funny dad

Congratulations to those who mourn, for they can be comforted.

-- Matthew 5:4

I have laughed in the face of death. Not my own. But perhaps when my time comes, if I learn by example . . .

It seemed like the thing to do. They had gathered round their father who was dying. And they laughed.

All his children were there: three daughters and a son. When the son said he was an atheist, I said that’s all right, I’m a Unitarian and most people think I’m an atheist too. It went over real big. They guffawed. They thought I was a real wit.

He was only distantly Catholic, and the children were mixed – another distant Catholic, an Episcopalian, a spiritual eclectic – and the atheist son. But they thought their dad should have the last rites of a Catholic.

I explained the options. Because my priestly colleague wasn’t working that day, I could refer to the priest of the hospital for sacraments, but I don’t control his schedule and couldn’t predict when he would come. Or I could do my own ritual of Anointing, from the prayer-book of the Protestant church I was raised in – a measure that even some Catholic families find to be of comfort. One of them thought she recalled that, while dad was in the hospital but had not yet come to the hospice ward, the priest of the hospital came by to give him sacraments. Others of them thought she was confused about this.

They were sharp and educated people, together for a common reason – they loved their father. They argued with vigor but without anger, and reached a conclusion: I would refer to the priest of the hospital, and then as we waited for him to come I would provide my rituals as well.

When I came back, that’s when the real fun began. They told stories. This sharing of memory is what we call in the trade “Life Review,” but I didn’t have to lead it. Their dad had been a funny man. They told jokes that he had told, and then they told jokes about him. Every now and then they would touch his arm. “Did you hear that, Dad?” They showed me pictures of him, at different places and times with differing combinations of them, and in the pictures people weren’t just doing a say cheese smile – they were laughing. So I said You guys laugh a lot, I want to join your family. And they said Come on in, there’s room. And we laughed some more.

And just at this moment in the doorway appeared Father Francis of the hospital. He is young and handsome and, like his namesake, can charm birds out of trees. He was in the mood to do so. We were all glad to see him. And we all said so at once. And we all laughed some more.

And Fr. Francis could see that this particular angel of death had turned out to be a comedian. So he made his way by stages to the bedside, sensing the mood of each grieving child, respecting the reserve of the atheist son, listening intently to their stories and wisecracks, laughing with them and making a few jokes of his own. And very lightly, without making a big deal of it, without quashing the celebration of a good life well lived, asking the assistance of the children when he could, he performed the Sacrament of Anointing for a dying father.

If you don’t do this work you don’t know how many emotions there are at a deathbed, and that only some of them are sad. There are cries and noise, but only some of it is weeping. A deathbed can be a merry place. A deathbed can be a school of gratitude for life.

A miracle does not contradict nature; it is, in the oldest sense, a thing to be marveled at. Faith is a way of facing the future, knowing that though my way of being in the world keeps changing, something marvelous can still happen. I left that room exalted. If my deathbed can be like this one, I shall not be afraid.

Congratulations to those who mourn, indeed. They have comforted me.

moral art

O gods . . .

Come down and redeem us from virtue.

--Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Dolores”

I have my grandpa’s knees. When I stand up, I channel him.

He hiked around his farm pointing to every shed and fence-post. His afternoon’s joy was to walk into banks, warehouses and stores where he was known as a customer or a creditor. “How you doin,’ Mr. C?” they would say.

But he flinched when he stood up from a chair. Bent at knees and waist, he could only shuffle his first dozen paces. Knee reconstruction might have extended his life. They can do these things much better nowadays, and someday I may schedule such repairs for myself.

If you do business in Manhattan and you are not wealthy, you walk. That’s why fewer Manhattans than Iowans are obese: you can’t drive from door to door. On every workday I walk a couple of miles. I go up and down hills. I climb two dozen or so staircases. This is not easy for the man with his grandpa’s knees.

But I will not be downhearted from a bit of ache. There are blue gelcaps available at the pharmacy. And there is of course my skill and discipline of movement.

