This week I have been thinking a lot about salvation/redemption/forgiveness in various areas of my life. I was compelled to write this because I heard a man’s story that reminded just how far people can come in life and it got me to thinking. how little thought/belief we put into redemption. In short, if a person messes up, can they fix it? Can they heal? Can they get better? Does jail or punishment really work? Does it accomplish what we want it to? 

Here’s the story I was inspired by:  A client of mine, on-and-off for years announced he was getting married and settling down. She (his fiancee’) was going to make an honest man of him. At some point, she asked him, “You’re not going to do that anymore, right? You did a lot of bad things. You’ve had a good run. You’re not going back there, right?” He thought about it and said, “No. I’m done”. He went on to detail that the step-child he will be raising actually believes in him, and believes he can do all things, and it makes him smile. 

Now when I say “bad things”, I mean bad things. This man, years before I knew him, was into gangs, was an enforcer of sorts, has some number of felony counts well beyond the “three strikes” rules we now consider a norm. He told me the other day that — over the course of his lifetime, he had more than one attempted murder charge brought against him. But that was him 8 or 10 years ago. In the time I have known him, his heart has always been in the right place and his children were at the heart of it.

His is the classic story of abuse, addiction, failing in school, learning to fight and living on the streets leading to his being paid by people to beat other people up by a criminal element that waits for kids like him to fall in with them. 

Years ago, when I met him, his girlfriend was cheating on him, he was doing drugs, maybe selling drugs, I don’t know. His brother had died of an overdose or in a gang hit or something, but what bothered him was that his girlfriend wasn’t taking care of the kids. He didn’t want his kids growing up like he did. When he finally left her, she went into a spiral of self-destruction that is hard to imagine. Their children were taken away by children’s protective services.and that was the game-changer. When they were taken away from her, they couldn’t give them to him with any kind of logic. He was legendary among local police departments for being mean and dangerous. This left him heartbroken, this man who so many people didn’t even think had a heart. 

He wanted to prove to DCF that he could handle the children, that he could stop drinking and drugging, that he didn’t have to be violent, that his children could go well beyond his life-style. And he had to do it while avoiding jail, because if he went to jail, he’d been told he wasn’t coming out. In the time I have known him he has fought against drugs, failed, and finally succeeded. He has had two failed relationships, but each was better than the last, and he now has a fiancee without  a criminal record, who has never had trouble with the law because she’s a good person.. And she connects with him because he has become a good person. He now gets weekend visits with one child, has the other nearby and has managed to put his family back together again. He has made peace with his ex (the mother of the children) and apologized for not supporting her emotionally, because he always met his financial responsibilities. 

Overlaying this was a meeting I went to early in the week where my friend Carrol was using the language of salvation and hoping to be commissioned as a Christian educator. She talked about “coming to Jesus” and “being saved from her sins” and “the authority of the Bible” and such things. The highly educated clergy and lay people around the table were uncomfortable with the language but were struck by her genuineness. She called something out of them called hope, I think, and they knew she would pass that on to any church she served. Still, at least some of them had to wrap their heads around her way of coming at the faith.

In the liberal church, we deal with salvation all the time, but the story of “God killing his only Son” as the means to doing it just doesn’t make sense. We don’t really get how doing that makes things better for anybody. but Carrol’s faith says it did and — however she got there — she has hope. In my frustration the other night, trying to bridge her worldview with theirs, I reminded them that, “There are whole sections of the UCC that believe in Salvation!” and all kinds of emotions exploded into raucous laughter. Of course they did, I realized, because all of the people in the room had some belief about how Christ works in the world and why we have hope, etc. For me, Jesus dying on the cross doesn’t make any sense to me, but there came a point in my life that I thought I needed salvation/forgiveness and, just in case that story was how it worked, I trusted God enough to believe, even if it makes no logical sense to me. So, yes, I had to suspend logic in order to believe.I didn’t suspend logic in the rest of my life, I just suspended it there and have become a better person because I believed it was possible to get better. “because the Bible tells me so”. 

But forgiveness and salvation and redemption aren’t really logical propositions. You can’t un-harm somebody. When people do damage to each other, it’s real — and often-times long-lasting. There are millions of people, for instance, in 12-Step rooms who can recount the damage they have done. They understand that what they have done is unforgivable, and yet they ask for forgiveness from somebody, accepting the answer “no” on occasion because the damage is real.And yet, people do change. They do it all the time. 

There are stories of the person who was a radical bomber years ago who fled the law and became a solid member of their school department with decent kids and so on. They lived decent lives for 20 or 30 years and now they are going to jail for some thing they did years ago. I always wonder what good sending them to jail does. They have done — on their own — the very thing that jail is supposed to do: redeem them. What’s the point? 

Our ideas about the world are becoming more black-and-white every day: Once a pedophile, always a pedophile.Lock them up forever.  Once a minister who hurt his or her congregation, always a minister who will. Take away their right to work in any other church. Once a criminal, always a criminal. “Three strikes and you’re out”. Lock them away for life. None of these are values we held 30 years ago.  Many people today still don’t, in the recesses of their heart, because they want to have hope.

Without hope, life is not worth living. And yet, we don’t want to be naive and foolish enough not to protect ourselves from a credible threat. Pedophiles, pastors, criminals of all sorts shouldn’t be trusted until they’ve proven they can be. But what if they do prove it? What if they do grow and change? What if they do see their lives and change them? What if they refuse to pass on the horrible lives they been given? What of they swear to themselves that their children will not know the horrors they did? 

John the Baptist and Jesus both called us to “repent”. We somehow misunderstand that. We think that “repentance” means apologizing.and saying we’re sorry. It doesn’t. The Hebrew word for “repentance” is “shoov” and it means, “turn around, go back, return to the right way”. Apologizing is a step in that process, but it is not the whole process. And yet, we in modern times, stop there. Why would be called to something we cannot do? .Let us have more hope than that. Let us demand more of ourselves and our brothers and sisters in humanity. Let’s ask for, and believe in, real repentance. 

The other option — lock people in emotional jails of “you’re stuck” or lock them in actual jails for $80,000 per year — doesn’t seem to be working. Not when you know people like the man whose getting married.

Peace,

John

It breaks down to: 5122 views, 176 posts over 29  months or — on average 29  readers for everything I have written, some far more and some far less. In case you’re curious, these are the Top 10.  Posts in general have more than the numbers listed there, because “home page” — whatever was posted that day–  has about 1,800 hits.  Still, here they are:

Title		Views
Guess Again: The Top 100 Albums of All Time		99
What If Good News Prevailed?		89
Do Your Own Theology — The Bible and Its Authority		79
South Church — Better Than It Has To Be		76
Liner Notes — Beebs and Her Money Makers, “Welcome to Barter Town”		63
Surprise! People Are Mad! Oops, Wrong People!		59
I’m sad, but this IS America…		53
A Theology of Ordination		53
Trucks Going Both Ways — Maine and the WHOLE gay thing…		52
Didn’t See That One Coming…		48

The reason I tell you all this is that I like numbers. Numbers are facts. Numbers are markers. Numbers are somehow more real than feelings, thoughts, etc, even if they are not more important.

So what does this have to do with recovery? 47 years ago, when I was 4, some God-awful things happened to me that kind of turned my mental world upside down. I don’t find any reason to say more than that, because, as of Tuesday, January 10,2011 — when the numbers hit 5, 000 — I am officially back from those events.

The long and short of how it all affected me is this: My good side became my “Shadow” and I unwittingly hung out an invisible  ”kick me” sign, which people have taken the opportunity to use over the course of my lifetime.  For those of you not acquainted with the concept, Carl Jung coined the phrase, “Shadow” to describe the part of ourselves which we don’t acknowledge or accept.  So, for about the last 47 years, I could acknowledge that there was Good in the world, but mentally I couldn’t accept that it could come from me.  This blog — your readership — helped me change that.  So, for everyone who ever cared enough to read my work, I owe a profound “thank you”.

