God is Still Speaking. Are We Listening?

SEPTEMBER 1, 2009 1:40PM

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In the Bible, both in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament, God often is said to have spoken directly to individuals, either in person or through angels, speaking in words that the individual understands. This direct speaking of the Holy One to individuals is true in many religions.

Today, most practicing Christians and Jews have no trouble accepting that God spoke "in the days of old" directly to individual people. And in the Bible it was not just to prophets and leaders but also to relative nobodies like Mary and Joseph long before they knew that they would do anything that would be considered of any real importance.

Today many Christians and Jews believe that those days of direct communication with God are over. We certainly do not often think that God will speak directly to us so that we actually hear God like we would hear a person speak to us over a cup of coffee. And the few times that a friend may have told us that God spoke directly to her, we likely placated her, all the while thinking she was a few cards short of a full deck.

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Some of you know that I have only once in my 70 years thought that God actually spoke directly to me. I was reading a book at the time, and it nearly scared me to death. Even so I was not sure who was speaking and ran around the house in the dead of night looking for radios that were left on, trying to figure out the source of the voice, checking outside looking for a neighbor standing in a foot of snow by our bedroom window. Nothing. Sue was asleep and the neighborhood was quiet as a church mouse.

So I spent a full year trying to convince myself that God has surely not spoken to me, and, besides, the message was unclear. If it were God couldn't God come up with something a bit less enigmatic than "It's not too late?" I mean, what was "not too late?" And what was the "it" that was still timely?

After a year of pondering what I heard that night I decided that God did speak to me and that God wanted me to devote the rest of my life to serving in ministry. Oddly, none of my friends or my closest advisors found this decision strange, nor did they think that 50 years old was "too old" to give up my life as I knew it and make such a total commitment.

I haven't heard a direct word from God since. Not even a whisper. Not in a dream. Nothing. Nada. Not that I haven't wished God would just sit down and chat with me, in English. It would be so much easier to just know what God wants of me now. I haven't all that many years left. Shouldn't we be having that little heart to heart talk that would make it crystal clear how I should live the years I have left?

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I hate to disappoint any reader who was hoping to find here the holy grail, or the golden compass, or the precious ring, or the code breaker, or some other thing that will make it easier to find our way. But I don't have that kind of answer for you. I know people who do. I know that we can turn on any number of televangelists who will tell us that God just had breakfast with them and told them what we are to do.

Mostly in those conversations God seems to be interested in divesting us of our money and giving it to those blessed to have God's cell phone number. Pardon my skepticism, but I doubt that God works quite that way, although millions upon millions believe that is exactly how God acts, much to the televangelists' delight.

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Let's move on to the good part. And that is simply that God is still speaking. God does try to communicate with us in many wonderful and useful ways. Many of them are listed at the end of this reflection.

But first we have to focus on how to hear what God is saying.

And here is the key: think of communicating with God like listening to a radio or TV signal. Right now there are millions of radio and TV signals being broadcast. How many of them can you hear with the receiver turned off? Not only do you have to have the receiver turned on, but it has to have the right tuner to receive the signals and you have to use that tuner to find the station you want to listen to or watch.

That sounds so obvious when we think of radio and TV signals, but we are totally flummoxed when we are asked to consider that we might have to have our spiritual tuner turned on and we might have to tune in to KGOD if we want to hear what God has to say to us. KGOD is the only frequency that Kingdom of God Broadcasting Company uses.

But, and this is important, once we are turned on and tuned in there are a variety of programs that God uses to communicate with us. And one of those is "Our Ordinary Lives." This program stars all of us, and is sometimes a sitcom, sometimes a drama, sometimes a melodrama.

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God does not micro-manage our ordinary lives, nor does God generally intervene in our lives in miraculous or extraordinary ways. You may be surprised to know that mostly God did not do that in biblical times either. While the Bible gathers stories of when God did that all in one place, it ignores the infinitely larger number of times when God did not intervene or speak.

And while I am convinced that God does act in miraculous ways today, I am also convinced that we often miss the miraculous in our lives because we aren't looking for it, and are far too cynical to believe miracles when they happen. If you don't believe that, try telling your friends about your miracle. They will say that they are happy for you while thinking that if miracles happen where was God when they last needed one?

Yet faith tells us that God is with us in all times and places. Always. God can comfort us, instruct us and help us grow spiritually through successes, failures, joys, sorrows, sickness, health, blessings, and countless other ways. The real question is not whether God is there and will help us, but whether or not we believe that God is there. And that belief matters only if our radio is on, and we have it tuned in.

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A simple question will help define the issue: Just how active are you in sharing your joys and sorrows, your troubles and successes, with God on an everyday basis? Or do you wait until your world falls apart and you pray that bargaining prayer from your foxhole?

The truth is that I, who surely know better, often am so worried about something, and it is driving me to such total distraction, that I forget to invite God into a conversation about my problems. I end up talking to myself endlessly when I should be communicating my deepest joys, fears and anxieties to God.

We need to be very conscious of including God in our daily concerns and activities, not using God only for emergencies and wondering why we can't hear God over the din of our pounding, racing hearts if we only call on God in times of crisis. We need to ask ourselves, "Where is God in what I am experiencing?" And, "What would God like me to learn from this experience?"

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I am not saying that God causes every event in our lives. Far from it. We have free will and so do all others. God has set in motion natural laws, even laws that we have yet to discover. There are natural disasters and accidents. And often our choices, and those of others, to say nothing of natural laws and anomalous, awful events, cause us great grief.

But if God made all the choices for us we would have no responsibility for our actions, nor would we be much more than mere robots going through the motions of existence. Life would be numbingly dull.

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God can use the events of our lives to teach us, if we will only allow that to happen, no matter how tragic those events are at the time they happen. And God will teach us love and wisdom out of which can grow understanding and humility, but only if we allow it.

We do not often stop to think that the ultimate price that we pay for love, for example, will always be sorrow and grief when that love ends. The price of love now is pain later. That is just the way it works. Were there no love there would be no pain, only indifference.

Some try to insulate themselves from love and from others so that they never need feel the pain. But if they succeed in doing that they will never know the joy of love, or feel the tenderness of compassion, nor will they know what we mean when we feel sorrow over grief of others.

In the end they will have deadened themselves to the possibility of ever knowing the very feelings that God teaches us are the essence of the spiritual life, the life that puts things spiritual and eternal ahead of things material and temporal. They will choose to forfeit the most precious gifts of God.

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There are, of course, many ways that God speaks to us today. God speaks to us through the actions of others, through our acts of gathering for worship, praise and instruction, through prayer and meditation, through our holy books, through our learning of spiritual disciplines and the teachings of our savior, prophets and leaders, and through many other formal spiritual disciplines.

I have chosen not to discuss those with you today, in part because it would take another reflection to discuss even one of them, and in part because there are countless books written already to help guide you through those spiritual disciplines.

But there are few books written on the most obvious first step: listening for and hearing God throughout our ordinary lives. And yet that is where even the most fervent believer most neglects the potential conversation with the Holy One. It is the place where we are both the most vulnerable to the vagaries of life, and yet where we are the least likely to turn on and tune in to the One who wants for us only that we live the very best lives we can, and live them abundantly.

The conversation that makes that possible is only available to us if we turn on and tune in. Otherwise, there is nothing but silence.

Blessings and Peace,

Monte

Are You a Failure?

The short passage of Scripture below this essay is from the prophet called "Second Isaiah." The book of Isaiah was written at two, perhaps three, different periods of Israelite history. Second Isaiah wrote during one of the very worst times in the history of Israel.

He wrote from Babylon, while in exile. Jerusalem lay in ruins. The nation had been dragged on its knees into captivity, Isaiah but one of thousands who endured the humiliating march to Babylon in chains.

The text above is the second of four poems, called "Servant Songs," written by this prophet. In the midst of total despair this prophet cries forth a new song; a song not about rebellion or a call for restoration of kingly glory. Rather it is a song of deliverance by the hand of God through the work of a Suffering Servant.

Given the broken nation, the humiliating despair, the depressing knowledge of being captive in a strange land it came as a plea for hope. Almost no one would listen to him, let alone act upon what he had to say. His message was laughable. Yet, in time, what he prophesied came true.

This short message is both strange and beautiful. And it begins in absolute audacity, for he addresses not just his fellow exiles, but the entire world: "Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from far away!"

And then he lays out his credentials, certainly useless in the present circumstances. But lay them out he does. He tells of his call, his vocation. God called him when he was in his mother's womb, before he was born. God even gave him his name; gave him his identity. But for decades God did not tell him what he must do.

