george spelvin

If I could just rehearse

one Wednesday in advance,

or repeat a single Thursday again!

But Friday’s already here,

With a script in hand I’ve never seen.

-- Wislawa Szymborska, “The Improvised Life”

There’s an old showbiz joke that always makes me laugh. I’m laughing as I write this down now. An actor – let’s call him George Spelvin – says that a certain producer doesn’t care for his work. “He wouldn’t cast me in The George Spelvin Show!”

And “George Spelvin” is another old showbiz joke. It’s the name that an actor puts in the playbill to conceal his identity. But of course each of us has been cast in The George Spelvin Show. We’re all, as Shakespeare said in the Scottish play, poor players strutting and fretting. And the script is late. Very late.

It’s one form of a common dream: they’re looking at you and you’re unprepared. Perhaps it’s an examination and you never studied. And you have no clothes on. You forgot to put them on. And you forgot to do the reading. And to go to class. Or you’re on a stage and you never rehearsed. When was that rehearsal exactly, the one you didn’t go to?

This isn’t a rehearsal. It’s the show. Whatever you do now, whatever you don’t do – it’s on the record. The house is full of people who paid the price of admission. They have high expectations. The reviewers are in their seats. They’re making notes and judgments. You’ll hear about it in the morning.

No do-overs. Not unless you incorporate the do-over in the plot. From now on you’ll be the person who spoke out of turn, or made the bad investment, or forgot his lines, or betrayed the one she loved. You’re blotted and there’s no eraser. You must either fake and hope to get away with it (soft-shoe, “Tea for Two,” take a card any card, a funny thing happened on the way to my life), or confess and make up as best you can. If they give you a second chance, it will be on a bare stage, with merciless lighting. There’s hope, but it’s a hard hope.

If you make the trick of course, fill the moment, deliver the punchline, draw the tears, stop the show, get the laugh, earn the encore, then it’s done and can’t be taken from you. If you love kindness, and act justly, and comfort the afflicted, and take care of your loved ones, the Lord requires no more of you. You’re not just practicing to do stuff, the show’s been open for a while now and you’re actually doing stuff. Didn’t they tell you? It all counts. Is that all there is? Yes, this is what there is; you were expecting something better?

Perhaps you should have paid more attention. You’re already in the middle of things, and the finale is coming on. You missed the feather-dusting scene, where the maid tells all, what the issues are, while she whips the sitting room into shape. “Oh, oh, oh! Six o’ clock and the master’s not home yet!”* You missed that scene, so you’ll have to suss things out on the run.

Finales matter, but we don’t like to think about endings – our own endings or, for that matter, anyone else’s, because those other endings remind us of our own. So we don’t give enough attention as the thing winds up. We don’t get ready.

I pay attention to endings. I’m not a perfect audience, and sometimes my attention wanders. Sometimes the protagonist no longer holds the stage, and I watch the supporting players, who have more need of my attention. But by giving the best attention I can, I bring these events to light, these events in which I have no part, events that I do not script or manage. Let there be light, says the stage manager, let the curtain rise; and life, including its beginning and its end, becomes what it is under the eyes of others. That’s why, as Donne said, the passing-bell always tolls for thee – it means that your audience is diminished, and your stage has shrunk.

But the script just arrived. You can see it in the hands of the stage manager; it was just put into her hands. She’s showing the script to you from the wings, but what’s that to you? Too late now, you’ll have to find your light and make it up as you go.

I saw a man die who was far from perfect. He struggled with addiction all his life, and went to prison for possession of cocaine. But he had come back again and again, had taken care of his sick mother for decades, and loved his sons. Two of them were at the bedside when the breathing tube was removed. His brain was dead and he didn’t breathe on his own, but the heart struggled on for ten minutes without oxygen, as the sons stroked his head and whispered tender words into his ears. The best of him was there with me.