I took my physical education not as a kid on playing fields, but as an adult in the performance studio, desperate to appear in public without humiliation. I wanted virtuoso skills, but the skills that made most difference were humble ones – speaking with words rather than against them, falling down and getting up, sitting and standing, walking and waiting. Knowing when to do a thing and when not yet. Doing one thing at a time, and completely. Learning that the strongest way is also easiest.

Transferring from the L to the Lex at Union Square, I must climb three flights of stairs before descending one. I’ve lost a few pounds a year for several years now. I think I left them at Union Square.

I look up that flight of stairs, and I know that when the moment comes I must not hold back. I imagine myself already at the summit. I must sweep to the top not in so many steps but in a single impulse. I put my knees and ankles and hips and feet in the same plane, I lean into the task, and launch. This is the way to get it done, rising above obstacles of age, decay and god-given awkwardness. How wise I am, how brave.

But now some idiot has stopped on the fifth step. In a red rage I halt. Nobody gave the order to halt, you bozo!

Sometimes the malefactor is an able young person, dawdling in a daydream, reading her blackberry, lounging up the stairs in what she imagines is a style. But sometimes it’s someone older and more overweight than I. Sometimes the malingerer has a cane and a limp.

Get over it! I’m no spring chicken either. I’m tired and I have places yet to go. I’ve got my grandpa’s knees to deal with, and I was doing a really good job until you dropped the ball. Do you see me halting and huffing and puffing, making a display of my difficulty? But you – you’ve made this worse for both of us. You’ve made my graceful ascent into ten laborious steps. By what right do you sabotage my art?

Such, in the flash of an instant, before civilization comes to my rescue, is my inner text. I learn two lessons in the face of my own savagery. First, that my immortal soul is most at risk as I am trotting out my virtues. Second, that there is a line of difference, below which suffering has no reward, and heroism no traction. If you live above the line, you’re tempted to cut no slack for those who live below it. Why can’t they just suck it up and work harder?

The great hymns to Hard Work are sung by people who have no experience of it. They ride on horseback through deathly fields of labor, work that wrecks the body and breaks the soul, while cheating the worker of his sacrifice’s value. Too big to fail, the riders smirk at those who provide their luxury, imagining that the difference between I and hey you there is one of character. They dream in the saddle that they are self-made.

I am both right and wrong in my moral art of stair-climbing. Right because I ought to transcend my pain rather than fetishizing it. Wrong because others lack the luxury of my choices. For some, there is no return to the right way of using their limbs, no reward for the discipline of climbing stairs, no virtuous cycle of weight loss and vascular gain but only a deathly spiral of unrefreshed fatigue and tissue damage. I ought to carry myself erect, but some cannot. “Another day older and deeper in debt,” goes the song.

I am one of Barbara Ehrenreich’s “managerial middle class.” We are bought off in genteel poverty with a fantasy of mobility, convinced that we have survived so far, and will some day rise above our mortal danger, by talent and effort. That’s the way someone wants it. We’re exploitable. We fear that with a single slip we’ll fall below the line, our floor that is a ceiling for others, below which virtue meets no reward. There are many slaves who work for wages. Imagining that we are in control, we can be cruel to those denied the fantasy.

Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Shall the truth make us free?

lousy knees

You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.

-- Leviticus 19:34

I get worried. I get nervous.

-- Juan Williams, Oct. 21, 2010

For nine years I have trusted my cars to a Muslim. I don’t know what country he comes from, and I’ve never asked: he is an honest man. He distinguishes the essential work from the desirable. He does the work I tell him to do, and for a fair price. I have come to trust his judgment. He figures out ways for me to keep my ancient automobiles alive without spending more than they are worth. On the one occasion when his work went wrong, he did the right thing, and with alacrity -- he had the work done again at his own expense, and he stayed on the case until he got it right. His conduct in this one area of my life has been so exemplary that, if it were necessary, I would trust him in other respects as well. I have recommended him to others. There are politicians, pundits and bankers in America who would be improved by taking moral instruction from him. He has succeeded by his honesty, and now he owns several stations.

