Traveling Marcies

In the above drawing I consider that more women should smoke pipes. Cigarettes are too ordinary, and while cigars have a shock value, they are disturbingly phallic. A pipe is a reversal of the Ward Cleaver trope: The pipe contains notions of relaxation and thoughtfulness, albeit reserved for Ward after he comes through the door in his "Honey I'm home!" domestic bravado - taking control of the castle once again, after spending a day as a middle executive eunuch. I suppose that I'm talking about the pipe pictured above. Corn cob pipes would reverse the Tom Sawyer trope for instance; Meerschaum pipes would reverse the Sherlock Holmes trope. The effect of these reversals is at least twofold: the pipe moment is demystified; the element of play is introduced - and play in these senses: the sense of carnival mask and the sense of the sign loosening, becoming pliable.
I will miss the mighty phallic symbol that looms over the Agnes Scott campus. As I walked around the track, and Jami ran, I was always conscious of some fetishized remnant of human origins hovering over us - I kept expecting a witch doctor to walk out the door or to encounter a shaman performing arcane rites with powdered herbs.


I'll be back on August 15th. Joe's picking me up the evening of August 14th at MARTA and we're going for a drink at Twain's. I don't say that I'll be back on the 14th because it will be late, almost ten, when I get back. But any intrepid soul is invited to join us. Jami will be back in Durham and will begin work on the 15th as Duke Divinity's Director of Development. Couples do this living in two cities thing - and now we've joined their ranks.
For those praying: you could pray for us about that; for us making career transitions and geographic transitions; for my meeting with the examination committee on the 16th; and my beginning a CPE residency at Atlanta Medical Center on the 20th.
Today, this morning, finally we're heading out.
We're both glad we didn't leave yesterday: too many things to tidy up, and I have this sinus congestion. I'm feeling better this morning. Jami's feeling better. The car's loaded with belongings for her to settle in in Durham. I think that there is room for my suitcase and computer bag.
This evening we'll be dipping our toes into the Atlantic (or else first thing tomorrow). If I find a hotspot I'll be able to post some more.
Years ago I attempted to change the typical prayer for "traveling mercies" which seemed to me too much like "travailing marcies" to something more thoughtful like "perigrinating providence" or "itinerant loving kindness" - but my idea never caught on.

Tidying up

Tomorrow morning I believe we'll hit the road. Right now, we're a bit under the weather and involved with settling some things here. But soon enough the road will beckon us and we'll wend our way eastward to Charleston. In some ways we prefer just resting here at home, spending time with the cats, reading and writing. I bought a suitcase with little skate wheels yesterday, and now I do not fear how heavy my bag is. I think lugging my bags from Gatewick to the train station and then lugging them through MARTA when we rearrived back and to the house from East Lake station told me that my wheeless bag was no fun: also Jami seemed untaxed as she rolled her bag behind her. I thought to myself: I've got to get one of those. And now I do. The temptation of the rolly bag is to go ahead and bring more books. I'm up to 30 now. Knowing what I wrote just last night, I've must cull this collection in two. How does a person only take 15 books. Do I go without Barth? perish! Do I leave some poetry behind? Of Kierkegaard, Zizek, Jones Theological Grammar - what do I put back on the shelf? And the Hebrews commentaries? Don't I need them for writing my sermon? Or the Luke commentary, just in case I change my mind and go with the Luke passage about Jesus sending Fire. And I've been looking forward to reading Whedbee's Comic vision of the Bible - which is due back at the CTS library the day I get back. Plus I was going to bring some fiction: Amis's London Fields, Pynchon's V, O'Brien's The Poor Mouth. Plus I'm bringing some water color paper, paints and brushes. And I am thinking maybe I'll stash some DVDs for that giant TV set at the beach house. And then I've got these clothes to wear.
Right now my nose is running awfully. It's gotten worse as the morning has progressed. Nothing to do but shut my eyes.

I'm staying up late writing

When I worked for a web company we had a contract with a coffee company: I had my ideas for plugging the product, ideas of the highest caliber, ideas which were ignored. I don't know where this drawing is now. It could be in a stack here or in my studio; it could be sold of lost. Her face, looking forlornly into the cup, is indicative of that moment of anticipation that the trimethyl zanthines will do their work and block receptor sites that signal drowsiness, giving the impression of an elevation of alertness.
And now a note about biscuits. My uncle Earl told me the other night that my grandmother made biscuits with lard. She would sift the flower into an old wooden bowl. Into the middle of this flower she would place a hunk of lard and add buttermilk. She would work the lard and buttermilk together until the right consistency was reached. Then she would make little palm sized pads of dough onto a pan, slide into the oven at 375 or so for 15 minutes and viola! Biscuits. Might salt have been added? How about fresh jalapenos?

On the Road

I will try to find hot spots and places I can plug in and blog from: I'm taking my lap top. Among other things I am writing a sermon for my examination committee on Hebrews 11:27 - 12:2. Good stuff about faith and Jesus. An interesting exegetical note is that in verse 37, there's a word the NRSV translates as "sawn in two" but supplies in a note that other texts say "tempted." Tempted doesn't fit the context very well: it would be like saying that some people had various limbs amputated and this one fellow here, who we're equating with these other fellows, has a bad comb-over. So "tempted" is untenable. "Sawn in two" is attested in many manuscripts, but so are other words that mean "pierced" "mutilated" "strangled" "sold""broken on the wheel""impaled""burned" and my favorite, though with hardly any great attestation, "pickled." I think Metzger, who wrote the textual commentary, liked pickled too - he supplies an exclamation point to the word. Hetaricheuthesan is the koine Greek word for pickled for those of you playing at home. I can see some of them, when you read about them made to wander (not their choice) in deserts among mountains and in caves and cracks in the earth, who, given the opportunity, might relish the chance to get pickled. It could be that the other words are ancient idioms for hitting the sauce: Last night Bob was sawn in two, someone might say. Suffice it that the word implies its own punctuation mark or else is a study in fractions. Having to choose between the groups is picklish.

