some grace

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.

-- Mark 12:17

As usual, Yeshua sets us a riddle. What things are Caesar’s? what God’s? Yeshua refers to a Roman coin, the denarius, bearing the emperor’s image. But what about the backside? On an Augustan denarius (Eretz Museum, Tel Aviv) there appears a temple. Such a coin shows how God and Caesar are stamped on the same substance. Can we really divide one side of the coin from another? give Caesar (or God for that matter) one side without giving also the other?

A hospice is a ministry. Like many do-gooder outfits, it belongs to God. We help people live in the face of death. We walk with them through the dark valley. We wipe away tears. But as we do this, we feel the hand of Caesar. Medicare pays the bill for most clients. So Medicare looks over our shoulders. And besides Medicare, there’s the state Department of Health. And something else whose real name I’ve never deciphered, whose fearsome acronym is JHACO. The public wants to know its money is well spent. We invite the emperor into our ministry because good work is not done for free. Our good work is marked by Caesar, who leaves his fingerprints all over our guts.

“Compliance can interfere with good patient care.” That’s what one of our administrators said to me, just as I was saying it to her. Bless her.

“Compliance” is all the stuff we have to do so that the regulators will let us continue the good work. A lot of it is what we just plain ought to do, whether anybody inspects us or not. We like to think we’re such good people we’d do it on our own. Unfortunately, though individuals have the capacity for virtue, organizations tend over time to be about as rotten as they can get away with. (Moral man, immoral society, said Niebuhr.) Every regulation is a memorial to some ghastly abuse, the solution to some shocking conundrum of sin. Somebody’s always already spoiled things for us. Regulations are the punishment for that original sin. The darker side of compliance is bureaucracy.

Documentation is a good thing, and I have taken pains to learn it. I ought to leave behind myself a comprehensible account of my work, so that those who follow me can know what I encountered, what I did about it and who helped me do it. And they should do the same for me. Such narratives are of clinical value. They help us do good work. Without good documentation, we cannot be the “interdisciplinary team” that hospice philosophy requires.

Harder to accept is that I must contribute to an electronic pseudo-statistical artifact that is duplicative of, but inferior to, good written narrative. Though this artifact does a poor job of describing reality and is therefore of no clinical value, it alone counts to the residents of that exotic world where regulations are conceived as our “plan of care” – the indispensable mark of compliance. Every minute I spend feeding this chimera is a minute taken away from my clients.

Air traffic controllers, if they operate “by the book,” can bring commercial aviation to a halt. If we in hospice operated “by the book,” following every regulation expressed to us by every agency with fundamentalist devotion, literally as it is written, we would never visit any patients. There would then be nothing to document. Conversely if we could separate legitimate documentation from deathly bureaucracy and shed the latter, we could meet about half again more clients, or care for them half again as well.

I rejoice that I am not an administrator. They receive The Word from on high, and must bring it down the mountain to us. Only the commandments are not ten; they are rather ten thousand. I’ve been given contradictory commandments. And I’ve been given commandments that, if I really did them, would be pastoral malpractice. But I’m learning not to blame the bosses. The fault is more in the song than in the singer.

So I bless the boss who said, “Compliance can interfere with good patient care.” She understands that God and Caesar are at war in our guts, and that we must negotiate between them if the work is to go on. It takes some creativity. Some grace.

I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below, clicking on the word “comment(s).”

first client

-- Something is taking its course.
-- We’re not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?

-- Samuel Beckett, Endgame

You remember your first clients, because they teach you how to work. I’ll call her Kitty. She taught me what my job was. I didn’t know.

Imperious, angry, terrified, begging and demanding help, a retired schoolteacher still teaching the world, she had for the first time met the pupil who would not sit down, the guest who had come to her home and would not leave. “I don’t appreciate that,” she used to say of some remark, some behavior or other, fill in the blank, that offended her prerogatives and high standards. Kitty didn’t appreciate a death sentence. It offended her. This wasn’t the way it ought to be. Somebody was to blame. Maybe God. No, that was impossible. Maybe herself. But no, that was inconceivable.

From the office they called me -- an intern chaplain making my very first visits. This lady has just been admitted, they said, and she has urgent spiritual needs. You should see her as soon as possible.

Me. They called me. But I was a mess. I staggered through my visits, deflected from the mark by doubt and fear of failure. These people are really in trouble, I said to myself. What have I got to offer them? No words from a book, no advice delivered in a seminar, could answer that question.