The only people who can claim to be original in America are the ones who no longer possess it. The rest of us are either immigrants, or descendants of willing or unwilling immigrants. We are refugees all from our particular Egypts. Trouble is, each new wave of immigrants thinks itself the normative one, the standard by which all who follow are guaranteed to fail. And when some of those who stayed behind in Egypt become our enemies, their refugees come under suspicion. The Japanese-Americans did not do well in America during an earlier war. And now there are those who want to drive out the Muslim-Americans.

The Park51 Cultural Center is not a mosque, is not located on Ground Zero, and will not be visible there. There is nothing to discuss here: those who rage about a “Ground Zero Mosque” are liars.

I, on the other hand, report to an office that is actually near Ground Zero. From my seat in a 1 train, as I go to or return from errands of mercy, I see through gaps in the tunnel wall some daylight of the still empty space. The tunnels themselves, where I spend much of my working day, are the next terrorist target. If once again war comes to my city, as it did to London and Madrid, I will be on the front lines. Though I never had basic training, I am a soldier. An unarmed soldier with lousy knees.

A few days ago I stood in a crowded subway at rush hour. A woman sat down on the bench below me, clothed in what I later learned is a niqab -- a robe of black, covering the entire body and face, with only the eyes exposed. I shuddered. And then I was angry.

This goes beyond the identification of one’s faith -- the yarmulkeh, or the turban and tiny sword of the Sikh, or the brightly colored scarf worn by many Muslim women, or the little crucifix hanging on the chests of many Christians, or the pendant of a flaming chalice worn by some ministers of my faith. This was a statement of the radical form of her faith, by a person concealing her identity.

The freedoms and opportunities of America, which for centuries have drawn the most energetic of the world’s oppressed, do not come for free. Their price is accountability. I can’t reward my mechanic for his good work if I do not know who he is. And because I know who he is, I could raise hell with him if he treated me badly. He can’t succeed without accountability.

Here was a person demanding my respect for her faith, without letting me know who it was I should respect. Honor without accountability. Concealing herself like the outlaw in a bank-robbing movie, clothed in a garment loose enough to conceal a deathly cargo, she placed herself in the very spot from which the next battle may begin. As Juan Williams said, I got concerned, I got nervous. I’ve seen the movie from Madrid. Honestly now, process observer, can you blame me? She gave me the creeps.

The train arrived at my station, and I got off. Nothing happened. As Juan Williams said a few seconds after the remarks for which he was fired by a radio network he was not working for at the time, we are not at war with Islam. But there is a radical form of Islam -- a perversion, some would say -- that is at war with us. It doesn’t take two to make a war.

We must not make enemies of those who would be our friends. That would be the stupidest, and most certainly disastrous, kind of self-defense. That’s the way empires destroy themselves. Muslims, like Slavs and Mediterraneans and Central Americans and Celts and even Anglo-Saxons before them, have come here because their home worlds were disastrous and they saw here a chance for themselves and their progeny. Surely we who arrived in America before they did can understand their purpose.

But it is not easy to love the Alien among us when some who speak in the Alien’s name have killed us. To pretend that we do not feel some turbulent emotions about this contradiction would be dishonest and irresponsible. We must get control of these emotions, but we cannot control them if we do not name them. That’s what Juan Williams was doing. And it’s what I’m doing right now. We’re naming these emotions.

We liberals sometimes forget our own psycho-babble. All together now, boys and girls, remember -- emotions are neither right or wrong, it’s what we do when in the grip of our emotions that is right or wrong. Emotions are crucial data of the moral situation, and we ignore them at our peril. Ignorance leads to error, and moral error is sin.

I am no progressive. I am a liberal: born a liberal, educated a liberal, lived and will die a liberal. And I grieve when the institutions of liberal value betray that value. Though NPR’s firing of Juan Williams does not rise to the full squalor of Shirley Sherrod’s firing by the Agriculture Department, it is another instance of the rot within liberal culture, its substitutions of correctness for honesty, of verbal formalities for moral responsibility. If we don’t do better than this, we don’t deserve our place in history.