Still making our way out of Decatur and onto the Beach

Last year I brought 32 books to the beach, vital things like Pound's Cantos, my Greek New Testament, Finnegan's Wake, and Portnoy's Complaint. Jami took great delight in counting them and proclaiming to her friends in the beach house, "my fiance' has brought 32 books to the beach." And I can only wonder, what's wrong with the world where a simple man such as myself can't drag along 32 books to browse through during a seven day sojourn at the beach? This year I said things would be different: I would only bring five or so, less than ten, no more than 20, but not 32 books. Not that I'm ashamed of bringing such a number of books to the beach: books like David Markson's Reader's Block and This is not a Novel: books of a fine avant guard sensibility. Books are fuel for the intellectual furnace. A lot of steam power is needed at the beach because the furnace is forging ahead, full steam, against the ocean, the ocean as symbol of unconscious desire and archetypal burbling. That is: the ocean is not just a body of water influenced by tides and having variable salinity; the ocean is a repository of longing and weltschmerz and schadenfreude, and heroics and courage: the Aran Isles, men and the sea, Old Spice, Moby Dick and the devious cruising Rachel. I can't just face the ocean alone, flailing at its waves like Cuchulain: it's the siren's song (name that tune), terror incogneato, terra firma and terra recota (the cheese of a new world). 32 books may not be enough.

most beautiful woman

In a couple of days I'm traveling across country to the beach with the most beautiful woman. Every day we're together is a sweet day. I ask my self , "How did I get here?"In a couple of days we'll erupt in ululations of "thalassa!thalassa!" and scrape sand windblown waving come crashing brinkward and tide our time baked books under slant shade.

I love London at night

Last year at this time, Jami and I visited my granny Wise in the hospital. She'd broken her arm in a fall at her house in the yard as she picking some flowers after she'd been home from dad's for a week. We visited her and then we went to get something to eat. We went to Mamie's kitchen, a local place that had taken over the remnants of a Hardee's. This is the place you go to get country ham and biscuits and gravy for breakfast. It has tiny tables, a vestige of the Hardee's. The tables are not big enough for the trays you carry your food on, so when you arrive at a table with more than one person a kind of awkward balance occurs. Still it's good southern food, which means that it's lard laden and not good for you. As we left, we were some miles down the road, when Jami said, "you know, that place, the food's obscene, I almost had to say, 'Porno gravy for me.'" Or she said something like that. Anyway, there you have it: Pornogravy. I think of that when I contemplate my earlier Margarine of error pun: pornogravy and margarine of error - two great tastes for the Fall. Would the Fall have been different if Adam and Eve had been a bit more mature: "hey what do you know, we're naked. No shame in that. What kind of pie do you reckon we could make from this. Do you think God'd like some?"

Levitational madonna

Still writing a day behind. This image, a woman floating above the waves [which are cropped out of my poor photo], comes to me again and again. What could it mean? I drew it and drew it exactly because it expresses an unknown idea. That is: when I drew it it seemed appropriate that the woman be hovering above the waves. People ask me what symbols mean and for as long as I've been alive, they can mean anything. In art history we learn about a fixed iconography: Jerome has a lion; Paul has a sword; Catherine has a wheel and Barbara has a tower; St. Lawrence, gruesomely has the griddle he was cooked on in his martyrdom. These are mnemonic devices- and not symbols per se - although they could be used symbolically. Quite possibly Bosch, when he painted his strangely surreal paintings was unaware of what symbolism he was joining together. The hollow man in hell just is - and what he is symbolic of is unknown. So today when we look at his paintings the wonder is our not knowing - that interpretation is elusive. Jung says that a symbol is a tendency in pursuit of an unknown goal. And so it is when images lose their charge, their energy, their symbolism is spent. To know is to be not useful - for what vexes us is the unknown. If we sat in a room full of knowns all day we would become agitated. It is the symbol that is the vessel for the unknown - like an algebraic variable - that pushes us forward. This is why we study scripture. When we think we know its symbols we turn from it, uninterested. But when we look closely, when we accept the text as provisional and connect ourselves into its world, we discover that we don't know. And the unknown pushes us from the inside to the symbol, to fill the symbol with thought, to as Ricoeur says, to say more to understand better. The symbol is the penultimate.

I now have phone service at our house

I ditched my cell phone carrier today. For the last two years I've had to tell people, "sorry, I couldn't talk to you when you called because you called when I was at home where my phone company doesn't have service." How tiring that has been. Now I can call and receive calls in the house where I live. Today Jami called me from the porch and I got the call in the living room. Amazing. The company I had been with seemed unable to provide service to a wide part of Atlanta - our home wasn't the only place that coverage was non-existent. I can understand. If I owned a company the last thing I would want to do was be anywhere efficient in a large metropolitan market with over 5 million customers. As I understand it, from the way things exist, people who are paid six figures by a large communications company to plan strategy, have determined that the best possible way to conduct business in the Atlanta metropolitan area is to provide sporadic coverage that frequently cuts off. Congratulations to them. I'm sorry that I had to leave for a company that has opted for the counterintuitive plan of offering coverage to every geographic spot in a large metropolitan area. I hope that they're able to continue with this strategy - apparently against all odds.
The important thing is that now I can make phone calls while I'm in the shower and speak to friends and relatives while drinking a beer in my underwear. Otherwise I've had to walk half-way to the East Lake station to get a signal so I could do that. I think that that's what America is all about: making phone calls on the privy. It's what brought our Puritan ancestors across the pond - that and finding a place they could practice religious oppression unhindered - this desire to speak while indisposed. Nothing could be more representative of puritanism than lying in bed throwing a toy for a cat while having a conversation with a friend or telemarketer.
All this with the phones is another sign of our departure. We needed to join our phones on a single plan for the Durham/Decatur household.
Jami bought a blackberry and she's having a great deal of fun with it. The camera on this phone takes good pictures. One picture of our cat, Cleo, is weirder than the picture I took where she seems to have four eyes. In Jami's picture Cleo has eyes brighter than the sun - the tiny cat is over whelmed by two large green discs that take up most of her head. So in a way, these phones are helping us to see reality in new ways.