For probably the first 10 years after what happened, I was the kid that people (I think) loved to hate. I was awkward,” too smart” for some, too nerdy for others, too greasy and too smelly for others,  too “gay” in Junior High (I didn’t like to beat people up and –more often than not — couldn’t).  And somehow, it all made sense to me, because I was those things.  If it was bad, I was it. Everybody said so, so it must have been true.

An experience with God and my mother’s insistence  kept me interested in church, and I almost had a girlfriend — (a girl who didn’t laugh at me when I hung out with her in the nursery, named Lynn Anderson), but I remained — for most kids — “weird”.

Freshman year in High School promised much the same thing. Even the kids no one would hang out with wouldn’t want to hang out with me. Then the world changed. We moved to Wilbraham, Mass (in the suburbs)  just up the road from Springfield (the  city, where we lived), which was just up the road from Chicopee (the poorer, smaller city where we had lived for my childhood).  School wasn’t really different, but the Wilbraham United Church certainly was. There was a healthy, fun-loving Youth Group and short curly-haired Youth Minister named Bob Kyte.

One day, Bob showed up at our house and asked my mother if it was OK that I go to “Leadership Camp”. As recently as a few months ago, I thought that Bob was BS-ing my mother.  Today, I consider the possibility that he might have actually seen something. In any case, that visit to the house sent me to Deering, my spiritual and emotional home for all-time. The Deering Camp and Conference Center’s Sr. High Camp #2 stunned me. I honestly didn’t know what to think for the first few days, because I had never seen such a community.  They didn’t think I “had five heads”. The campers and the staff treated me like an actual human being. They loved me — not because I was this or that, not because I earned it or didn’t. They loved me simply because God created me and that was good enough for them.  I don’t remember a person, for the entire week, picking on me. Not one.  While I probably thought I had five heads, they wouldn’t have cared if I did. In addition to my call to ministry happening that week with the wonderful Peter Wells there, I cam across a book that would change my life: Peoplemaking by Virginia Satir, which I somehow connect with Mike Gatchell (maybe he brought it there or something. I don’t know). Satir’s book changed my life because it said that families could be whatever they wanted and they could be happy. I had experienced a new world at Deering, and I could dream about a new world via Peoplemaking. (Yes, I’m sure I thought the book was about sex. What else does a 14-year-old boy think about?)

From that time on, I knew there could be Good in the world,  and I was determined to make it be that way.  But my spirit remained the way it had always been: There was Good in the world, but somehow — no matter what they said — it didn’t apply to me. I could soak up the holiness at Deering,  but in my heart of hearts, I “knew” I didn’t fit there, with those wonderful people.

But I made it to seminary, Gordon gave me a good recommendation, and I was on my way.  I didn’t really fit there, either. I wasn’t female enough, gay enough, foreign enough, Black enough or whatever to understand what life was “really like”.  I was, as Charlie Crook and I used to say, “The White Male Oppressor”.  But, for a guy who was racist, sexist, homophobic and whatever I was believed to be, I suddenly had friends — Todd Farnsworth (who was really holy) and Joe Tripp and I became fast friends. Without really knowing what I was doing, I was leading the biggest prayer group on campus — and the only one, I gather for years before that.  I thought that’s what you did at seminary, and so it’s what we did at seminary. And I knew in my heart that I wasn’t any of those “isms” because I had learned about Women’s Liberation and Men’s Liberation ten years before that at Deering.  And I knew what health looked like from Satir’s work.

But I still believed I was weird — lucky to be surrounded by friends — but generally weird. My first internship confirmed that, but I sent my first bunch of kids to Deering and they were changed, just as I knew they would be. I had done something right.

I talked with my friend Leigh McCaffrey (from Prayer Group) one night about the dreams I’d had every night since I was a kid, when she said, “That’s not normal” and my past demons sprung to life. All the love that Deering-ites had shown me was now being changed with something new — honesty.  While Deering folks would have liked me if I had five heads, I didn’t like myself having them. I wanted to be “normal”, whatever that was.

For a year I was out of the Parish and wrestling with those demons while attending school and being miserable. I was ready to drop out. Maybe I was wrong about God’s call. Then Gordon showed up and gave me perspective. Later,  Todd called me from his former internship and asked if was interested in a staff position at Centre Congregational Church in Lynnfield.  This, too, changed my life. Having done some good for kids prior, I was confident I could do something there. The staff there was wonderful. Mark Strickland let me do my own thing. Marilyn the Associate Pastor didn’t “get” me, but she realized she didn’t have to. The kids and I clicked and I have been absolutely blessed to have them and their families in my life since then. At my ordination, they were there. At my wedding, they were there. When they go married, I was invited. Bob, Derek, Dawn and the rest of the Cunninghams, I owe you soo much. Rob and Bill McCarthy, I can’t imagine life without you. Matt and Camille Utterback , the same. Lisa Dodge, Ken Warnock, wherever you are, I have been soo blessed by you, especially at my first church in Upstate, NY when you came up to visit. Oh, and special “Hi!” to Shawn Murphy and SAC. In seminary, when my peers told me I wouldn’t be a good minister because I didn’t think like they did, that Youth Group proved otherwise. They were changed and I was changed by that ministry — by the grace of God, not me, but God in me. And, yes, they too made the Deering connection and were changed.

In my last semester at seminary, a woman from one of my classes — Mary Dean-Lee pulled me aside and said, “I’m sorry to have missed you before this. You’re not who people think. You’re going to be a great minister”.  And my outlook about myself — because she had nothing to gain from that comment — began to change.

I had my first church and — somewhat because I wasn’t used to “normal” —  I failed.  Looking back on it, the church was working through a trauma of its own and I made every possible mis-step I could. But the Youth Group was wonderful. The Sloths, the Christensens,  (all of them), the Ripleys  and Lisa’s family were great and remain treasured friends to this day.

A few years after that, in Rochester, I came into contact with AA and the 12-Step model and began to realize that God could forgive whatever I done in my lifetime — whatever that was, and I was sure I’d done something.

Years later, I went to grad school, tried a new-church start, and in each place, my sense of self (my IALAC sign, for those in the know) got stronger.

I wrote a book (Thanks Liz and Leigh. I sold another one this month!) and later decided to write a blog. With Liz’s and Cathi Chapin-Bishop’s help, I began doing this. I thought I’d write one thing, get it off my chest, and go on with life. Alas, it didn’t work out that way.  People began thinking I knew what I was doing as a blogger!

In 2010, something changed, finally. I had begun to write this blog around that time, and I found myself with my very own “in-care student” (someone on  their way to becoming ordained).  Char Corbett is a fantastic, holy person and yet, here she was coming to me for guidance. I began to think that I might actually have something worth giving. After all, you can’t give what you don’t have. When Char got ordained, the blog had continued to grow. Now, after all those years in the parish, I was a minister.  Thanks to Char who never realized what I secretly believed — that I had nothing to offer her, because she was a better minister than I was.

And the blog grew. Bob and I fought. Val and I agreed. Bob and I agreed. Rob wrote in. Cathi wrote in.  I was someone, sort of, and not just in my own head. The numbers proved it.

Then my friend from California, Craig Hames, called and told me that I was some sort of holy person to him — the person who said the right thing at the right time, even if I didn’t know it.  A while later, I figured it out. While I was never going to be the Gordon Sherman, I fit the same function for Craig: the one God sends to help when in trouble.  I wasn’t the real Gordon, but I was somebody’s “Gordon”. All of these things integrated into my being and I was nearly recovered after 46 years of trying.  I was blessed, fresh on the heels of my triumph wih Char, with Carrol Cyr as a new “member in discernment”. And the blog continued our development. She could argue with it, get mad at it, agree with it, “wonder where that came from” or whatever, but we both grew because of it.  In a few weeks, Carrol will probably get to be a Commissioned Minister in the UCC.

