Empires Fall

 What we see from a look back through the eyes of archeologists, historians, and philosophers that that “everything falls”. This is why Bob Frankie counsels the value of catfish, bottom feeders.

Not unexpectedly, Empires crumble more than fail catastrophically. In fits and unsteady devolution, Empires come unwound. For those who rue the fall of Roe, those who hope we are the exception to the rule, those for whom all things just work out, I’m sorry for your upset. There has been grand vision that would have avoided this evidence of the rule that Empires are delusional and their worst attributes finally become the accepted promise, false though it may be, that our desire and our power can overcome every obstacle. Unfortunately, we never see that we are our own worst enemy and find ourselves betrayed by mere belief.

From here to the officially recorded final days of the American Empire there remains an abundance of opportunistic for individuals and modest communities to experiment with a variety of ways to live the reality of choice and consequences. Metaphorically, how do we develop and disperse seed for living that is aware of our tendency to greed, exceptionalism, privilege, and power? 

Such awareness is no guarantee of a next economy that will prioritize the “general welfare” of those on a new bottom-rung over the “common defense” of the wealthiest. Even if we are consistently paying attention, the nature of suffering rises to the surface and yet another fall eventuates. While this might lead to some theory of progress from Empire to Empire, it seems to simply mean that each succeeding Empire destroys it basic resources and environment more quickly than ever before.

As the dystopian phase of Empire fractures through enforced unity, I recommend reading The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. Her image of seed and the building of community through whatever version of A Handmaid’s Tale eventuates focuses on the articulation of a vision larger than our ability to currently call it into being, persistence as the courage needed in such days, and a willingness to see through the eyes of change.

As much as ever, there is no perfect eternal. This means we carry our part for those seven generations hence with a lightness of being and deeply serious willingness to invest today with what we can only hope for those yet to come. How do we envision and teach what we have learned about the way the “demos” gives up on itself and fails to stand up for anyone and everyone not of its tribe. Eventually this means giving up on itself, failing to promote the next needed quality and failings into the great rut of “thoughts and prayers” masquerading as effective action.

In our focus on independence we failed to learn empathy. In our greed for instant success, measured in money, we failed to value civic responsibility and listening to cries of pain. All we could finally muster was an impotence born out of ignorance based on our unconscious and persistent prejudice that our individual experience is the end-all and be-all of decision-making.

May you love your enemies well enough to live your best life, even as you daily, trustingly, invest in a tomorrow still generations away.

Passing Through

she who passes

through sheol

attends to the middle

of every fantasy

with no attention given

to beginnings or endings

creation has no teleology

only eternal

meaning daily

choices

the dark is never

an ending spot

always one of three days

hiding in plain sight

the mystery every cocoon knows

the old is dissolved

and resolved pasts

never ever end

are only passed on

a work worthy

of Sisyphus

costing Prometheus’ wage

she who anoints

is also she

an anointed

weakly justified

as his majesty

privileged exempt

from a middle way

forever lost

in one beginning or another

in one eternal form or another

to be an anointed

and anointed

is to be entered

is to birth

sh-he of the moment

an always ambivalent space

recursing and inventing

a next fulcrum point

never more than a middling figure

rehearsing refreshing

every memorized script

until it is inhabited

beyond any method

imagined as sufficient

astride a flooding torrent

Building a Built

In retirement we elected to buy a small house that still has too much yard to mow and sidewalk/driveway to shovel. We didn’t know about a drainage issue. I suppose it could be called a ranch-style house though it is essentially a double-wide trailer that some of our friends call FEMA-FABulous. After 13 years of being here, there are some definite changes that would be a delight to the eye and also add to the resale value. Most every pastoral move we made brought living in the mess of an update to the parsonage and who wants to do that one more time. Plus, the state of the economy and all the decision-making necessary about who would do the work keeps us in a state of stasis. What do you call a building if it is no longer in the building stage, but has become built?

In the meantime, I have been watching some “educational” TV on the architecture and engineering of massive rebuilds of some public properties around the world. It is absolutely stunning how such massive weight can be constructed in such a way that we see the poetry of form with no real conception of all that goes into the magic of visual art.