Keeping Track

The track at Agnes Scott, in all its pristine glory, with only a couple souls following its course. I am amazed at how many different greens there are in the world. Jami runs and I mostly walk, but sometimes I heave my body with its 50 surplus pounds over part of the oval. It feels good, especially along the shady part.
For seven years I lived in New Mexico where this green leafyness is an alien occurrence (among other alien things). Whenever I see places this lush I enjoy them in a new way. Not that New Mexico doesn't have charm. It's very quiet there at night and you can see all the stars. Even after 100 degree days, the nights are very cool. I remember once in Athens 20 years ago, it was 85 degrees at night. The heat was trapped in the humid air.
Agnes Scott is where Jami and I saw Ross McElwee's Bright Leaves last Fall. McElwee is a documentary film maker who teaches film at MIT. The first film I saw of his was Sherman's March - a film about romance in the South during a time of thermonuclear threat. Bright Leaves is about his family's involvement in the tobacco business. His great grand father was a competitor of the Duke family. I think about this film more now that we're heading into tobacco country (or terbaccky as they say there).
This is our last week together here in Decatur. This Saturday we're driving to South Carolina and then to North Carolina. People will be here to see after the cats and the realtor will show the house. But Jami will stay up at Durham, beginning as Director of Development at Duke Divinity and I'll come back here to begin my chaplain residency at Atlanta Medical Center.

A Sketchbook page

When I watch Fellini's Nights of Cabiria I have this feeling of sadness: what will happen to this poor woman. The film ends with Cabiria, returning from the woods, her money stolen by another bad lover, and she's walking along the road, despondent, but soon surrounded by young people walking along the road with guitars and accordions. A young woman turns and says, "bona sera." And that's the movie. Cabiria smiles and you're left with the feeling that somehow she'll find her way again. The music in this film is incredible.
Meanwhile Jami is reading the last Harry Potter (while I'm watching the movie). I think she's at the point where Harry confronts Colonel Mustard in the Study with a Horcrux. The knife fight scene, on the run away train's roof, through the alpine pass guarded by pygmy warriors heaving their long spears, as Hermione pilots a flaming dirigible (is it a rigid or semi-rigid airship?) onto the train to rescue Harry and Ron from Voldemort and his ninja assassin window cleaners is next [and I should say that this scene is almost entirely my conjecture - but Jami assures me that I'm unusually prescient]. Somehow it all ends with the three of them at the train station. A train pulls in with a group of young people playing guitars and accordions; a young girl turns to the three of them and says, "bona sera."
The priestly source and the Deuteronomist walk into a bar on the banks of the Euphrates, after a couple of beers they're singing a song of Zion. "In the beginning", they said, "there was tohu wobohu," and an evening breeze blew across the river face. They asked for a light, and it was good. PS looks at D and says, "so does the snake come in yet?" They eat a plate of fish and a plate of vegetables. The bartender comes by and says, "you two have to leave. It's getting late." So PS and D left the garden on the banks of the Euphrates and wandered among the closing bistros, seeing if they could find one more place to drink one more drink. PS looks at D and says, "for all the people here, at times I don't Noah soul."

In his 100th year

Bonneau Dickson completed his baptism last week and today, Saturday July 21st, Jami and I attended his memorial service at Rock Springs PCUSA. Some people are fortunate enough that their faith and character effect the Church over a long span of time. Certainly his career as a minister is nearly as long as Columbia Seminary's history in Decatur. This last May at graduation I took some photographs of Bonneau and Jami conversing. At the time I believed that he would make his 100th birthday. He seemed lucid in conversation, still possessed of some wit and a sense of presence. He was still working in the development office when Jami began as Annual Fund director in 2002. He was encouraged me in my sermons and ministry: he preferred my Gen 15:6 sermon to the award winning sermon - which made me feel good. The memorial service was satisfying. I felt we had the opportunity to reflect on Bonneau and say good-bye.

OK now the Danae is finished

Ok I went back into the Danae and changed the color of one of the falling books from yellow to a lavender with a yellowish spine and corner tabs. I love this painting. I think it will look great in our new home in Durham. Even though we don't have a new home yet, and we're still living in the old one. And our old one is still unsold after three days. Where are these people? This place is a bargain. I hope one day to do a painting as rife and recondite with symbolism as Bronzino's Venus, Cupid, Time and Folly. What a wonderful painting. I also hope to become more expressionistic like DeKooning. But the end of it all is continuing to find and use my own voice - to be wary of working in the vein of another.

Yassir, Dat's my Baby

Jami put a melon under her shirt and the fun began. Comedy can be this simple: a melon under a shirt - it's pregnant with possibilities. This may be the oldest joke in human history. Hieroglyphs indicate this being done to amuse the Pharaoh. Sometimes the Pharaoh did it to amuse his courtiers. Whole retinues put melons under their clothes to imitate pregnancy. And further back, there are Sumerian scripts that have recently been translated as "and then a melon was procured under the shirt in mimesis of pregnancy - we all laughed and had some more beer." The Romans combined Carthagenian fertility rites and Greek harvest festivals into their own slapstick creation of the Melonalia - where citizens walked around all day with melons under their togas and made mocking reference to getting too near the Priapas last night. Medieval Popes would carry melons under their regalia in demonstration of the text where Paul says that he is giving birth to the Church. Some early papyrii of the gospels contain palimpsests in descriptions of the Loaves and Fishes that say "and melons under the shirt." In Netherlandish paintings of the 1400s and 1500s women are carrying melons under their skirts in devotion to the melon martyrs, a group of holy virgins that were assailed by melons on a visit to the Holy Land at the behest of Louis Xth. A notable example of this devotion is seen in Van Eyck's Arnolfini Marriage. The presence of the little dog in the painting is not so much an iconographic indication of fidelity as it is to the fact that the bride has a melon under her dress and the groom has a melon for a head. And there is Durer's wood engraving Meloncholia I- a figure, head slumped on hands, while a cupid plays with stilts, is surrounded by mathematical and engineering shapes, at a loss for motivation in a surfeit of knowledge. Melons under a shirt were seen to be a cure for this state of affairs - hence the title.
On another note of comic genius: this morning Jami and I were discussing buttermilk, the fact that it doesn't have any butter, even though butter comes from milk. Because she grew up on a dairy, she has a wonderful store of milk production and bovine nurturing lore. It's hard to gainsay anything that she might assert. But still: no butter in butter milk - this seems way too conterintuitive. But she affirmed that this is the case - butter milk is milk allowed to go sour (which begs the question of expiration dates) and that it contains no butter. That curds are not butter - and neither I suppose is whey (what exactly is miss Muffet eating?). She told me that butter is churned and that different churning styles and methods yield different types of butter. To which I said, perhaps too hastily, that there would seem to be a great margarine of error in butter making. I say too hastily because the room got real quiet. I don't know what happened exactly, perhaps the house is settling still after 60 years, but the door to the bathroom was closed very softly in front of me. This is the treatment I receive from a woman who has a photo of the town of Bath on our bathroom door. I remember when I was young and reading about the great depression that stocks were sold on margin - and I remember thinking to myself, "that tub of Parkay in our refrigerator? You'd buy stocks with that? No wonder people were depressed - margarine tastes awful on melons."