I called her that evening, and Kitty invited me to her home the next day. High in a spotless apartment of a housing project tower, she opened her door to me. Unusually robust for a “terminal” patient, she led me to her parlor, gave orders for coffee, placed me on her couch and herself in an armchair close by. I felt her authority. I’m the wrong guy, I thought, for a commanding lady estranged from one of Harlem’s great black Baptist churches because, as she would say, they “don’t have the true Spirit.” I’m – well, I’m, er – white. And I’m a Unitarian Universalist: I bring to her parlor my utterly classic liberal Problem of Belief.

Kitty didn’t have time for any of that. She never noticed my disbelief, she brushed it aside. She didn’t give a damn, there was work to do.

I opened by the book. I asked what she was feeling, and encouraged her to tell me about it. She poured out her rage, indignation, confusion, terror. How could God do this to her? She, who had always tried to do things right. She wept. The worst thing was, she and God weren’t talking to each other. That was what most terrified her. She couldn’t pray.

I suggested that God, according to everything I had been taught, wants to know our honest thoughts. Not just the nice things, the adulation and adoration and gratitude; but also the rage, the resentment, the impossibly difficult critical questions. This idea surprised her. I asked if I could help.

So she took both my hands, and we both bowed our heads, and I started talking. I began with the facts. I told the Spirit that I was here with Kitty, that she had seen the end of her life, was overwhelmed and angry about it, didn’t know what she should do or how she should do it; she felt abandoned and betrayed, and needed help to find the meaning in these days to come. I kept listening for the next words, and all the while Kitty kept speaking for herself, over under around those words that were not mine. And when there were no more words to say, I said Amen, and she did too. And we looked at each other. And let go our hands. Something had taken its course. We knew this because we could feel it had finished now. If you can feel the end of it, you know it was something.

Kitty didn’t die. At least not on my watch. Like a number of people with her particular diagnosis, she got better. We had to discharge her. Our parting had a different grief.

Kitty ordained me. Though I can’t give a simple answer to the first great theological question (and am not obliged to), I am her “man of God.” No matter what other seals of approval I may acquire, I will retain that one. God bless her.

I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below, clicking on the word “comment(s).”

christian home

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life

That was my father’s prophecy every morning as he raised the shades, let in the light, and roused us to the day. It was fatuous, and he knew it. An introvert’s vaudeville, over the top in his under the vest manner. Like Jack Benny, he made the same joke every day, and that was what made it a joke.

I was brought up in a Christian home. In my father’s Christian house there was no war of faith and learning. To understand a Bible passage, you had to inform it as you would a sonnet, bringing all your heart and all your soul – and all your mind. Poetry, music, philosophy and history, plays and novels were our prayer life, and these were not harsh disciplines, like hair shirts to irritate the flesh, but sports and tournaments of delight. Above all, words. Words of the scripture, of Shakespeare or Milton or lesser poets, or words of daily life, trained to athleticism by stunts, puns, colossal spoonerisms and daring inversions. A regimen of poetry, transcending calisthenic and precipitating laughter.

His darkly bound books in many languages, shelved to the ceiling, were family gods, and though they would not speak to me, I knew these lares were friendly. Later I learned that his collection included both scholars of Higher Criticism who taught us to ask of scripture the questions we would ask of other reverend books, and prophets of Neo-Orthodoxy who taught us we might still be sinners as we did so. But there were other works as well, and there was no barrier between scriptures of the church and scriptures from outside it. If Yeshua said that what we did for the least of his kin we had done to him, Arthur Miller said that a man is not a piece of fruit, you can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away – and Arthur Miller was just as likely to show up in a sermon.

My father wrote his sermons between midnight and three on Sunday mornings. He cranked up the music as he banged his typewriter: Bach and Brahms, Mahler and Wagner, Poulenc and Honneger, Haydn and Mozart, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Gilbert and Sullivan, Victor Borge and Ray Bolger, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and Virgil Fox. In our bedrooms we might wake for a moment to his blessing and assurance of safety. How could anything harm us when our father was awake and working below, communing with theologians and artists and scripture while Mormons sang the German Requium?

In our Christian home, religion and learning were intimate. When did study become a sin, and education a sign of moral degeneracy? By what perversion of the American dream has expertise been designated a disgrace? To what prophet was it revealed that only residents of tiny dying towns have values, and that people of the urban centers (most of us in fact) are not real Americans?