As we were leaving our last pastoral assignment the trustees of the building decided on upgrading the parsonage. A major redo of the kitchen meant the moving of plumbing that had previously been in a lowered ceiling. I am still astounded at the plumber who was hired. After the pipes had been exposed, he arrived in the evening after another job and stood and looked. And looked and looked some more. A small piece of paper and pencil came from his rumpled shirt and a few notes jotted. A brief goodbye was exchanged.

The next morning there was a delivery of a load of pipes on the front lawn. Working without seeming to measure anything, old pipes were removed and new ones were rerouted from the ceiling to the wall and around a window. I’ve never seen someone work so slowly, efficiently, and rapidly. Here was an artist whose work will never be public. My jaw still needs to be picked up as the memory returns. What a delight to have taken the opportunity to be present as he worked to improve the flow of water and sewage from the upstairs bathrooms.

Architects, engineers, and plumbers are gift givers. Together we have benefited from their gifts. We are likely not to take advantage of what they have to offer, for it is far easier to sit and type away on an old iPad as a rotating fan moderates the heat. May the next occupiers of this space see its potential to be a base from which to offer their gifts. It is a simple space that can encourage a healthy balance of slow consideration, efficient living, and rapid resolution of bound up paradoxes and outright contradictions.

The Neverending Story

When asked about my favorite children’s story, I have no satisfactory response — too many come to mind. I expect there is still a finite number of Little Golden Books. Fairy tales from the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Anderson spring easily to mind. Comic books came early to my life. My father’s interest in science fiction rubbed off, I’m on the lookout for another copy of Waldo by Robert A. Heinlein, published the year before I was born, that continues to come to mind regarding the importance of community to an individual’s survival. Classics like Winnie-the-Pooh and Alice in Wonderland are a continual delight. Much more could be said about The Once and Future King and Princes Bride.

I could branch out into early radio theatre and the grip of The Shadow clouding men’s minds. Saturday movie serials, with their Perils of Pauline endings to lure us back next week, certainly hold an important part in growing an imagination.

I finally focused on The Neverending Story by Michael Ende coming up on its 40th anniversary of being translated into English. [Note: Do also find his book, Momo.] There are many places in The Neverending Story where the story could spin off in quite another direction. Each time we are simply told that that is another story for another time. This is quite true to life. Every family tree and autobiography needs to be reminded that none of this stuff we like to concretize into “reality” is as straightforward as it might seem. We lose much when we forget how slim the thread is that leads to any moment.

Near the end of the book, as Bastian returns the book that has shifted his life and finds the bookstore owner has had his own encounter with the Childlike Empress, Mr. Coreander reminds us all — “Every real story is a Neverending Story.”

It is extremely important to read the book and not rely upon the movie. If you can, find the edition that tells the story with two colors of text (red, for the context in which The Neverending Story is being read, and green, when The Neverending Story is being lived). One such version has an ISBN of 0-385-17622-8.

Yes, it is alright to translate Mr. Coreander’s response as, “Every real life is a Neverending Story.” Now it is time to take the unknown story that could be built upon as another story for another time and in this time follow where that might lead. We are not constrained by what has happened so far. To not honor the Neverending Story process is to numbly await Nothing. 

Empathy

Facebook periodically shows a post from years ago. Today it brought back what was probably my last handout at our yearly conference of Wisconsin United Methodists. The second of its two observations was about the need to add another source of authority or decision-making guide. What has come down to us are honored texts, established traditions, application of reason, and the value of personal experience (Scripture, Tradition, Reason, Experience). This fourth category of experience worked as a good balance to the weight of accumulated tradition in the same way that reason can temper scripture.

As the seasons change we have moved away from an emphasis on what holds us together, a commons of shared lives. The Declaration of Independence has moved from a national independence to an independence of an individual. We no longer understand that a variety of infrastructures supported by all provide a background for an individual success. Investment in the community is preyed upon rather than increased.

