The Book of Louis

"Bless me father, for I have sinned...I have conducted church services without reference to the Bible."

"This is a most grievous sin, young man. It's going to cost you 5 'Hail Marys' and a recitation of Dante's Paradiso."

Church services may serve multiple purposes--community-building, moral compass-pointing, personal reflection, and many others you could name.

But at the most fundamental level, if I don't have an experience (however brief) of the numinous, I feel I would have done better to stay home and read a good book. The numinous is not to be confused with the supernatural, for the numinous is as natural as breathing and as close as your jugular vein. You don't need to be in church to experience it, but church creates a space to do so, and to do it with others.

As in a play, when the entire audience experiences the collective lurch in the gut when fate clicks forcefully into place, or a truth of human character is bravely revealed, or a line is uttered that just makes you aware that you're actually here now in the moment, to experience this collectively amplifies the effect. Actors know this when playing to a small, spread-out house, when the very same line or event that elicited a gasp from an audience of critical mass, lands like a dead carp. The emotion has been described, but not lived.

A feeling of the numinous can't be managed, prescribed, engineered, or otherwise willed into being. Creating them is art, not science. Different people manage to achieve it by totally different means, and fail to by identical means. As a practitioner, one gets the hang of it after a while, but it is not your poodle. There's more going one than just the words you've decided to say and how you've decided to say them, more than just 'all about you'.

In this the year of the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, much is rightly being said about the impact that the poetic sensibilities of the translators had upon the ears, hearts, and minds of those who either read or (more commonly at the time) heard it read in church. Some of the free-verse and blank verse poetry in it is unmatched in its power to create a sense of transcendent truth, as with this from Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 (to cite but one well-known example):

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

Cadence, parallelism, repetition, and a sense that it's gathering momentum as it moves--lots of tools from the poetry toolkit, used to wonderful effect. Even if we don't like the content, that doesn't mean it isn't any good.


In the beginning was the word...indeed.

Use of the Bible in church services brings with an easy authority, some of which is to do with its provenance and reputation and status in the Western canon, but much of it too is to do with the effortlessly convincing feel of the poetry. Poetic language is its own form of discourse, a discourse that engages acceptance of the listener through the beautiful arrangement of sounds, like music.
This very naturalness of authority is also a very reason not to use the Bible so much.

I tend to use a lot more secular poetry in church services. In it, Beauty is still a means of creating a sense of transcendent Truth, but it's freer of the baggage of millenia. One poet I use from time to time is Louis MacNeice, a very secular man, (though the son of an Anglican bishop), classical scholar, academic, radio producer, father, husband, lover and betrayer, an extraordinary talent wrapped in a familiar, flawed form--more like us than Ecclesiastes. Take this for example:

"Entirely"

If we could get the hang of it entirely
It would take too long;
All we know is the splash of words in passing
And falling twigs of song,
And when we try to eavesdrop on the great
Presences it is rarely
That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate
Even a phrase entirely.

If we could find our happiness entirely
In somebody else’s arms
We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s
Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
Eyes of Love entirely.


And if the world were black or white entirely
And all the charts were plain
Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters,
A prism of delight and pain,
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.

I've recently added this to a clutch of his work that I'm calling the Book of Louis. It compares favourably with more well-known poems on the same theme like Frost's "The Road Not Taken". But more to the point, you get the sense that this is a man who has lived speaking to us (as we are) from the heart. There is always in his work and abiding sense of acceptance that the world is not perfect and cannot be made so, that our lives are heavily compromised affairs, and anyone that tries to sell you another view is on the grift. But beyond this world-weariness, there is the voice that speaks in the poetry, that finds the deeper harmonies in a complex world.

Finding the deeper harmonies in the secular, through the discourse of poetry...this I like, and I feel is fitting for church services in an increasingly post-Christian world.

For I feel somehow that if a 9 to 5 man like Louis can find this mature poise, reconciling life as we live it with the deeper realities, so can I.

I recommend him to you.