In Shakespeare’s time they didn’t write plays in “acts;” but publishers later arranged them in five acts to honor the ancients. Fourth acts have a stillness in them. I’m doing my fourth act now. The plot’s in a lull, but the catastrophe is winding up. Hamlet says the readiness is all; if it be not now, ‘twill be to come. The audience is waiting, a little impatient. They’re talking amongst themselves while I say wise things. They’re hoping the finale will be worth the fuss. If it’s worth the fuss, it will expiate, explain, excuse a lot. Finales matter.

*The Skin of Our Teeth, Thornton Wilder

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is is

It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.

-- President William Jefferson Clinton

My morning apple is green, but Clark Kent is Superman, Barack Obama is the President, Marlon Brando is Stanley Kowalski and God is Love. And this morning it is time to get up and it is raining or rather, there is rain here. Some people say that one politician is just like another or rather, there is no difference between them. Under the table these two letters, is, are operated by many different actors doing different kinds of things. And so, while the president drew scorn for his motives, he was voicing one of the most intractable and complicated controversies in the history of civilization. Much depends on the meaning of the word “is.”

Philosophers throw chairs at each other over the dilemmas of Essence and Existence, Being and Becoming. Plato the Essentialist tells me that my chair is only a chair because it participates in the eternal and invariable idea of chairness, and that all the details we most care about, the size and shape, grain of the wood, pattern of upholstery, comfort of its padding to the small of the back, are so much insignificant detail. David Hume the Empiricist tells me that my chair is only a chair by supporting my butt, reflecting light in a certain way, squeaking when I sit down it, feeling soft or hard, warm or cool to the hand, and any thought about its essence or the nature of its chairness is an idea that I make up by fusing those primary realities. Jean-Paul Sartre the Existentialist would go further, and say that talk of essence is dishonest metaphysical claptrap – bad faith – and the chair is nothing but how it exists, maybe not even that.

There’s no pure language for the asking of such questions, no way to ask that does not presuppose one of the answers. But we can’t avoid the questions. I am what I am and I am becoming what I am becoming, but which aspect is “real?” Do you know me when I do exactly what you thought I would do? Or do you come to know me when I do the miraculous thing you never expected? It matters whether you say, “You’re not the person I took you for” or “You’ve become a different person.” Both statements claim new knowledge, but one of them privileges essence and being, while the other privileges existence and becoming. Orthodox theology says God is what He is, “as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.” Process theology says God is becoming what She is becoming, is “emotionally affected” and “suffers with the world.”* The priest wants us to be something, but the prophet wants us to become something. Perhaps salvation is our becoming what we are.

There is a chair and there is a Hollis sitting in it; there is also a Harvard and, depending on what language game I play as I say it, there might be a God. But there is no Harvard in the sense that there is a chair: Harvard is not a collection of objects. And there is no God in the sense that there is a Harvard: God is not a closed relationship of persons. But all these kinds of things exist – they exist when we talk about them in the proper way.

And if we speak improperly about them, they don’t exist. If I cannot name the chair, and take it for a hairbrush, then it’s just an object. If the people of Harvard forget to address each other by their callings, if they take themselves for a political party or a sociology experiment, then it’s just another aimless club. And if I forget how to use the word God, naming an object or a datum or a person instead, then God will be proven not to exist.

When Kitty taught me how to pray,** the Holy Spirit came a-visiting, and it surprised me. There wasn’t another person in the room. The thermostat was not affected. There was no extra rush of oxygen. These are the facts. There was just me and Kitty, holding each other’s hands, and saying certain words. There are no facts about God. But I knew the visitor had come because I felt it leave when we were done. Kitty said the Lord was with us, and I won’t argue with her.

*David Ray Griffin, “Process Theology,” A New Handbook of Christian Theology, eds. Donald W. Musser and Joseph L. Price (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1992), pp. 386-7.

**”First Client,” November 17, 2008

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past regime

My self is an anthology of stories.

-- Don Cupitt, Life, Life

I have learned to make important decisions by asking, “Can I tell this story about myself?” I was raised to enumerate the reasons for everything. I made lists of reasons, for and against, on opposite sides of a ledger. I said, looking at the balance of the page, “All right then, that’s what I’ll do! -- or not do!” And then the truth would intervene.

I once thought I was an atheist because I couldn’t prove God by syllogism. I thought I should deduce my politics from undeniable axioms. But the world isn’t a political debating club or a dogmatic treatise, and it doesn’t matter whether I win the argument. What matters is that I live sustainably, and that’s the end for which reason serves as means. When reason turns impractical, it turns irrational.

Will this story bear its weight? Can I tell it so you’ll hear it? To tell the story I must see you face to face. It matters not so much what you say as what I see in your eyes. If I can’t tell it to you, then it doesn’t have enough truth to live with.

In a regime that now thank god recedes into the past, my supervisor shut me down as I talked about a client. “Stop right there: that’s story-telling!”

She wanted to cut the gab and get the data. The legal definition of a hospice patient is medical, and a nurse’s proper report is an inventory of medical data, readings on the dashboard. We need to know pulse and pressure, loss or gain of weight, ease or difficulty of breathing, degree of alertness or disorientation, details of consumption and excretion, the staging of pressure ulcers, the site and severity and quality of pain. The medical meaning is in the pattern of these present data: once we know the facts and vectors we’ll know what there is medically to do.

We spiritual counselors also find data. Chaplains too seek meaning. But we can’t take readings from a dashboard.

I had a colleague who wrote in his notes about “increase” or “decrease” in the client’s “spiritual well-being.” Someone taught him to do this so he could sound like a doctor. But the soul has no crankcase and there’s no dipstick to read it with. To speak of an “increase in spiritual well-being” is nothing more than to say “I think he’s doing better,” but say it pompously.

There’s no instrument to measure the state of a soul, but what if there were? I who enter the room in good health and an hour later will go home, I am no one to judge the client’s state of being, to call it well or ill. The soul’s exit from the world is not supposed to be pretty, any more than its entrance is. This one’s terror, that one’s bitterness, the other one’s anger – these may be proper answers to a rotten hand of cards that God has dealt. I’m not God’s bodyguard. Let Her defend Herself.

Meaning is not a pattern of data on the dashboard, or a quart of well-being dumped down a funnel. Life’s Meaning is not the answer to an examination. To talk about it is bad poetry. The very form of the question, “What is the Meaning of Life?” is invalid. It’s like asking, when it rains, where the “It” is that’s raining.

We only talk about meaning when we have lost it, because when life is meaningful we’re too busy to talk. Life seems meaningful – ceases to be meaningless – when there’s something still to do. If you can tell a story that’s not yet finished and you’re included in it, you are not lost. To complete some work, or mend a quarrel, or see a grandchild married, or leave a testament, or even just to sing a song, this song of grief. I cannot choose the task or write the plot, but sometimes by listening I draw it out. Sometimes I get to name or bless it.

And so I say in hindsight to a past regime, who shut me down for story-telling, “Damn right it’s story-telling. That’s my job.”

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never sleep

I never sleep really comfortably, except when I am at a sermon, or at my prayers.

-- Francois Rabelais, Gargantua (trans. J. M. Cohen)

The license of the plebeians must be restrained and humiliated. . . . But if one day . . . the art of mockery were to be made acceptable, . . . it would summon the dark powers of corporeal matter.

-- Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

It’s been said that Yeshua and his followers would have been indistinguishable, in the markets of ancient Palestine, from Cynic philosophers – wise-cracking countercultural street performers who sang for their supper, and came indoors of an evening for a good meal and a piece of floor to sleep on. If no one in the town would take them in, their rules of engagement told them to shake the dust from their feet, and move on.

It’s also been said that the prophet could speak for hours to multitudes who gathered on hillsides. And that the multitudes would listen. He could make a splash, in the city square or on the hillsides. He was a good communicator. The most indubitable fact about his life is that he attracted enough attention to get killed.