Finally topping  off the ministry thing was Susan Townsley at Ron Brown’s installation. I had known Susan from Bridgeport where — while I did some good work, I felt like a colossal failure. She had been on the church and ministry committee when they had put my standing “on the back burner”. There were two possibilities here: 1) They were organizing and had to because I was out of state or 2) I really was a bad minister and they were trying to cover themselves by politely withdrawing my standing.  That day, she was there and gave  me a hug and seemed generally glad to see me.  She gave no sense of “ooh, what an idiot”.  Maybe I’m conflating events, but I think that members of the Bridgeport Church were actually there that day, and they were happy to see me — or at least didn’t vomit or run away.  However good or bad I had been, I had not been evil or destructive. I hadn’t destroyed God’s gift.  If I wasn’t evil and I was doing something good in the world, maybe I was a good person. Maybe I did fit in the church. Maybe I did fit in with the Deering folks — and what could that mean but that I was a human being after all?!

The Deering Reunion this year and David Hauser’s just simple acceptance made me know that it might be true. It turns out that David was in my very first living group all those years ago and he remembered me as a seemingly  normal person –even back then! If I have even some of the spark within me that Paula Richards and Sue Tatem and Buzz and Gary have, it’s possible that I’m way more human than I would have guessed. It astounds me that it’s taken me this long to figure it out, but that’s what abuse does, I guess.

In any case, I was ready to say I was back to full human status at the end of last year because people thought highly of my blog when I ran out of steam at year’s end. Then something happened that I didn’t expect — even without writing, the stats took off. Somebody was reading this. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I hit the 5,ooo mark!  Looking back, my wife has liked it, my friends have liked it, Helen Caldicott liked it for goodness sake! Ed Smith said some nice things the other day. Clients have seen it and liked it.  People I don’t even know have liked it — not always, but that’s to be expected.

It shouldn’t take 47 years and 5,000 people reading this blog for me to get over my past, but it did. For those of you who have read it, each little click of care, every good comment, every reasonable argument or simple “huh?” meant my ideas and I mattered. Every passing comment of “I like your writing” or “I like your blog” put back a piece of me. And so, I thank you, for all you have meant to me, readers.

And as it has been for me, I remind you that no kind word, gesture, or action ever goes un-noticed. It may confuse people. It may even, when people are really twisted, anger them. But it never, ever goes un-noticed. Know that all your kindness, your care, your support have helped me like myself and feel human. For people that already start off as human, your words, your kindness, your caring propel them into the stratosphere of love.  You are truly miracle workers in my life and the lives of others. I’m good for awhile. Whether you ever  read this blog again or not, keep up the good work.

Peace,

John

P.S. Since they weren’t explicitly mentioned in here, Thanks to my best friend Alan Bercovici for all the golf games through the years and thanks to Tony Briand for always being sane during High School. My brother’s a great guy and my sister rocks. And my kids love “Florida grandpa”.

It began with The Polar Express — a movie I had seen in 3D with the kids when it first came out. A warning — NEVER bring little kids to see this movie in 3d with full-sense-around sound. When the train drives over your head, it looks, sounds, and scares the life out of you as though it were real.  Try holding a shaking while YOUR heart-rate is still above normal and see how fun it is.

At home, on our TV screen at least, the movie takes on a gentler tone, and becomes a movie about — of all things — faith.  The beginning of the movie features two different boys struggling with the same question: Do I believe and get on the train or do I let my disbelief get the best of me and let it go? One boy gets on after deciding “no” and changing his mind. The other one pretty much stays with his “no” answer until the others stop the train and wait for him. In a theme reminiscent of Walter Wangerin’s Ragman, the “believers” stop the train and go back and get the little boy for whom “Christmas just doesn’t work out”.  This boy doesn’t really make it to the big train cars, even after he gets on the train — because he doesn’t think he fits, and he doesn’t want to pretend he does, which is, of course, his choice.  The community of kids stop the train, go and get the kid, bring him hot chocolate and still he  doesn’t leave his car to check out the big train where all the fancy things happen.  But the community respects him enough, generally, to let him stay where he chooses and lets him come to them at his own pace. They bring him to the North Pole and he has to choose to move, to get out of the car he’s in, and to go see The Big Man Himself.

Whatever has happened to this child, it seems to be more than “I didn’t get a sled last year”. maybe it was the story on the news of the family that died in a Christmas fire, and maybe it was the look of the boy’s house in the movie that did it, but I was thinking real trauma from real life had taken away this boy’s reason to even hope for a better life.  This is the kind of thing that happens in people’s lives all the time. This (to use the psycholical term) “learned helplessness” requires extra care and work from an outsider to allow hope (and later choice) to happen. First comes rescue, then maybe daring to hope, then hope itself, then daring to try, then actual belief.

The other boy — the one called “Hero Boy” in the subtitles —  is too smart for belief. For him, much like Thomas in the gospels, only seeing will work to create belief and hope. But there is a part of him that wants to believe, just as I think Thomas did. Experience, “reality”, intellect, “growing up”, puberty, whatever it is, gets in the way and covers over his heart and his hope and his belief, but the spark of hope still burns somewhere within him until he’s left with, “what’s the worse thing that could happen if I believed?”.  Turns out you could die on a mountain railroad or a frozen over pond, or see a ghost hit his head on a low tunnel, or be stopped by elks, but — in the end — the North Pole actually does exist — and far more incredibly than anyone could have imagined.

As I watched, I thought of how much of faith is like that.  As we begin to remember the preposterous that we once knew , we begin to hope that castles and fairies and Santa and a beautiful reality  exists somewhere. We know too well that life makes sense most of the time. Still, love and hope and the Creator of it all aren’t always sensible — they’re extravagant and real.  So first, we get on the train because we woke up, then because we could escape the cold and get comfortable, then for some period of time, things get dangerous as reality itself gets unhinged for the smart person and the depressed one, the black one, the white one, the male and female, the courageous and the disliked know-it-all.  And if you stay on the journey long enough you get to see something like what you’ve dreamed about — only way, way better in ways and degrees you couldn’t even imagine. This is what faith promises, or hopes for, or believes in. It makes the crazy impossible train and the long walk through the snow to help others soooo worth it. What the boy was hoping for was a local town fair. What he gets is Disneyland, 6 Flags, and the Cathedral all in one. As Christians, we like to think the same way. Buddhists, Taoists, Jews, Muslims all (I think) look at faith the same way. So here’s the deal: you don’t have to get on the train. In fact,  if you get on because other people “made” you, you’re probably not going to enjoy it anyway.  But if you get on, and it’s even slightly your choice, I can promise you a pretty amazing ride to where ever that thing goes.

The second movie we watched is the classic “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Though it is (horrors!) in black and white, and clearly set in another time, it looks so familiar where it shouldn’t  be. Further, critics have called it “hokum” in the past and talked about “Capra corn” and they — as snivelling cynics often do — miss the point. When we as a society lose track of this, we are in serious trouble, which is how we got to here.

Clearly, the movie is about a man (Jimmy Stewart)’s innner demons and his struggle to have a better life away from the people around him whom he doesn’t exactly fit with, but is called to nonetheless. Yes, the themes of “one man’s life impacts those around him” and “life is worth living” are great ones that the movie conveys extremely well, but that’s not what I want to focus on here.

The thing that makes the movie both great and “corny” to cynics is it’s realism. In the town of Bedford Falls, we have the taxi driver and the cop, the librarian and the banker. We also have the immigrant in the slums, the factory worker, and the factory owner who’s lucky to “get in on the ground floor”. We have the forgetful and the deaf, the High School hero and the supposedly “loose woman”. We have the drunken and the sorrowful who either escape their fate or don’t. We have children who catch colds while playing and others who are lucky to survive them. There are people simply trying to get by (George Bailey and his family), there are people making progress for their family (like Martini’s new house), and there are people in Mr. Potter’s slum — and they all live together in the world that is Bedford Falls. All of these folks make up what we now refer to as “the 99%” while one man — Mr. Potter — owns nearly all of it and wants it all.

He is the man at the draft board who determines who will live and who will die, just as he is the man who sets the rents and rates at home that could determine who lives or dies. He is the man who owns it all, but has nothing. He’s the man who makes the Congressman wait til he’s done.  He’s the man that calls the police over one act of bad banking while he lives his entire life acting unethically. As Jimmy Stewart’s George says in a time of economic crisis, “Potter’s not selling, he’s buying”. What he’s trying to buy is control over their “measly little riff-raff” lives while they “do most of the working and living and dying in [that] town”. As George says, “Isn’t it fair that they should do that with a roof over their heads?”

Those of us who are like George have every right to want to leave all of that working and living and dying behind and live out our dreams. We have every right to live out our destinies. But if we leave behind the rest of Bedford Falls behind mentally, if we forget that the drunk and the floozie are connected to us, if we forget that the world is made up of all those other people — with their shades of good and bad, smart and not-so-smart, we leave the world of Bedford Falls to people like Mr. Potter.

Pretty soon, children are dying from “regular life” accidents like kids playing on the pond, houses are taken away or never built, and corruption reigns in the streets — all of the things that could have been prevented if we had cared enough to know both the Sam Wainrights and the Mr. Gowers of the world and formed a bridge between them in our community, both Bert the cop and Violet the “it” girl.

The picture of community in “It’s A Wonderful Life” is what America used to be — a connected mass of one life touching and building up another. It’s a tough life, as much as it is a wonderful one, but people make progress because they know and care about each other, and they protect each other from the Mr. Potters of the world, who care nothing about them and threaten\ “offer” to dislodge people from each other.

Bedford Falls is the Social Contract in action, the psychology of community vs. our fear of co-dependence. It is the best of America for the most people, but it isn’t always fair for the George Baileys out there. It’s so unfair at times that we may want to die, but in the end it’s that very community that saves us.

We need to protect ourselves from the Mr. Potters of the world who take but give little back, who divide and conquer, who remove the very thing that keeps us going after a hard day working and living and dying. But we need to do that by accepting that George Bailey has a job to do right here at home in Bedford Falls.

Peace,

John

But back to Newt: honestly, I think I’m on to something here. He plays up the boyish charm and we think he’s cute, somehow. He’s a rascal, a rabscallion, he’s impish… and he’s as simple about politics  around him as a ten-year-old.  When he says something goofy, we all think “He’s just being honest”… As honest as any ten year old ever was.

There’s a reason, though, why we don’t let ten year old boys become President. A slingshot is not foreign policy. Putting frogs down a girls dress isn’t the way to handle say, Hillary Clinton, or the dissident who won a Nobel prize. Laughing at nerds doesn’t make for a good economic strategy. We all want to remember innocence and misunderstanding as “those cute things kids say”.  I, anyway, like innocence as much as anybody. But misunderstanding and, say, nukes, don’t bode well for the world. The Kid in all of us is cute, because his (or her) world is the playground. How much damage can they do there? Only a playground’s worth. Then the big people take over, because Junior could get run over by a car.

I wonder, as I think about it, whether Sarah Palin wouldn’t think it were cute if a ten-year-old put a frog down her dress. I think she’d think it was cute in the same way building a tree fort that said “No Girls Allowed!” was.  She’d giggle and think, “He can’t possibly mean that!” but he would, because — at least in my childhood — ten-year-old boys thought girls were “yucky” and “mushy” and stuff.

Bill O’Reilly has started (or maybe I just noticed) with the same thing, taunting Mitt Romney saying, “Are you a tough guy?” . I wonder how many other professional Right-Wingers think the same way. President Obama looks way too serious to be playing with those boys. He acts like a Big Person if you’re ten.

By the way, I hear that Mr. Gingrich is a very smart man — an intellectual of sorts — or he fancies himself one. I have no doubt that Bill O’Reilly, as much as I dislike his opinions, is also very smart. He certainly makes more money than I do for what he does, and that kind of success requires a certain intelligence. Sarah Palin was governor of a state, for goodness sake. Clearly, she’s got something go on in her head. But I can picture her putting on lipstick in front a “big girl” mirror wearing her mother’s fake pearls, just to see what it’s like.

The problem comes when the 10 year old walks around in a however-old-he-is body. One doesn’t really expect an adult to leave his wife while she’s got cancer because the girl around the corner likes him. One doesn’t really expect an adult to quit her job just because the job gets hard or because she’d like to do something else now. I hope Bill O’Reilly’s never stuck his tongue out at a guest, but — if I’m right — I wouldn’t be surprised. This is  where the scandals come in — when that cute little child is asked to always Act Like An Adult, which is the job of the President. If they can pass that test, then they can qualify to run.

I don’t mean to pick on Gingrich, Palin, O’Reilly (or Limbaugh or Bachmann or Herman Cain) because that’s who they are. What I’m fascinated by is that we, as Americans, take such delight in them.  We are (or maybe it’s just the media) “hooked” by them somehow. Maybe they represent a simpler time, or “pure” innocence. They represent something in us that we genuinely liked — at ten. They represent something we miss in ourselves now. Nor do I mean to just pick on conservatives — I bet Bill Clinton’s got a little of that boyish charm thing going, too, but look at his scandal. And Clinton was a Rhodes scholar, so he’s no intellectual slouch either.  The idea, though, that “boys will be boys” — and I mean real boys — is an acceptable idea to some people in politics is an idea worth considering, but it’s one that will get us in trouble once we’re called to deal with adult issues.

Peace,

John

You know those insurance charts that give points to events and — if you’ve had so many, you’re likely to suffer health consequences? If they’re true, 2012 is primed to be a year of health consequences. The thing that surprises people about these charts is that both bad and good events are stressors, especially if they are “big” events.  So here’s the list of big events from 2011 (and yes, I know, it’s not over yet…)

Weather:

First part of the year: Largest snowfall on record in Connecticut.

Middle of the Year: First tornado in 50 years hits Springfield. I was two blocks away from the center of storm.

3/4 of the way through the year: first Earthquake in memory hits Springfield area.

October: Power outage for 10 days.

End of the year: Wettest year on record in Connecticut — just reached in the last month or so.

Health

First part of the year: found out I needed neck surgery and if I had whiplash just once before the surgery, I could be paralyzed.

Through June: worried I’d be paralyzed.

May or June: Had surgery on my neck which could have resulted in paralysis or death.

June: I found out it didn’t. Now I’m fine.

Ministry:

June: after years of languishing in document limbo, I was given standing again in my denomination. Nothing bad, just lost in the shuffle. A wonderful thing to get back, though. Thanks, John Clarke, Jack Cooke, and Committee on Ministry!

April through July/August: majorly ministered to by Kyle Watson, Stephen’s Minister at South Church, also George Harris at South Church

Spring through present: Personell Committee, South Church — tough work, but important, not always my best, not always my worst.

July: I preach at Plantsville Congregational. Had a great time. Consider preaching and parish ministry again. Thanks, Barbara!

September through now: Emely Goodnow, field ed student gives two really good, deep sermons at South Church. I was lucky enough to catch them both.

