See the tree how big it's grown

This is the oak I planted from an acorn dropped by an oak growing in my grand parents' yard ca. 1965. I remember scooping a bunch of acorns into a Swisher Sweet cigar box and scattering the acorns all around our front and back yard. This oak survived, thrived and grew. The Japanese maples mom planted are gone (mom always planted Japanese maples), but this tree remains. I'm as surprised as anyone. I know that one day it will be cut down, but so far, even though it takes up the space of two or three cars, free market principles haven't brought about its demise. I didn't plant it per se: as I remarked I scattered it around, purely by chance, and this tree is the product of that chance. Chance is the foundation of my art. Well, ever since I was in high school I've found chance based art liberating. Duchamp, Cage, Klee, Pollock - all used chance elements in various constructive ways.

Today a death occurred in the emergency department. A man who'd had a gastric bypass (and he's not the only person to die after this procedure recently) passed out at home and was brought back to the ER where he died when something happened to stop his heart. His wife and sister were distraught. Their church is one of those charismatic churches that emphasize healing and miracles - that God commands us to command him and that our words, our confession brings about reality. The wife looks at me and says, "he's still warm. We can bring him back. There are miracles. You do believe in miracles!" It dawns on me, she expects me to act like I can bring him back from the dead. She expects me to begin praying demanding God to make this man live. And I'm stunned. I say nothing at first only to flatly say that yes, I believe in miracles. Inside I'm thinking, "if I bring this guy back, I'll have to bring everyone back." Once you bring someone back from the dead everyone will demand, will feel entitled - they'll say, "you brought him back, what about my husband? Doesn't my husband deserve to come back? Why isn't my husband good enough?" And then family, "you brought a stranger back, why not aunt Mildred? Isn't she as deserving as some stranger?" Then people are knocking on the door at 2 am: all demanding that someone be brought back to life. Once you start bringing people back from the dead you can kiss a ski vacation to Wyoming good bye - and I want to go to Wyoming: we're going this New Years - and I'm not sacrificing time with my wife and in-laws to raise some guy from the dead, because that's not the end of it. Then people are crashing their cars into trees and trains, once twice thrice - fifty times and more: why not, "Fred'll bring em back." And then the whole country is a Christian zombie nation, people dying and popping back up every day. And then when I die, what about me - no one's bringing me back. The Christian zombies won't care; they won't try.
Also I looked at this guy and I thought, "Jesus died. Jesus was deader than this guy, stone cold non-heart pumping, non-lung expanding, non-circulatory brain dead dead. Jesus was deaddeaddead. And to just willy nilly raise someone up who's still warm seems to dishonor the Lord's death. Death was good enough for Jesus. Death freaks us out; but it didn't freak him out. he was content to be in God's hands - even a God whom he'd felt had forsaken him. "
I'm not looking forward to death. More than ever I value life and want to keep on living; and I would be crushed if I lost Jami. I remember my mom's death, and my grand father's death, and my grand mother's death, and so many others. They all affected me but not the same way. I cried, I felt empty, I was relieved.
Faith to me is more real when it lives without moving mountains. Real faith lives in the fact: the death, the loss, the disappointment. Real faith finds joy when all is down - not a fake joy, pretending. There's something about the kind of faith that exercises the miraculous to engineer my wishes and desires when I wish and desire them that seems like a stupid faith, a dull brained dim watery faith - such a faith denies the pain, the suffering.
But who doesn't want quick results. We live in a culture of results. The free market ideology is about results and immediacies - no waiting, no long term - maximize gains, and productivity is the bottom line, a bottom line that justifies everything. There's no room for death. Death is a luxury, an inconvenience, laziness. Death is nonproductive. Death says there's something more than the bottom line. Imagine a Bergman film, the pointing bony finger of death - but imagine death being shocked at the laughing feasting figure of Jesus. And that is our faith: death sits down at the table with us, but only as a guest, only to pass the salt.