The Lucretia Sold

Finally this painting hangs on a wall in Atlanta. I wrote about it some months ago, despairing that it would find a home. But now a businesswoman wants it hanging on a wall in her house. So much for it being too painful.

It's a wonderful world

It's a wonderful world where Monday's post isn't posted until Wednesday evening. I'm slowing down this month: lots of packing and stacking; getting the house ready; writing and painting. I'm reading a lot: commentaries on Colossians, Hebrews, and Amos; Barth, Jungel and various New Testament and history of Jesus surveys; the comic vision of the Bible; poetry. I had been working on a sermon on Amos 8 that focused on Bodies and how it's our bodies that betray us, how our bodies hunger for God's word, how the body of society betrays the bodies of the poor and weak and finally the strong - but how we are Christ's body, and how Christ's body is both word and body, and that in Christ we are healed from the depletion and despair Amos outlines for us - that is: I was going to take the Amos passage and turn it into a eucharist message. But since there's no quorum this Thursday I'll do another passage. The passage for the Sunday following my rescheduled examination committee is Hebrews 11:28 - 12: 2. It's about Christology: who is Jesus? What does it mean that he's the author and completion of our faith? Why don't I just preach any old sermon to the committee? Authenticity - it has to be authentic for me. And authenticity is specific to time and place. I could do the Isaiah 5 passage or the Psalm or the Luke passage. Christology though interests me at this time. I've begun rereading Meier's Marginal Jew as well as Grillmeier's work on Christology. These in conjunction with Ehrman's work, Misquoting Jesus, which is a great lay exposition of his Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, have given me a lot to think about. Ehrman's work, which highlights the textual vagaries of the "inerrant" word, is one reason that Barth's caution against a paper Pope is important in knowing Jesus. This is why we say scripture contains the word of God: Jesus is the Word - not to be confused with a collection of symbols indicating phonetic actions and mental uses - Jesus is the Word in that he lives out in actuality (not symbolically) God's intentions and loving sovereignty - a loving sovereignty that is cruciform and weak rather than indifferently powerful. That is: from Genesis to Revelation, Jesus has to be the focus of our interpretation - otherwise we are in danger of lapsing into treating the text as a rule book, or a source book of folk tales. What Ehrman has done is destablize the matrix of infallibility a supposedly inerrant word would create: a fortiori subverting our tendency to cherry pick texts in support of our causes and projections. Ehrman's "attack" or insight brings us back truly ad fontes: to the oral culture the Jesus story was crafted in; the oral culture Jesus acted in. I read today an article in New Testament Studies about how our emphasis on the text blinds us to the oral nature of the act, the event of Christ. The oral word is a performative word in that it is always a word spoken in dialog and in group participation. This article clarified for me a phrase from Papias, where Papias says that he sought out those who had known the disciples "for I did not consider what came out of books would benefit me as much as a living and abiding voice." [Papias 3.3 apostolic fathers / loeb classical library. Bart Ehrman translator]

No Place like Heimat

Yes,I went on a bit of a rant (a rantlit) about the quorum and what an inconvenience it is; I was a bit sarcastic about members motivations for effecting this deficit; and I impugned their character: a full scale ad hominem attack. In the South we call that an add hominy attack.

Above is a photo of the house Lurilene was born in and lived in until recently. It replaced one of those houses with the columns, the moonlight and the magnolia, after it burned down ca 1917. This house is still there, on land that the family had lived on since 1867. Of course, now it's surrounded by a subdivision: hundreds of cookie cutter houses resembling monopoly pieces stacked on sidewalkless winding streets, each in yards with spindly trees that might produce shade in 15 years or so.

The house we're leaving now, here in Oakhurst, is not quite that storied, but for us, it is the house we were married in, the house we spent our first months together in, and the first house Jami bought. Now we say farewell to our modest 1100 sq ft domicile. Hopefully it will sell to a person or couple who wants to live here and fix it up further. We'd like to think it's not just another tear-down, like those that are already dotting Decatur and Atlanta.

Tonight we ate sushi at Nikemotos, and as we left, we looked up at the Atlanta skyline and remarked how this view won't occur in Durham. I said that 20 years ago this view wasn't here either. When I was a child, the blue domed Polaris restaurant was the most significant building on the Atlanta skyline. Now, when you're riding into town on MARTA you can see the Polaris, the Hyatt, and it's surrounded by other buildings. When I was a child, growing up in the country, I had classmates who would go into town. They would proudly recount their experiences: they rode the Pink Pig at Riches at Christmas and they ate at the Polaris. They is really a little girl named Tammy, God knows what happened to her - but I remember her as being the queen of elementary school. She had sung on an album with her church choir - now I am wondering, "what did happen to her?" By high school I think she was still around, but we never heard from her. I guess you've got to be careful not to peak in elementary school. You've also got to be careful not to peak in high school. It's also good if you can avoid peaking in college and grad school. Actually it's best if you can still be working toward your best years when you're in your 50s and 60s. I hope that I'm still swinging at 90. I believe that Neill Young's "better to burn out than to fade away" is a false dilemma and that we need neither burn out or fade away. Perhaps it's possible to be the best we can be at any given moment.

Now it's back to Durham. But first the Beach.