August: re-connect with Charlie Crook from seminary to do Bible study for Carrol. Also included: Leigh McCaffery for the Spiritual Side

October: Charlie dies suddenly.  On the positive side, reconnected with his sister and connected for the first time with his brother and sister-in-law. On the negative side, his death still sucks the life out of me. I just grieve.

December: Second “in-care” student nearly through “the pipeline” — Congrads Carrol !

Work:

Private Practice grows quite a bit.  Agency work up and down and up.

Jan through May: Taught a new class on Biology of Addiction. June: Stopped teaching for the foreseeable future.Until surgery: busy, busy, busy, extremely busy.

After surgery: tired, tired, tired, not so tired.

Since then: busy, busy, busy, extremely busy.

Soon: Not busy at all, really.

New year: some balance?

Political Scene:

First part of the year: sort of hopeful. Obama still president, economy bad.

Second part of the year: totally hopeless. Obama still president, caves in on everything, economy worse.

Occupy Wall Street happens: A renewal of hope (wasn’t that the subtitle to Star Wars?). Obama still president, says nothing, but stops caving.

Post Occupy encampments: Obama still president, says a lot, acts like the man I voted for. The people lead and at least one leader follows. I am hopeful for the first time in years! Who knew?

Friends:

My best friend, Al: didn’t see nearly enough of him. My fault.

Todd Farnsworth: Good to be with you.  Good to have you back.

Deering friends: wonderful to reconnect! I can’t even express that love.

David Hauser, Sue Tatem and AbilityPlus

John Odams: Back in my life.

Hall, NY folks: again, wonderful to re-connect.  Derek is growing so much internally, I’m so impressed. All the Sloths and former Sloths are so warm and incredible and doing great things with their lives. My daughters felt immediately comfortable with them.

Charlie Crook: Still dead. OK, it depends on what you mean by that.

Usually, I talk about how cool my friends are and feel like a “hanger-on” to their fame. This year, Ron Bottitta is by far the person I’m most proud to know — not because he’s a great actor (he apparently is), but because he’s a great citizen. The number of times he was at Occupy LA this year impresses me. I never made it to Hartford.  Also, Bitsy Eddy — arrested at Occupy Oakland!  Incredibly brave people.

Boston folks: I miss you greatly and want to spend time with you.

Family:

Michelle, my wife: 19 years married, grew a lot this year, a great chaplain, did CPE this year, plus great ministry at South Church. It’s good to be married.

Daughters: growing like weeds.  absolutely incredible children that make me proud of them all the time — in school, at church, at home, just wonderful.

Lisa, our housemate: Nice, friendly third parent to two wonderful children. Thanks for everything.

Sister Michelle: Is already a BIG local star, first album out this year. Next year, conquering the world!

Dad: still as funny and great as ever.

Scott: I’m glad we celebrated your birthday this year. You’re a good man.

So, that’s the synopsis. Enough HUGE losses, enough wonderful surprises. Can’t wait to see my insurance chart.

Peace,

John

From Exodus 20: 2 -

² “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.  –  The elected person should not put their constituents into any type of slavery — emotional slavery of any sort —  or literal  slavery (i.e. you work very hard for someone else for no money at all).

³ “You shall have no other gods before  me. – The elected person should not take an oath to any person, ideology, (maybe party?) other than serving their constituents and/or the country as a whole.  This means no pledges to “Never Raise Taxes”, no pledges like the Contract for America, no pledges to the NRA or PETA or anybody.

⁴ “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. ⁵ You shall not bow down to them or worship them” —    The elected person should not pretend they are something they are not. They shouldn’t craft an image of themselves as pure in any form that they are not. They shouldn’t pay anyone else to craft an image of themselves as pure in any form that they are not. They should let someone else craft an image of themselves as “pure” in any form that they are not.  This means no “spin doctors”, no PACs, maybe no soundbites.

⁷ “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. — The elected person should not ever claim to be doing things because God told them to, unless it’s actually true. In that case, the person should be tested for sanity. If they are sane, and they’re telling the truth that God said it, they should use God’s name.  If it can’t meet both of those rules, it’s blasphemy for religious types and just plain a lie for secular ones.

⁸ “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. ⁹ Six days you shall labor and do all your work, ¹⁰ but the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. ¹¹ For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. — The elected official should take time off to reflect as often as necessary.

¹² “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you”.  – The elected official should remember their history, but also honor their forebears by being able to meet the challenges of their own day. I want my kids to be respectful of me, but I also want them to be themselves. Let’s take that to the national level.

¹³ “You shall not murder” — Murderers need not apply, in general. People who like war should not be elected. The term often used is “kill”, but the actual term is murder – planned killing. War is planned killing in a larger scale. I understand that countries need to do things at times in self-defense. But war as “conquering” — nope.

¹⁴ “You shall not commit adultery” — straightforward.

¹⁵ “You shall not steal” — in any way , from anybody — especially your constituents. In addition, maybe no lobbying after you’ve left office.

¹⁶ “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. — also straightforward — but so far from the debates and the ads.

¹⁷ “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” — The elected person should not taking what’s not theirs, either from countries or from other people. They shouldn’t  abuse their power just because they have it. No sexual harassment, then.

The text continues:

¹⁸ When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance ¹⁹ and said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.”

²⁰ Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.”

²¹ The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.

We are in such a mess right now, because we are so far from where we should be. Yeah, we’re afraid of God, and yeah there’s a thick cloud between us and God — not because we created that cloud, that thick wall between us and the way things should be. Our government ought to be afraid of a truly just God if this is where we’re at.

By the way — last thing.  Because it’s only my opinion, nobody should ever use this as some kind of litmus test. It’s not anything else to pledge allegiance to.  But it’s a place to start.

Peace,

John

I am in a position where I deal with the same things — decent people who have done really horrible things — both in psychotherapy and in ministry (I serve on a Committee on Ministry where we have dealt with pastoral misconduct as well as being a psychotherapist).  In addition, I work with addicts on a near daily basis so I hear about the stupidest and most vile behaviors on a nearly daily basis. Sometimes they are committed by the same person and sometimes the same person is on both sides of the coin — perpetrator of stupidness and victim of evil. In fact, those are the greatest number of my cases, I think, by far.  Person X is the victim of the most evil, insidious, devious, planned and disgusting behaviors and now can’t seem to get out of their own way, “snatching”, as Lincoln said, “another defeat from the jaws of victory” in any number of ways in their lives.

The number of women (and men) I know who have been sexually abused, physically abused, emotionally abused, domestically violated, legally harassed, and addicted by some evil scumbag (yes, that’s how I see them) grows everyday as I continue in my chosen fields.  They sit in my office and tell me stories that no one would believe and — for years — no one has, and they think something’s wrong with them. They are some of my favorite people in the world. It’s my job to tell them that, no, they’re not crazy.  No, things are as bad as they seem, and even though there frequently is no justice, they are still good people. And they are.  I tell them that they, statistically, they make life better for the rest of us.  For every twenty things that happen to them, there are twenty people out in society that don’t have to put up with that kind of grief.  All things being equal, though, I’d rather society shared the “wealth” so that no one had to walk around with their lives.  Actually, I’d rather there weren’t so much “wealth” of trauma at all, but this is what we’re given.

Do these people do incredibly stupid things often? You bet they do. They sleep around without birth control, they can pick a loser out of a crowd at a 1,000 feet away (and then date them), they fall back “off the wagon”, they spend their hard earned not-enough cash on easily available, extremely expensive, poisonous evil and they get called things like “drunks” and “druggies”, “whores” and “borderlines”,” thieves” if they steal to pay back their dealer and so much more. And — by any objective matter — they are those things.  But I swear to you, those people are not evil. They do things that — to the untrained eye — seem evil, but there is no maliciousness behind them.