Happy anniversary

Friday November 30th is our eleventh month anniversary. I am in wonder at this beautiful woman.

the passage of time

These two photographs are taken in approximately the same spot: Salem Rd in Newton County. When I was two we moved to this house and lived there until I was 12. The top photo was taken in 1964, note the old frame house across the road. We lived in a ranch house that I will post a photograph of later - but it looked like a typical red brick ranch house. That ranch house is still there, though painted white now, and the office of a used car lot for the last 20 years. The yard is paved, except for this oak tree I'm standing under as I take the bottom photo. 39 years ago I planted this oak tree from an acorn that I gathered from underneath an oak that grew in my grandparent's yard.
Just last year the cow pasture that had been across the road was sold and developed, all with astonishing speed. Now there's a Kroger. Three months ago I noticed a stop light, right where we used to live. And this time a road has been graded and paved.
This Thanksgiving Jami and I, on the way to see dad and granny Wise, stopped at the neighboring Shell station and I walked over into this yard, this parking lot, and stood in a spot that I hadn't stood in since I was 12, since this oak tree was a slender sapling verging into a mere ability to provide shade. I stood there and took a photograph approximate to the slide my dad took 40 some years ago. That yard was small. How did we fit here? How did it take so long to mow this lawn? How did I get lost in woods as small as a strip mall and a gas station?
More of my youth is erased. My great grandfather's farm, a quarter of a mile down the road, is now under a subdivision and day care center. This whole road, once an obscure country road with two stop signs along 8 miles south of I-20, where very few cars drove on any given day, is now crowded with traffic even at night, houses abound and stores - a McDonald's even across from my great grandfather's old home, and another McDonald's at the interstate.
Now I am resigned to change. When I was a young child my mother read me a story about a house in the country: in image after image a village and then a town and then a city grew around the house, until the house was surrounded by tall buildings. I was fascinated by this progression. I listened to this story over and over. I devised maps as I grew older where I imagined the growth of settlements into cities. I poured over diagrams of progress. Birth growth and deterioration and rebirth fascinated me. The little house in the story is eventually moved out into the country.
What did I feel while I stood on this piece of ground? Not a revelation. Not a recapitulation. A repetition? Maybe the sense that whatever was there for me is no longer there. I can never go back to some simpler time or some time before, some time where a deep mystery might be discerned in its inception. I'm a 47 year old man standing under an oak tree in a small patch of asphalt surrounded by used cars taking a photo of an intersection. Before I was here, even as a 12 year old, there was a dirt road, a dirt road that curved and twisted in different ways, that wasn't straight, and oddly fewer trees punctuating cotton fields. And even further back was there a road or even a path? Indians. Buffalo - Buffalo roamed throughout the eastern seaboard. Perhaps I can find the small road again - but not here.
Once Jami and I went to a small church way out in the country. It was spring and the scene was bucolic. The church was on a hill, overlooking granite escarpments scattered among pasture land. Picturesque. We thought, " how can we get here?" But even there, development was not far away - just over the hill and down the road.
Is it possible, like the small house in the story my mom read to me, to be returned to our beginnings, back into a place of nature's abundance and purity. Isn't this the human desire to return to the garden? If only we can find the way back to Eden, past the fiery sword brandishing angel, through the over grown gates, into a forgotten paradise? Revelation itself ends the human story not back in the garden but in a city. But any garden we might end in is not the original garden. That garden has been traced and erased many times. Like our memories the facts change and are transformed: we discover that the north facing window really faced east; the well house was wooden and not brick; the tree was pine and not ceder. Places we remember so clearly turn out to have never existed; things we don't remember, we did.
When I stand here, what am I remembering - even more so, what am I forgetting? My dad remembers that when I was 12 or younger, that I pestered him no end to go to a stunt car show at the Lakewood fairgrounds. I have no memory of this. Even having my memory jostled, I can not conjure a vague trace of a memory. I have absolutely forgotten something I desired with all my pre-adolescent heart.
The Bible is an artifact of things we've forgotten. We have here narratives recorded - but also narratives lost. The history of the Church is a history of remembering and forgetting - but remembering and forgetting imperfectly.
In the Scottish nudist camp, people are off kilter. I'm sure that pun's been made before. I thought about that this afternoon, as I sat in CPE, and I wrote it down, so I wouldn't forget it. I've thought of better puns, puns that I have failed to record, and now these gems of wordplay are lost to history.
The world is full of things forgotten. Great paintings are now lost. Vermeer painted more than 42 paintings. A van Eyck nude with mirrors, the pendant to the Arnolfini Marriage, was lost at sea. Rembrandt's only sea scape has been lost in a robbery in Boston. We have no way of knowing what the music of the Romans sounded like. Ancient writings are lost to us. What is Beowulf but the popular literature of its day - and what is lost to us from then: more stories of Grendel? different monsters, different heroes.
Under such an oak on such a bit of asphalt did once a child weld a plastic sword in a last ditch confederate stand against the Saxon invaders, saving Guinevere from the dragon, so that Lincoln might drink from the Grail and king Arthur might walk on the Moon. My parents stood in wonder at their sleep walking son under the moonlight. Why did we buy him that sword?

Moving into the new place

We have a new place. Jami found us an apartment surrounded by Duke Forest. The apartment is as big as our house, but it is laid out differently - in our house (which we're selling) you can get to any room via a central hallway (almost a circular layout); the apartment is laid out linearly - you have to walk back through the living room to get to the bedroom or study. I like the apartment. It is surrounded by quiet woodlands. As Jami said: there are no buses and cars and people. But we do miss being three blocks down from our church. It's unlikely that we'll find a church like Oakhurst in Durham. We like living in a neighborhood near stores and parks, but we'll try this for a while.
Of course I couldn't stay up there (not yet). I drove back to Atlanta to return the rental car. I drove in the rain all the way. All the way I listened to satellite radio's NPR and BBCAmerica stations. There's something comforting about listening to people have reasoned conversations as I drive. I remember when I lived in New Mexico: I would be driving at night, 90 miles between towns and absolutely nothing in between, and listening to people have conversations about aliens and paraphenomina. I know that that doesn't sound reasonable - but this was reasonable for New Mexico, and it was entertaining. CS Lewis once remarked about Charles Williams (a Christian writer of occult romances) that you sometimes forget about how peculiar another human being can be underneath appearances of respectability. Hearing people talk about anal probes and ESP, normal people, people who if you saw them on the street you'd say, "there's a normal person, clean cut, well dressed, not over eating and exercising, probably possessed of moderate political opinions and believing that Church shouldn't interfere in the state and vice versa," gives me insight into the the weirdness that is humanity. Take any person, no matter how rationalistic they might seem, and at some point, I believe that you'll find the numinous center, that place that they may not admit to themselves (much less anyone else), but a place of unfounded belief - that is belief that relies on personal experience, is unverifiable and non-duplicable, but is nevertheless a belief in something other, something strange, something unknowable. For some people this center is nearer the surface; for some people this center pokes out. This center doesn't necessarily express itself in religion. Religion may cloak this center in fact - especially where religion is considered a social norm.
I find drives such as this, 370 miles, SUV chugging along at 19 mpg, with a mild drizzle to light rain, to be wonderful for thinking, conducive to the creative juices; indeed, the car becomes my monastic cell, a vehicle of prayer and meditation. The broken white lines become the beads of a rosary. Each intersection is a cross.
I made it back to Atlanta, dropped off the car, and took MARTA back to Decatur. I'm back in our now catless near empty house and I can't wait until I'm able to make it back to Durham - the place that I increasingly feel like is home, the place where the most wonderful woman in the world lives.