God did give him his only weapon: his voice, his tongue - sharp, like a "sword;" made him like a "polished arrow." And God protected him, hid him "in the shadow of his hand...." God did this until the appropriate time, until now. Now, in full adulthood, God told him what he must do. God gave Isaiah his commission.

He must have often wondered to what task he was called. He must have tried many tasks; tried to discern the nature of his call; tried to figure out what exactly he was to do with this life which God had long ago claimed.

God said to this exiled prophet, "You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified." Think about that. God tells Isaiah that he is "Israel." He is the servant who will speak to and for all of the people of the nation. Does this not strike us as ridiculous? This single, exiled, prophet, this nothing will be the vehicle through whom God will be glorified. It is crazy on the face of it.

So it should be of no surprise to us that the prophet tells us that he replied to God not in happy gratitude that at last he knew what his commission was to be, but that he, Isaiah, was unequal to the task. God, it seems, had the wrong man after all.

Isaiah tells us why he felt that way. "But I said, 'I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.'"

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Surely we can identify with that. God had called the prophet from before his birth; and yet, until now, had given him no commission. God had given him nothing with which to oppose the tyranny of the Babylonian oppression but words. Yes, he had a silver tongue, but it up to now it had done him no good in his counsel to the leaders of the nation.

Up to now his tongue had, by his own admission, been used to assuage his own vanity, his pride; to improve his position among the powerful, and to gain for himself stature and admiration by those below him in position and in power.

And so Isaiah was ashamed. And he felt deep in his gut that he was unworthy of the commission. He felt that he was worthless. And if he accepted this commission he believed that he would only let God down, even as he felt that he had done up to now.

This I can identify with. This I think that many of us can identify with. In my case it feels like deja vu when I read this passage. I have "been there, done that." I have often felt exactly that way.

There was not a time from the age of 15 that I did not know that God had called me to be his servant. He called me then, and again at age 18, and at 23, and again at 38. Yet I did not heed the call. Rather, I ran. I ran from the call.

I was gifted with words. And I used them well, often to my own advantage, and often to feed my vanity. At the time I told myself I was doing it for others, as a public servant. I was not then even aware that I was vain, proud, and selfish. After all, if I worked 70 hours a week for the public it only made sense that I would be given increasing responsibility and increasing exposure to, with praise from, the bigger players in the public policy field. It only seemed right.

By any worldly standard I was a success. I spent seven years in the Executive Office of the President, rising quickly through the ranks. I headed the Federal energy and minerals program at the age of 29; was Deputy Director of the Ford Foundation's signature Energy Policy Project, and was the Director of two divisions within the General Accounting Office, rising to the highest rank possible in the Civil Service by age 35. I was Vice President of a Fortune 500 company; and CEO of a division of that company before the age of 40.

And I woke up one morning and thought, as Isaiah did, that it had all been for vanity. And that I had failed. I felt that I had failed myself, but most of all, that I had failed God.

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How about you? This text doesn't just relate to me. This text is not only about prophets and people who at the age of 50 head off to seminary like I did. It is about anyone who reaches out beyond the possibility of doing something just for themselves and doing it as a way to answer a call to service.

It is about all those who have tried to make a difference and yet felt that, in the end, it has all been in vain, who question their motives and their need for approval.

People like these:

--- If you have ever tried to teach a class so well that you were sure that the kids would get the point, and that the parents would be proud of the children's, and your, efforts, and yet the children were indifferent and the parents seemed not to care.

--- If you have ever tried to reach out with help and with your presence at a time of deep crisis in someone's life and they neither seemed to understand nor appreciate what you were doing, and your assistance seemed so futile.

--- If you have ever been enthused about a project or an idea that you just knew would be well received by your bosses, and yet when you presented it you were told that it was considered not worth the effort, or that the company just did not have the time to spend on it, nor the interest in it to make it happen.

--- If you have ever tried to live your working life by the rules, being fair and living up to high moral standards, only to watch others who lie and cheat and dissemble, and who cozy up to the boss, get the promotions and the bonuses.

--- If you have ever tried to raise your children by the virtues of personal integrity and honesty, only to have them ignore your wisdom and turn to their peers for their support and approval, unable to find even the smallest redeeming value in your years of loving care as they grew up.

--- If any of those and countless other seeming failures resonate with you --- then you, with the prophet, have at sometime cried out, "I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity."

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No. This text is not just for prophets and pastors. It is for anyone who has tried to do something noble and good only to feel that the effort has been wasted. It is for anyone who ever has felt that something that they tried would have succeeded if only they had not been so vain, so self righteous, so pridefilled, that they must be the source of the problem.

And the odd thing is that it matters not whether our self-incriminating analysis is true. Likely there is some truth that cuts both ways. Yes, we tried to help others, to serve. And, yes, we were often proud of what we were trying to do, and maybe even just a bit too needful of praise, hoping that someone would recognize that we were making a difference and care enough to say so.

The problem is that God will not listen long to our lamentations about our failures, failures of either character or content. God will not judge us by the standards we set for ourselves to be judged by. And God will surely ignore the standards of success that society assures us are the measure of our real worth.

When God does that, takes us as we are and offers us a new chance, a future that we can move into, without condemnation for past actions or words or mistakes, we will find that grace hard to believe. And we will find that grace hard to accept because we believe that such grace cannot possibly apply to us.

We do this because we too are judging ourselves by the same immediate results that society says we must seek. We too want results. And we want them right now. The sooner the better.

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But usually results don't come instantly.

A teacher may never see the results of her efforts with a group of children. That is unless, if she lives that long, one may drop by to see her after a 20th anniversary reunion and say, "I just wanted to thank you, Miss Jones, for helping open my eyes to a whole new world when I was in your class my senior year."

And your constant care in the last months of your dying friend may never yield visible results, unless, if you are lucky and the friend's child is sensitive, he may write to you, perhaps a year later, "Millie, I just think that you should know that Mom told me how important your constant companionship was to her when you were there for her all those times in the months before she died."

Pastors, teachers, spouses, parents, friends, workers, care givers and managers had better be in love with something far more significant than immediate, visible results.

The call, the vocation, the ministry, of care and outreach to others has such lofty goals, the work of God in the sweep of human history is so mysterious and veiled, and the plans of God for us and for this world are so grand, that all we really know is that the harvest of many of the most important seeds we sow cannot occur until years, perhaps even generations, after we have so carefully sown those seeds.

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Beyond that we must have faith; faith in God and faith in our efforts to care and to give of ourselves to others.

And so we must hold fast, and say with Isaiah. who said immediately after his lament, "yet surely my cause is with the LORD, and my reward with my God."

And in the marvelous, mysterious wisdom of God we will find that all of our judgments of ourselves, and of others; judgments of performance and results, of winners and losers, are but a human miscalculation of what God values most.

We value and judge by "success." But God judges by "faithfulness."

Isaiah quickly learned this truth, for he immediately says that God has cut through all the hesitation, ignored the supposed "failures" of the past and told Isaiah "It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth."

This commission is mind boggling. It reverses every value that Isaiah had assumed was God's measure of Isaiah's worth. In an instant, in a few very directed words, God shows how little he cares about Isaiah's past failures, real and imagined. For here God treats Isaiah as a man of incomparable worth -- and shows it by giving him an even greater commission.

And so it is with us, my friends. With all our judging of ourselves, with our second guessing, with our listening to the praise and the insults of friends and managers, parents and children, God is prepared to look into a future without so much as a murmur about what we did or did not do in the past.

Only God can decide the success or failure of the things we do when we seek to live a life of love and service to others. It does no good to try to usurp God's authority in this matter. God alone will judge.

God calls us to faithful service, not to culturally defined success. So, if we would live our lives in answer to the call to reach out to others, then we must often be satisfied with knowing that we have made a faithful effort in the vineyards.

In this lifetime we may never know for sure just how "successful" we have been. But the Scriptures tell us, unequivocally, that God's definition of success has little to do with worldly rewards and everything to do with loving kindness.

We each must decide which kind of "success" we seek and whether or not our own self critical eyes will lead us away from or toward the faithful service that God counts as success.

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Addendum:

Isaiah 49:1 Listen to me, O coastlands, pay attention, you peoples from far away! The LORD called me before I was born, while I was in my mother's womb he named me.
2 He made my mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me; he made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me away.
3 And he said to me, "You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified."
4 But I said, "I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the LORD, and my reward with my God."
5 And now the LORD says, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him, for I am honored in the sight of the LORD, and my God has become my strength--
6 he says, "It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth."

25 By Old Blue Eyes: Sinatra's Great Standards

AUGUST 11, 2009 10:04PM

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There is no socially redeeming agenda here. Nothing to read. Nothing to think about. Nothing to get all worked up over. Just great music. By The Man himself.

