The Swerve

       In April 1973 my great grandmother, Monte Stanger, turned over in bed, speechless, reaching for her husband.  Grandpa Ira didn’t think anything of her embrace.  In the morning he got up to make coffee.  He returned to the bedroom, unable to awaken her.  The time for aiding her had passed away when she had vainly reached for him in the night.

       I was eight years old when I overheard this account of grandma’s stroke-- too young to have my psychological defenses against death dismantled.  Until then I’d pretended that death only came to other people’s families. Facing such forces of destruction so early led me to become a precocious little philosopher. 

      So, it was again at a much too tender age that I picked up Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things at Howard’s Bookstore in Bloomington.  There’s no shortage of things a young man can lay ahold of in Bloomington, including an ancient Epicurean philosopher who believed that we are nothing more than atomic particles in motion.  The late Stephen Hawking likened us to “chemical scum.” The rock group, Kansas, no less starkly said, “all we are is dust in the wind.”

      Recently, I re-read Lucretius, noticing a critical feature of his argument.  Lucretius hypothesized that atoms swerve to combine and make an increasingly complex world.  Lucretius never discusses where such an unaccountable swerve comes from. 

      Yet, it’s some swerve!   In order for the element Carbon, upon which all life is based, to have been formed in the slow-burning bellies of ancient stars, gravity and expansive force had to be minutely balanced. I’m told that the odds of this happening are like that of one person winning the lottery…numerous times… in a row.  I’m no mathematician, but when the same fellow keeps winning the lottery, my bet is the game is rigged. 

      Indeed, the world does seem rigged, swerving in favor of life against the odds.  So, you will perhaps forgive my Easter faith for believing that a Presence more loving than my sleeping grandfather one again swerved down to catch my grandmother as she reached out in the night.

The Day Voltaire Died

     On the third floor of Ballantine Hall, at Indiana University there was a study room.  At 11:00 AM I plopped my book-bag down near an open window.  It was seasonably warm and uncommonly still for early Spring in Bloomington.

       I began reading about the Enlightenment (that intellectual movement in the 1700’s that denied the miraculous) when the tree outside the window unaccountably twisted. Its branches violently shook in a sudden burst of near gale-force wind.  I would have ignored this except that along with the burst I felt a simultaneous shock and heaviness.  My heart rate accelerated and the back of my neck burned.  I got up to “walk it off” as if I’d had the wind knocked out of me.

     The experience seemed unaccountable.  It was probably five minutes before my heart-rate returned to something closer to normal, and I was able to plunge back into my study of that sharp-tongued advocate of Enlightenment--Voltaire.

     A voluminous writer, a champion of human rights and toleration, Voltaire was also a bitterly sarcastic philanderer and critic of Christianity.  He died May 30, 1778 angrily dismissing the Catholic priests who tried to minister to him.

      That evening, as I was returning home from class, I noticed dozens of cars in my grandparents’ yard.  I stopped, and my Father, teary-eyed, walked toward me with the news:      

    “We lost Papaw this morning.” 

      It had happened at 11:00 AM.

      March 24, 1987 was not just the day my grandfather died.  It marked the death of the Enlightenment’s influence on me.  However I might have construed my 11:00 AM experience that day, its exact synchronicity with papaw’s heart attack was too much to ignore. Voltaire simply couldn’t account for it.  I concluded that mysterious powers were at work in the world, and they were not merely indifferent to my grief.

      People wonder how someone with an appreciation for hard science can believe that Christ’s body rose from the dead. One kind of answer is that I know that I’m not imagining things.  My experience was real.  Voltaire was wrong. That tree moved.  

My Psalm 147

Hallelujah!

We shall overcome,

rebuild Jerusalem

with a song:

a Chinese baby

leans forward on a mother’s lap

a gathered exile

bouncing to the beat--

An stately Black woman

rises, right arm raised to the sky

“yes, yes, yes!”

Wounds bound.

Professional eyes,

bloodshot, now weighty with scorn

widen with strength to be quiet

as he stands for the chorus.

Young ideas

startled into a blank stare--

an impulse checked--

love restored. 

Sing with thanksgiving;

strum away a sprinters confidence,

replacing it with hopeful rest

in all excelling love Divine.

Extol the Lord, Oh Jerusalem!

Strengthen the bars of our gates.

Re-water the world from on high--

remake everything with his

primordial, last words.

Hallelujah!

We shall overcome,

rebuild Jerusalem

with a song.

My Psalm 148

Hallelujah,

Let them praises give Jehovah!