This week's been a blur

And that's likely to continue as the month wears on. This Thursday I had been looking forward to meeting with the subcommittee on examinations of the Committee on Ministry; I was in the process of preparing a sermon on Amos 8 (the lectionary text for that Sunday): I was thinking to myself, "getting this out of the way, right before vacation, traveling to Durham, and leaving Jami up there, as I get on a plane to come back to Atlanta and begin this CPE residency - that will be good." Now though, because the committee doesn't have a quorum (suddenly a week before it meets there's no quorum), I'll have to wait for a exam on the 16th of August - provided that that date the committee has a quorum. Will there be a quorum? What's to stop them from doing the same thing all over again? What's to stop one after another of them from saying, "I'll do something else. There's plenty of other people to be on this committee. They don't need me." When you're notified a week in advance, you know that the lack of a quorum was not caused by an accident, a funeral, or a hospitalization. A week in advance, you know that they could have come, but that it wasn't important enough for them. I'm sure that each absence is an absence of missionary zeal: each absence is not a preference to hit the beach, but a desire to tramp into the rain forest of Guatemala bringing medical supplies and rebuilding the shack with the corrugated roof that was the only hospital/school house/shopping mall/church for 100 square miles. I'm sure that the people whose absence caused this lack of a quorum will attend the August 16th meeting, even though they suffer now from malaria, dengue fever, gangrene, the spontaneous sloughing off of limbs, and the flesh eating virus - all acquired just this week in service to the gospel. They will be there, because after hectoring me to cross every tee and dot every aye and lecturing me on what it is to be a chaplain, they will be there because they treasure the vow they took to be a friend to their colleagues in ministry so seriously. And it's that one word "friend" that convicts them to the core of their hearts. For they understand friend and being a friend, not in the context of a back slapping bon homme, that subsists on the surface of relationships, but that they understand friendship in Aristotelean terms: that friendship is a matrix of accountability, wherein we construct narratives of living out the gospel, wherein we learn the virtues, and wherein we model for each other what it is to carry the image of Christ - as Paul said, "till Christ be formed in us," implying that the Christian life is a life of relationship to and with each other and with God. And that to simply let a meeting not meet because of a failure of quorum, because they took a vacation, would be a dissing of the relationship of ministerial friendship at the very moment that relationship would be forming. They wouldn't do that. I know that I wouldn't do that to them - especially seeing how's I'd taken a vow.

And What I actually preached on Sunday past

Galatians 6:1-18 ^NRS Galatians 6:1 My friends, if anyone is detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness. Take care that you yourselves are not tempted. ² Bear one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. ³ For if those who are nothing think they are something, they deceive themselves. ⁴ All must test their own work; then that work, rather than their neighbor's work, will become a cause for pride. ⁵ For all must carry their own loads. ⁶ Those who are taught the word must share in all good things with their teacher. ⁷ Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow. ⁸ If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit. ⁹ So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up. ¹⁰ So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith. ¹¹ See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand! ¹² It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh that try to compel you to be circumcised-- only that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. ¹³ Even the circumcised do not themselves obey the law, but they want you to be circumcised so that they may boast about your flesh. ¹⁴ May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. ¹⁵ For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything! ¹⁶ As for those who will follow this rule-- peace be upon them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God. ¹⁷ From now on, let no one make trouble for me; for I carry the marks of Jesus branded on my body. ¹⁸ May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit, brothers and sisters. Amen.

Galatians contains the world of the early Church. It is not just Paul writing to a church like Thessalonians and telling them what a good job they're doing and to keep it up. It is not a letter like Romans where he touches base on some common theological issues. It is not like Corinthians where he answers some questions and straightens out some ethical problems. Galatians is a letter charged with conflict from the beginning. Galatians begins with Paul accusing the Galatians of leaving the true gospel to follow a false gospel. Paul is distressed that they will be a church in name only. Paul is distressed that they'll talk about Jesus but he won't make a difference in the way they live.

If this whole letter is so pivotal for the history of the Church, then this final chapter is the central point of the whole letter. If not for what Paul says here, then the Galatians could go and do their own thing. If not for what Paul says here, the Galatians could take Jesus as a starting off point in a mishmash of Jewish and Gentile beliefs and leave him behind But what Paul says here changes everything. What he says here is the reason he stopped persecuting believers and became one himself; what he ways here is the reason he confronted Peter earlier in the letter; what he says here is the reason he is writing to the Galatians with such urgency.

What Paul says here is that because in Christ's cross he is crucified to the world and the world to him – even as he had earlier said that he was crucified with Christ and lived now by the spirit – all that matters to him now is a new creation. The whole dispute of practicing circumcision or not is beside the point. The new creation, where we're crucified to the world and the world to us in Christ's crucifixion, is not about what you do to yourself. The new creation is not about who you are or who your aren't – as Paul had said earlier: the new creation is not about whether you're a man or a woman; a free person or a slave; a Jew or a gentile – all these distinctions have been done away with in Christ.

In fact, says Paul, to dabble in these distinctions now, to attempt adding them onto your salvation in Christ, is actually to cut yourself off from Christ. Why? Because all these distinctions are done away with in the new creation where Christ is; these distinctions are part of the old creation where Christ isn't. And this is a radical thing for Paul to say, because it flies in the face of how life worked in ancient middle eastern as well as Roman society. To be part of the new creation is to take yourself out of society.

Just like the ancient Hebrews after crossing the Red Sea, so these Galatians, after embarking on a journey of faith, want to go back to Egypt, back to what is safe. They want Jesus, but they want the comfort of the familiar. They want to live in their familiar distinctions.

This ancient culture (and today's middle eastern culture continues to be like this) was a culture held together with boundaries. Every person had his and her place. And every body was a part of the group – there was nothing like we think of as individualism. You were not on your own, but you were part of a group. Your group defined you and you defined yourself by acquiring honor and avoiding shame. Men were better than women; free persons were better than slaves; and depending on where your were, Jews were better than Gentiles. Each person fit in their place and received honor for how they lived out their roles. To step out of place was to bring shame on yourself. There were other boundaries too: rich and poor, benefactor and client, upper and lower classes, old and young. For men, Jews, Free persons, rich, benefactors, and upper class things were swell; for women, slaves, gentiles, clients , poor people things were not so swell. For all these people, locked in struggle to gain honor – and honor was primarily gained at the expense of others, while avoiding shame, life was like a prison. It was the strong versus the weak.

What this new creation does is demolish this whole system. Believers had only known this system of honor and shame – and now suddenly not to have it. They must have been very grateful when some people showed up and told them that “yes this is wonderful news about Jesus, a great person, but you need to add something to your faith. Try this new way of defining yourself over against others: you'll have honor among yourselves and honor with God.” How could they know that they put themselves back in the old creation when they did this? How could they know that they'd cut themselves off from Christ? Paul's telling them this right here.

Christ's crucifixion shatters the honor and shame system. Crucifixion is the most shameful death a person could die – Romans reserved it only for the worst offenders and Jews saw it as a curse. But Jesus takes that shame and raises it up to the highest honor. His crucifixion turns honor on its head: shame becomes honor and honor becomes shame. All the very strong who thought they had all the honor, suddenly had all the shame; and the weak, who could only lose honor and gain shame, found themselves the recipients of the highest honor. Paul makes such a fuss about it because he recognizes what's happened here. He was on his way to the top. He was getting all the honor and he was on the strong side of all the boundaries: a man, a Roman citizen, a Jew, a Pharisee. He was looking at a lifetime of respectful greetings, sitting at the head of the table, being the benefactor. He meets the risen Christ and suddenly counts it all loss. He saw it just as surely as a great chess master sees defeat or victory 12 moves ahead.

Hence Paul's urgency in this letter. He knows that once you've seen the crucified and risen Christ you can not go back to the same world. That creation with its human invention and coinage is passing away. It's power is sapped. It lingers with just enough life to appear strong and it depends on people's fear, and it depends on people's need to define themselves against a threatening other, to prop it up. Paul writes with raw emotion to get them back on course walking toward the truth of the gospel. They have wandered, but not too far.

Paul tells them, “forget these boundaries: male/female; free/slave; Jew/gentile. Forget this lame attempt at looking Jewish – as if suddenly, having begun with Christ, the Law might somehow make you right with God. Instead live by the Spirit. You know the Spirit; you've had it since the beginning. You know that it cries from your hearts to the Father. You know that it was faith in Christ that occasioned the spirit's birth in you. Don't you know that Faith making itself felt in acts of love is everything? Like me, you too are crucified to the world and the world is crucified to you. Live in this new creation.”

The world Paul describes in Galatians s a world of relationships. Paul talks about his relationship with Christ. He talks about his relationship with Peter and Peter's relationship with others. He talks about his relationship with the Galatians. He tells them that he broods over them, like a mother broods over her child, till Christ is formed in them. This relationship with Christ frees them. Men, slave owners, Jews, rich, benefactors, upper class: all are freed from needing to maintain their honor. They can suffer to be weak and to be humbled because Christ has made weakness and humility the new coin of the realm. Christ's weakness is not the weakness of a weak man; Christ's weakness is the tenderness of an adult with an infant – it is overwhelming strength that lays aside brute power in order to nurture and save the very least of creation. Women, slaves, gentiles, clients, poor, peasants: all are freed from the threat of shame, of being shamed by the group. Christ has put on their weakness and their shame and wears it as his royal robe.

In Paul's discussion of the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit we see how the relationships of the new creation play out versus the old creation. The works of the flesh are a fine way to survive the old creation: they amount to: get even, worship idols, join a party, keep up with the Joneses, buy more stuff, drown your sorrows, play the odds. Paul says that if you sow here, you'll reap corruption. But the fruit of the Spirit is enjoyed and flows from being in relationship: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, generosity and self control. The old creation with its boundaries, its honor and shame, is incapable of growing these things. And so Paul encourages them to bear each other's burdens while they bear their own, and to look for the good of their fellow believers.

Paul's remark about the Spirit entering our hearts with a cry to the Father tells us that this new creation relationship between people and God and between strong and weak is possible through our faith in Christ, our love and especially in prayer. In prayer we encounter a relationship with God that is not dependent on our doing something to get God's attention or approval. In prayer we become engaged in a dialog with God. We ask out of our weakness. We ask in the faith the Spirit grows in our hearts. When we don't have words, we know that we are understood. And we learn to listen. God speaks in our hearts. God hears our anger, our suffering, our grief, our fear –These things do not put God off. We are not so vile, despairing, bored or idiotic that God isn't involved with us, bringing us along, on course to the truth of the gospel.

And so for us: we've entered into this world of the Galatians. We face the temptation to have Jesus plus something else: Jesus plus our prestige, our memberships, our bank accounts. We don't live in an honor and shame society, but we're still fond of boundaries that define us against some weaker other, weak but at the same time, a threatening other. We define ourselves against race, against gender, against religion, as well as against citizenship and class. Politicians make great hay ramping up the fear. Be afraid of immigrants; be afraid of terrorists, be afraid of people who are different, who worship different, - they're going to take away our way of life. They're going to blow us up. Fear is the easy way of filling the coffers. Fear gets out the vote.

TV news and other programs love fear as well. We're invited to idolize distraction and spectacle. We're invited to enjoy the cathartic release of violence in movies where when the hero uses violence it's always justified and always works. We're invited to get drunk on fantasies of revenge. Fear of the other which makes itself felt in threats and violence - ;that's how the old creation works. That's what the flesh knows and understands.

Everyday this old creation keeps on. Over the course of history and in different places on the planet, it's taken on different forms – but it's always been consistent about people defining themselves against others and fearing the other; might makes right; never be weak.

Every day the Spirit works in us, guiding us to the new creation and the truth of the gospel. Every day we speak to God and God speaks to us. Every day we have opportunities to bear each other's burdens, to love the other, to advocate for the other, to make our faith felt in our acts of love.

In Christ, through whom the world is crucified to us and we to the world.