We liberals like to point our fingers at others, but we have also played our role in the war on intellect. Drones and imitators in the universities turned an obscure French philosopher’s difficult technique of reading into a school of nihilism, in which all discourses are equivalent and the illiterate is as good as the eloquent – 50 Cent and Jerome Kern in the same display case. Liberation theologians shamed us for appealing to the laws of reason that make liberation necessary. Those who sabotage themselves so effectively scarcely need enemies. The self-loathing of intellectuals turns out to be no more liberative than their arrogance. The proud and deliberate ignorance of our culture and its leaders was an ejaculate of deconstructionist dreaming.

My father died five years ago. But if he were still with us, he might say this week that he got his country back. And in memory I got his learned Christian home back. The lovers of ignorance, haters of knowledge, of those who gather it and of the places where it is gathered, took it on the chin this week, and for a time they are chastened. Let us, then, be up and doing . . . still achieving, still pursuing . . . Awake!

I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below, clicking on the word “comment(s).”

nunc dimittis

Now you can dismiss your servant in peace, . . . since my eyes have seen your salvation.

-- Luke 2:29

I’m way too invested in this.

I am a boomer. One of the first boomers, the leading edge on whom our ills are blamed. When black people stood up for their rights and made people angry, we were blamed for it. When the country lost a war, stuck in the morass of two presidents’ cowardice, lifting its helicopters off Saigon roofs while enemies rode into the suburbs, we were blamed for it. When at Jackson State and Kent State Universities the nation killed its children and cheered, we were blamed for it. When under a conservative president the country turned away from ideals to the worship of mammon, we were blamed for it. I graduated from college in 1968, the year hope died – the year of war’s failure, assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, police riot in Chicago and election of a paranoid president. Happy graduation: enjoy your adulthood.

Enough already. We weren’t in charge. Our parents were in charge. There wasn’t a boomer president until 1992.

A dirty word, “boomer.” Sounds like “bummer.” Give us our full title. We are the “Post-War Baby Boom.” No one remembers what that means. The PWBB began in 1946, when soldiers of Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation” came home from the Good War and decided they’d had enough mayhem. Aided and abetted by a vast welfare plan, they got married, bought houses and produced children on a record-shattering scale.

It’s not our fault. We didn’t choose to be born all at the same time.

Politicians beg for our votes and diss us. They say we are a privileged special-interest group with disproportionate power. Our “privilege” amounts to this: that wherever we went, there wasn’t enough. There weren’t enough houses, there weren’t enough schools, there weren’t enough colleges and, when some of us sought academic careers, there weren’t enough careers. When we retire and die, there won’t be enough money to pay the promises made to us. We were born by decision of our parents, and we will live with those decisions until we die.

But when the Maker of All consults my generation’s account book, she will read there a shocking secret: there are credits lodged against the debits. When I was a child, a black child could be beaten, shot in the head and dumped in the river for whistling in the presence of a white woman, and white people would close ranks around the murderers; black people couldn’t vote. Tomorrow a man of African descent may be elected president. This is a Sign: and like all true signs, it does more than signify – it Is.

In my seminary I studied with a great black Liberation Theologian. Like Jeremiah Wright thundering to his congregation that America lives under the judgment of God and her chickens are coming home to roost, James Cone testifies to his classroom that the Enlightenment was a rationalization of white European power and Thomas Jefferson was a rapist. It’s painful for liberals to admit that enlightenment is no guarantee of virtue; and the sins of Jefferson, our second Unitarian president, hurt us personally.

The great liberationist says “Racism is alive and well” at my seminary; but he says this to a classroom featuring people of all colors, and he represents from his tenured chair a faculty diverse in nationality, gender and race. He invokes the memory of 1968, when America was going to hell and he was writing his first books. But his present audience and the present occasion of his speech were inconceivable in 1968. If racism is alive and well, then the words “alive” and “well” have changed their meaning – or perhaps the word “racism” has changed its meaning.

When I was a child, racism was the law and racists boasted of their racism. Now racism dares not look in the glass to see its face.

I’m way too invested in this, and it won’t be my personal achievement. But it could mean that my generation, our adulthood ruined before it began, can take pride in our lifetime. The demographer says that in twenty years or so I’ll be out of here. But like old Simeon, I’ve seen the promise in the flesh. Nunc dimittis tuum servum.

I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below, clicking on the word “comment(s).”

ten thousand

The ten thousand things depend upon it and it denies none of them. It accomplishes its task yet claims no reward.

-- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 34

“Pray without ceasing,” said the apostle (I Th 5:17), but this confuses me. If I prayed without ceasing, then there would be no time when I do not pray. This is not what most people understand by prayer. I wouldn’t get much else done.