Just slip on some headphones, or turn on some nice speakers, and listen. Open OS or any other sites in another tab and go about reading, writing or whatever else you want to do. The list will keep playing until you want to stop it.

This is too good to miss. The Chairman of the Board at his finest. I took a lot of time organizing only the best here, and have arranged them to move smoothly from swing to ballads and back, including some sentimental songs that are identified solely with Old Blue Eyes at the very end.

This is my tribute to Frank as a follow up on the popular "Who's Going to Fill Their Shoes" post, now pushing 2500 "listens." Nobody will ever fill Sinatra's shoes.

Enjoy!

Permission to Die

AUGUST 10, 2009

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This is a true story. The dialogues are reconstructed from memory of events that happened 18 years ago.

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"So how many are there?"

"Right now there are six. It changes from week to week."

"What exactly am I supposed to do?"

"Just drop in and see them for a few minutes each day you are here. Talk to them. Say a prayer before you leave. I think one or two of them are in comas, but check with the doctor. With the heavy pain meds sometimes its hard to tell if they are sleeping or in a coma."

"You say that none of them is expected to last a month?"

"That's right. They are in our in house hospice."

"I don't think this was in my job description when you interviewed me."

"Job description is your term. I never use it. This isn't a job. Its a calling. I can't tell you what you will be doing in any detail. If you don't think you are called to do this particular thing, then don't. One thing you learn in your 'in field' training is what you are called to do and what you are not. Hopefully you will find that you are called to do whatever needs to be done."

"I know that. I wasn't saying I won't do it. Of course I will. I was just saying that I didn't expect this."

"When I started chaplaincy 15 years ago I didn't expect most of what I have been called to do. You can't really program it and you surely can't plan it. Its day to day. Eventually a kind of pattern will emerge, more by instinct than anything else. Go home for the rest of the day and think about it. If you don't do it, let me know. There are lots of other things that need to be done, but I think you should try to do this."

The Chaplain of Good Samaritan Home smiled at me and picked up a chart on his desk, a signal that the discussion was over. I thanked him and walked down the long main floor hall to the small office behind the chapel that I was given to use the three afternoons and Sunday mornings per week I was to be there.

I learned soon that the closet sized office was a place to hang my coat and set down my briefcase. My real "office" was to be the entire 6 story, three wing, 400 resident retirement home.

"Good Sam" occupied a full city block and was perched high on the west bank of the Mississippi in South St. Louis. It was affiliated with the United Church of Christ. It has since been torn down for development. I can not bring myself to say for "progress."

I was a 52 year old second year seminarian at another UCC affiliated institution, Eden Theological Seminary, located in the suburb of Webster Groves, 6 miles northwest of Good Sam. "Student Chaplain" was my second "in field" education assignment.

Field education was important at Eden. It was a key part of securing the Master of Divinity degree necessary to become an ordained pastor. Three years of field education, plus at least one summer of full time Clinical Pastoral Education in a local hospital, was required to graduate.

It was a bit of a plum to get an assignment to Good Sam. It was one of the few remaining total living facilities in the area and included everything for the residents from assisted living apartments, individual rooms, rehabilitation, an infirmary with a hospice ward, a secure dementia wing, plus dining room, coffee shop, drug store, lounges, recreation rooms, chapel, library, and several commercial services available on site. It was a self contained urban village for the elderly.

After my Monday conversation with the Chaplain, who was my field supervisor, I returned on Wednesday and made my way to the infirmary on the 4th floor. I introduced myself to the nurse supervisor who would soon become my friend and a mentor.

"Hi, I am Monte Canfield."

"Glad to see you, Monte. I'm Mary. Dave has already filled me in. I am very glad to see you. Last year the student wanted nothing to do with the infirmary, to say nothing of the hospice, and it put quite an extra load on Dave. I don't imagine he told you that, but he spent hours here that meant working extra hours to keep up with everything else.

This is far too big an operation for one Chaplain to handle. Let me walk you through the infirmary, introduce you to the doctor and some of the nurses and then I will show you the hospice."

After the tour and introductions, she took me to the back of the infirmary, down a small hallway and into a small ward that was decorated more like a large home bedroom than as an infirmary.

The lighting was subdued. A chair was available beside each bed; and soft music played in the background. It was a pleasant enough place if you didn't think about what it was for. A nurse sat at a small desk near the center of the room. We talked to the nurse a couple of minutes.

Then Mary walked me to one end of the room. "There is room for ten beds here without crowding things. We want the patients to feel as comfortable as possible. When beds are not occupied we move them out of the room to give it a feeling of greater spaciousness.

People are moved here only when two doctors, the staff doctor and their personal physician, agree that they are not likely to live more than another month. Of course we have a few that surprise us and get better for a while, but it is only a matter of time even with them."

"And most of them are Christian?"

"Well, yes, if you mean that they belong to the church. UCC membership is required for admission to Good Sam, as is the recommendation of their pastor. But their faith varies. Some have not set foot in a church in decades. Some married into a church going family but have little or no faith. And some, mostly men, simply do not share what they think about religion, considering that a very private matter. Most are from a generation that sees religion as a very personal experience."

"Dave told me that some may be in comas already."

"I will take you around in a minute and you can see for yourself. Of the six here now, one is definitely in a coma but seems to be stable for now, and one is kind of in and out of consciousness, partly due to his condition and partly due to the heavy pain meds. But I suggest that you always assume that they know you are there and can hear what you say."

We walked to each bed and I was introduced to all, not just the ones who could talk to me and clearly recognize me, but to the one who was in a coma and another who appeared to be sleeping.

After the tour I went back and spent a few minutes at each bedside, learning about the four who were clearly aware and saying prayers with them after asking them if they would like that and asking if there were any particular things they wished me to pray for.

None wished for their own healing, understanding exactly where they were in their own journey. All of them asked for prayers for family members. All said they were glad I was there and looked forward to seeing me again, asking when I would be able to come back. I told them I would see them on Friday.

I spent some time at the two beds where the patients were not responsive. I read some short passages of scripture to them, and said a prayer with each, out loud. I told them I would be back on Friday, although it appeared clear at the time that they did not know I was there.

Over the next two weeks I spent a few minutes with the hospice patients each time I was at Good Sam. I got to know four of them much better and even managed some cognitive contact with the one who was sleeping the first time I visited. He was very much "in and out" but I was sure that he was aware of me.

At the end of that third week I was told that the doctor thought that none of them would last more than a week longer.

That upset me more than I thought it would and, because I was scheduled for a week off the coming week, I went to Dave and asked him if I should come in to be with them instead. He said, "No. You told me before you came here that you needed the week off, so go."

Before I left for the day that Friday I went up to see each one and explained to all, including the one man who was asleep again and the one in a coma, that I was going to be off for a week, but that I would be back to see them a week from Monday, ten days later. I felt I was a bit disingenuous saying that while knowing their prognosis, but I wanted them to know that I was not abandoning them, because that is what it felt like to me.

I felt very badly about the whole thing and wondered if I was just in way over my head. I talked to Mary about it and she nicely reminded me to remember who was really in charge, pointing upwards and giving me a quick hug.

Ten full days later I returned with real trepidation to the infirmary. Mary called me to the side to bring me up to speed.

"I hope you had a good week, Monte. We held our own here, but missed you a lot."

"Just tell me how many died while I was gone."

'Why don't you just come down to the hospice ward with me? You really can't avoid it, you know."

We walked into the hospice ward, my heart heavy. There were now eight beds occupied. I could not believe how many were dying in such a short time span. In less that a month first six, and now eight more.

Mary went to talk to the duty nurse and I sighed and headed to the first bed in the row. It was a man I had not met before. I introduced myself, and went through the pastoral care routine that I was developing without being conscious that a routine was emerging. The new woman in the second bed was asleep, but I went through the same routine as if she were not.

At the third bed I recognized the man in the coma. I looked quickly at the next bed and the familiar face of a lady I had come to admire smiled at me. Quickly I walked down the aisle looking at each bed. Each bed had the patient in it who was there when I left ten days before.

At the last bed the woman raised her head a bit off of her pillow and lifted up her shaking hand to me. I took it and she smiled and said, "Welcome back, Chaplain. We have been waiting for you."

I talked to her for a couple of minutes and told her I would be back in a bit after I talked to the others.

I walked quickly to door where Mary was waiting with a small smile on her face. We walked down the hall a few paces.

"What happened? Surely Dr. Lewis could not have been that far off. He does this kind of prognosis all the time."

"His prognosis is based on reading the body. He doesn't factor in the determination of the spirit that stems from love."

"Love?"

"Yes, love. These folks love God and they have come to love and rely on you."

"But they hardly know me. And why did they not die? They would then be in a far better place than this. They don't need me around to do that. That is between them and God. And what about the one who is seldom conscious; and the one in the coma?"

