Homemade Prayers Vol. 1

Metaphors 

Dear Lord

Lead me not into cheap metaphors,

like, “Running is like faith, because

you suffer but you persist

and try to be disciplined

and at the end you feel something

approaching glory.”

Also please lead me not into

trying to sound clever

all the time

by, for instance,

trying to avoid cheap metaphors.

Amen.

BA214

Dear God,

Normally,

I’m not into those prayers

which ask for Your direct intervention

in things.

Like people who pray for their football team to win,

or to get that big promotion

or even for a sick person to get well.

I feel like You don’t really like to get involved

in things like that.

And that what we really should be praying for

is Your help in living through whatever might befall us.

I feel like

that’s more Your scene.

Having said that,

it would be great if this airplane didn’t crash

into the North Atlantic.

Just putting it out there.

Amen.

The Butterball Effect

The turkey market is in turmoil, so says The Economist. The annual supply of 40 million turkeys is ready for the chopping block (or has already faced it), but big family gatherings are out this year. Meanwhile, Denmark is culling 17 million mink, for fear that the coronavirus they carry could make human vaccines less effective. And the number of wildfires in Brazil’s Pantanal region, home to thousands of species of birds, mammals, and fish, has reached a record high.

So much for those springtime feel-good images of “nature reclaiming the planet.”

Remembrance

Followers of the Barclay’s Premier League will be familiar with the red poppies which start appearing on uniforms and managers' lapels in early November. Last Sunday was Remembrance Sunday, which is to the UK as Veterans Day is to the US. Our online church service therefore took on martial overtones: a soldier playing a bugle followed by a moment of silence; a reading of “In Flanders Field” by Anne, one of our congregants who rocks up in a jaunty uniform from time to time; a sermon evoking memories of fathers and grandfathers who were on the scene in Ypres, Gallipoli, Verdun.

I am certainly down with honoring lost loved ones or the horrors of war. But I’m not sure if war commemoration is the role that the Christian church should be playing here. Yes, we did read from Isaiah 2 about beating swords into plowshares, but this was far overshadowed by glorification of men in uniform.  Our closing prayer cited, mistily, “the call to arms, the patriotic songs, the courage, the comradeship.” At the end of the sermon, we ran a short video from a WWII veteran saying that the men he served with were “real heroes,” and who am I to say they weren’t.  But is it the role of the church to glorify war heroes, or to ask why they were there to begin with?  What beliefs and actions of men put these pour souls in a foxhole somewhere, and how do we reconcile this with our idea of God?  What, indeed, would Jesus do?

I’m a fan of C.S. Lewis, but this speaks to something in his writings I’ve always had trouble swallowing. In Mere Christianity, Lewis lays out elegant and convincing arguments about right and wrong, and why those concepts are universal, and how we all know it deep down (i.e., because they come from God). Yet some of his examples – “there are situations in which it is the duty…of a soldier to encourage his fighting instinct,” or “if no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality” (whatever that might be) – give the impression that he conflates being a good Christian with being a good Englishman.

Easy for me to say, I suppose, as I’ve never been compelled to take up arms to defend my children while bombs rained over my hometown.  Compared to most of the people in my congregation, I’m a generation removed from World War II.  Also, as an American, my associations with war are less about fighting off the Nazis, and more about the neo-imperialist aggressions of my home country in the Middle East. In any case, my understanding of the gospel tells me that war is wrong and evil, full stop, and we should be extremely wary of myths and rituals that might lead us to believe otherwise.   

A confession

Okay, one last thing about the election and then I’ll get back to writing about Thomas Merton and running and stuff.

I have a confession to make.  I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. 

Of course I didn’t vote for Donald Trump.  I didn’t vote at all.  I can offer excuses.  Getting an absentee ballot from overseas is kind of a hassle.  I vote in Massachusetts, as reliable a blue state as they come, so my vote wasn’t going to change anything.  I was lulled into complacency by the pre-election polls, all of which characterized a Clinton victory as a metaphysical certainty.  I also have to admit that the Democratic nominee was not exactly the most compelling candidate ever, for various reasons which aren’t worth exploring here, but I think you know what I mean.  I suspect that many people of my political persuasion didn’t bother voting either.  We all know what happened after that.

My hope was that 2020 would be different.  Chastened by 2016 and four subsequent years of incompetence and nastiness, Democrats would turn out in far greater numbers. Perhaps even some of those who voted for Trump in 2016 as a kind of protest would come to their senses and vote for his opponent, or at least sit this one out.  This year, I dutifully emailed my absentee ballot to the Scituate Town Clerk in September.  And everything worked out like I hoped.

Sort of.

Let’s be honest: I am not shouting the DNC platform from the rooftops, and I hold no deep passion for Joe Biden (though I do admit he has grown on me over the past couple of months).  My vote, and probably yours, was cast primarily out of disgust at the current occupant of the White House.  Running as the antithesis of a vulgar con artist was an effective strategy for the Democratic party in 2016, but it’s not going to be so useful in the long term.

And while Proud Boys and the QAnon crowd make for good television and enable us to feel all glib and superior, it should be clear by now that Trump’s supporters are not the lunatic fringe.  57% of white Americans (and 55% of white women) voted for Donald Trump last week.  So did 26% of nonwhite people, 28% of GLBT people, and 42% of college graduates. 