Maybe the apostle thought it was okay if nothing much got done. He thought the end was coming. No kidding. Soon. Like a thief in the night. You couldn’t lay up treasures here and now, not even spiritual ones, because the here and the now would soon be gone. But the end was delayed and, to our great disappointment, time goes on. We learn that we must care how things come out. Like it or not we are stewards, because the world will outlive us and we must leave it in a tolerable state for those who follow, a few of whom at least we love. We have stuff to do.

When a family says, “Before you go, would you pray with us?” – it’s clear that up till now I haven’t prayed. But then, I didn’t mean to. Prayer is not a thing to be pushed on people. I’m only supposed to do it on request. Until that request comes, I’m supposed to be doing something else.

My life is mostly something else.

So don’t tell me I must rise at the third hour to pray, I have responsibilities. Ten thousand other things to do. And I have a problem with authority. I’m Unitarian. I don’t even recognize my own authority.

I don’t pray without ceasing. I don’t have a discipline of prayer, though I am brought to it by others. I pray if I’m asked. The people who ask for it – they discipline me. Is that good enough?

Good enough for whom?

If my colleague thinks I should have a practice, he means that I need a regular prompt, like a muezzin’s call, to halt the day’s stammer. What I give on request to others, I should give to myself.

Ten thousand things. I won’t do them all. I won’t do most of them. I choose what to do, and the other things – they just won’t be done right now. If I can choose, leaving the other things to providence, isn’t that what we’re talking about? The giving up of things. I am not equal to the ten thousand, but they call to me nevertheless. A mist of obligation rises, all the things I ought to do, in so many different ways, for so many people, from so many points of view. It’s not so much my vices as my virtues that seduce me. My passion to please. My desire to comply. I would pass all tests, meet all expectations. I’ve auditioned for the role of Great Exception.

The Tao is the pin that punctures the balloon of my grandiosity. Lord, help me choose, because I am not equal to it all, it’s far too much. There’s something here for me but only if I discern it. If it finds me.

I used to say I didn’t want to go on stage with any nice guys. The only good comrade is the one who chooses without guilt, plays without mercy, and does with killer instinct what is to be done. Making the invisible visible is rough business. To think of what you ought to do is a mystification and a temporizing betrayal. The world doesn’t watch temporizers. Holding one’s moistened finger to the wind is not the way of faith. The mountain never moves by dithering. Only if we do the work and nothing else can we help each other.

Lord, it’s too much for me. Help me own my inadequacy. Close the doors of fantasy. Open the eyes of my eyes. Mark me for discernment. The thing that is for me to do, if I do it, is my glory.

Discernment is a via negativa. There’s cruelty in it. To know what you are doing is to know the things you are not doing. All nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine of them.

I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below, clicking on the word “comment(s).”

no argument

A work becomes inarguable when it creates the terms by which it is perceived, when it becomes its own system of value, when there is nothing behind what it is saying.

-- Herbert Blau, Blooded Thought

I have to do this. But I didn’t know. I only learned by doing it.

Is it any good? That's what I asked as I fashioned secret juvenilia, recreating poems I had learned in literature classes. Am I any good? That's what I asked as I trampled the stage in school plays. Do I look normal? That's what I asked as with fear and trembling I approached a girl, requesting what would terrify me to obtain. Did I get it right? That's what I asked as I stuttered my tremulous thoughts to sullen undergraduates filling out their distribution requirements. How can I become a real boy? That's what I asked as my wooden head puzzled what a man, a husband, a father would do. Do I deserve the space I fill?

It took half my life to grasp the futility of such questions. There is always a problem, always something wrong, always something deficient, always another test. The Voice has only one thing to say: No, Not yet. It will say these words as long as you keep asking the questions. It’s not the voice of life.

“Try not,” said Yoda. “Do or do not. There is no try.” Calvin, though his doctrine declares the uselessness of effort, drove his followers crazy with trying. God, he said, is utterly free; God knows whether you’re damned or not, and nothing you do can change the truth. But a Calvinist is a human being, and cannot leave it at that. Human nature drives a Calvinist to try, try – to prove, prove – that what he presents is the appearance of an elected one. To whom should he present? To the Voice that always says No, Not Yet, It’s Not Enough. Yoda’s voice does not appear in Calvin’s book. Yoda knows that trying and doing are fundamentally dissimilar. What you do is what you are not trying to do. If you’re still trying, you are not doing it. Trying is a siren, a dead seduction from the task.

That’s what artists know. Trying is for dilettantes who prove, by grunts and grimaces, that they are “at their work.” If it’s hard to do, you failed. Effort only leads you astray. So how can a strutting sinner, how can a poor player dissected on the stage, be saved? How can I do what is really hard to do, and not by trying? Not by work, but by grace. How ironic.