Here's himself reading the lovely love poem "Meeting Point"

"'Only connect', was the whole of his sermon" --E.M. Forster

It's not often I use video in this blog other than for purposes of ornament. This video is the entire subject of this entry. I present it here without comment, and look forward to reader reactions.

I'll give it a week, then write my responses below.

*****

4/7/2011

Okay, so it's been more than a week. What do you want at these prices?

Most responses so far (from Facebook) have tended to focus on an assumption of the tragic loss of an innocent, Edenic state of being. I do not know for certain that that happened in this instance, but the history of such encounters would suggest you can bet the rent that this tribe did not remain isolated.

The myth of a golden age, where indigenous cultures flourished untouched by any outside (thus necessarily corrupting) influence, is one of those common-sense human presumptions that crumbles under examination. There never was such a time or such a culture. Movement, contact, and assimilation have been the constants in all human history, unless you assume that indigenous tribes grew up out of the ground like indigenous plant life.

The DNA record clearly shows common ancestry in sub-saharan Africa, movement up the fertile valleys into Europe and Asia, and then branching and splitting separating, until the tribal journey began to fold back on itself and certain human relatives, separated since time out of mind, encountered one another for the first time in their experience. At which point they either cooperated, negotiated or fought for dominance.

There is hardly one square kilometer or habitable or arable or grazable land on the planet that has not been acquired, conquered, inherited, or brokered as a result of such encounters. The isolation tribes like the one in the film find themselves in, is as a result of following herds or food-gathering or fight and flight. They are far and away the exception.

However, just because history has always been thus is no excuse for not trying to come up with better ways of managing such encounters. Because, for me, the real issue in the film is power. The Europeans have it (in the form of knowledge, technology, and resources), and the tribe does not (apart from perhaps a better knowledge of the immediate area). It is thus the Europeans who have the greater leverage in mystifying and controlling the tribe, and thus in a far better position to determine the outcome of the exchange.

What helps this seem normal, natural, and right is that we buy into the infantilization of the tribe by ascribing the romantic 'noble savage' status to them. By assuming they want to be and should be left alone, that this is what is best for them. So, I imagine, is typhus, which is natural in that part of the world. Which is NOT to say that we have a right to 'civilize them' for their own good. However, given the massive power imbalance at work, it is the Europeans who are in better position to consider carefully what the best course of action might be, given the inevitability of human contact, the utter impossibility of utter isolation forever. Noblesse oblige...emphasis on the latter term.

Witness how white Europeans managed the encounter with the indigenous Australians and you get a good idea of how NOT to exercise power. In a landmark announcement today, the City of Sydney finally called a spade a shovel, and finally called for the phrase 'white settlement' to be replaced by the more accurate term 'invasion'.

That this has taken over two hundred years to be uttered (and not without the predictable apoplexy among of those privileged by the invasion), is as deeply dispiriting as anything I can think of, but at least it's a step in the right direction. The past cannot be undone of course, but the scenario played out in the film will continue to be played out in the developing world, perhaps in far less picturesquely romantic circumstances, among those without power or agency in negotiations that will determine their futures and the futures of their offspring for centuries.

Compassionately ascribing full dignity and agency to the socially marginalised, the dispossessed, and the powerless, was the ministry of one Yeshuah bin-Yoseph, otherwise called Jesus. That was 2000 years ago, and how's that working out for ya?

Let's hope that if we are contacted by an alien race, they will have evolved beyond our practices. Otherwise, we're screwed.

Domesticity: Appeasing the Household Gods

The ancients were said to observe two kinds of gods: those worshipped in the temple and those worshipped in the home.

These latter were thought to protect the home and its members, and were represented by small icons or objects in shrines. But just as often, the household gods were located in actual domestic objects--the hearth, the doorway, the window, the roof timbers, a cooking pot. (Sounds like the title of a Magritte painting.) These homely gods were propitiated by small offerings of food and drink, or were invited to share the family meal.



The domovoi, the brownie, the teraphim--all could be kickin' it in Vegas, or living large in Rio,
but for them, there's no place like home...