Figures

I went and saw my great uncle, Frank, at the Home. He's in the same place that my grandmother spent her last six months at, but he still has his senses. Sure, each time he sees me he calls me by my dad's name, Jerry. He says, Jerry, glad to see you. And I go along with it. His twins brother's name was Fred. Fred died in a mill accident, his arm was ripped off by a machine and he bled to death, four years before I was born. I'm named after him. So if I say that I'm Fred too early in our conversation uncle Frank will say, "you look well. I haven't seen you in years. " I'm afraid at those moments he might think I'm a ghost. So at the beginning of our time together I accept the fact that I'm Jerry. Even though I'm not.
Over the course of our conversation uncle Frank will piece it together and blurt out, "you're not Jerry you're Fred."
Instead I listen to my uncle talk about his life. He'll repeat the phrase, "life's a teacher" several times, and I can't help wondering what he's learned over 98 years. I consider that in 47 years I've learned that things work out. I can anxiously buy the best seller now or I can check it out at the library in a few weeks or buy it in the remainder bin for a dollar in a month. That all I was anxious about at 20 or 22 or 26 or 30 has had a way of working out and that if I'd been less impulsive I'd have saved myself some grief as well as some money.
Frank talks about being in the Masons. He talks about teaching Sunday school for 30 years. He talks about his wife and his brother and his mother (the Victoria I'd posted on previously here). He wants to know that I'm right with the Lord - though he's less prone to preach now. His faith seems more declarative now than imperative. More about what he believes than what I should believe.
I used to pester him for information about his father and grandfather. But I've not these last two times. Still he tells me that I remember things better than he does. As much as I want to turn over some long fallow piece of family lore, some secret that will unravel the mystery like a massive knot, I realize that such a thing is not worth it here. I have started to simply enjoy being in uncle Frank's presence. Here is a man who is 98 this November. He has lived a life. Now he is tucked under his blanket in his room on a day after Independence day and it's 93 degrees outside. Just a few years ago he would have been sitting on the front porch at this place: now he's in his room. He lives outside of time.
When I leave I don't play the radio in my car. I want to retain the feel of being with him and hearing him as far down the road as I can.

I am now 47 years into my life's arc

In the Movie Goer, Binx Boling says in the conclusion of the book that he's entering the 30th year of his life's arc, and that statement seemed to me then, as now, to describe well the sensation of being on a flight - that life has a course that motivates like a physical law, that arches from under and outward from me in a way incalculable. I've taken the time to destroy old journals today. At some point I've discovered that the past must be looked in the eye and thrown away. As a Southerner I've been brought up to believe otherwise, but I believe my upbringing was misguided in that point. Or I should say that we're encouraged to kick among the embers of the past, in so far as those embers have to do with lost causes. In so far as those embers have to do with family secrets - well forget those. It's the secrets though that press against our lives without reason. As in the movie Cold Comfort Farm, our elders have all seen something awful in the woodshed - and we all have to pay!
Mythology has the story of a family secret: the Minotaur, the son of queen Jocasta and the bull of Poseidon, is imprisoned in the Labyrinth - at the center of his existence folded back again and again on himself. The secret (this minotaur) devours the children of Thessaly until Theseus discovers and exposes the secret. That's what systems theory teaches: that secrets focus anxiety onto individuals and away from ourselves - in so doing, we don't develop ourselves and we build instability into the system.
The top photo is of Jami and Me. In 47 years, this is the best year of my life.

Prodigal Son

About the same time I painted the banner for the church in Covington, Billy, the minister there, asked me to paint a parable - the prodigal son. I was loosely thinking of Rembrandt's Prodigal while I did this, though there's little resemblance compositionally, I used the welcoming gesture of a father embracing his son. I added a reflection of the older son, scowling. The soon to be slaughtered calf is visible, as are a guitar and playing cards (symbols of the Prodigal's profligacy. The Prodigal Son thwarts our expectations. We side with the elder son - a pulled up by the bootstraps, nose clean, eyes dead ahead adept of moral accountancy. We look at the Prodigal through dim glasses and see only warts - he is the convenient receptor of our projections: wastrel, dirty hippie, bum - all the things we're afraid of finding in ourselves and bury deep under the surface. To embrace the Prodigal is to embrace moral failure - that is, the possibility that you're just like anyone else, in need of forgiveness. The question is: how can we be like the father, willing to break cultural norms of honor and shame and extend to the weaker position mercy. We live in a society that punishes weakness. Our foreign policy is driven by not showing weakness and projecting power. Our motto: never let them see you sweat. For all the people championing "Christian" values - the big value that Paul voiced "when I am weak, then God is strong" is left in silence. What would it be like for Christians to revel in their weakness: to parade the weakness of the church instead of complaining that we're not powerful? What would it be like for us to investigate weakness, to privilege weakness? These are the questions the Prodigal asks us.

My great grandmother Victoria

My great grandmother Victoria was my great grandfather Jim's second wife. His first wife and child had died in a fire - as I've been told though I've no other corroboration for this, the fire that is and the deaths. It seems to me to explain, not excuse but explain, how he contributed to the hardness of Victoria's life.
She was the daughter of a school trustee and Jim was not very interested in education. Her father did not like Jim (although it was Jim who year's later went back to Georgia for his funeral). Not long after their marriage, Jim moved the family from Georgia to Arkansas, where his sister and brother-in-law had settled. (I have relatives in Arkansas who'd not know me from Adam or even Lucy of the Olduvai gorge) From what my great uncle tells me, his father was not the most faithful man and at some point, when the family had been in Arkansas for 20 years, Victoria put all the children on a train and headed home to Georgia. She'd missed her father and mother (who'd both died while the family was in Arkansas). She'd missed the green hills. Six months later Jim showed up again and she took him back.
My great uncle has a kind of love/hate feeling toward his father. He adored his mother though. But it was not long after the family returned to Georgia that Victoria succumbed to cancer. She died in 1926.
The top photo is Victoria at about 25 and the bottom one was taken close to her death at 50. Looking from one photo to the other, I'm struck by how hard her life must have been. I can tell she's done a lot of work and suffered a lot since she wore that ornate, lacy hat and her easter dress in that early photograph.
In family systems we talk about how things come down through the generations: how relationships and dynamics are replayed from one family unit to the next. Everyone is effected differently - as we each understand these things with a stronger or weaker sense of self. But I do wonder at how we've all (in our family) been effected by Jim and Victoria down the line.
Perhaps when I go home for the Fourth I can trouble my great uncle for some further remembrance of his mother - or maybe I'll just spend some time with him and let the past rest.