How does one hold the attention of an illiterate audience in a noisy city square, or on a hillside? Not with a sermon. Street sermonizing is a notoriously deluded enterprise. There are people preaching what they think to be The Word on street corners of my city today, and no one stops to listen. Not unless they have other skills – skills that can only be described in the language of showbiz.

We don’t have to speculate about his skills: the research has been done. The scholar of street performers in Washington Square Park discovered that the successful artists, who gather and hold audiences, get an audible response every eight seconds.* There are two ways to do this: “making people laugh (comedy) and showing something amazing (testing fate).” We know the kind of conjuring tricks by which a holy man could earn his reputation – these miracles appear on the record, even if he did not do them, because prophets were supposed to amaze the crowd. What has been concealed, though perhaps the signs are in plain sight, is his gift for comedy.

The deepest secret about Yeshua is that he was among other things a comedian. To reconstruct his act, we must read it in a way that priests will not permit. They’ve kept the lid on through the centuries, for when the comic word breaks out the falsely dignified are first to be deposed. It isn’t easy to discover what was covered up. There’s no logical way to see what has been veiled. Comedy is what doesn’t translate, easy to conceal, a matter not of content but of form and context. A man gets beaten with a stick: is it comedy or tragedy? no telling in the abstract. If we would search out laugh-lines, we must look for signs of irony, of wordplay, of satire and table-turning. We should ask how the line would sound if Mort Sahl had said it. Or Henny Youngman.

“Let the dead . . . bury the dead.” Ba-DUM-bum.

“The Sabbath was made for man . . . not man for the Sabbath.” Think about it.

“Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s . . . and to God what is God’s.” Don’t let the dust choke you on the way out.

Well, maybe you had to be there. No, seriously. You had to be there. You had to see him work the hecklers, outwit the tricksters, disappoint the ones who wanted him to self-incriminate. You had to hear the crowd roar when he brought the pompous rascals down. These were the poor and desperate of Judea, unsure of their next meals. They loved to see the wise and mighty put to nought. Their laughter was the congratulation that he offered them. “I'm not so much interested in politics as I am in overthrowing the government," said Mort Sahl. Yeshua wasn’t a politician or a soldier, but he played with words like “kingdom of God,” and in the kingdom of Caesar that was enough to get him killed.

Laughter is not systematic. It’s a corporeal event, asserting paroxysm against syllogism, the belly against the brain – body (if you draw such distinctions) against the soul. It’s always liquidating authority. It puts the Word in Flesh, and scares the church to death. Boo!

*Sally Harrison-Pepper, Drawing a Circle in the Square: Street Performing in New York’s Washington Square Park (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1990)

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many irishmen

The intelligence of the men is a great surprise to me. They learn all the details of guard duty and Camp service, infinitely more readily than the Irish I have had under my command.

-- Col. Robert Gould Shaw, letter to his mother, March 25, 1863*

It came as a “surprise” to this white commander of black troops that they would make “as good a regiment, as any that has marched.” With abolitionist condescension, he said his troops were “like children;” but in due time these men of the 54^th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry convinced him of their manhood. The irredeemable troops of that army, according to Shaw, were not the black ones but the Irish ones. “The Irishmen,” he wrote (May 25 1861), “seem sometimes utterly unable to learn or understand anything.”*

I grew up among institutions of the Mayflower, in Connecticut River towns with village greens, Greek Revival civic halls, and white frame meeting-houses with green shutters, clear windows and pointed spires. I lived in parsonages of Victorian or English colonial origin, one of them from the time of the French and Indian War. I attended a prep school of Anglo-Saxon nomenclature where, though neither I nor my parents were native to New England, our British name and pink complexions earned us trust. In those towns the suspect peoples were the ones whose families had arrived on other boats. They were Italian, Portuguese, Slavic or Irish, or Jewish.