In a long chorus down the ages, from pre-history, through animism and totemism, through the elaborate pantheons of Greece and Rome, right down into present-day Shinto practice, the domestic gods sing a homing song to all who would be pater (or indeed mater) familias, to attend not only to the heavens but to the earth, to the needful work of home-making, with all the attendant maintenance of external boundaries, internal systems, and its emblematic role as ornament, the visible incarnation of a 'good' life.

I've spent the past nine months more or less at the temple, in the role of votary. Now it's time to propitiate the long-neglected gods of the household, and assume the role of--what other word is there?--husbandry.

There's an old saying that a clean-n-tidy home is the sign of a wasted life. And how often have I guffawed in agreement--citing the silly neurosis of the bourgeois obsession with having everything just so. And how I have thought ruefully about the years that have slipped into the void on the back of DIY projects in homes others now live in. Or the eons of vacuuming, dusting, and cleaning, when things just get dirty all over again. Years that could (and maybe should) have been spent learning any one of a million useful, self-improving skills, or engaging in charitable actions. If the middle classes channelled all that domestic energy and time into the temples of wisdom and/or justice, I used to say, think how much better the world might be.



DIY? Or D.I.E?

 In fact, I often catch myself dreaming of a life, post-parenthood, in a decent flat with regular maid service, the better to free the hands and attention for 'higher things'.

But the older I get, the less certain of anything I become. And as I potter about the place, doing odd, needful jobs--mending the fence, moving furniture, cleaning the pool, cooking one of my signature dishes---I remember that doing the needful things with mindfulness and love can fill ones days in a way that doesn't feel wasted. Granted it's not a trip to Disneyland, but then, neither does a trip to a holy-of-holies ever live up to the expectation. Most things are more gorgeous in the promise than in the reality.

And reality also has sacredness, even its mundane and domestic face. The household gods don't really ask all that much, just acknowledgement. When you forget about them, things start to fall apart, reminding you that you need the gods of the hearth to get on with living a life rather than dreaming of a different one.

Uh-oh. Someone's been away at the fair too long...

How do I know there's real joy in this sort of worship too? As I was getting some tools out of the shed yesterday to do a little, needful job, I found I was singing quietly to myself a catch of an Irish ballad my father used to sing as he noodled about the house, doing the thousand-and-one jobs he seemed always to be doing, as happily as a puppy tumbling over itself with a favorite ball.

And I remembered, as I sang his song, that the animistic tradition of the household gods was said to originate in ancestor worship. I think I read in JG Frazier's The Golden Bough that the 'house spirits' are always friendly, attached as they were to particular families, with whom they has been known to reside for centuries, threshing the corn, cleaning the house, and performing similar household tasks. Their favorite gratification was milk and honey. Then I remembered my father's insatiable sweet-tooth for anything sweet and creamy, and I burst into tears.

I can still hear him telling me to be careful around such things, every single time.

For here I was and am, replaying his husbandry long after he has departed, doing the needful things that keep a household--and the family within it--going, and he is still with me, consubstantial in my domesticity. It was his strong (and I see now, everlasting) arms I can thank for the life I have, and all the joy in it, and for those who now depend upon me. I honour him, propitiate this household ancestor/god if you will, by attending to the needful things. Knowing this is a rare joy.

The temple will still be there when I return to it.

"Leaning on the everlasting arms" sung by the remarkably affecting voice of Iris deMent to take us out...forget the picture, just listen.

Minding the Gap

It's a curious existential moment when you see a beloved old friend after a gap of many years.

There's a kind of time lapse effect that happens in my brain, at least, when the vision of my old friend before me is overlaid on the loved memory-image I've carried around in the intervening years. Your mind, well mine at least, spends some time simultaneously entertaining two hypotheses of what must be there  beyond the image in my retina. And during that time, your mind (mine again) does what it does between frames of an animated cartoon--fills in the action. I see them age, in time-lapse, before me. It creates a sharp, tender shock.

Where a person ends and where his friend begins is never entirely clear. Relationship is alchemy.

It is at such moment when you realize that this life is made precious chiefly by those with whom we are privileged to share it. This privilege is only partly earned; it is mostly, I think, a gift.