"Monte, listen to me. They all know that they will soon pass over. And obviously the ones that you thought were simply out of it were not. On some level they heard you talking to them. Look, Monte, you told them that you would be back in 10 days and they took you at your word."

"But that shouldn't affect whether or not they would die when I was gone."

"Don't you see? They were waiting for you. They were waiting for permission to die."

I was shocked; completely baffled, confused, and repelled by the thought.

"I have nothing to do with giving them permission to die. That's not what I am doing here. I never mentioned dying to them. Never."

"Well, maybe it is time that you did. You are their Chaplain. Their own pastors almost never visit them and none of them have been here since they have been in the hospice ward. Dave was able to visit once toward the end of last week, and, like you, he told them that you would be back today. I fully understand why he told them that."

Mary continued, "Don't you see, Monte? To them you are their vicar of God. Whether you want the role or not, or, for that matter, whether or not they are right to think so, these older people need to know that it is OK for them to die. They want permission to do so.

There is no one else who is as close to them spiritually right now as you are; not even their family members, although most of them can't bear coming anyway, and so they don't. But you can give them that permission. They are ready to go. Let them."

I was still confused. But mostly I was in denial. I wanted no part of any such power, real or imagined. I had never asked for it. I did not seek it. I did not think it was good theology. I did not see it as part of my call. And I certainly did not think I was worthy to offer such permission.

I simply did not know what to do. But, almost instinctively, I trusted Mary. After 30 years dealing with people in situations like these she had learned much and had kindly shared that learning with me. I was learning something that I did not want to know. But I had to learn it.

I walked back into the ward and went to each bed, picked up a listless hand or held the thin hand of one who was awake and smiling at me. With great emotion welling inside of me I told each of them, "I am very glad to see you. I missed you, and want you to know that I recognize how hard it is for you to go on day by day."

I continued, "But I also want you to know that you will soon be going to a wonderful place, a place too beautiful for mere words, a place where there is no more pain or exhaustion; a place where you will be with God and where you will be again with your loved ones who have gone there before you."

And finally, I told them, "It is OK for you to let go of this place now. I can imagine how hard it must be to hold on here. So it is OK to go to on to that life where you will be in the the much closer presence of our Savior, the place we have all dreamed about since we accepted our faith.

I will miss you when you go, but I promise to look you up when I get there. It will be good to see you again when you are strong and happy, without pain and surrounded by love."

I then said a simple prayer. "God, this is your precious child who will soon be coming home to you. Please welcome this loved child with the same open arms with which you welcomed you Son."

Then I kissed each on the forehead, women and men alike, and walked from the room, tears streaming down my face. I knew the glory that awaited them, but I knew the sorrow of the coming loss to me of these who were strangers only a month or so before.

By the end of the week all had passed quietly on to be in the closer presence of the Lord. As each passed on I said for each the prayers for the dying, or for the dead if they died when I was at school and not at Good Sam, and I found comfort in those ancient words.

It was a hard lesson to watch how death was an integral, inevitable part of life that each of us must learn to accept in our own way. My lesson came unbidden, but proved to be the necessary lesson for me.

Through the years of my ministry, and through hundreds of bedside vigils and funerals, I always had misgivings about the authority that most members of the church place in the hands of chaplains and pastors. I still do. But I never again doubted that they do trustingly give us that authority.

And I finally accepted that, if they believed that I was the one whom God had given to them to help them through some of the hardest times of their lives, and even through their deaths, then I would do the best I could to serve them with love, compassion and hope.

From that time forward until now nothing in my ministry would ever be more humbling than this unwanted calling. There has been nothing that I consider myself both more burdened by, and yet more privileged to do, than to be there for them when they need God's love the most.

Claiming the Stories of Faith

AUGUST 7, 2009 9:25AM

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Woodcut of Abraham and Sarah

Note: this post is directed primarily to Christians and Jews and to those interested in the theology of those faiths. However there are hopefully lessons to be learned that are applicable to those of other faiths and those who are interested in the foundations of Jewish and Christian faith.

Christians and Jews should look to the Bible for the great stories upon which our faith is built. In spite of what our clergy and doctrinal theologians too often teach, our understanding of God is not found only in a few key verses, lines, lists or parables. The stories of the faith are most often where the theology had its genesis, not in lists of rules.

Faith is far more than rules, "dos and don'ts," doctrines and dogma. And faith is demonstrated in stories; those of our ancestors in faith and our personal stories. Stories are at the heart of God's message to us. To the extent that we embrace our faith, ancestral stories within the Bible are our family stories, told to enlighten, inform and form us in our daily living.

To give you an idea of the truth of this, let's look at the story of Abraham and Sarah, the story out of which came the greatest proclamation of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther concluded that our salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone. This is the idea we today call “justification by faith.”

Other conclusions have been derived throughout the centuries from the stories of the faith and are recorded in the Talmud, in the teachings of the early church, both Eastern and Western, and in many of the teachings within Christianity and Judaism today. Much of that theology is derived from the stories of faith found in the Bible.

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The story of Abraham and Sarah in the Hebrew Bible runs from the end of Chapter 11 of Genesis into the beginning of Chapter 25. I am going to summarize some of the highlights of that story now. You should, of course, read the story for yourself and see if you get some of the same ideas and come to similar conclusions. Each story informs us differently as individuals.

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In Chapter 12 Abram and Sarai, trusting God's promise to them totally, pull up stakes and leave their homeland of Ur, and the life that they knew, not knowing even where they are going, only that God told them to go, promising them a great future.

They end up in Canaan. But Abram is put to the test soon thereafter. There is a famine in Canaan, and Abram loses faith and they abandon the promise and flee to Egypt.

There, fearful for his own skin, Abram has Sarai claim that she is his sister. (She is his half-sister; but she is also his wife.) He does this because she is beautiful and he is afraid the Egyptians will kill him and take Sarai if he admits she is his wife. So she lies to please Abram, who is not killed, but Sarai is taken and becomes one of Pharaoh’s concubines, and a favorite at that. That is pretty impressive since Sarai is pushing 70 years old at the time!

Because Pharaoh is charmed by Sarai, he pours riches on her “brother” Abram. Pharaoh ferrets out Abram's deception, and, acting more honorably that Abram, he has them both kicked out of Egypt! Surprisingly, Pharaoh doesn’t have him killed; and he doesn’t strip him of his possessions. So they are out of Egypt, but they are very rich.

The first thing you notice is that this is a very strange, highly condensed story, full of hyperbole and shrouded in bits of myth. Yet it is very much designed to show clearly the motives and ambitions of Abram and Sarai.

Nothing about Abram's character is glossed over or made to seem better than it is. Abram shows almost no redeeming qualities at all, does not trust God, and uses half-lies to secure his own future. Yet God does not abandon him and continues to protect him.

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In Chapter 13 we find Abram back in Canaan, cattle farming with his nephew, Lot. But they have so many cattle that they can’t both graze the same land, and quarrels break out between their herdsmen. So, in stark contrast to the person we came to know, and dislike, in Chapter 12, Abram becomes very generous and lets Lot choose the best land. Abram takes the scrub desert.

In other words, Abram, once again trusts the promise, trusts God to provide. And God does. More importantly, God again appears to Abram and repeats the promise: land, descendants, prosperity, and that a great nation will arise from him, a nation by which all other nations and peoples shall be blessed. Abram again believes God, and both he and Lot prosper.

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Chapter 14 is an odd little interlude in which Lot finds himself embroiled in a local war, gets captured, and is rescued by Abram. After that, King Melchizedek, called a “priest of the most high God,” blesses Abram. In the New Testament book of Hebrews, much is made of Melchizedek, but he does not play a large role in the story of Abraham and Sarah.

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Chapter 15 is a pivotal chapter. It is the sixth verse of Chapter 15 that St. Paul relies upon to show how we are justified by grace, through faith. This idea was effectively buried until Martin Luther resurrected it over 1400 years later and put his own spin on it. A key verse reads, “And he (Abram) believed God, and the Lord reckoned it to him as ighteousness.”

Right before this verse, Abram’s faith had wavered yet again. And we can easily see why. In spite of the promises of God, Sarai is still childless, and Abram can’t see how she can ever have a child. So he doubts.

And God promises yet again! And yet again, Abram believes, and this time, because of his faith, God treats him AS IF he were righteous. God, “reckons it to him as righteousness.” Now, clearly, he isn’t very righteous. He is not “right with God” which is what being righteous means.

He is righteous neither according to his actions in Egypt, nor according to his constant vacillation in his trust of God. But, just this small amount of faith is enough for God to treat him as if he were righteous.

