Reverend John Ames, talking to his young wife Lila in the book by that name by Marilynne Robinson. (Lila had asked him about people going to hell when they died.)--  "Thinking about hell doesn't help me live the way I should. I believe this is true for most people. And thinking that other people might go to hell just feels evil to me, like a very grave sin. So I don't want to encourage anyone else to think that way. Even if you assume that you can know in individual cases, it's still a problem to think about people in general as if they might go to hell. You can't see the world the way you ought to if you let yourself do that. Any judgment of the kind is a great presumption. And presumption is a very grave sin. I believe this is sound theology, in its way.”

Reflections on a Poem

 

Christ Climbed Down by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Christ Climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candycanes and breakable stars

Christ Climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no gilded Christmas trees
and no tinsel Christmas trees
and no tinfoil Christmas trees
and no pink plastic Christmas trees
and no black Christmas trees
and no powederblue Christmas trees
hung with electric candles
and encircled by tin electric trains
and clever cornball relatives

Christ Climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesman
covered the territory
in two-tone cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck creches
complete with plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post
the babe by special delivery
and where no televised Wise Men
praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year and ran away to where
no fat handshaking stranger
in a red flannel suit
and a fake white beard
went around passing himself off
as some sort of North Pole saint
crossing the desert to Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
in a Volkswagon sled
drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer
with German names
and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts
from Saks Fifth Avenue
for everybody’s imagined Christ child

Christ Climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no Bing Crosby Carollers
groaned of a tight Christmas
and where no Radio City angels
iceskated wingless
thru a winter wonderland
into a jinglebell heaven
daily at 8:30
with Midnight Mass matinees

Christ Climbed Down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary’s womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody’s anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest
of Second Comings.

I seem to recall that this poem was in our Xmas worship service bulletin in about 1970, inserted by our "hippie" associate minister, and I for one thought it might be a little sacrilegious but overall the truth, and I liked it.  I still do.

Not a poet, but a lot of things of late come to mind about what Christ might climb down and run away from of late.  Just one update: 

...to where no family--congressman, spouse, and children--posted a Christmas greeting of smiling from their living room in the best holiday spirit--one might guess but for each one of them bearing firearms made expressly to kill their brothers and sisters. Second Amendment be damned.

Happiness Is Wanting What You Have

Four o’clock.  I’ve been walking.  While I was in Acacia Rez, on a walkway, I had a wave of gratitude.  Yes, I am 82.  Yes, I am “over the hill.”  But look at all I have!  I was able to make the walk, in peace and comfort, with all my faculties.  The day was pleasant, not cold or windy or raining or snowing.  It was not crowded or noisy or unsafe or unfriendly.  I walked fairly swiftly, without stopping or diminishing my pace.  It was good!  I was able to do it!  This old man’s still got it!  Thanks, Lord.  Thank you thank you thank you! 

Pearl Harbor: 80th Anniversary

Saw the WaPo front page for my birth date, which happens to be a summer day in 1939 antedating that "dastardly" attack on Pearl Harbor by two and a half years.

Honoring tradition of the bad news first, at the top of the first column the wire service reported the fatal electrocution in Tientsin of a Chinese civilian male.  He had made contact with an electrified fence that the occupying Japanese forces had erected around the British and French compounds.  The victim's body was left dangling on the fence.  The battles of World War II began in Asia before they did in Europe, and well before the "awakening of the sleeping giant" on December 7, 1941.  

Also at the page's top, King George V was pictured with the Queen and the two princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, the royal couple just back from a good-will visit to the States and Canada.

The day before, six people in D.C. had suffered heat exhaustion and one drowned.  Curiously, the Post used the convention of designating three of the victims as "colored."  Presumably (and ironically) the four victims with no identification were "white."

Plans were revealed for closing Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, which the Attorney General described as a "place of horror," operated under a system that was "necessarily vicious."  (Surely he meant unnecessarily vicious?)  Alcatraz was not closed until 1963--24 years later.

Lady Astor, a member of the British Parliament, who was notorious for saying outrageous things, some of them vicious (e.g anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic), advocated a tax increase on tobacco, saying that smoking is "almost" an egregious "crime." A peer thought this view was curious since she was born in Virginia, USA.  She replied, "When I was in Virginia hardly anyone smoked a cigarette, and the Bishop of Virginia ... said he would rather see his daughter drunk than smoking a cigarette."