Yesterday was the occasion of the retirement of one who has been my oldest, continuing, deep friendship in the UK. Those assembled were an old crowd of friends who started working together, when we were a generation younger. We built careers together, created and raised children, travelled together, and shared the myriad tiny triumphs and the inevitable personal failures that make up the rich pattern of any normal life. The pub rang all evening with the rich laughter of remembering. Wine flowed, and we broke bread. And that communion was not the end of the sacramental dimension of the evening.



Every meal shared in joy and generosity is a communion.


Many were with partners different from those we began with, and many who would have been there, had moved on to other climes and lives, as I have done. And so I thought it fitting, when toasting-time was ripe, to lift one "To absent friends."

"Absent friends". How that phrase stuck with me as I rode the train home to Manchester, which is soon to my home no longer, in a few days. Travelling, moving, and self-imposed exiles are often called "the curse of the Celt", and I've got it in spades. There as a lot of love in the room last night, but the truth is I have been a absent friend to these, and to more than these, and last night's reunion brought that home. Absence made a lot of hearts grow fonder, and the occasion and the wine helped too.

An awareness of what is missing

As every psychologist knows, memory has a in-built prestige-enhancing function, a mechanism by which the terrors fade, the joys remain and are morphed into a personal hagiography. We remember our kids talking earlier, the travels more joyous and not at all dull or difficult, and perhaps even the role we played in people's lives more central or essential. But we can remember things in no other way, at least not without professional help and careful reconstruction. What I remember feels real, so that's how I take it.

The memories I've hoarded from our shared past, along with a steamer trunk of hard-copy photographs, are  no substitute for being there, and the wide gaps of time since we were dissevered, I from them, serve to remind that NOW is ever the only time we really actually live in. The rest is a story.

Don't misunderstand--last night was a rare joy. But I also got the sense during the prolonged hugs goodbye that more of us than just me wanted to have a good hard sob about where the years had gone, and how now as retirement, and the only possible end of retirement, begins to loom for us all, that we want another crack at doing over and doing BETTER the friendships that had so sustained us during a time in our lives when we were young and had the whole future--that which we now grow old in--ahead of us.

Listen to this is you can:

Ill-equipped for the journey

You know I love you, but I’m lost.

My compass is cracked.
My maps are smudged and old,
And I couldn’t find the right
Survival gear for the wet and cold.

I can’t quite trust the compass:
Its memory of poles locked within.
I mean, it works and all--
But I forget which hemisphere I’m in.

The maps are so old
That Indonesia reads “Batavia”,
And some ‘Soviet Union’ still
Spreads blood-red across Asia.

And I searched every website
To find just the ‘right stuff’,
But it’s made in those places
We warred with.
                             I thought: “enough”.

But the windcheater doesn’t,
And the cargos split at the seams,
And the shoes, the shoes
Are like wearing little trampolines.

You know I’m lost, but I love you;
I’ll be there as soon as I can.
Though my lens is a cleft world view,
I’ll be there as soon as I can.

Less than two weeks left at theological college. Shipping boxes packed, I'm down to a suitcase and a briefcase and a travel guitar, and a strange, dissociated feeling.

As I prepare to close one chapter and open another, I find myself in that liminal space, the edgelands between actual places, where one is neither here, nor entirely there.

It's difficult to get your bearings in a long twilight, and difficult to gauge direction when you, for a time, belong nowhere in particular.

In transit: a 'world without end', without borders, sans frontieres.

For me, this will end. But God help those for whom such days are all their days: refugees, asylum-seekers, the perpetually displaced. They're everywhere, but hidden away from the sort of people who will read this.

I dedicate this, as a prayer, for them.

A pertinent Woody Guthrie song:



A Game of Inches

His name was Neil, and he was from Toronto, Canada. Early 40's, I guessed. Great smile, hard not to warm to.

"You're a long way from home," I said.
"So are you, brother. American?"
"Baltimore, originally."
"Lovely city," he said. "Know it well. Great baseball town-- you an Orioles fan?"

And we were away...