And that is true with us. Our faith is seldom, if ever, pure. We vacillate, we wander, we have our doubts; we come back to God, only to back away again and try to control our present and invent our own future. But God accepts our small, faltering, halting attempts at faith and justifies us, though we are not actually righteous. Christians, of course, believe that this justification comes to us because of our faith in Christ.

But in this story, there is a price to be paid by Abram for his wavering faith. God tells him that the some of the promise will be delayed, and not just for a couple of weeks. God says that the total fulfillment of the promise will be delayed for 400 years!

Abram will reap some of the rewards of the promise in his lifetime, but it will be future generations who will reap the reward of a land that they can call their own! Abram himself will not see this, but his descendants will. Because Abram vacillates, over and over, between faith and doubtt he full reward of the promise is delayed, but the promise remains!

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And so we come to Chapter 16. And Sarai is still barren. Plus she is getting really old. So she and Abram decide, again, to abandon the promise; to try to take life, literally, into their own hands, to circumvent the waiting. Sarai tells Abram to lay with her Egyptian slave girl, Hagar, and attempt to conceive offspring through her.

He does; and Hagar becomes pregnant; and then makes the mistake of flaunting that fact in Sarai’s face. Sarai becomes furious and mistreats Hagar, who runs away. But this amazing God cares not only for the chosen, but for others as well, and He sends and angel after Hagar, who tells her to return.

The angel guarantees to Hagar that her son, who will be born Ishmael, will be cared for by God, and will become a great person and nation in his own right. But there is no guarantee that Ishmael will inherit the promised land. Rather, Ishmael will forever remain outside of God’s divine plan for this elected family.

But, and this is vitally important, Ishmael will be greatly blessed. God blesses and cares for so called "outsiders" as well as for we who think of ourselves as "insiders."

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By Chapter 17 yet more time has passed. Abram is now 99 and Sarai is 90! And, in spite of their doubting the promise and their aborted intentions to take their future into their own hands, God appears yet again; and again God promises. But with the passing years the promise looks even more impossible and ridiculous to the couple, and also to us.

Yet, God is insistent, and in a symbolic act of great importance, which is often ignored or misunderstood when we read this story, God changes their names. He gives them new identities which signify new life and new possibility.

Abram is named Abraham; Sarai, Sarah. To underscore the truth of the promise, Abram, which means in Hebrew “Exalted Ancestor,” becomes Abraham, which means, “Ancestor of a multitude!” And still Abraham doubts, name change or not. Abraham doubts. We would likely doubt too.

And so God “cuts a covenant” with Abraham, makes him a promise that will be sealed in blood. And the sign of that covenant is circumcision. Circumcision becomes the physical sign of the special and chosen nature of Abraham in God’s eyes. And Abraham trusts God again — a lot, I’d say — because Abraham then circumcises himself! And he circumcises his 13 year old son Ishmael. That is likely more detail than we needed to know. But just imagine the pain!

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This little wince filled scene brings us to the climactic Chapter of the promise: Chapter 18. This is not the end of the story by any means, which runs on through Chapter 25, but it is the high point of the story of the promise made and to be kept.

Three men visit Abraham and Sarai. And Abraham extends to them hospitality. In reality, they are God and two angels in disguise! (As a little aside, this is where the saying in Hebrews 13 comes from “Be kind to strangers, for you may be entertaining angels unawares!”)

In the course of the visit the strangers ask after Sarah, who is in the tent preparing food. One, who is God in disguise, says to Abraham that he will return to them and Sarah shall have a son. Sarah, eavesdropping, overhears this, and laughs to herself at the audacity of such a statement.

But God hears her unvoiced laugh and tells Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.” But Sarah denied, saying, “I did not laugh!” The Lord said, “Oh yes, you did laugh, Sarah!”

Here then, we are at the heart of the matter: how very hard having faith is. Listen to Walter Bruggemann on this key point in Chapter 18:

“Once again, this story shows what a scandal and difficulty faith is. Faith is NOT a reasonable act which fits into the normal scheme of life and perception....

Abraham and Sarah have by now become accustomed to their barrenness. They are resigned to their closed future. They have accepted that helplessness as normal. The gospel promise does not meet them in receptive hopefulness, but in resistant hopeLESSness....

The total Abraham /Sarah story is about a call embraced. But in this central narrative the call is NOT embraced. It is rejected as nonsensical. And indeed, if no new thing can intrude, if newness must be conjured from present resources, the promise announced here IS truly nonsensical. But we must focus on the question of the Lord in verse 4, “Is anything impossible for the Lord?”

Bruggemann is right. We are at the heart of the matter of this story. This is the conundrum that we always face in our relationship with God. If we say, “No, nothing is impossible for the Lord,” then we embrace the promise, however unsteadily.

If we say, “Yes, some things are impossible, even for God,” then we are not yet ready. We are not yet willing to let the initiative flow from us to God. We aren’t ready to relinquish control. So God can say to Sarah, and to us, “Oh, yes, you DID laugh!”

And that could be the end of the story. God could add, “If you are going to laugh at my promise, you are on your own. I’ll go help someone else!” But, of course, no thanks to Abraham and Sarah, it isn’t the end.

You see God’s plans do not depend on our opinions about how preposterous we think God’s promises are! Even here, toward the very end of the story of the promise, Abraham and Sarah still have serious doubts. But, God will be God and will do what God wants to do.

God will keep Abraham’s and Sarah’s future open, in spite of their doubt. Just so God keeps our future open, in spite of our doubts. We may think that we are in control, but it is not up to us to decide what God will do. God intends to "make all things new", in spite of all resistance from us to the contrary.

The question for us today is the same as it was for Abraham and Sarah then: Will we trust God? Will we embrace the promise, the future, and live the sense of joy and freedom that embrace can bring? Or will we laugh and say, “There are some things that really are impossible, you know.”

This story says that the future is in the hands of God. It always has been. On our own, all we can claim of the future with certainty is the knowledge that we all shall die. That is our future without the promise. With the promise of the promise we are told that we shall live, now and forever.

In this story Abraham and Sarah, ultimately, trust the promise, and God has the last laugh. Sarah has her baby boy, and God names him “Laughter!” Isaac means laughter. Later God will name another baby boy. He will call this one, Emmanuel, “God with us!”

It all comes down to this. Will we believe the promise of faith? That is always the question. God promises us new life. And the story of Abraham and Sarah urges that we see that God will provide it. That is their story. It is also our story, a story told about our ancestors in faith. Are we ready to claim it? Are we willing to receive from God, grace, through faith? The offer still stands. The promise still awaits.

The Battered Boy Who Found His Identity by Reading Books

The boy was quiet today; introspective. He had been angry when he woke up, but he stuffed it down deep inside himself. The anger never did him much good; it just made him feel worse.

His mother had beaten him again last night and locked him in his bedroom for the rest of the night. He was used to it but hated to have to pee in an old coffee can and remembered the time when he had to go number two and had to pound on the door to wake someone up to let him out in the middle of the night.

He had heard rustling and grumbling in his parents bedroom next door, followed by his mother screaming at his Dad. He had prayed that the one to open the door would be his Dad for he feared what his mother would do if she opened it. Thankfully, it was his Dad who opened the door, tossled his hair, and told him to be quiet so he didn't further upset his mother.

He loved his Dad beyond measure and was very grateful that he had come into his life three years earlier when Mom decided to marry him. Dad was his only protection and there were mornings when he was on the verge of tears seeing Dad go off to work knowing that he would be captive to the ever changing moods of Mom without Dad there to protect him.

Ironically, summer times which his teacher said were great times to be a child, to run and play and feel the joy of freedom from school work were the worst times of the boy's life. He lived for school, the protection it provided, the niceness of the adults, even the stern ones, and he worked very hard to please them.

They, in turn, seemed to like him a lot and thought it was wonderful that a poor boy who lived in the old Army barracks down by the Bay was such a good and intelligent student. They knew nothing of his home life and he was not about to tell them.

And so the boy became what we would call "bookish" and for the rest of his life he would escape into the world of books where he was free to do whatever the writer did, taking flights to worlds he could explore without fear, reading the biographies of great men who overcame lives much like his own.

Books became his mentors, his guides, his lovers, and most of all, his friends. They still are to this day. In books he saw that any life could be overcome, that better things could happen to those who really worked at having a better life. And he learned that while it helped to have at least a few people to serve as guides, like his Dad and his teachers, mostly it was up to him what he would become.

But there were times like today when he was listless, tired of the beatings, tired of trying to please when what he did one day was praised and the same thing the next day criticized and often punished.

While he knew that he was brighter than most of his classmates the inconsistency of his mother's moods was more than even a bright nine year old mind could handle. He could not understand the smothering, gushing shows of love and affection at one moment only to be followed by screaming, spitting rage and beatings the next.

