstart stream and the majestic tree holding the soil of the bank progressed, it was the upstart stream that won with persistence and steady effort. The majestic hickory tree was doomed. My father remembered the store owner who sold meats he butchered in Goosetown. He stopped and visited Fialko’s. The little store also had a little bar. It was a family owned butcher shop, canned goods store, and neighborhood bar. Just enough to pay a family’s mortgage, bills, and put food on the table and maybe finance the family’s dream of seeing their child have a better life and maybe even get to send a child off to college. So my Dad asked if Mr. Fialko would like the hickory tree to smoke the sausage he made. He paid a nominal fee for the old doomed tree and we were gifted with fresh made sausages on yearly intervals for several years. The immigrants made by with little things that made the difference; from keeping a goose in the yard to be butchered, to gathering the dandelions for salads and making wine, to a community buying a steer to be butchered and celebrating the butchering with blood pudding for a week. Those were days in the process of being forgotten when I grew up. Those were the ways of immigrants, despised by the cultured people who felt threatened by them, and despised even more by the children stigmatized by old world ways for which they were stigmatized. I mostly knew the old grandparents, the original immigrants by reading the newspaper’s obituaries and seeing someone passing away that had been born in Italy or in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 1890’s or early 1900’s. They were passing as I was growing up. But they had been part of our history. Now their grandchildren who didn’t speak the language of their grandparents were often my best friends. I was a social disaster in high school. The ethnicities remained family points of identity even though we were all Americans now. But somehow I noticed one day that I usually had a crush on a Polish girl, an Irish girl seemed to like me as a friend, and somehow I managed to ask out a German girl and my best friend was Slovak.

            My friends’ grandparents had been legal immigrants. Still there were fears that they were changing our nation. These hordes of legal immigrants who were Slavs, Italians, Greeks, Catholics and Jews were threatening what was good about America. So we began to reform the immigration laws to reflect the United States population as it had been in 1890, Protestant with a whiter complexion. Reformers also noted that these Jews and Catholics often routinely used alcohol. If we couldn’t make an Italian or Greek or Slav look American, we might be able to do something good for the lesser races by prohibiting the sale of the alcohol they consumed. You know these immigrants were such an appalling feature of our beloved America. But the immigrants remained and had families and eventually the grandchildren of the immigrants and the children of favored tribes that had come to America a couple of generations before the less favored tribes all played together, fell in love, had arguments, played baseball, rooted for the Cubs or Sox or were traitors to their geography and pulled for teams like the Mets. P.S. I sometimes have been known for saying "Let's go Mets!"

            Today there are new waves of immigrants. Some are legal immigrants coming from new lands with strange religions and frightening histories. Their people are associated with terrorists and jihad. Sure probably some are simply looking for a place to be free, where instead of being constrained by societal limitations they can pursue their opportunities like the people who come to America from the Middle East and end up having the highest percentage of college graduates within any American ethnicity. But some are bad apples. We need to do vetting. I am not contradicting that. I am acknowledging yes there are some who want to come to our land to do evil. But for many they come because they believe in America and that their children will enjoy a better way of living than they and their families had known in the old country.

            The same is true of the illegal immigrants in our midst. They risk a lot to come here. They know that they are not always welcome, but there are opportunities for their families that they will have here and that their children especially will have here that they don’t feel they can hope for in their old countries. They risk a lot and sometimes the bad people in that old country take advantage of the undocumented. The drug trade which we once smiled at in the days of Al Pacino playing a Latino in Scarface, or on Miami Vice when doing lines of cocaine was treated ambivalently as a delightful evil; has tempted some who imagine a shortcut between entry level American life and the dream of upper middle income level privilege. They risk a lot trusting the two-legged coyotes that will bring them to the north. They don’t think of themselves so much as law breakers as they regard themselves as providers for families whose lives will improve because they make the choice to get their families to a place where they can have opportunities.

            I know there are a lot of ways we can deal with these situations. There are legal solutions and human ones and arbitrary ones. I don’t know the answers. I am not inclined to thinking the off the cuff simple solutions will prove to be the best.

            I have written all this to simply say that this morning I woke up thinking that some problems are worse than others. As we are thinking about building walls and measures to keep people out I want to remember that there are worse problems than when people want to enter our country. I can remember a wall built to keep people inside a place they wanted to escape. Governments are funny that way. They will build walls as easily to keep people out or to keep people in. I want us to be interested in creating the sort of society where other people want in. It seems a lesser problem to me than changing ourselves to make people to no longer want to come in. Somehow it doesn’t seem to me to take long from working to keep people out until we will become a place where people don't want to come. From there it might not take long for people here to want out. I know that the same government that spends a lot to build walls to keep people out can someday want to build walls to keep people in. In won’t be as expensive to build a wall to keep us in once we have built a wall to keep others out. Once the wall is built to keep people out, they will only need to change the direction where the guns are pointed to keep people in. Some problems are better than other problems. I want the problems associated with people who have joined together to make our nation and society a place where people want to get in. It will always be problematic when we do that, but it’s one of the better problems to have. When we get them to not want to come, then we will really have problems.