This personalization of independence has no check on it and is causing irreparable harm through fact-less conspiracies and a prioritizing of what’s-in-it-for-me. We have come to terms with multiple scriptures and traditions. They are no longer monoliths. My sense is that we are no longer dealing with reason as we focus on teaching-to-the-test. Likewise, experience has run amok by leading us to a smaller and smaller horizon as we dive to claim what-I-experience-you-should-experience.

To assist a broadening of reason and experience one significant corrective is that of Empathy. Both reason and experience benefit from considering the reasoning and experience of others. Empathy is a horizon-expanding quality or value and is much needed.

A luncheon conversation with a church leader led me to bring empathy into the conversation.

Now, to round out a trinity of references, this blog entry remembers an old position paper, a current conversation and places the question of empathy in your hands. What can you do to practice empathy and to assist others to see through an additional lens? Having established a “can”, the kicker is in the actual doing. Blessings on honoring the lives of others as the old saying still has some life — none are saved/healed without all being saved/healed.

Tall Grass

May was a no-mow month. I have extended that for one patch in the backyard. When it comes time to rake leaves in the fall I’ll mow to facilitate spring-time snow melt that doesn’t drain well. between now and then it will be a place to observe it more natural state. This is a compromised state, given the many decades it has been regularly mowed.

Watching from a swing set on the deck, a swirling wind was highlighted by the tall shoots of grass bobbing their many-seeded heads. Pushed this way and that, the rhythm of the wind could be seen at a distance as well as felt on the face.

After watching this display for a while, the height of the grass came through. Apparently, year-after-year and decade-after-decade, this grass had been cut off, never maturing to carry its genetic heritage further. Like Malvina Reynold’s song lyric, “grass growing through cement”, this grass was ready to take advantage of no mower coming by. Year-by-year and decade-by-decade this grass not only held the sandy soil together but kept looking up, reaching up. This year its reach was not cut short. Trust in the unseen (an end to mowing) held steady. The courage of persistence is bearing fruit.

In a larger field we also see the wind that is blowing. A democracy, with all its inherent difficulties of clarifying its purpose of carrying conflicting visions of meaningful life, has been waving relatively free. This power and that (wind, fire, rain, hail, goats, gardens, and weeds) are no longer able to accommodate one another. No matter the external situation, there is an internal rot that will cause democracy to fail of its own.

Conceived as a communal endeavor (admittedly minus native people, slaves, women, the poor) the cry of independence from external control has morphed into cries of independence from one another within the body. Independence, individually based, betrays independence, of the community. Moral: democracy is not as persistent as grass and will blow away as its multiple roots no longer intertwine.

Choosing a Scenic Route

While engaged in conversation enroute to a specific destination, I became engaged enough to miss the expected left turn. When queried by my passenger about whether we were still planning on going to the original destination, I light-heartedly remarked, “Yes, we’re taking the scenic route.”

Taking the next left turn, onto a street I don’t think I have ever been on before, there was a front yard decked out in a multitude of flower beds. Scenic indeed.

Missing a turn in life is not all that unusual. Sometimes we even invest such a miss with huge consequences. Generally we note a missed turn as an encounter with fate, and a negative encounter at that. Blame is easy to come by. Somehow we attach more significance to the downside of a mistake than we do to a serendipity.

To rebalance our responses, it might be we need practice in taking a GPS sigh of “Recalculating” and turning it in a choice we have made to take the scenic route. Trusting the encounters with life (including death) means that there is joy to be had off-the-beaten path. A “road less taken” is no less capable of bringing the Delight-of-the-Day than is a regular route. In fact it may more counted on than finding our routine has hidden the scenic just behind plain sight.

This is not an Algerian seizing-of-the-bootstraps. Claiming we are on scenic route keeps us more securely on the Beauty Way.

Compassion fatigue is real. So is beauty fatigue. A periodic reaffirmation that a misstep can be redefined is a significant spiritual practice — When you stumble across today’s next rose, doff your hat to it, and carry its memory into any designated destination you find yourself returned to.