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helluva time

In my mind, I’m 5 foot 3, but deep down I know I’m only 5 foot 2.

-- Menachem Pressler*

What goes for a tiny pianist would go for a writer, an actor, a preacher, or a prophet. Skill is not enough. Mastery is not enough. Talent is not enough. You have to know you’re better than you are. Humility is a fine thing until the lights come up. Then there’s no democracy, only emergency.

If I’m doing one thing (A), what happens when they tell me to do another thing (B) instead? I figure out a third thing (C) to do, and they think I have obeyed when I have not. Deep down I’m a contrary sumbitch, always seeking a way to do it my way.

But if the audience is pleased, what’s the harm? Have I not performed well? Is this not honesty?

When the lights come up, it’s emergency. Surveys can’t lead you out of this mess, and if the crowd knew how to save themselves they’d have done it by now. They don’t know what they want. They don’t know what they need. You have to lead them. You have to show them what they want, and what they need, and let them name it as they will. Afterward they might say, “Thank you, that’s what we wanted,” but they didn’t want it in time and couldn’t have described it. They hadn’t a clue. That’s what it’s come down to, when the lights come up.

I don’t want to be onstage with nice guys. When the lights come up, my comrades should be ruthless, and do what’s necessary when it’s necessary. Not what everybody thinks they want. And not at some prudent time when the council has met, pondered, revised, temporized, compromised, incorporated alternatives, and ensured that no constituency is left out of the process. By then you’re watching the boat drop over the horizon. Permanent regret.

Many a man wishes he’d known, at the age of eighteen, that there comes a moment when you have to kiss the girl, and nothing else is to the point or even acceptable.

Authority adheres to you not because you’re always right, but because when the lights come up you dare what others dare not. That’s charisma. The boy Yeshua, left behind in the temple by mistake, debated the scriptures with those older and wiser. He did not ask permission, he did not defer – he spoke as one with authority. He was having a helluva time it seems, until his mom and dad came back, turned off the lights and took him home, where he had no honor. The boy knew his stuff, it seems.

You’ve got to know your stuff, and you’ve got to play the notes, but the people can’t tell you which notes to play or how to phrase them. Smile and say that’s an interesting suggestion, you’ll give it careful consideration; then do exactly as you please. They’ll probably imagine you took their advice.

We don’t have an organ in our church, but we have a grand piano, and a grand pianist who plays it grandly. A survey produced an anonymous plea: “Could he please not play so loud?” Hmm, let me see. Such an interesting suggestion. We’ll give it the most careful consideration. The name of the instrument is piano-forte. That is, soft-loud. It’s meant to play softly and loudly in alternation. The music written for it is sometimes soft, sometimes loud. That’s how classical music works. It spins its long tales by contrast of many variables, and among those variables are softness and loudness. European classical music is perhaps the world’s only music in which softness and loudness have MEANING. Shall we excise the loudness that is written in the name of the instrument, the notes of the music? Shall we ask the artist to play in only one key, or facing away from the keyboard, or with one hand tied behind his back? We shall in fact direct him to do exactly as he pleases. That’s the kindest response.

You must know your stuff, and know the public more intimately than they know themselves. Note their anxiety, but disregard their account of it. When the great gong-show starts, give them what they could not know they yearned for, and might resent you for exposing. This humility before The Spirit is not a moderate thing but a scandal, an outrage, a peak of arrogance. How dare you do what needs to be done? How dare you do what, if you do it without delay or compromise, they might some day thank you for?

You’re the one who takes the risk. That’s your side of the covenant. They’re the ones who might throw tomatoes. You could be horribly wrong. But if you ask them what to do, they will certainly, sooner or later, throw their tomatoes. They don’t really want to be consulted.

An artist’s love, like that of a poet, a preacher or prophet, is tough love. Listen to the spirit. Do as it directs. Don’t apologize. Have a helluva time. Act as one with authority. This is not moderate behavior.