Dad had let him out of the bedroom at 5:30 this morning, had kissed him on the forehead, and gone off to work. The boy had gone quietly into the bathroom, washed his face and brushed his teeth. He got dressed in an old pair of jeans, put on a fresh t-shirt and his socks and tennis shoes and headed to the kitchen to make a couple of peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

He grabbed a few of the Toll House cookies Mom had made yesterday and filled the large old Thermos that Dad had given him with milk, placing all of this in a cotton bag. He went carefully back to his room and got two books from the series "The Lives of the Presidents" that he had checked out of the library. He put them in the bag, and quietly slipped out of the door.

This decision could have consequences that he had already weighed. Mom would not be up until much later but when she got up and started on her three pots of coffee and three packs of cigarettes for the day she would at some point realize that he was gone. Then it would be a flip of a coin as to how Mom would react.

She could be furious and be waiting for him at the door when he came home, or she could be grateful that she did not have to deal with "that little bastard" all day. But either way he knew he would not come home until he saw Dad's car in the parking lot. Dad was the only protection he had.

So as he walked away from the barracks apartment he knew that this was just one of the chances that he had to take. He had taken it many times before and he could not begin to predict how she would react.

Later, he learned that life in general would be no different. He would learn that you did whatever you had to do to keep yourself together as much as possible, to protect and improve your own person, because not many others cared one way or the other. And to do that you often had to take chances.

He headed for the slough that flowed into San Diego Bay and his day brightened. He went to his favorite spot under some scrub brush, sat down in the sand near where he had managed to capture a trap door spider a couple of days before. He had let the spider go soon after and watched it scamper back to its hole and close the door firmly over itself. That hole was its sanctuary.

This spot on the sandy banks of a dirty creek flowing through National City's slums was his sanctuary. He could see North Island far in the distance from here. Dad was there and would be home in the evening and provide him some protection.

So he had his sanctuary, his Dad for protection later that day, something to eat and drink and two good books to read. He would read and dream about how the Presidents had each overcome their own particular problems and he would tell himself that if they could do it so could he.

He would watch the gulls and the herons, the pipers and the other sea birds that fed in the slough. And he would walk down later a few hundred yards to where the creek entered the bay and see if he could spot some crawdads and flounder and, if he got lucky, he might see a couple of immature hammerhead sharks that hunted the small fish where the slough joined the bay.

For today, it was enough. He opened the cotton bag, took a drink of milk from the Thermos, got out the next book in the series and started reading. For a boy who did not often smile there was a smile on his face, just a little one, by the time he got to page two.

"Good Fences make Good Neighbors"

JULY 31, 2009 3:44PM

Allie, Jake and Gracie. Since this picture was taken Jake is bigger than both of his half sisters

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We were frustrated and angry. I said, "We'll put in a fence."

"A fence?"

"Yeah, not around everything. Just on this side, from the front of the porch to the property line, then back to the garage and tie in there. About 130 feet as I measure it, maybe a little more."

"What kind of fence?"

"I was thinking a tall, 5', chain link. Something strong but that you can see through."

"Well, I definitely would want to be able to see through it to see what that bitch is doing. But isn't that pretty expensive?"

"Look, she says she will kill the kittens if they come on her porch again and I believe her. And you know they probably will go there again before we can catch them because Irene always fed them there before she moved. So, yes, we will catch the kittens and bring them inside, but I don't know how easy it will be to trap Mama."

"So? I still don't see why we need a fence."

"Because she has told you and everyone else that she has no intention of moving. And even if she does we have had pretty poor luck with those neighbors in that apartment. More importantly, you know that dog lunges at you every time you walk to the garage. She intentionally puts him so he comes right to the property line and sometimes over.

I saw that metal stake she puts the chain on. Its driven in the ground less that a foot. If that dog pulled that stake out you could never fight off a vicious 100 pound dog and you know it. The Police Chief says he talked to her and she told him to get off her property. There is nothing he can do until the dog actually hurts someone."

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We had been feeding the Mama cat and her two kittens in our summer kitchen shed. We had a heated water bowl and heated pad they could use for warmth, but they seldom stayed in the shed. Earlier that spring Sue caught the kittens and we had them spayed and given rabies shots.

They were about nine months old at the time, calico sisters of the two kitten litter Mama had dropped the prior summer. We called them Gracie and Allie, for Gracie Allen. I can't remember why. We did not consider them "our" cats. They were feral and we already had a cat.

Since we had no doubt that the woman next door would try to kill them, we had to catch the kittens again and bring them inside to be house cats if they would tolerate that. Sue caught them, brought them inside and they adapted quickly.

Unfortunately, our old brindled tabby, Divot, hated them and attacked them constantly. Fur flew everywhere and they were terrorized. Later, after months of trying to figure a way to keep Divot from killing them we gave up and a good friend who had to put her dog down recently took Divot.

Divot adjusted totally to being the only cat again and is happy. We pay for Divot's vet bills, buy food and litter for her when our friend will let us, and Sue visits our friend and Divot frequently. Now that Divot is queen again and has no competition, she could not be happier.

Meanwhile, since there was no way we were going to get that renter to move from next door I proceeded with the fence project. First was the land survey which was $450. I got a friend who was starting a landscaping business to do it as a way to add to the things he offered his customers.

Although he had never done it before he did an excellent job and charged me "only" $1250, about half of what others were charging. So the fence project was $1700. Vet bills were another $150 for the feral kittens, and we still had the evil woman next door to contend with. Why? Because of the dog -- and because before we caught Mama she had another litter. We didn't know where she was keeping her kittens.

We had started feeding Mama out behind the garage on the alley because the dog would go nuts when he saw her and she would not come around, and the woman next door was threatening to kill her too. I had no doubt she would poison Mama if she could.

Within two months Mama started showing up out at the garage with two kittens, a light colored calico and a gray and black tabby. While we had put a nice custom made cat box out with the food and water they seldom got in it, preferring to live in the bushes and under the sheds in the neighborhood.

One morning Sue called me from work, "The cat box and the food and water dishes are gone."

What do you mean 'gone?'"

"They were there when I came home from work last night and they are just gone this morning."

"We both know who took them but there is no way to prove it."

"I know. But now I am worried about the kittens. If she sees them you know what she will do. They can scoot right under the fence in several places. I've seen them do it."

We agreed that we had all the cats we needed and that we would try to find a home for the kittens. So we called around to see if we could find anyone to take them. That did not work out.

A week later.

"The calico hasn't been around all week."

We looked around the neighborhood several times but never saw the calico again and have no idea whether the woman next door had caught it and killed it or if something else happened to it. Again, we had a theory and no proof.

Meanwhile, Mama had started rejecting the gray tabby, swiping at him if he came to eat and hissing and running him off. He was almost three months old and we had watched Mama do the same to Gracie and Allie at about the same age.

Mama's hormones were kicking in and she was likely to go into heat again shortly. It was time to catch her if we could and have her spayed. Eventually we caught her in a humane trap and had her spayed and given a rabies vaccine.

The little gray tabby was ultra friendly, loud and demanding of attention from Sue, totally unlike his calico sister who was shy and skittish before she vanished. Whenever the garage door was opened in the morning he was waiting for attention, running to her and crying all the time. She would pick him up, pet him and then get into the car. Soon he was jumping into the car as soon as she opened the door.

He would wait for her in the afternoons and as soon as she got home he would follow her car into the garage and yell his head off for attention. She was trying desperately to not get attached to him. But he started following her to the house and the dog next door would lunge and bark and claw at the ground and sometimes the fence.

I had more words with the woman about chaining the dog too close to the fence, which was 6" inside my property line. She screamed at me and I gave up and called the Police. They spoke to her again and told her I would press charges if the dog kept tearing at my new fence. I heard her screaming at them but the next day the stake was a couple of feet further from the fence.

Meanwhile we gave up trying to convince ourselves that we could not take in one more kitten, which is how we got Jake. He decided he was an inside cat and was never going to be alone again from the moment we set him down on the kitchen floor. He quickly started following his half sisters around demanding their attention too.

I named him Jacob because the Jacob of the Bible was a charmer and a scoundrel and Jake is growing into the name very well. He is loving, gets in trouble all the time, charms the socks off of everyone and then gets into more trouble -- just like his namesake did.

Through all of this commotion and anger and frustration with the woman next door I had been talking to her landlady about her. The landlady told me that she would do nothing about her until something happened that I could prove. It never did.

But, adding in the vet costs for Jake, when the dust settled the woman had cost us about $2000.

And, wouldn't you know, only a few months after we took in Jake the woman moved. I don't know why she moved but we were relieved to say the least.