In those days it was rumored that in the cities there were black people, but “Negroes” didn’t come so close to us in daily life that we would fear them. If we were liberals, we might declare ourselves “on their side” without knowing any of them, but if we did so the Italians and the Portuguese, the Slavs and the Irish took offense.

In Shaw’s day the Irish were less reputable than free Africans. But when the Kennedy boys went to schools like mine and one of them became president, the Irish forgot eight centuries of warfare with the English and became New England’s newest white people.

So what is this “white” identity of mine? The community called white at any given time is a conglomerate of tribes. A generation or so ago these tribes were killing each other. Their common story is of mutual hatred and murder, and they suppress it as the price of admission to whiteness. They make each other powerful by forgetting their history, and by closing ranks against the ones left out, who remember history.

The critical theories of the latest fin-de-siècle tell us that race is socially constructed, and the composition of whiteness is therefore a convention like “king’s English.” Science provides no genetic definition of race, nor will it countenance the notion of subspecies. “Race” enters history only because human beings think it is important. Yet friends of African ancestry tell me that they and their children cannot “pass” for white in the way that Slavs and Mediterraneans have done: Danny Glover in a three-piece suit still can’t get a taxi. Their testimony implies that racial classification – and reclassification – has perceptual if not genetic limits. As long as the first fact noted about my brother or sister is their pigmentation, then some will be excluded to define the inclusion of others. If a time is coming when, on meeting my African brother, I don’t think off the top of my head “Oh, there’s a black man!” – that will be a good thing, will it not, my friend?

What do I get for being white? Though I didn’t choose my place in history and can’t unchoose it, the places we are thrown into at birth aren’t equal – just ask those thrown into the valleys. Here on my modest hill I received an extra portion, not so much of assets as of aspiration, and in my hand was placed the key to a prestigious culture. That I have not mastered the universe – well, perhaps that’s my fault, and mere survival therefore is my fortune. What I lack for being white is an identity.

Why did my people – whoever they were, German, English or Celtic – come to what they called a New World (though they stole it from those who had owned it of Old)? What persecution or privation drove them from their native continent? It’s all under wraps. To acknowledge the story of those olden days is to break solidarity with our new-found friends, those other whites whose ancestors made us leave the Old World, but who now enjoy with us the fruits of theft, the robbery of labor or of land. We do not talk about our losses. We’re here now, where hard work gets you what you want. That’s our whitebread culture, in whose scripture nothing but valiant effort and deserved success are written.

When I go to hear Delta Blues, the audience is surprisingly white, which makes me think the mythology of valiant effort and deserved success has failed us. It fails us first because it’s false: life is not fair, even to white people. It fails us second because, even when it’s not disproved, it’s boring even unto death: there is no mode for our fear and suffering. And so we envy those outside our circle. And we go slumming.

O to be Irish! Or Hungarian, or Czech, or Sicilian, or Polish, or Basque, or Catalan, or any ancestor of whiteness who still recalls his song. Or to be black.

And that’s another reason why I can’t destroy my white identity – because I don’t have one. White is no identity.

*Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune: The Civil War Letters of Robert Gould Shaw, ed. Russell Duncan (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1992)

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sufficient evil

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

-- Matthew 6:34 (KJV)

And I’ve carried this burden of privilege all my life, though I did not fashion it. People who had no notion of me passed it down. My privilege is hard for me to see because it hasn’t made me wealthy. It’s also hard for me to see because I’ve never been without it. What would I compare it to?

Long ago, ancestors of mine stole the labor of others and confused it with their own. They imagined that their pile of wealth was a figure of their own hard work, and then they passed it down the generations to those who thought they earned it just be being born.

More recently and locally, my parents did what they could, what they thought necessary, to get me good schools and good connections, the skills of mind and heart, that I would need to gain good things in life. They made a pile of social capital for me, as big as they knew how. As best I could I did the same for my kids.