Grace – the real illusion of a miracle. “Lend me your ears,” said Antony in the crowded square; and if I have grace you will lend me your ears. But if you hear my effort, how hard I work to make you hear me, you will not listen. Art is a cruel place, no place for sissies. To those who have, more will be given, but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. But then neither is reality a place for sissies. It’s true in art but in reality as well, that what gets truly done seems – really seems – really easy. Could have been no other.

So in this Cockpit where I work, this Department of Reality, this Chaplaincy, where Life and Death play out their tragicomedy, I do the work that on a good day lets me leave the work behind. It’s hard to learn to do things simply. It’s hard for a singer to learn the throat’s co-ordination. It’s hard for an actor to learn the gesture that can touch the hall’s back row. It’s hard for a pastor to learn the simple presence, the seeing and the being-with, that heals. But when the spirit moves us, the learning is already done. It’s then that, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know. We go backstage, behind opinion, and correctness, and approval, and debate.

I am not always pretty. I am not always good. I am not always right. I am not always true. But sometimes after sixty-one years, with all my heart and soul and strength and by grace, I do what will be done. Take me or leave me then. It’s what it is. There’s no argument.

I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below, clicking on the word “comment(s).”

modern baron

The gift of the One to Men.

-- Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

The wind is meager, so we motor rather than sail past the island. Isolated by shallow waters and swift currents stands the burnt shell of a Scottish castle designed by Frank Bannerman VI, who bought up the surplus of the Spanish-American War. One might say, flinching at the joke, that he made a killing with it. Bannerman’s Castle was his arsenal. A ruined residence in the same style commands the island’s crest.

I’m also thinking of William Randolph Hearst, who built another self-designed hotchpotch castle on his private mountain, overlooking the other coast. And of Shelley’s Ozymandias. The destroyed castle mocks Bannerman, and the preserved one mocks Hearst. “Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!” says the severed stone head.

“If you’re rich enough,” I say, “you can realize your fantasy.”

Fantasy of isolation. A castle is weirdly ambivalent between defense and offense. You shall not be moved from your keep; but because you are immovable, you can always “sally forth.” So you rule the terrain. Kings hated it when their barons built castles. It threatened their fragile authority.

A baron in your castle keep, no one can sneak up on you. The mountain, or the river and its currents, impede approach. Whoever wants to touch you, you can see them coming. From your battlement you can repel them – particularly if you are self-sufficient, with a store of food and armament within the walls.

The wealth of a modern baron comes not from isolation but from commerce; there are people he wants to touch, and to touch him. But he can afford the private planes or skilled river transport that take him out into the world, and that bring his chosen guests into the keep. The modern baron is so rich, he can even pay the cost of his dysfunction.

“Thank God we all die,” says my host.

My friend, who invited me on his boat, has longer experience than I to look back on. We were talking of a futurist who says that science is about to cure us of age. We may see lifespans of patriarchal length, a thousand years or more. “What’s really strange,” says my friend, “is that he thinks this is a good thing.”

If we live to a thousand years, where will we put the children? What shall we do with those misguided beings who engender and give birth to them? Perhaps we shall have no children. If I have nine more centuries to live, I may not want a squirming grandchild on my lap. If I am immortal, my descendents cannot make me so. Perhaps we’ll keep the children on a reservation, lest they change things. However old they grow, they won’t know what we know. They’ll lack the true perspective. Perfecting, rubbing smooth our pleasures, we may never give way. Some dying churches are like this.

But of course we must give way, and unmade, we must make our immortality. Every thing I do now is a hundred other things that now I’ll never do. We cannot keep to ourselves. If I do not learn the strange new pleasures of my children, and if they do not know my joys, if I do not love and am not loved, then my relic castle, burnt out or preserved, will mock me in my death. It is not that we must love in spite of death; it is because of death that we can love. I work in a cockpit of love and death. Death shows his colors here, and the trumpet calls us to change and to declare our loyalties. If I had forever to love you I’d never bother, and you’d never care.

Our mortality is therefore our gift and the ground of our joy. Tolkien imagined two kinds of sentient creature, one immortal and one mortal. The immortal elves poisoned the world in self-regard, greed and lust for power. In boundless grief they have left Middle-Earth to Humankind, who came later and who, dying the individual “death of weariness” that elves never knew, must save the moments of their lives in loyalty and love. The transitory survives where the eternal does not. Our castle walls dissolve, and we must meet each other in the open air. Thank God we all die.

I encourage readers to leave comments by using the widget below, clicking on the word “comment(s).”