At the crucial moment you must be more than you are. If you’re five foot two you must grow to five foot three. This is not the time to take suggestions. Be a nice guy later, but right now you must know, and nurture, your inner sumbitch.

“A Pianistic Quarterback Passes to a Younger Generation,” New York Times (November 30, 2003)

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real boy

Your eyes paint the picture they see. They cook and feast at once.

-- Don Cupitt, Life, Life

Seventy-six Fahrenheit, and the weighted air does not move. I can’t breathe. I stand quite still and sweat, as they say, like a pig, though I think pigs must sweat with more elegance than I. Sus domestica is an intelligent and dignified animal, and might resent the comparison.

Some of my people say that I’m a man of God, that I carry the Spirit with me. But the spirit grunts and moans in this slow-cooked flesh, longing for a cold shower and a change of clothes.

These bottom-of-a-fishbowl days, trials of endurance that cannot be blamed on a thermometer, are among the city’s climatic pranks, its special contributions to meteorology. We carry on our affairs in a tidal estuary – nothing is ever washed out to sea; everything churns and sours. What goes around comes around. Karma. Until the autumn breezes come to save us, we live in our own effluence.

My colleague thinks I have a fashion sense. She flatters my “muted greys and browns” with an esthetic interpretation.

I never thought of myself as relevant to fashion. I place myself in the category of things strange-looking but presentable with some effort. Who was it said, please God, make me normal? Perhaps I am learning, at long last, to look normal. That’s what I hope for as I choose the day’s clothes, or as I buy those modest vestments from catalogues and discount stores. My younger presentations were often misguided, peculiar. Passing for ordinary, if that’s what I’m doing, would be progress. Has Pinocchio finally become a real boy?

I’ve learned that I must respect the physicalities. In a day’s campaign I might walk a few miles, climb twenty or so flights of steps, adjust to the climatic terrors of a half dozen subway cars, and stand on as many steamy platforms waiting for those cars to open. I’m a walrus and, if I begin the day in a suit and tie, then by noon I’ll look like what the cat dragged in. And smell that way.

So I’m a bit informal. I’m big on linens and breathable fabrics, stuff that won’t be ruined by a little moisture. As the Fall comes on, some may think I’m dressed too cold but, like Dave Letterman in his frigid studio, I’d rather not be dripping on the script.

In recent years I’ve discovered an intuition for colors. So on a given day, among the prosaic alternatives of trousers (pleated or tropical), turtlenecks, polos, blazers, tropical shirts (monochrome or fine-print), I choose an ensemble. I learn from the day’s predicted high temperature which wardrobe I should deploy – winter, summer or transitional. And then the work of decision begins, among the exchangeable alternatives of a template.

There are two ways to organize by color. The first is by gradation, and the second is by contrast. When I wear my lime green tropical shirt, should I show above the top button my tee-shirt of paler green (or hunter)? Or should I show the goldenrod, or light brown? Under my black shirt, a tee of black, or grey, or cardinal red? I ponder on these matters. It isn’t just any old shirt, any old tee, and any old pair of pants. There has to be a plan, a concept, if you will.

When my colleague thought I had achieved a semblance of fashion, I thought I might have finally passed for prep. Which I never quite achieved when I was a prep.

These colors matter. I’ve known people – they seem always to be vegetarians – who wear nothing but brown. Vegetables are more colorful than the people who eat them. I’ve also known people who wear nothing but black. Some others are addicted to pink. Enough said.

Colors matter. But they do not exist. They are among the qualities that Descartes called “secondary.” Monet has proven how such things change in the light. Though L. L. Bean assures me that this shirt hanging in my closet is of cardinal red, Nature did not sign it so. It’s just a fabric, treated so that light of certain frequencies does not reflect from it. I find it quite exciting, but my kitty, brilliant as he is, doesn’t know the difference.

And rainbows don’t exist. Our crippled eyes filter out all else, and what’s left of the sun’s refracted radiation appears to us in an arc of all possible colors – by which we mean the colors it is possible for us to see. In God’s eye there a million more colors, and she casts them in vain – unless there shall be wiser, more perceptive creatures than ourselves to follow us, and receive the blessing that has been so long on offer.