Today, we have a new neighbor, another renter, a very nice single man in his 40s who has two cats! We often talk over the fence, almost always about loving cats. Right now I figure if every conversation we have is worth, say, $1, we should pay for the fence in about half a century or so.

I am gradually more able to look at the fence and not see dollar signs, but hey, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Or do they?

Mourning into Dancing

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Note: like most of my religious posts this is not short. If you are looking for a religious sound bite, this is not it. Understanding religion is not easy even for professional clergy and theologians like myself. And making it easier to understand by intelligent laypersons takes more words than if I were writing a professional paper where I could assume that everyone understood the text, the context, the jargon, the shortcut phrases, and such. I write this post to be clear and understandable to Christians, and, hopefully, to other believers and non-believers alike. Keep in mind this is written by a Christian for other Christians and those interested in this religion, but it contains metaphors, themes and moral injunctions that should appeal to anyone interested in living an ethical life.

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Jeremiah 31:1 At that time, says the LORD, I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they shall be my people. 2 Thus says the LORD: The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness; when Israel sought for rest,

3 the LORD appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. 4 Again I will build you, and you shall be built, O virgin Israel! Again you shall take your tambourines, and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers.

5 Again you shall plant vineyards on the mountains of Samaria; the planters shall plant, and shall enjoy the fruit. 6 For there shall be a day when sentinels will call in the hill country of Ephraim: "Come, let us go up to Zion, to the LORD our God."

7 For thus says the LORD: Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob, and raise shouts for the chief of the nations; proclaim, give praise, and say, "Save, O LORD, your people, the remnant of Israel."

8 See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor, together; a great company, they shall return here.

9 With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back, I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble; for I have become a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn.

10 Hear the word of the LORD, O nations, and declare it in the coastlands far away; say, "He who scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd a flock." 11 For the LORD has ransomed Jacob, and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him.

12 They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the LORD, over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd; their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again.

13 Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old shall be merry. I will turn their mourning nto joy, I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.

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Jeremiah is a hard prophet to write about and the passage above is not typical of his writings; but it is the most important thing he has to say to us today. Mostly Jeremiah was a prophet of gloom and doom, and rightly so, given the time in which he prophesied. And, even a casual reading of his book will leave most readers with the distinct impression that often his elevator did not seem to go to the top floor.

Jeremiah was known to do crazy things. He was kind of a living metaphor. For instance, one time he walked 800 miles from Jerusalem to a place on the Euphrates River where he buried his new underwear in the side of the river bank, because, he said, "The Lord told him to do it."

Then, much later on, having returned to Jerusalem, he goes back to the river and digs the underwear out of the river bank, and the garments have all rotted and decayed. His point? This same fate will happen to Judah if it does not straighten up. A dramatic demonstration, to be sure, but there must have been an easier way to get the point across!

When not busy subjecting his underwear to the rot test he is screaming at people and almost gets himself killed several times for speaking God's word to people who simply don't believe it is God's word. How can God's word actually come from a guy who seems several cards short of a full deck?

And so, Jeremiah was often in mourning, mourning for the nation, and at times for himself; mourning because the day of reckoning for Judah was fast approaching and the people who needed to listen mostly ignored him.

But we must also remember that Jeremiah always had something than many, then and now, do not have: hope. Jeremiah was never without hope. Amidst his outrage, his diatribes, his utter disgust with the government and its people, God never let Jeremiah forgot that, with God, there was always hope.

But, mostly he was in mourning and left to his own devices he would have been a bitter, lonely man. But God filled him with hope, hope that he otherwise would have rejected because all he had to do was to look around him and see that there was no reason to hope.

And just as God insisted that Jeremiah preach the damning of the nation which had lost its way, God insisted that Jeremiah include in his message the hope of a brighter day.

Remember another thing about Jeremiah: he was God's spokesman, and it did not matter to him if he fully understood why God wanted him to say and do what he did, nor if he agreed with it. He spoke what God told him to say, and if he personally suffered from the responses to his oracles, well, that just went with the territory. And in the text above it is clear that at one point in this dismal prophet's life God told him to speak of turning mourning into dancing.

For you to understand how he got to this point I need to set the scene for you. Israel is in shambles. The Northern Kingdom, Ephraim, has already been overrun for over a hundred years, and is captive to foreigners.

What is left of free Israel is the smaller southern part, Judah, which is now facing its own doom, and is about to be destroyed by Babylonian hordes from the north. Shortly, the great city of Jerusalem, the city of David, will fall, not once but twice in ten years, and its leaders will be marched off to Babylon in chains.

Ironically, Jeremiah is the only prophet who understands that this invasion by the Babylonians is God's work. It is God's punishment of the Israelites for turning away from him.

Yet, in the midst of all the chaos, rot and decay, in the twilight right before the darkness of total military defeat, God speaks a work of hope through Jeremiah: "In that time, says the Lord, I will be the God of all the families...and they will be my people."

But when, one might ask, is "that time" in which God will once again be with God's people? There is an unstated opportunity for learning here, for the Israelites and for us. "That time" is in God's hands. "That time" will be when God says it will be. God's promise insists that God is in control, even though the Israelites may think that they are.

God is in control; not Judah; certainly not already defeated Ephraim. Even the fierce Babylonians are but the tools God will use to chastise the Israelites who have turned their hearts from him believing that they are in charge of their own futures.

Given that, what then, is the role of the Israelites? Israel's role is the wait and watch upon the Lord in hope, waiting and listening for his Word. God has promised that hope will be rewarded "in good [God's] time."

What is a bit amazing is that we Christians are already much better off than the ancient Israelites. Christians can not hide behind the idea that we have not heard. We have already heard God's word to Christians, and still we dig ourselves deeper into sin.

God has not told us to wait and watch for when God will be with us. Christians have been told for over 2000 years that our salvation is here, now, Emmanuel, "God with us." God has already answered us.

But have we really heard him? Do we really believe it? Have we heard him tell us that now is the time to turn our mourning into dancing?

The Israelites had to wait through a time of destruction and despair before they were to hear the Word of God again. But we have heard it. Christians know what that Word is, who that Word is: Jesus Christ. For those who believe the Christian message and know what it means to follow him in the Way, this time, now, is "in God's good time."

The Gospel message is that this is the time when God says it is time to turn our mourning into joy, our mourning into dancing. This is the time to dance, to participate in the party that God is offering us because of faith in his Son.

God is saying to us, "I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you." If we believe that then why all the worry about when "things" will get better? Things, including material things, are already better for many of us. But. instead of helping things get better for all, we insist on hoarding our blessings, including our bounty.

Are we sharing those blessing with others so they can know them too? Are we reaching out to those that are hurting, have suffered losses, are in the throes of illness, and said that we will be with them and pray for them, that we will help them, sharing with them some of the love that God has poured out on us?

A few have shared generously and continue to do so; many have done that for a while and then fallen back into fearful, self preservation mode, even though God tells us we already have our salvation, that however bad it is now for us we will experience joy and love beyond our comprehension at a future time.

This is the time to share, to invite, to help, to reach out, to give both our bounty and our love to others. This is the time to dance, and to share that hope with others who have it far worse than we do, a time to turn our mourning, our self directed pity, towards others who are desparate to turn their mourning into dancing.

We may say that we are not worthy to celebrate; we may say that our Christianity is weak, that we have doubts about our faith. Of course we are not worthy! Christianity does not exist because we are worthy. We have weaknesses; we have doubt; we are, in other words, human. If we were worthy we would not need Jesus, his love, his sacrifice for us. God isn't inviting us to dance because we are worthy. He is inviting us because he loves us. It is by our faith in his Son that we are "considered" worthy.

We may say that we can't forgive those harsh words, the hurt we felt, when this one or that one said this or that, or did this or that to us.. We may say to ourselves, "I find it hard, maybe impossible to forgive." Of course it is hard to forgive. We are all sinners.

Why would we think that forgiveness should be easy? It was not easy for Christ to go to the Cross for us; to forgive we who crucified him. Yes. You are a sinner. But don't be afraid to come to the party -- because God is inviting only sinners anyway!

Why hold on to old hates, when there is so much love that you could be spreading around? So come to the party dressed in your sins. God loves you and if you come to the party some of that excessive love that God freely gives may rub off on you. And you may be surprised to find that you have the courage to ask that person that you "simply cannot stand" to dance.

Remember this: everyone is invited. Everyone. God excludes not one single person. To the Israelites he invited the far flung remnant to come home and rest under their own vines and trees unafraid. Christians are asked to invite others to "come and see" what we have when we gather to worship.

Were we to do that what would the visitors see? Would they see Christians partying, rejoicing in God's grace, welcoming all to come in and party with us?