I am a Yankee Doodle Dandy

When my mom went to the hospital when she was pregnant with me when we lived in Decatur in that small duplex near the seminary, my dad said, since it was late July 1st, "as long as he's not born on the Fourth of July." I don't know why he said that. My dad says lots of things that elude a discovery of origins, but that he's a private man and the Fourth is the least private of holidays. My mom went into over 48 hours of labor (she would later expand the hours into the 50s, 60s and 70s as she grew older and needed counter arguments to my arguments. I was supposed to be humbled by the agony I'd put her through and do what she told me to do.). I was born at 7:58 am in Covington, GA - since it would not do for me to be born outside the family precincts.
I've enjoyed it. My dad's fears seemed beside the point. Louis Armstrong was born on the Fourth - so there's an artistic precedence. Wherever I've been there've been fireworks. Usually I get the day off. It's summer and perhaps people will be having a picnic. The Fourth is a good excuse to eat hot dogs and drink beer and hang out in the sun. We need more such secular national holidays. More mandatory time off to clamber along lake shores and produce explosions.
The middle photo is a photo of a photo in an album at my cousin Lurilene's house. Jami and I visited Lurilene this Sunday. While there we leafed through photos and heard family stories. This is one of my favorite things to do. The photo above is of Lurilene's husband as an child at a Fourth of July parade with his sister.
The bottom photo is a snap I took of the fireworks here in Decatur a few years ago. Bob, Kelly and their kids, Annalee and Michael, asked me to meet them behind the MacDonald's where there's a good view of the local show. Taking a photo of fireworks is not that easy. I think you could either go for fast shutter speeds and capture fantastically detailed explosions, or you could slow the shutter speed and get wonderfully blurry explosions. This is about the best my camera will allow.
The top photo is what it is: a celebration of American patriotism and puritanism. How can a nude celebrate puritanism? How can it not? What does America today have in common with Vienna circa 1890? A lot of porn and a lot of guaranteed public outcry about sex: the great double standard - and is it any wonder Freud got his start in that Vienna? I have a great deal of ambivalence about this country: loving it and wishing that it were France or Italy.
God bless our country and take away our army as a tool of corporations, our airforce as a tool of defense contractors, and our navy as a tool of political pork.
God bless our country and take away our wealth.
God bless our country and give us hearts that value humanity above profit and ideology.
God bless our country and free us from Global Capitalism - the real beast.
Take away our love of violence, our belief that words are weak and that only force works.
Give us hearts of love and compassion.
Give us a love of real leisure - and not the leisure industry.
Give us a love of nature - so that we would preserve it and punish those who would destroy it under the mantra of "jobs" or "free market."
Give us real health care.
Give us leaders and not thieves and brigands.
Take away leaders who get by by generating fear and pushing buttons of racism and greed.
Give us the enlightenment realm that Jefferson and Madison and Adams dreamed of.
Those words on the Georgia state seal "wisdom justice moderation" - give them meaning in our society as more than a joke, an ironic pose of history, but as words that define us in civility of discourse and compassion of advocacy for the margins of society.
In Jesus name,
Amen

The Danae is completed

I decided that applying more paint, tightening up the color and composition, worrying over the over all balance, and gilding the lily any more were not things I needed to do. I think a painting invites a perpetual involvement, a good deal of the art is knowing when to say "enough." In art you learn that even the best works go out into the world displaying their flaws. It is a conceit to believe that something can be so well done as to be flawless. Flaws are in many ways what adds life. Or I should say "so called" flaws. Flaws lead us into areas of investigation we'd never think of. I have learned over the years not to be afraid of my flaws but to love them. We can always be better, but never perfect. Perfection (and a more dubious word has never been spawned: consider how we interpret "be ye perfect" in the sermon on the mount what would rather be translated as "be mature" or "grow up into the description of God as loving as described in the preceding verses" - how much mischief is caused by that idea of perfection, that holiness is somehow being afraid of the trembling of a tea cup and having spit shined shoes) is a deadness, from what I've observed. I've never seen something with the label of perfect that didn't seem lacking in life.
Of course I use the word "perfect" sloppily. As do most people. It's just about as meaningless as the word "great" or "greatest". Is it really perfect that I've found a parking spot in front of the store? Or else I use the word ironically. What about when something is perfectly flawed?
Nature is perfectly flawed. No straight lines exist in it. No entire circles. The earth: not a perfect sphere but oblate and set at an angle. Nature is all asymmetry: as are we. Yet it is a perfect world: just the right distance from the sun and made of just the right compounds of chemicals at the right temperature. We don't know how else to define life, but that we expect otherworldly life to conform to some observations of ours projected onto them. How flawed. But it makes perfect sense.
Years ago, when I was in high school, and suffering artist's block, afraid to spoil the perfection of a page, second guessing by second guessing, I broke through when I determined that I would call nothing a mistake. I took that damned internal editing function on and turned it off. I now say that art is a choreographing of mistakes and accidents. I work at making all my mistakes work together. I let my mistakes live.

The address on my birth certificate

The address on my birth certificate is next door to Susan's place. In the last week I've gone through slides my dad took between 1956 and 1967, and I discovered this slide of my mother standing in front of the door on the stoop. I took a photo of the slide through the slide viewer twice: one photo has good detail, the other is aligned with my posture in the bottom photo. From the photographs I can tell that the mailboxes have changed and different screen doors were installed. The front door is the same though painted white now. Shutters have been added to the windows.
My mom, as the middle images give some hint, is pregnant with me.
And so there's a repetition to Jami and me standing together on the stoop in the top picture.
This place is not far from the seminary and over the last four years I've thought how intriguing it is that my life is bracketed, beginning and middle, by this place: how I've gone to seminary almost at my mother's suggestion on a car ride through Decatur 37 years ago, where she pointed out the seminary and we drove by where we used to live.
For dad staying in Decatur would have been helpful. Driving 5 miles into downtown every day for thirty years is very different from driving 35 miles into Atlanta from the country and back again for thirty years.

Farewell MouseyTongue

Memories: like the corner drugstores of my mind
Misty colored memory memories


Of the way we were

Scattered pictures
like tiny bubbles in the wine
Make me feel happy
Make me feel fine

Can it be all was so simple then
Or has time rewritten every line?
[or have lions rewritten it in thyme]
If we had to do it all again
Tell me Would we?
Might'n Couldn't have'n'd [actual southern modal construction] we?


Speed boats, coursing through the water spouts
Tangled fishing lines in kelp beds
may be too painful to forget
Here come some high notes now
Some Diva showboating
A shift from the minor to the major key and back again
Of the way we were
Of the wavy fur
God Speed MouseyTongue!