A "pert Broadway showgirl," a Miss Maurice, testifying in a federal mail fraud case, said that the defendant, a Mr. Buckner, had romanced her by, among other enticements, inviting her to go with him to Manila on a business trip.  "Was that an elopement?" the Assistant US Attorney asked.  She said, "Oh no.  He often talked about marriage, but only like you'd talk about the war in China."  Cross-examining, the  defense attorney asked, "It's not uncommon for a gentleman to ask a lady to take a trip, is it?"  "Oh Mr Minton!" she said, flushing and lowering her shadowed eyelids.  Tee-hee-hee.  All present found that titillating.  The prosecution interjected, "I don't know where Mr. Minton comes from; that must be the new technique."  Mr. Minton (chuckling): "At any rate, I was young once."

Me too.

Kristallnacht

Last night my companion and I attended a Jewish Sabbath worship service at the Temple-Tifereth Israel Synagogue in an eastern suburb of Cleveland, meaningful for us in many ways, and deeply moving.

I am appallingly ignorant about Judaism and apologize for knowing so little, given that Jesus and his disciples were Jews and their scripture was the Hebrew Bible, what Christians have for centuries been calling the Old Testament.

I do know that the people in attendance there were lovely and their worship behavior was reverent and majestic.  When we entered the large sanctuary we were greeted with "Shalom" and each of us handed a program and a worship book in Hebrew and English that is read from back to front, right to left, as is Arabic.  The rabbi who led the readings  directed the congregation to the page numbers in question and we were able to follow along pretty well.

This sabbath worship service remembered Kristallnacht, the nights in November 1938 in Nazi Germany when its Jewish population was attacked by stormtroopers and many non-Jewish civilians, destroying their homes, shops, and synagogues, and murdering many of them.  It was beginning of the Holocaust in which many Jews were imprisoned in death camps and massacred, up to the time of the invasion of the Allied forces and liberation of the camps in 1945.  The teens of the congregation lit candles of remembrance and read passages of history about the Holocaust.

Music was performed by members of the Cleveland Orchestra.  It included works of Ernest Bloch, Maurice Ravel, Sergei Prokoviev, John Williams' Theme from Schindler's List, and songs by Srul Irving Glick.

I'm thankful for the experience.  Shalom.

My Twins Are 50 Today

On November 12, 1971, in Columbus, Indiana, my life partner gave birth to a girl and a boy.  We did not know beforehand that there were two babies, so we were stunned even more when the blessed event turned out to be two events.  As I recall, the girl arrived at 9:50 PM, the boy at 9:54.  It was a Friday, as it is today.  I was in the delivery room with their mother and I saw them.  The first thought on seeing the girl was something idiotic like, Who is this strange creature? And, gosh, she's completely naked!  And alive!  And finally, My God!  She's my daughter, our daughter.  And a fine baby girl.  It's a miracle!  And when the doctor said, Get ready for another one, I was stunned, and in a few minutes I was totally stunned when a boy, tiny and red and thrashing his arms and legs like a windmill, also appeared.  We were parents of fraternal twins!  A boy and a girl!  Mother and infants were cared for and bedded down for the night and then I went home to the empty house and called everybody I could think of to tell them we were parents of a girl... and a boy.

They are 50 years old today.  We are grateful.  They have grown gracefully into the fine, mature adults they are today.  We encouraged them to become independent and they learned well.  I could write a book, of course, but today I just want to make note of this remarkable day.  Thanks, Higher Power, for the blessed events.  

End of DST 2021

 Autumn is well along, winter will soon be here. Today was beautiful, nary a cloud, blue sky all day and a reddish-orange sunset; still plenty of leaves, most of them yellow and red and orange, have not fallen; and I was up in spirits all day because I counted just a few of my blessings this morning when I got up in kind of a whiny mood.  I remained up because my daughters and son-in-law, and Dot, the black mouth cur, my grand-dog, visited today.  They winterized my windows, which will elevate the quality of life in my apartment this winter in northeast Ohio (in which I shivered last winter).

Tonight my girlfriend and I watched The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, opening with Tim Blake Nelson ("O Brother Where Art Thou") in the title role singing "All day I've faced the barren waste without a drink of water," cracking his voice like Hank Williams, accompanying himself with guitar riding on Old Dan.  He then shoots several bad hombres dead in various cartoonish duels.  Won't say more except it was entertaining throughout with several short stories, including James Franco, Liam Neeson, Zoe Kazan, Tyne Daly, et al.  It's a Joel and Ethan Coen movie.  Then we watched Montford: The Chickasaw Rancher, based on a real Chickasaw man and his family and their pioneering settlement of Oklahoma after the Civil War.  Also entertaining.  And enlightening.

Before sleep, I will read more of State of Terror, by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny.  (Hillary couldn't be outdone by Bill, who recently teamed up with James Patterson for a couple of novels about terrorist plots.)  I now read books in large print if I can get them from the library.

It's past midnight now, but I get an extra hour of sleep tomorrow.