Or would they see us picking and choosing who could come, who could dance, who will be considered eligible to become "insiders" and who we will define as "outsiders?' Would they see a warm, open, welcoming, joy filled group of people or would they find a dour, doubtful, fearful, closed, prejudicial, worried and inbreed bunch who have confused their own insistent selectivity with God's openness and love?

Christians would do well to remember that God calls all people in this world "his children." Christians have the way that we come to him, to close the gap between us and him. But Jesus came to the world that all might be saved, that all would be welcome, that all may know the joy of turning mourning into dancing.

No one should presume to claim that they know how God intends to bring all people to him. I know how God intends to bring Christians to him. That is enough for me to know. I have found in my years of working with Christians that I had more than enough work just getting Christians to dance. But the goal is the same regardless of the path: to make it to the dance and to live within the spirit of the promise of God to Jeremiah.

"They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the LORD, over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd; their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again. Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old shall be merry. I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow."

God promises that the rest of this life and the life to come can be a party, a dance in celebration of life, of God's gift of that life to us. Now is the time to turn our mourning into dancing.

The Case of Shoney's Big Boy & Evil Motorcyclists!

First published on JULY 20, 2009 2:01PM

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The famous Shoney's Big Boy Mascot

A typical Shoney's Big Boy Resturant in the '50s to '70s

Riders bunched up --

right before setting the bike for a slide turn

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Based on a true story. Summer, 1968

Every summer my best friend, Earl, and I chased the Grand National motorcycle circuit.

Flat Track racing was the most important part of the Grand National Circuit. At speeds that can hit 140 mph on one mile dirt tracks, riders slide into a corner, lean in for a left turn, put weight onto a steel soled shoe used as an outrigger, turn the front wheel to the right to scrub off speed, and slide the rear end of the bike around to face the other way.

This is a ballet of exquisite and infinitely dangerous beauty, often with more than a dozen riders hitting the corner at the same time, three and four wide, rubbing handlebars as they execute the turn. There is nothing remotely like it.

Every year Earl and I rode our bikes from DC to five to ten flat track races. We were young and we worked in the Executive Office of the President (EOP) so we were full of ourselves. We also drank too much. But we were happy drunks. Mostly.

This trip was in August. We were going to the Charity Newsies race at Columbus, Ohio.

Before I-68 was built the quickest route from DC was north on 1-70 which became the Pennsylvania Turnpike heading west and then, south of Pittsburgh, getting off the Turnpike where it was then a straight shot to Columbus through Wheeling, WV, and into Ohio. Not quite 500 miles.

I was on my new 1968 Triumph Bonneville and Earl was on a 1966 Honda CB 450. We left DC around 9 am on Saturday morning and made good time. We hit Wheeling about 4 in the afternoon. We decided to eat in Wheeling. Actually, I decided it. I wanted to do it early and at a place that didn't serve liquor. Earl would drink if it did.

There was a Shoney's Big Boy in Wheeling right off the interstate. As we rode into the parking lot a sign saying "No motorcycles" greeted us. We parked near the door and went in anyway.

When we got into the restaurant we were met by an overweight matronly woman who said, "No motorcyclists are allowed in here."

Earl said, "What do you mean, "No motorcyclists?'

"It's the policy. No motorcyclists.'

"Are you the manager?"

"I'm the head waitress. No motorcyclists."

"Let me speak to the manager."

She sighed and turned and walked to the back of the dining room and disappeared into a hallway. By this time others were entering behind us.

A small, thin middle aged man with no chin and wearing glasses came out to talk to us.

"I'm sorry, gentlemen, but you will have to leave. Corporate policy is clear. No motorcyclists are allowed."

"Corporate policy? "

"We are a chain of restaurants and no motorcyclists are allowed in any of our establishments."

Earl, usually calm and by nature bemused by life in general turned to me and said, "Let's go. There is a bar and grill across the street."

I'd like to tell you that I was furious about the policy, but the truth was that while I didn't like it at all we ran into it a lot of places. The other truth was that we were still 150 miles from Columbus and I had no intention of riding with Earl after he had three or four Martinis.

"Show him your parking permit, Earl."

Earl turned to me and said, "I don't have any parking permit for here." He could be thick at times. I moved in front of him, got out my wallet and produced my parking permit, said nothing, and handed it to the manager.

The parking permit was plastic laminate with a picture of the White House in the background and bold letters saying "West Wing Motorcycle Parking. Use North Gate." It had an identification picture of me wearing a suit.

Now the truth was that we did not work "in" the White House. We worked next door in the old Executive Office Building. But there was staff parking across from the West Wing Portico on a concrete pad made especially for motorcycles. EOP and White House staff both used it.

The manager looked at the permit and studied it quite a while. Meanwhile the line behind us had become a bunch of hungry, pissed off people. They were hesitant to say anything. They had watched too many biker movies.

The manager handed me back the card and said, "I'm sorry, sir, but the policy is still no motorcyclists."

I said, "Fine. We'll leave, but first I need to use your phone. In private. I need to call long distance and I will reverse the charges."

Seeing this as a way to get us out of the restaurant he said, "Follow me."

Earl said, "I'll wait here."

I went with the manager into his tiny office. He handed the phone to me across his desk. I took it from him, set it down on the desk, dialed "0" and then a number, picked the phone back up and walked away from the desk as far as it would allow, turned my back to him and pushed the button down on the cradle.

"Yes, operator, my name is Monte Canfield. Please reverse the charges." I paused a while. "Hi, Give me Bill Storm's office please." I paused. "How you doing, Cathy? It's Monte. We've run into a little trouble here in Wheeling, West Virginia. Is Bill in?"

I again paused a while and said, "Hi, Bill. Yeah. Got a bit of a problem here, a case of corporate discrimination." Then I explained to the imaginary person on the other end of the line what we had run into. "Wednesday or Thursday? Yes. Got it. I'll tell the Manager. Yes. We will. Thanks. See you Tuesday. Bye."

I handed the phone back to the Manager, who looked a little pale in the gills, and thanked him.

"Who were you talking to?"

"The Secret Service."

"The Secret Service? Why?"

"Well, the President never has liked any kind of discrimination, as you know. And when we run into it we are supposed to report it and the Secret Service takes it from there. They give it to the Justice Department to handle. The FBI will have a man out here Wednesday or Thursday."

"The FBI!?"

Yes. Who do you thinks investigates for the Justice Department?

"Look, we don't want any trouble. Why don't you gentlemen just come on in and eat and we can forget the whole thing."

"Can't do that. You've got a "No Motorcycles" sign out front and you didn't want us in here before I called them. That told me all I needed to know."

I turned and started walking back to the front of the restaurant. The little guy was following me all the way telling me how sorry he was, that it wasn't his fault, he was only following the rules, that it was corporate policy, and getting more upset by the second.

When we got out to the waiting area Earl was sitting there on a bench reading a newspaper.

"Let's go, Earl."

The manager was literally plucking at the sleeve of my leather jacket.

I turned to him, "What?"

"Please!"

I waited a while just staring at him. Finally I leaned down close to him and said, softy, "OK. Look. We'll be back through here on Monday. We'll stop by and see what your 'corporate policy' is by then. If it is different, I'll stop the investigation. OK? But that is the only chance you get."

"I understand."

We walked out the door, got on the bikes, and Earl looked at me and said, "What went on back there?

I wanted him to suffer a bit so I said "Nothing. Let's go."

"I need a drink."

"No, you don't. You don't need a drink until we get to Columbus and get checked in to a room. Then you need a drink. By then I will need one too. We're going to McDonald's."

We went to McDonald's. Then we got on the bikes and rode hard to Columbus, where we got a room at a Holiday Inn.

Earl was pretty cheap otherwise but he always insisted on an upscale motel, with a bar. We checked in, headed for the bar, had a few drinks and a late dinner in the attached restaurant. I ate mine. Earl picked at his while drinking Manhattans.

We had a great time at the race on Sunday; saw the full program which ran from noon well into the evening. The final started about 9 pm. It was some of the best racing in the world.

My favorite, Gary Nixon, National Number One, on a Triumph Bonneville much like mine, won. Beat the field of mostly Harleys. With that win he cinched the National Number One title two years in a row, 1967 and 1968. That was a satisfying feeling for a Triumph junkie like me.

On Monday we headed home. At lunch time we pulled into the Shoney's Big Boy in Wheeling. The sign was gone. We parked near the door, intentionally took our helmets in with us and were ushered to a seat immediately.

I had a tuna salad sandwich with chips. Earl had a salad, a chicken fried steak with home fries and fried okra, and peach pie a la mode for desert along with about four cups of coffee. That boy could pack it away as long as it was early in the day.

For the record, I never ate at a Shoney's Big Boy again. Then again, I never saw a "No Motorcycles" sign outside of one again either.