The Democratic party has some serious reckoning to do.  For starters, they need to find a way to skillfully incorporate the left wing of their party.  Long before anyone had called PA, the media (from Fox News to the NYTimes) was already trying to drive a wedge between so-called “centrist” Democrats and "The Squad” (see also Biden's bizarre “I am the Democratic party” line in the first debate).  Bernie Sanders may or may not be your cup of tea, but the issues that he is hollering about – the disastrous state of the US healthcare system, the climate crisis, the collapse of American manufacturing – are not going to solve themselves.  They’re certainly not going to be solved by a return to the good old days of neo-liberalism with some BLM-friendly branding tacked on.  Let’s not kid ourselves: if these issues are left unaddressed, the US could very easily find itself right back at the brink of fascism, or worse, in the not-to-distant future.  So, fellow "progressive," I ask you: what are we willing to do, and to sacrifice, to prevent that from happening?  

Update

 

I know it doesn't magically solve everything, and I know that around 70 million of my countrymen voted for a sociopath, but this will at least make the next four years a little less exhausting, and hopefully a little brighter and better.  Now all we have to do is survive the next 11 weeks.

Crumbs

I was starting to feel a little strung out and in need of fresh air from the perpetual CNN-watching here.  So I walked down to the bank in between Zooms to get cash for the cleaning guy. 

Passing the newspaper stand, I noticed with relief that the headline had nothing to do with the election, but instead was about whether the cantons or the communes should pay for something-or-other.  In Switzerland, power and resources are generally devolved as locally as possible.  To wit: around 80% of the taxes I pay go to the canton or commune, and only 20% go the federal government.  If you asked a random Swiss person on the street who the head of the federal government is, chances are they would have no idea.  I couldn’t tell you who it is right now either.  (ed: It’s Simonetta Sommaruga from Aargau, member of the Conseil Fédéral (and educated as a classical pianist), who is currently serving her one-year rotation as President of the Confederation.) 

On the way back from the bank, I picked up a few things at the grocery store.  I still had a little time before my next meeting, so I took the long way home to pass by the Tour de Champel, where I planned on sitting and eating a ham and cheese croissant.  The tower itself is fenced off for renovations, and the lone park bench in the grassy area next to it was occupied by a woman, speaking animatedly.  As I approached, I could hear that it was an American woman.  “I’M SITTING THERE *CRYING,* AND YOU’RE TELLING ME OFF!” I heard her yell to the man who stood in front of her, indicating to her left with a straightened arm, as if she were making a left-turn signal while riding a bicycle.

My first instinct was to approach her and say don’t worry it will be okay the election seems to be trending in the right direction, but I quickly discarded this idea and diverted to the grassy area across the street from our apartment.  I sat on a park bench and watched the birds and ate.  I made the tactical error of removing the croissant from the small paper bag, so I ended up with crumbs all down the front of my jacket.

The End

You need to see it for yourself.  Because just reading the news stories about Trump’s statement at around 7pm ET on Thursday will lend it a degree of coherence and sanity, and it was anything but coherent and sane.  It was the desperate ramblings of a supreme narcissist who, seeing his world beginning to crumble, would rather destroy everything than submit to a reality which doesn’t fit his narrative. We’ve moved beyond electoral politics into grotesque theater.

In around 15 minutes, the President of the United States managed to claim that the country’s election process -- the process on which his authority rests -- is corrupt. That the counting of legally cast votes should be stopped (except in Arizona, where there’s still a chance that he could chip away at Biden’s current lead).  That the polls predicting a big Biden win constituted voter suppression (evidently this was no problem in 2016).  That votes for his opponent are illegal.  That this was all perpetrated by “big media, big money, and big tech.”  That bursting pipes and nonexistent “secret counting rooms” have been engineered by a corrupt Democrat machine to steal the election.  This is gaslighting taken to its more extreme and most dangerous.

Meanwhile, one by one, Trump’s enablers turn their backs on him.  Fox News, whose coverage of this election has been commendably fair and critical, stuck by their decision to call Arizona for Biden, despite Jared Kushner’s frantic phone calls to Rupert Murdoch. Twitter, long the vehicle for Trump’s most specious and inflammatory rhetoric, began flagging his posts as false and misleading.  GOP leadership, realizing that Trump has outlived his usefulness now that certain congressional districts have been retained, refuses to parrot his conspiracy theories.  His inner circle has dwindled to a smattering of sycophants and immediate family members.  

It almost makes you feel sorry for the guy.  Almost.

This election could still go either way.  As I write this, Trump leads in Georgia by less than 500 votes.  Biden’s lead in Nevada is less than 9,000.  I honestly have no idea what will happen over the next two months.  Yet I am given some confidence and hope by the people, Republicans and Democrats, who are actually administering the election process.  Public servants in department store clothing who are discharging their duty, capably and seriously.  People like Joe Gloria in Nevada,  Gabriel Sterling in Georgia, Jocelyn Benson in Michigan, Kathy Boockvar in Pennsylvania.  These are the people who give me some hope that my home country might be able to pull through this in one piece.  May God keep them safe.