A friend of mine this week differentiated between a woman who stole diapers and formula for her child (because the baby was hungry and wet) and a man who steals enough to drive a Mercedes. Both are thieves, truth be told. Both may go to jail, but will probably get a slap on the wrist by the court system. Both have good and bad in their personalities — nowhere near the dichotomy of Cathi’s friend, but it’s still there.  And yet, my friend knows that one of them is evil, while one of them does wrong things.  While I have police friends and ministry colleagues who swear there  is no hope for people who do wrong things, I tend to disagree.  I differentiate based on the only things that help me make sense of it all — trajectory, love of image, and grace.

When I served a church in Bridgeport, a couple asked if I would marry them, even though they’d “lived in sin” for some years prior (their term, not mine). I explained to them that — by anyone’s standards — they were going in the right direction and that it didn’t seem right to stop their “progress” by refusing to marry them.  I still use that standard. If a person is trying to get better, that’s totally different than someone who doesn’t care about anyone and isn’t even trying to get better.  I still expect progress after a they have the idea of what’s going to work but wanting to get better’s a great start.

The next thing I see is what I call “love of image” as a way to differentiate the evil from the not-quite-right-yet.  Evil people care far more about their image than they do about their reality. It doesn’t matter that they deal drugs or weapons of death or that they molest children — they look good. Doing scummy things and intently looking good is one of the signs of evil I see frequently. For these people, there is a sense of entitlement, a sense of self-love, a caring about things — especially reputation — far more than about people. People like that just creep me out.

Given the choice of the high living drug dealer or the low-living addict, I’d choose the addicted person every time. There are people who go into ministry for the adulation, for the entitlement and the privilege, for the feeling of intellectual superiority while they “save” their flocks  from minor sins. Those people are not — in the final say — ministers. They are egotists with a job that says “minister” on the door.  Real ministers have consciences, real ministers have guilt over things they’ve done, real ministers want to be better, even if they just aren’t right now.  They are human beings capable of absolute lunacy as much as the next person and whatever it was they did seemed like a good idea at the time. These people are humans whose jobs require them to put the “minister” sign on the door, but they think, “if those people only knew how messed up I was, they could fire me now”.  There but for the grace of God go they. God calls them and they don’t know why.

At the other end of the spectrum is the person whom God didn’t call, but secretly or not-so-secretly thinks God should have called them, so they could have all the worship due them.  In their mind, they are doing God a favor by acting the way that they do. There without the grace of God go they, but you’d better not tell them that. Here are people that get into it because of the family name,  or because of some genetic predisposition to narcissism, or because — gosh darn it, they look good in a suit. Needless to say, this is not a reason to go into ministry (or anything else for that matter). The minute a baby spits up on them during a baptism or someone calls because their loved one died at 3 in the morning or someone argues over theology or their salary and there’s hell to pay.  Ministry is such an odd profession — it requires such different rules than other jobs, such twisting and turning with boundaries in order to stay professional,  questions of friendship, being “in community” but not “of the community”, questions of appearance, style, taste, etc…. If you expect to constantly receive attention and support, you will be greatly disappointed. Remember that the model of ministry we use originally was killed by the very group he was trying to save and you can see how far distant from narcissism the job is.

And yet, the distance from “I’m set apart” to “the rules don’t apply to me” isn’t very far at all. Plus, because the image part of ministry is so important to people, it’s not hard to see how people could be fooled by the image of  a pastoral narcissist. The distinct nature of the job, the importance of public image, and a perceived connection to the Ultimate Power in the Universe makes ministry a breeding ground for narcissism.

On the other hand, Freud and Jung might have been onto something when they talked about people being afraid of parts of themselves and projecting it onto others or warping it into being super nice. The people who are most afraid of their “Shadow” (the Jungian concept of the part we don’t want to see in ourselves) — the people with the most evil to hide — end up looking The Very Best in their actions or in their clothes because that’s where they’d rather spend their energy.  We all have good and bad in us, it’s part of our nature. It makes me worry about the Perfect Pastor who leads The Perfect Church of The Perfect People because perfect people don’t go to church. They don’t need to have a pastor at all, let alone a perfect one.  And a perfect pastor isn’t going to understand the kinds of people who actually come to church because he or she won’t understand the problems they’ve never had. So, the perfect looking, perfect sounding, perfect acting, always-able-and-never-having-a bad-day pastor is a myth. If you see one or — more to the point, are told by said pastor/priest/imam/guru that you are — beware that there’s something wrong in the scenario.

While especially true of ministers, it is true of all kinds of people. The abusive spouse or intimate partner, for instance, is well known to vacillate from sickeningly sweet to mean, violent, and all around nasty. Salesmen, actors, investors, unemployed garbagemen can all have some deep dark side.  Heck, even Gandhi got angry and semi-violent with his wife (at least in the movie).  But Gandhi wasn’t concerned with image. He was concerned with being his best self and living out his own expectations of himself.  People who are first concerned with how things appear really worry me. People who worry about how things actually are, are great human beings. Cathi knows this all too well from her days as a psychotherapist and, I suspect, other places. The tricky part is people who actually manage their own image while appearing not to.  Those people are beyond narcissists and all the way into psychopathic. No one goes far in the psychotherapy world without running into them as clients or family/friends/lovers of clients.

So there’s the first two parts of the scale of good and evil people: 1) are they headed in the right direction and 2) Are they interested in hiding their humanity from others? Worse yet, are they good at it?

The third part that keeps me going is grace. Given that any person who comes to see me (any person at all, really) has a bad side and has chosen to deal with it, can they be forgiven? I know a man who seems to have done horrible things to his daughter — but only once, by all accounts. Can he be forgiven by his daughter? I have no idea. Would he love to be forgiven by her? Yes. Can I forgive him? Actually, yes. I can forgive him because I think, given the person’s own humility, God can forgive him. I know the legal system says “once a perp, always a perp”. I know that many psychologists and many clergy consultants think the same way, but I have to believe in grace and growth and forgiveness if I am to have any hope for humanity. If there’s no growth, no change, no possibility for them, then there’s no reason to do my job — either of my jobs (therapist or minister).  And if I have to believe in growth and change as possibilities, I have to consider the possibility that this person — the one in front of me — is the one who can change and will.  Sometimes I’m wrong, but most often — whatever the deed is — I’m right.  How far change is possible and whether trust can be re-established enough to guarantee the safety of the people around them is another question.  But if grace exists, I have to consider that it might be possible in my client or the pastor in front of me.

Does any of this mean that my heart doesn’t get sickened from some of the things I hear at work or see on the news? Not at all.  As I hope I have shown here, evil is still evil, and people can do great and irreparable harm to others with it.  But people who want the truth and follow it wherever it goes, people who try their best, and people who seek real grace, even though the world may not want to give it, people who choose not to endanger others keep me going. That, and a lot of sleep, some anti-depressants, and a God who doesn’t leave me alone through it all. With these tools, I can make it through.

Cathi, that’s all I’ve got. I hope you — and anybody else in a similar situation — are able to hurt less when all is said and done.

Peace,

John

[BTW, for those of you that know her as "Cat" and wonder why I call her "Cathi", it's an old habit from our days in High School. But beyond that "Cat" sounds too short to me. The "t" sound seems too aggressive while the "th" flows more -- like she does. Under no circumstances should you assume that she's one of those "girls" who makes a smiley-face or a heart as the dot over her "i", though.  She's not now and she never was.]  : )

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, the human condition in America has gotten worse.

Over the last few months, I have seen clips of people at the Republican/Tea Party debates yell incredibly disgusting things. I don’t mean the candidates, though I worry about them as well. ” First there was the person who said that the uninsured man should die when Ron Paul asked rhetorically “what can we do? Let him die?”. Then there was the person who yelled, “Kill ‘em!” about people who don’t or can’t work. Again, I don’t blame the people on stage or their party for what was said, but I worry that they think the bully in the audience is somehow their target audience — the voters they “have to” get in order to win. If that’s your core constituency, you’ve really got problems. I get that people are frustrated, but that’s inhuman and evil. Which leads me to Penn State.