Like the weather for Brits, baseball is phatic talk for Americans (North and South). But this wasn't simply two fans shooting the breeze.

Neil tells me he played third base for the Toronto Blue Jays, actually in "the show", the big leagues, a utility infielder behind the seriously great Corrie Koskie, a young prospect and potential hall-of-famer. Neil made it to the show late in life at 29, after years in the minor leagues, brought in specifically as an old-timer to give the youngster the benefit of his experience, if not his talent. He got a little game time, drew the league minimum pay, but travelled to the big parks all over the US.

Including Baltimore's beautiful Camden Yards, perhaps the most beautiful ballpark there is. It's home plate marks the spot where Babe Ruth's father's bar stood.

There's no such seat as a bad seat here.

He says he played in my hometown park many times, waxed lyrical about the nearby Inner Harbor, where he and his team-mates wolfed crabcake dinners, washed down with ice-cold beer on the long balmy summer evenings. Loved Baltimore. Loved life in the show.

The thing is, we were having this conversation on a wet Tuesday night in Manchester England, at a bus stop on the Oxford Road. I had just come from seeing an arthouse film nearby, was heading back to my flat.

We boarded the bus together, and I could see by the interior lights that Neil had been living rough:  grimy hands, rugged clothes layered for warmth. Computer bag, sans laptop, but papers sticking out of every compartment.

We climbed to the top deck of the bus, and I sat, but Neil stood at the front against the big glass window and launched into his set piece speech for the assembled crowd, mostly of uni students heading back to their lodgings from the city, as well as uncomprehending Asian men, heading to the Curry Mile.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sorry to have to do this. All I can do is tell you the truth, and ask for your help. I haven't always been as you see me now, I'm a father and a grandfather. But I've been having a hard time lately. I need 20 pounds today to get into St. James shelter tonight, where they'll give me a bed and a shower and food. But mostly security, because it's not safe out on the streets. I have 13 pounds, so if you..."

For 20 quid, this would be Neil's safe-at-home

He said all this looking down at his worn shoes mostly, only occasionally looking up as if he was remembering his media training. He worked the aisle, and finally came back to the front, where I was. I gave him 2.20, all the change I had. His take was still a little short of the 20 he needed.

Then he sat next to me and told me point-blank the story that had been hanging in the air for the last several minutes. A story about never quite making it in the show due to his late start (29 is elderly in pro sports if you ain't got runs of the board). Taking to drugs for consolation, which then took to him in a way he didn't expect. A bad and busted marriage that brought him to the UK. Divorce, bankruptcy, kids taken away. Then, the streets...

Neil's neighborhood.

But he was clean now, had been for 9 months, and was trying to put some kind of life back together.

Then he asked me what I was doing in the UK, so far from the Baltimore of his fond memories.

Deep breath: Unitarian ministry, I said.

He took my hand and wished me well, apologizing for the dirt, but that it had been 'a particularly hard day'.

And he said that there could be no more noble life than devoting yourself to the service of God and others. It was my turn to look down at my shoes.

He said that you've gotta have God or the Spirit or something at the centre of your life if you're gonna get yourself straight.

"There's no other way," he said, heading for the exit, flashing a smile that would have, at one time, been 100-watt.

And he swung off the bus and back out into the night, and was gone.

Baseball is often called a game of inches.

In a season of 400 or so at-bats, inches make or break you: to have just ten hit balls break an inch or two shy of being caught...or a pitch that hangs just an inch or so in a hit-able zone above the plate... or a half-step between making it to 1st base before the throw out from shortstop. These inches make up key playing statistics, and are all that separate a failed career from a  great one, a life on the rough from the sort of money that will mean you'll never again have to work a day in your life when you leave the game. Money that can buy a lot of rehab.

Well, there goes Easy Street...

Neil didn't get these inch-breaks, and didn't have the inner resources to take it well. And just like that, you're on the mean streets of Manchester trying to stay clean and, at a minimum, get indoors so you don't get rolled for what little cash you have. I'm sure it all seemed like yesterday to him--the big ball parks, the TV cameras, the hotels and airports, and beers with the boys on Baltimore harbor.