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pastel bedclothes

Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it.

-- Genesis 3:17 (NRSV)

Somebody did something terrible. I can’t tell what it was exactly, and I can’t name the one who did it. But the evidence is all around. The reek. The smoke. The suspicion.

Once upon a time, the world awaited. Light came in my window, inviting me to put my feet on the floor. Meaning no harm, I could do none, to others or to myself.

At least, it must have been that way once. The picture is not, as Descartes demanded, clear and distinct. There are fragments. A white frame house with green shutters all round. Trees reaching out for each other over a quiet street. A window’s outline projected on the floor of a church basement. A guy with lady’s hair, dressed in pastel bedclothes, walks on a hill with sheep. Jesus loves me, this I know.

It’s not clear and distinct, but it never entirely fades. Not entirely.

The more honor you give to The Suspicions, the more they multiply. They always have Prudence on their side. If you’ve already feared This, you should really fear That. Be very afraid. Don’t just do what seems right, are you looking for trouble? Bah, humbug.

The people who fund my ministry don’t trust me. Nothing personal, they don’t know me and the feeling is mutual, it’s just business. We clinicians are all in a ministry – nurses, social workers, doctors and me. We’re here to wipe away the tears. But the agencies that pay for the services think we’re trying to rip them off. Because somewhere, sometime, somebody once ripped them off. It wasn’t me, but I must play in the wreckage of the primal trust.

Trying to do good, we must pay for the sins of others. So we fill out forms about each client, about what we did and what we plan to do and why and what got done and not, and about what we say to each other we should do, and about meetings where we can’t say old information, can’t say new information, but must without saying any information make a plan of care in which we all “collaborate.” This is what, from the high regulatory desks of Planet PencilPush, seems good use of our time. It costs time which is money, limiting the number of tears we can wipe away. Think of it as a lesson in Original Sin. We don’t have to commit that Sin right now: it Originates before we get there. The level ground on which we walk is already tilted, the compass points are all wrong and the right angles are something less than ninety degrees. It’s a fallen world in which we must take our straightest shot. Two and two are five. So forgive me if I have walked past a door of grief, knowing I haven’t time both to wipe away the tear and to document it.

Forgiveness, as Tony Kushner said, is hard, it's where love and justice meet.* My colleague thinks I don’t understand what it’s like to be black and female. And of course I don’t, never will. Nor does she understand what it’s like to be a white male trying to understand a black female. Never will. All we can do is listen, looking toward the place on the horizon where parallel lines meet. Take it in, play it back. Compare our incomparable experiences. “That part of your story – which I have not experienced – is it at all like this part of my story – that I have experienced?” Midterm without end. Describe several similarities and differences between two stories. Be specific in your answer. A very imperfect procedure; but what else can we do? We come from different locations. The world is fallen. It’s this or scorn.

Forgive my ignorance and procrastination, I find that I am writing this on the day after Yom Kippur. We all need a day of atonement, a day to get it done and move on. Forgive ourselves and others for all the things done and undone by which we fall short of what we know should be. Not because forgiveness makes sense – we have, after all, only five loaves and two fishes – but because it clears the way to life.

Forgiveness is not a process or a syllogism. Though you look for it in the lesson plan, it’s not there. It’s a thing you just do. Or not. Don’t get ready for it. Just do it.

Last time I went back to that street, the house with green shutters was still there, and the trees still reached for each other over the street. The guy in pastel bedclothes, some say, is still walking those hills. Or might sit next to you, next time you fly home to Emmaus.

*Perestroika

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urgent silence

All of us . . . believe some modes of existence are superior to others. But only the liberal, committed to a vision of harmonious communal pluralism, is unsettled by this truth.

-- Sam Tanenhouse, “Peace and War,” New York Times Book Review (August 29, 2010)

Though you cannot hear the underlying agreement in our inflamed discourse about poverty and violence, we all agree – liberal and conservative, black and white, separatist and integrationist – that there are a lot of young urban men who would be better off if they felt that reading, studying and getting good grades were a path to success. That’s because reading, studying and getting good grades really are a path to success. The bitch goddess basketball, on the other hand, disappoints most of her devotees and corrupts the rest.