Reading Rabelais

What have I been doing all this time? A few months ago I did almost three posts a day; now I'm closing in on three posts a month. Can it be that the rigors of chaplaincy, moving, painting, scheduling, cooking, devising intricate anecdotes salutary for humor and incisiveness have held me back from developing further my time folded upon blog blog blogging bloggidly? Can it be such a state of affairs that ensues and entails rigors and chaplaincy and chaplincy - and the Champlain See - take so much from me that when the time comes to write, I writhe.
Several times in the last few weeks I've had conversations where Jami or Bob or Cheryl or some one will say, "see here, this conversation we're having right now here now - this is what you need to be writing in your blog, this is what you need to be blogging." And I won't have time. I'll sit down to write and sleep, with its needs and demands, its soothing promise of eyes closed and warm covers and deep dreams, dreams of lands of warm dreams and oceans of sleep, or rest, will converge on me and remove me from this task, this writing task.
I think something similar happened to the Apostle Paul, when he was living in Spain, the lovely Thecla at his side, as he looked out over his vineyards, and read Horace, while sitting under a cork tree, while he composed songs and taught his sons Latin and Greek and the stories of his Greco-Hebrew childhood, that things just slipped his mind. He didn't write further letters telling believers to not dis the leadership of women; to not get carried away by end time predictions, but instead do some good in the here and now.
What a time to have lived. Still I would not depart this present moment to live there and then - no matter how many questions might be answered - and all sorts of form critical and redactional and canonical questions abound. But at some point the past has nothing for us. What is past is so far removed from our concerns that our will, much less our emotional strength, is lacking. We are eventually thrown back to the present, and as Ecclesiastes counseled: living in the present is our appointed task - not piling resources away for the future, nor pining away for a golden age. In the present we meet all our pertinent challenges. About each moment of the present we can only ask: Am I savoring enough of this? Am I seeing clearly? Am I drinking fully and recognizing the content of the air - such that were I to breathe it again, I would know it and relish it? am I l0ving fully or do I love absentmindedly?

Cary speaking

Cary, pictured above, who delivered the sermon for my ordination, ministers at Mountain Brook PCUSA in B'ham (the official name of the city in 50 years when the next great vowel shift in the language occurs - where English fractures into ten dialects and today's American Standard English is used mostly for official documents, reminiscent of the Church's use of Latin in Italy ca 1500). Cary preached a sermon where he used the story of the Monkey God and the Buddha. I told Shannon (who came and sang) that Cary had piqued my interest in this Monkey God and that I'd like to investigate this Monkey God some more.
Let's be clear about one thing: monkeys are not chimpanzees. I was looking at my notes from when I did my internship at Mountain Brook supervised by Cary 3 summers ago and a man who grew up among missionaries in India and worked with primates was very emphatic that chimps and monkeys are two different species. But a monkey is a primate: just like the Pope is the primate of the Roman Church. I love the fact that primate signifies such diverse things: what if one day a monkey might be elected Pope or perhaps the Curia might be sighted swinging from vines and grooming each other clean from lice and fleas. Ahh Monkey God, you'll always be, one sweet primate to me.
And what is a primate. Primate stands for first or perhaps final; then penultiMate should stand for second or as a prelude to the end. There could be postmates, trimates, quadromates - a regular mating ritual. Middlemate would be that that stands (or sits or reclines) in the middle, media res - in the media resting, wresting.
So if the Monkey God meets the Buddha coming through the rye - as opposed to the road where the Buddha must be killed, which seems harsh - but instead meets coming through the rye, which could be a great teen coming of age story, a picaresque, a gambol, a rollicking thrill ride for the summer like a Separate Peace: say the Monkey God goes to college and rooms with the Buddha, but the Buddha runs out of deferments and gets drafted and the Monkey God helps him escape to Canada, and they gin their way rye vermouth, and coming upon a camp of gypsies or counter culture communitarians or prophylactic presbyterians (it could happen: check back to my comment on Dan's comment on Gaye's comment on Jami's comment on my ordination paragraph where I talk about zombie presbyterians: it could happen); but this Monkey God and Buddha and the hippies or dead heads or simple farming folk create a utopian society only to have the cutlery division still running after 100 years (think about it: Oneida cutlery was the going concern of a utopian community dedicated to open marriage and educational and societal experimentation - but no one thinks about that when they're cutting their steak).
I think the Monkey God is the last best hope for America. We've aped sentient creatures long enough.