Our children are not sociology experiments. When we first look in their eyes, we pledge not to toss them in the human lottery to come up any which way. This child, we proclaim in the name of what is sacred, will have a good start. We promise security, nourishment, encouragement and means to independence – which is more than many children ever get. We promise like Billy Bigelow to earn what it takes, or beg, or steal or take it. We promise to be unjust for this child’s sake. If we don’t make and keep this promise we are bad parents. Of course my children are privileged: it was my sacred duty to make them so. And when every valley is exalted, those who are now poor will privilege their children better than they can now.

Linus said he loved mankind, it was people he couldn’t stand. But there’s no love of God when you hate your neighbor, no scrubbed and shiny love in general apart from grimy, paltry love of ridiculous and needy creatures that surround and cling to you. The love of all is just an open set of particular loves – the love of this one, and of this, and this, and this, and . . . the next one might be Yeshua. And Linus, with his abstract love, loves none.

This is what we mean by family values – that we particular persons, few or many, nuclear or tribal, are pledged to each other in ways we are not pledged to the rest. And yet the love of those within our circle is always standing in the way of greater love outside. That’s why Yeshua renounced his family and left his home, taking to the road. He always drew the larger circle. His vision was so big, it shattered family. “If you want to be my disciple,” he said, “you must hate everyone else by comparison – your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters.”* They’re all your neighbors, even the centurions and god help us the Samaritans. And by the way, those brats out there, they’re all your children.

But here we go again, prophet – I can’t be father to all children. You invited little children unto you, but the story says you didn’t father any of them, clothe or feed them. No, I’m not a lily of the field, nor was meant to be; that is not my social location. I’ll make a deal with you. You pay the mortgage, find the health insurance, dive bottoms up in debt to send the babies off to college while dreaming of your next pink slip – then, and only then, will I let you tell me who my children are. Shatter me, prophet, if you must, but it’s my duty to shield my family from the likes of you.

St. Francis imitated Christ, renounced his parentage and wealth, and took to the road. I know that, if I quit my job, scattered my meager assets and left my home to consort with brother sun and sister moon, my children and my spouse would not feel honored by my choice. I have a family and I value them. I cannot, will not live as Yeshua and Francis did.

Imitatio Christi is not for me. We cannot all be Yeshua, if Yeshua is to be himself. Someone has to keep the house where he will knock and enter. Someone has to serve the dinner. Someone has to break the flask of oil, and wash his feet. The basileia tou theou is not all spirit; it has a body and an infrastructure. Christians say the church is the body of Christ, so – feed the holy flesh. Someone must go to market for the bread and wine. Someone must own and operate the kitchen where the poor, and the prophet, are to eat. The prophet needs a large supporting cast. If only stars can enter heaven, then hell will prove to be a tranquil place, a neighborhood where we would love to raise our kids.

What is this privilege I inherit, some of it because my skin lacks pigment? It’s partly what my parents did, and should have done, for me. And partly it’s the detritus of crimes done long ago, washed down through channels that were cut before my birth to my back door. So far I’ve survived, while someone else did not; but my inheritance, taken all together, hasn’t made me rich or safe. My grandpa, who owned property at a time and place when black men couldn’t, left me some money; and when it came I didn’t give it to the poor: I paid my debts and kept myself in business. Note to Francis: becoming homeless doesn’t solve the homeless problem.

I am not rich or powerful. In my seventh decade I’m still just hanging on. And what is my duty toward countrymen of color, more than to love kindness, act justly and walk humbly? A wise kind man of color, who led one of my church’s recent weekend inventories of racial justice, advised us not to accept the blame for all of history. We cannot be guilty of what we did not do. And we cannot be responsible for what we cannot do. To know your duty is to know the thousand things that are not your duty.

When Yeshua said the troubles of the day are sufficient, he was warning not to cripple the moment with terrors of the future. But neither should we sicken it with guilt of the irremediable past. The day is sufficient. Only on this day can I be just.

*Luke 14:26 (New Living Translation)

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