Are you kidding me?! Really?! What kind of people think that football is more important than rape of children?!!! Seriously?? Someone does? And it’s not just someone… No, it’s a LOT of someones — protesters, rioters, staff, lots of staff over the years. Colleges like Penn State owe their existence to the reputation of their students. I can say now and forever, I would never, under any circumstances, hire a Penn State student who took place in the protests and riots against Joe Paterno’s firing. I don’t care if they go on to get a doctorate in anything, I will not hire them, because they have no morals. In fact, they have, sadly, less than no morals. They have anti-morals.

What kind of a person rapes a young boy? How about more than one? That’s some sick son-of-a-….. What kind of a person sees it and doesn’t stop it? That’s some spineless person, at best. What kind of board knows about this behavior and keeps the molester from… the shower room? Seriously? What does one call that? Institutional evil? I don’t even know what to say. Then finally, someone shows up and says, “This must end!”. Sanity survives in one person, at least, and whatever board they have making this decision. Adults who should have known better are forced to take responsibility for their actions.

Paterno, to his credit, accepts the decision after letting the rapes happen. Who could take away his right to be a responsible adult and role model to thousands of people? Why, of course, the lugheads who protested the decisions! And I, for one, don’t want to hear, “they were drunk”. Drunken inhumans are not better than sober inhumans — they are just drunker.

Is it possible that we have somehow created a group of sociopaths big enough to do all of this? The lone psychopath is bad enough. Groups of people who choose a game — yes, it’s still only a game! — over adult, responsible action on rape are just so far out there, that I could not conceive of them. Sodom and Gomorrah used to be just a story. Now, it’s America — and not just idiots, this is supposedly educated people, the leaders of tomorrow, all those things we say at their commencement speeches.

How did we get here? Where did we go wrong? What kind of a system produces this? What, in God’s name, is going on here?

I’m sorry that this blog offers no solutions, or answers. It offers nothing but a rant, but dang! Events like this are the reason that people print things in “all caps”! This blog should probably all be in all caps, but I just can’t believe it. I hope it gives voice to other people’s thoughts and it’s the best I can do.

People who have been raped frequently suffer from it for years, sometimes the rest of their lives. They live with shame, they live with guilt, they live with shame if something bad happens to their perpetrators. Where ever Penn State is, it must be horrible for them. If the protesters\rioters knew that, I’d hope that they wouldn’t do what they are doing. But then I’d have hoped that long before now.

Having said that, I will say here what I frequently tell my clients: I pray for those who have been raped — in this situation and elsewhere, male and female. I am soooooo sorry that this happened to you. If you’re a victim, it’s not your fault. I can assure you that, no matter what the circumstances. I also pray for those who commit rape, that they might find their way back to a life they can live with, by taking responsibility for their actions. If you’re still alive, there’s time to change. Those who think football is more important than people’s physical, mental, and spiritual health — I’ll pray for them, too — right after I throw up.

Not at peace at all,

John

There are plenty of reasons for a man to get married. Mine apparently has something to do with Laura Ingalls Wilder, though I wouldn’t have believed it until last week. As my wife approaches her 43^rd birthday, I have become glad and gladder that she is a reader, and that she has a fondness for the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

My wife and I are very different people. She’s from the West, I am from the East. I’m from the city and she’s from… I’m not sure what you’d call it, near the Silicon Valley.  She’s moving into in her mid 40’s now and I’m in my early 50’s. Reagan was president when she was in her teens, so conservatives ruled her world. Carter was president in my teens, so I remember real liberals. My folks worked in factories, hers in a lab and in computers.  She’s a voracious reader, and I seem to be turning into a voracious writer.

And as we dated and learned stories of each other’s childhoods, there came what would become an ongoing theme — the idyllic picture of my future wife, sitting in her father-built tree-house, reading. Occupying a special place in books she read numerous times were the “Little House On The Prairie” books, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. And when she was done reading them, she’d come in and watch TV with the family – you guessed it – Little House On The Prairie with Michael Landon as “Pa”. I learned my lessons about justice and family from such fare as “Batman” and “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father”, she was into that more “girly” stuff while I was into the more “masculine” images, of course.

If I were to write a book on life lessons, it would be “Everything I Needed to Know Was Found in Folk\Rock Music”.  If Michelle was to write a book, it would be “Everything I Needed to Know is in The Little House Books”.

In the summer of 2010, this bi-focused life was experienced in the “Rock and Roll Prairie Tour” – the first few days on our westward vacation were dedicated to Rock Music – Martin Guitars, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and later a history of Oklahoma Rock and Roll at a museum in Oklahoma. The rest of the trip was about “Laura”, whom we would get to know as a person over the course of days. We saw Laura’s house when she was an author, a replica of the actual “Little House” described in one of the books. There was a play about the Little House books and how they came to be writer. I think we took the same general path of Laura’s life. My wife took a piece of grass from the prairie near the cabin. It was like that. All of that seemed a bit much to me, but I’m sure the entire history of Rock and Roll in the car seemed a bit much to her.

One of the other differences that had to be worked out in our marriage was gender roles and expectations. I had been told that I might be better off to marry a feminine, dumb woman, but it didn’t fit me. What would we talk about if I had to spend the rest of my life with her? So, I married a genius or near genius and, at times, it’s a challenge because she can argue me under the table even if I’m right. But she likes men and I like women, so for nearly twenty years, we’ve been trying to make it work with all those differences.

She has thought a lot about being a woman and I… well, I’m just a guy. I never wanted to be a MAN (grunt, grunt). I want to be a GUY (hand me that wrench and pass me my beer after I watch the Three Stooges). I mostly took male “normalcy” for granted until I got married and I still try to, but in a house of two daughters, a female cat, a female dog, and a female housemate, it gets harder and harder to do.  My “guy-ness” never had any interest in dominating women and I always thought women could be anything they wanted to, so I’m not threatened by them, but their world is still weird.

As you may have guessed by now, women were, are, and remain, a mystery to me. What they do in “women’s world” (when they’re by myself) is a giant Black Hole in my knowledge base. I feel like Sargeant Shultz from the old “Hogan’s Heroes” TV show – I know nothing. As my children approach their teenage years, I see more of what goes on, on that planet, but it’s still weird.  All those years of, “It’s a woman thing, you wouldn’t understand” – said by men or women – led to this weirdness.

Prior to our meeting some twenty years ago, I had always assumed that growing up and “being a woman” meant “being feminine” – all dainty and unable or unwilling to work at hard physical labor – certainly un-required to do all that. In the East, it’s what “ladies” in the Big City aspire to be, at least as far as I know. As I’ve said, I’m not a “real” macho man, so I don’t really like “feminine” women. I don’t want to work that hard. I wanted a partner – an equal.

But, the Western woman – and the mid-Western woman — is very different, especially when it comes to being “dainty”. She is “female” and “a good woman”, but she is not a “lady” per se, averse to hard work. She doesn’t expect to be fawned over, even if it would be nice every once in a while.  Fawning and the “dropping of the handkerchief” thing is not all that practical. The western woman of literature is practical, and a partner.

Now, I want to be a leader and be a Beta-male. She wants to lead in the world, and the whole gender thing gets funky at times, but it’s a good thing it does. So, here we are, going through life as “Harry Chapin meets Laura Ingalls Wilder” – which leads us to last week.