And can it be

that I am able to speak into

heavenly heights I can only imagine?

Since when can I speak to the moon and stars,

the chaos of the deep and the waters above the firmament?

How do I

exhort the temple mount

with all it’s fruit trees and evergreens?

I’ve known people who are convinced they can talk to their birds.

But I’ve seldom talked to trees.  I’ve rarely attempted to commune with crickets. 

I’m not sure this

White House listens to anybody.

The races won’t listen to each other let alone me.

Men and women are so seldom on the same wavelength.

I’m pretty sure young people don’t always want to hear from old farts.

*****

Let them praises give Jehovah!

For his name alone makes cohorts fall down

His glory is above everything—it connects with everything.

It will not be ignored.  He has raised his people with this horn of authority:

All creation will join together in the praise of his holy ones, even the children of Israel.

Such

convening power 

this song of delight sung by all of God’s singers!

Everything—everyone, now, in the tightest of tight harmony!

For his name alone pitches the heights and the deep so that every deaf thing hears.

Let them praises give Jehovah!

Hallelujah!

My Psalm 149

Ps 149:5-6

 Let the faithful shout in glory while on their private couch

May the praise of God be in their mouths as a double-edged sword in their hands

Hallelujah.

I heard in heaven a new song,

and not the modern kind of new.

It wasn’t a bigger, better, and a patented original.

It was a melody intensely familiar--

evoking the scent of Easter in my childhood--

before religion was deafened

by sophisticated disappointments.

And the unfamiliar, distinct measures

re-energized my old age.

May the whole gathered church

vibrate the world to its core

with ever-new waves of heaven--

Sanctuary sounds emanating from on high

through every private prayer-room--

when we shout and sing.

There’s no more powerful weapon.

The song is a double edged sword--

The one that comes from Jesus’ mouth into ours.

Our song is the instrument he uses

to shackle the thugs of all nations

and to advance justice.

Never underestimate the social power

Of a new song from the Source.

For it is written:

Such redemptive singing is our great honor.

Hallelujah.

My Psalm 150

Ps 150: 1, 6 

Praise God in his sanctuary;

praise him in his mighty heavens...

Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.

Inhale. Follow the breath

Deep into the inmost sanctuary

Anchored above the firmament

And exhort the angels.

Exhale. Release the future

In remembrance of each exodus

Each restoration, ascension and Pentecost

Knowing there’s always more.

Inhale. Gather strength

To trumpet blast the news of wellness--

To make the entire world our amphitheater.

Blow! Fill the whole register with eschatological noise.

Let every rhythmic breath anticipate that one.

Ashes Before Roses

      My religious background emphasizes the simplicity of the earliest church before it came to adopt traditions like today’s observance-- Ash Wednesday.  If my great grandparents were alive today, my Grandpa Archie would have bought candies for his valentine today.  But he would have been shocked if anyone tried to put ashes on his forehead.  Yet, we ought to think hard before we opt for flowers and candies over ashes today.

       Valentine’s Day, ironically, owes its character to another convergence of State and church holidays.  February 13-15 was the Roman Lupercalia, a kind of drunken fertility ritual.  The Emperor Claudius on two occasions put Christian martyrs named Valentine to death during the feast, so the church came to remember the dead martyrs on February 14, too.  Both the remembrance of the martyrs and the fertility celebration continued to coexist until the mating ritual basically took over the holiday.

      Today Valentine’s Day celebrates that mixture of fear, bio-chemical desire and psychic attraction, which people call “being in love.”  This intense but fleeting sense of attachment rules the way this culture thinks about relationships.   When my wife and I were in Mystic Bay, Connecticut celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary, an unmarried couple from New York City congratulated us on our big day.  They confessed that they had never been able to maintain feelings for anyone more than two or three years. 

     “What’s your secret?” they asked. 

      My wife and I looked at each other and giggled.  

     “We have no secret,” we told them.  Christian love doesn’t depend on feelings.  Sustainable feelings of romantic attachment are the result of partners training themselves to put the other first. 

      Ash Wednesday calls me back to that selfless love.  Often, that’s why I buy flowers.   I don’t receive ashes myself, but I do ritually remember that we mortals should be ruled by something more than momentary feelings.  The message of Ash Wednesday supports Valentine’s Day.  Without sacrificial love, amorous love usually ends up spreading heartache. In the end Christ’s love is more compelling than Cupid’s trance. That’s why we put crosses and not hearts atop church buildings.