We argue with malice and fury about who’s to blame and what the fix is. But everybody knows that learning to read is more liberating than basketball. Basketball has its place and can, like music or poetry or worship, save lives. But reading saves more lives, and our access to literacy is a crucial part of what we white folks mean when we talk about our white liberal privilege. Literacy is better than illiteracy; and those who would be free must become literate. Everybody knows this. Or rather, those who do not know it will never be free.

The liberation theologians say that we white liberals are privileged people – that we have, without entirely earning it, what oppressed people want. Now listen. Don’t just react defensively. Listen to their critique. We have what those less fortunate want. That is to say, the oppressed want what we have. They want, in some respects, to become like us. Why then do we despise ourselves? Why are we so desperate to go slumming, as if we could transform ourselves into people who themselves want to change their identity? What sort of solidarity is it that causes us to hate in ourselves that to which the oppressed aspire? Could it be that our feigned love for the culture of oppression is a way of fixing the oppressed in their place, in hope that they won’t enter our neighborhoods, compete for our jobs, or infiltrate our voluntary associations? The Delta troubadour who sings with a clanging guitar of whiskey, wandering and women, is not about to buy a Volvo and apply for that new position in the English Department. Or run for president. There are good reasons to listen to a Leadbelly record, but let’s not fool ourselves that we’re doing anything radical as we listen. Leadbelly is, for us, safe.

You see, there’s no innocent way forward, no systematically pure creed or discourse. No language policeman or process observer can do anything but seek the last word in an argument that never ends. But we have to step out of the circle. We have to go forward. We have to leave the argument behind.

I and Thou, my brother, my sister. Ich und du. That’s what it comes down to. There’s mystery in it. Frankly, I don’t understand how we get along at all. But we have to keep doing it. We have to keep getting along, and more than that, we have to proceed toward justice. And since the terrain of history obscures the way and we lack the requisite Mecca-finder, we adopt together and for now some provisional marker of justice, good enough orientation perhaps until we can get there and revise our purposes. And we must remember, when we get there, that the marker is not, never was, God Herself.

We do this, as we do every other important thing, with insufficient knowledge. My dearest friends, my children and my spouse are a mystery to me; so how could I ever claim, my brother, my sister, that I understand you? Or demand that you understand me? Across the gap a spark of agape must fly. This flame is not ours to command, and yet we must be ready for it. Ideologies of blame and rejected responsibility violate the requisite stillness. W. H. Auden said that “the essential aspect of prayer is not what we say but what we hear.”* Faith is the urgent silence in which we wait for love’s prompting.

Urgent silence is the skill of a chaplain. We do not hurl good news onto the porch like a paperboy, but wait for good news to be born in a parlor of grief. Our comfort for those who mourn is a comfort of their own, revealed and blessed. Standing in for the Shepherd, we walk with them through a dark valley toward the sunlit turning.

Those who feel they have a license to fix, to save and rescue, should not apply for this job. To give the mourners their freedom, we must honor their pain and protect it from meddlers. We give the mourners their freedom not because we lack a theology but because our theology demands their freedom. Chaplaincy is a theology of immanence. Blessed are those who mourn. They have the blessing. We can be midwives at its birth, but not its parents.

Liberal faith says truth has more than one voice. No scripture or bishop is beyond question. Not that there is nothing sacred, but that the sacred recedes as we institutionalize it. Christianity’s worst day, said my liberationist professor, was the day on which the Roman Empire adopted it. If God became flesh in Yeshua, then truth is in the body, its weakness and passion, sufferings and accidents.

And liberalism is not value-free. Wake up, comrades, the coffee’s getting stale. Some “modes of existence” are better than others, and some are downright wicked. Literacy is more liberating than basketball. We believe it, and it’s true. It’s a fact.

*quoted in Context (Vol. 42, No. 9, Part B)

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