Last Saturday night, (two Saturdays ago, by the time you read this) we had a nasty, nasty storm. There was– a week before Halloween – 6 inches of snow, mixed with rain, on top of the leaves in our trees. There were loud “booms” in the neighborhood and my daughter would announce “transformer” as each one nearby blew. She also announced “flicker!” each time the lights did, until they didn’t do anything at all.  On Sunday, we didn’t have power, so Michelle emptied the freezer and the fridge “until the power comes back on”.  Would I have done that?  No. It wouldn’t have even occurred to me.  The only part of food I know anything about is eating it – and cooking it if it’s something I grew up with. Picking it, storing it, worrying about it? Not my deal.  If it was winterizing the car, I’d know what to do. (So there.)

Anyway, that was Sunday. Monday, we still didn’t have any power, and my wife knew just what to do.  She got out the grill and the briquettes.  Then she went looking for wood, just like Laura would do, though she, of course, did it with a car. She came home (while I was at work) and lit a fire in the fireplace, just like Laura would do. The next day, I had the kids while she went and taught a class, just like Laura did later in life. Tuesday night there still was no power, and we had a funeral to go to, so — like the family in the covered wagon — we packed up many of our worldly goods in the station wagon and went.

Wednesday, she had class, so she got to combine teaching (as Laura did) with traveling with the family in a wagon (as Laura did) only to return home and cook over an open fire, (as Laura did).  I came home from counseling people to her discussing the finer points of grilling and food spoilage with family friends. Did it bother her to be grilling in the cold and the dark? Not so you’d know it. After the company left, she lit the fire using a variety of materials, pulled out the lanterns and candles and sectioned off the rest of the house so we could all huddle in the one room with a fire. Did I mention she’s not afraid to work? My wife generally has more energy than the Energizer Bunny and this past week was no different. She was in direct contrast to the house with no energy and the family that required it.

Thursday, this whole thing was getting tiring, but I had an office with electricity and new internet to go to and I stayed there most of the day. When I came home, I was sure the power must be on. CL & P had said it would by last night at midnight. It wasn’t on, but my wife had gotten better at keeping the house warm – opening the windows during the day, closing them at night, blocking off sections of the house, lighting a fire (and probably a few other things as well) all kept the house a nearly warm 55 degrees at night. We had also begun offering hot showers to our friends, as part of the western hospitality thing that Laura would have practiced. There weren’t as few people in our neighborhood as Laura would have seen in her little prairie house, but it did seem like were in the middle of nowhere without any neighbors or modern conveniences. Thank goodness no one came over the ridge into our neighborhood wearing only their union suit, like in the Christmas episode of the TV show.

Friday, it was back to teaching class, taking the kids with her and reviewing their schoolwork\projects afterwards.

Saturday, while I went to work cold and groggy, she got up and took the kids once again. But this time she took them to a place that used to be more rustic than our house – Camp Wightman – where she and the kids cleaned up around cabins, buildings, and other places.  After that, she and the kids moved into one of the cabins overnight. The cabin had heat, and electricity, and the promise of internet – three things that our actual house no longer did. In addition to all of this, she stayed up and worked on sermon she was preaching the next day and doing laundry. (I can do laundry, and have done so for years, I just don’t know where to find washing machines unless they are a) in my basement or b) at the Laundromat in our neighborhood. I was impressed that she found the machine and did the clothes before I got there from a long day of working and driving.

Sunday morning was difficult. She had plans and knew how to pack and move and do all those things and I couldn’t think clearly. Anyone that knows me can tell you, I’m not a morning person. Also, as the one who was giving to hope to people all day in my office and trying to give hope about the house lights, I was all out of hope. When someone at the camp asked when power was coming on, I said, (with my morning voice, but quite seriously) “Never ever”.  So she went off to preach and I took the kids hither, skither, and yon to all the places they had to be – church, choir, special meal after church, etc. Sometimes, we’re the good modern couple (remember, Harry Chapin always wanted to spend time with his kid in “Cat’s In The Cradle”). Sunday was one of those times.  By mid- afternoon, it became apparent that neither hope nor our electric lights were coming back on. I was fit to be tied. (Pa never got mad, at least on TV, but I sure was that day and she handled it).

Our friends had gotten their power back on so the girls went to their house while we adults toughed it out at the house. Our housemate lit the fireplace while we went and had a change of pace – dinner and a movie, out. Harry’s not as comfortable on the prairie as he is with all the modern conveniences. It was a good night, but our neighborhood still had no power and I had moved onto the third stage of grief – after denial, and bargaining with the new life. I had moved into anger, but kept it together while Laura didn’t seem to mind at all.

Monday night, I needed creature comforts and went to our friends while she needed alone time and stayed at the house for the night. By Tuesday, power was on and “Laura” had toughed it all out.

So, as I said, I married a thrown-out-of-time, real life, Laura Ingalls Wilder. I still haven’t read the books, but she doesn’t have the entire Harry Chapin catalog, either. We manage. So now, in the 20^th year of our marriage (20 years in May, 2012), I am singing the praises of someone from a “girl” book, someone I thought was kind of silly and boring for years, someone who is female, but not necessarily a “lady”, someone who picked up the slack when her husband was out doing his job, (which includes raising the family).  I think highly of that woman who survived our “winter” in the wilderness. I celebrate Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Peace,

John

Banks, for so long able to do what they wanted, have started to act like “fairness” is a virtue.  Webster Bank the other day ran an ad here that said, “We wouldn’t charge you an extra fee — like some other banks — (wink, wink, nod, nod… Bank of America) because that wouldn’t be fair“.  This is the same bank that has charged us overdraft fees in such a way as to collect the most money for the fewest transactions for years. Now they think such things might be unfair. Now fairness counts. Now “fairness” is popular.

Republican candidates, still arguing in the debates over who is the most conservative\capitalist\patriot among them are falling on deaf ears. Now, we wonder if  Conservatism = Capitalism=Patriotism. Democrats who still use the same equation are also falling on deaf ears, because there is another equation: Speaking Out=Democracy=Patriotism which is vying for the airwaves.  Even “Joe the Plumber”, a conservative icon, is now saying “They are not all communists. Many of them (at Occupy) are just plain disgruntled Americans. I support the disgruntled Americans part.”

Fox News, which has controlled the news and the debate for so long, now is being told by protesters “Fox lies”.  One of those sides has millions of dollars, hundreds of TV and radio stations, and lobbyists in Washington donating to politicians campaigns. The other has power. Go figure — democracy by the 99% has begun to challenge “Patriotism” by the 1%.  Even charges of “class warfare” from candidates using “spin doctor” techniques and sound-bites simply fall to the floor.

If we look at my post of a while ago, “Some Demands”, there has been some movement on them. Recently, two senators proposed a Constitutional Amendment repealing the Citizen’s United decision which said, “Corporations have the same rights as people”. This was one of my “demands”.  I also complained about fees on debit cards, and B of A has taken back their fee. The people occupying Wall Street, and our consciousness now, have started reminding us that “those who have the gold don’t make the rules”, which was my first demand, if I had had a movement. In short, since I don’t speak for them, they speak for me. They give my voice amplification, even if they-don’t-know-me-from a-whole-in-the-ground.  I suspect that they give other people’s voices amplification as well.

As the winter storms continue, I had the image of Valley Forge stuck in my head: patriots freezing in the snow, choosing to do so because an idea of a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” stayed in their hearts and called them to do what they feel is right. Yes, by the way, I know it’s an anachronistic image (Lincoln’s words with Washington’s troops), but the possibility of a new generation thinking about each other as patriots would be a welcome sight, even as it takes in the whole scope of American history. Of course, there is no way to know if they will Occupy through the winter, but it was a fascinating mental image and one I would support.

So, for now, here’s to Occupy Wall Street and it’s brothers and sisters around the country.  For people who haven’t done anything, they’ve sure done a lot.

Peace,

John