I'm glad of course that there are places like the St. James (Anglican) shelter, and quietly mortified that my own denomination offers NOTHING of the sort, and that all I could offer him was pocket change and an ear.

Because not all that long ago, at a very low point, it would have only taken one or two irrational decisions for me to be exactly where Neil is. I was just luckier, with better friends and family, in a country with better health care, maybe armed with a sturdier psychology, having been born to functional, loving parents. All factors beyond my absolute control, in the game of inches called 'life', which remind us of the truth of "there but for the grace of (fill in the blank), go I."

"There's no doubt life's a mystery, but so too is the human heart."

--Mary Chapin Carpenter, John Doe no. 24

So why is there no picture here of Neil in his heyday? After all, you don't need a degree in IT to find pics of pro sports players. Just a Google-search, which I ran when I got home, trying to find him, trying to get a little more insight into this strange, brief encounter on a Mancunian bus.

And it turns out there never was anyone named Neil that ever played for the Jays, not ever, not in any level of the Jays organisation. Not one, not ever.

New identity, name change? I scanned hundreds of player photos. Nope.

Did I get the Jays right? Maybe I misheard...maybe it was the Expos of Montreal. Nada.

Maybe this was the most elaborate shake-down ever by a professional beggar who's mastered the 'short con'.

But as I put this little blog post, and myself to  bed, it is hard to shake the feeling that this mystery man, who arrested my attention with his charm and his story--an up-beat, beat-up Canadian Ancient Mariner--this guy I met looking for shelter--is actually me. A version of myself that slipped out of a parallel universe created by different breaks and life choices, a fun-house-mirror view of the man I could easily have been, and at one time just missed becoming...by a matter of inches.

How precarious is this life, dear reader! How much our fortunes are finely tuned and balanced by powers not our own. Only when you know this, really know it, does the empathy and compassion required of us by Jesus, Buddha, and so many others, seem achievable.

"Hobo's lullaby", written by Woody Guthrie (mon hero) and sung by the amazing Emmylou Harris.

So g'night, "Neil"--or whoever you are. May you find peace and rest someday.

Donations can be made to the St James shelter--just click the links above.

A Dead Man in Islamabad: suggestions for a churlish pub quiz.

Before drinking single malt and waving the flag, before we let triumphalism so flood our neo-cortices that rational thought becomes not merely impossible, but perverse, have a go at answering this simple quiz:

1. Explain in sound-bite length the answer to this: So we can stop the wars now, right? If not, why not?

2. Demonstrate (by logic or magic) that the 5,885 total fatalities borne by coalition troops in said wars in any way, directly or indirectly, brought about the death of OBL. Then explain your proof to one of thousands who's lost his legs or eyes in said wars.

3. Compute the efficacy of our violent actions in Pakistan, given this ratio: 2000 killed (most collaterally) by predator drones to 1 by bullet. Then factor in cost-to-taxpayer of said drones.

4. Argue that justice has been served by execution rather than capture, interrogation and trial. Be sure to define your use of the term 'justice'.

5. Compile and present what proof you have ever personally seen (rather than been told) that OBL is guilty of instigating the 9-11 attacks. Extra points for photos/videos. Critically analyse the interest positions of the sources of the evidence.

6. Perform a cost/benefit analysis on the funding and training US gave OBL to resist the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980's, in terms of the skills OBL has used to elude execution/capture for the past ten years.

7. True or false: The Taliban have never been more effective than they are now and they appear to be much, much larger than al-Qaida (hint--source: American Intelligence,  BBC News).

8. Calculate, in units of millions of votes,  how this will affect President Obama's re-election chances.

9. Estimate the impact of winding up two large-scale military operations upon the looming US budget deficit.

10. Explain to a clever 12-year-old how creating a martyr out of someone (who has long since ceased to be anything other than a figurehead) is anything but a propaganda win and recruitment boost for Islamic militancy as promulgated by the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, etc.

Pass your completed sheet to the MC. Do not offer him violence. He is only the messenger.

Winner gets a set of steak knives.

Let's party!!!