Writing

Pop in fresh, dough boy, said the Germans on the other side of no-man's land, trenchantly. Enough of your tankless onsluaghts, we treaded carefully, around the subject, the subjective and the subjunctive. Or might would could've'd, co-ordinate Claus and subordinate Claus at Christmas time, a gift of speeches and cream, pyre are squared, rounded hedged and lopped sided.
We left the dough boy behind, but the painting, which I did in the Spring of 2006, is in our house and will soon be moved to Durham, where the most beautiful woman in the world resides. It's an expressionist landscape. Why don't I do more of them? My hope is that eventually I will do paintings as thick and indecipherable as Auerbach or Kiefer or de Kooning.
How I wish that I were in Durham right now, even as Jami is concocting vichyssoise of indescribable richness and warmth.

And now I'm ordained

On Sunday I was ordained to the ministry of word and sacrament. A host of people were involved: Billy and Dan came from my home church in Covington; Nibs and Caroline and Suzette from the church here at Oakhurst; Lou from Memorial Drive; Cousin Cheryl from Fellowship; Joe from Twain's aka Good Shepherd; and driving from Birmingham in atrocious traffic - Shannon to sing and Cary to preach. It was a good commission. In the service I was especially proud of paraphrasing the last few verses of Psalm 100 to make a reference to Bakhtin's discussion of time and space: human cosmogony conforming to hierarchal space in the middle ages, and to leveled out time in the Renaissance. That is: the house in which humanity finds itself is hierarchal, everyone has his or her place with no hope of going up or down - except in so far as they are subject to fortune or live in destiny; when the Renaissance comes, this hierarchal spatial home is exploded and out of its ashes is built a cosmogony built on time, a home where humans move up and down in freedom [albeit limited freedom understood as autonomy; whereas the medieval freedom might be understood as living in one's space modeling the virtue of contentment], but where people experience themselves as not moving up and down but back and forward. Hence time is a leveler: anyone can light anywhere, regardless of birth. So I wrote that God "our Creator, Judge and Defender is steadfast in goodness and mercy, the same throughout all time and in all places." How many people will have spotted Bakhtin's reference to Pico della Mirandola? A whiff of neoplatonism perhaps. But it is the remnant of my desire to create a carnivalesque worship service. There was no grotesque and no visceral laughter - well maybe a little, as I stepped on Billy's lines as he was asking me the 9 questions: "whoever in our company be dined, must answer me these questions nine."
Afterwards a group of us went to Twain's. We drank pints and ate fish and chips. Shannon called our friend Karl who recounted ribald tales of ordinations past and various legends, which refreshed us with their grotequeness and laughter. It turned out to be a carnivalesque evening after all: what with the feasting, the ribaldry, the grotesquery and laughter.

It's November now

It's November now - Fall, the season where we celebrate the Autumn of humanity, where Adam and Eve, disAbled raised Cain. Enoch already they flooded, Aunty Deluvianne, arc de triomphefetted their babble, and ur-Urian unmenschenables adequate sacrifices of gout, frankenstein and merv. It came about in those days, along the river Euphrates, **** said "lights" and divided the lithe from the awkwardly moving amphibious landing goal tendering tofu wabohuites of Kenosha, Wisk Cosine. Sines and nomine worked wonders and all the saints weened hollow days and pumped full knights, rooked and bishop pricked fungible goods and evens, getting. And then arose a pharaoh that knew not where the remote was, not the remotest idea, and **** spoke to Moscowitz burning brush saying, "go tell that that that that that that," and so it was, and came to pass, and happened, that from that day till this and even till this day, that wherever that that that that is that-ed, that those that that that that even till this day and a day and half a day hoist a moist frothy two and a half eight and a quarter before half and a hilt halter top topped unter den linden and through the hills to grossmutter's hause wir knock dame treffen hen arf!
And then arose Shamgard who killed six full days of time with a hang nail.
Deb, the Canaan knischites bee, hailed Jael time and her trepanatorish arts, pegged barracks heading home.
Judge for yourself and they did as each did what was left of their own time and righted themselves acquitted. What the ex-honor ate.