There are times when even the quiet beauty of the cottage is not enough to soothe the soul; this has been one of those times. Since the shootings in Las Vegas, I have found little solace in anything, except, perhaps, sleep.
Sunday, Mother Eileen captured the anguish, pain and despair I feel in her sermon. After the Prayers of the People, the bell tolled once for each person killed in Las Vegas. The service closed with “My Country Tis of Thee.”
My head bowed, I fought back tears.
There has been Las Vegas. Jeff Sessions is claiming that bans on discrimination don’t cover transgender people. The Trump Administration is rolling back rules that help women have birth control as part of their medical coverage.
The United States joined Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China and a few other repressive regimes in refusing to declare it immoral to execute people for being gay.
What?
As the bell was tolling [and it tolls for thee], I thought of a long ago, rainy, cold November afternoon and looked at my mother and said: what kind of country are we? It was the afternoon of the day Kennedy had been killed and that moment is etched in my brain, looking out the front windows at a sad world and wondering just what kind of country would kill someone who seemed to be having so much fun and was doing good things?
There was nothing my mother could say. To this day, I remember the look she gave me, wanting to have an answer and having none. The silence still rings in my ears all these years later as does the memory of the slick, wet street, a yellow and red city bus moving slowly down the street.
Last night there was another torch lit march in Charlottesville, VA. A return of Richard Spencer and his white supremacists. Listen to their chants: “The South will rise again. Russia is our friend. The South will rise again. Woo-hoo! Wooo.” [Washington Post, October 7, 2017]
Russia is our friend? The South will rise again? Russia is not my friend and the South envisioned by these chaps is not a South in which I would be comfortable. It’s one in which I think I might be afraid for my life.
Today is Columbus Day, the day everyone makes noise about old Christopher Columbus and his “discovery” of America. Personally, I suspect it was the Vikings a few centuries earlier but they don’t get credit [maybe I think that because my mother’s family were Swedish]. However, as we have discovered Christopher Columbus was brave and not a model of morality in the way he treated native Americans. White people, in general, have not been very kind to native Americans.
Thirty years ago, my friend Ann Frisbee Naymie and I had a conversation about this and she just said to me: bad karma for what we did.
Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, who has announced he is not seeking reelection, electrified the world yesterday with a tweet saying the White House was an adult care center and someone had missed their shift. Really? A Republican lawmaker is talking about a Republican President in this way? Wowza! You go, Corker. And I agree with you that Trump runs the White House like it’s an episode of the President and, like you, I think it is possible Donald Trump could stumble us into a nuclear war before he realized what he’d done.
Two hospitals have been evacuated in California and at least 50 structures destroyed in fires that are causing people to flee from Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties while in southern California fires are raging in Orange County, south of Los Angeles.
The Four Horseman are riding.
Thank you, Mother Eileen, for giving shape to the inchoate agony I was experiencing when I walked into church yesterday. Thank you for ringing the bell for the deaths in Las Vegas. Thank you for asking the painful questions we all should be asking ourselves. What kind of country are we? What kind of country do we want to be?
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From Claverack 10 12 2017 Thoughts on what I would preach…
October 12, 2017Monday, I sent out a blog inspired by Mother Eileen’s sermon at Christ Church on Sunday and forwarded her a copy as she is not on my list. She wrote back the following day and jokingly suggested I might preach this Sunday, which led me to think about what I would preach. What would I say if I had to, this Sunday, preach at a church?
I looked up the gospel for next Sunday and its essential line is: many are called but few are chosen.
Certainly, that fits with last year’s election cycle which started with more candidates for the Republican nomination for president than I remember in my life. Many were called and, in the end, the one that was chosen was Donald Trump and he went on to become President of these United States.
It will probably surprise many who know me but every week at church I light a candle for the man. No, I don’t like him. His policies seem mean spirited, quixotic at best. His relationship with the truth, as I experience it, is equally quixotic.
And he is President of these United States, a man with great power, influence and the ability to shake the world on more levels than I believe he is aware of or understands. But he is the president and I pray for him, hoping, on a very fundamental level he doesn’t do anything that will prevent me from being back at church next Sunday to pray for him.
He appealed to a disenfranchised part of America we, all of us, have not been listening to or acknowledging. They gravitated to Donald Trump as people in the water after the loss of Titanic, desperate to be saved, crying for help. Do I think he will save them? No.
But I want us to hear their cries and find a way to address them and to help them. They are Americans. With very real issues.
Today I read there are the most job openings than there have been for a very long time. Those jobs are harder to fill because we have a massive opioid crisis and many people cannot pass drug tests. Companies are beginning, in desperation, to turn a blind eye, not asking for drug tests for dangerous jobs because they can’t find enough people to fill them.
Not so long ago, there were two Amtrak employees killed, men not much younger than me and their autopsies revealed they had non-prescribed opioids in their systems. Our local paper, the Register Star, gave a face to the epidemic by highlighting on the front page a young woman, full of hope, who overdosed.
It is time we faced this epidemic, its causes and its ravages and did something and quit pretending everything is going along just fine.
President Trump, weren’t you going to make this a national emergency? What happened?
Nothing much. Why not?
Even the beauty of the cottage is not soothing my soul these days. What am I to do?
Many are called but few are chosen. What is it I am called to do in this tumultuous time? Every day I ask myself that question. What am I to do? What am I called to do?
Whether you are a supporter of Donald Trump or not, what is that you can do, personally, to change the awful things that are happening in this country?
Many are called, few are chosen. What will make me chosen? What thing can I do to make this awful time better? I want to. I do and I am not sure what it is that I should do. Pack a bag and fly to some war-torn part of the world and put up my hand and say: I’m here to help? What can I do?
A friend suggested I do that. Maybe I will.
We all need to ask ourselves how we are going to respond to Jesus’ call? I am not a raving evangelical. Far from that. I respect, at the deepest level of my soul, the kindness Jesus worked to insert into the human dialogue and which has resonated for both good and ill since then.
Since I was a boy, I have thought Jesus would be appalled at what has happened to what he started. He preached love and love is not often what has happened.
Many are called but few will be chosen. Be one of the few. Practice what Jesus taught.
Tags:Amtrak, Christ Church, Donald Trump, Many are called but few are chosen, Mother Eileen, opioid crisis, Titanic
Posted in 2016 Election, Civil Rights, Claverack, Columbia County, depression, Education, Elections, Entertainment, Gay, Gun Violence, Hollywood, Homelessness, Hygge, Income Inequality, Mat Tombers, Mathew Tombers, Matthew Tombers, Media, Mideast, Political, Political Commentary, Politics, Social Commentary, Television, Trump, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »