Over my Dead Baby!

Like many, I have a few dark stains left on my sense of humor from all the dead-baby jokes I heard in junior high. I could fabricate a good one, given enough time to think of gruesome scenarios and obnoxious puns. How many dead babies does it take to tame a lion? Just one—it acts as a pacifier (does kitty want a binky?). Putting the quality of the joke aside, the dead baby is not a child, at all, but a comedic device. I would not use my baby cousin to test a swamp for alligators or, perhaps, prop-up a refrigerator while I searched for coins. The jokes cross racial and gender lines and take advantage of a simple irony: the idea of something precious ruined and abused. How many crystal vases does it take to knock your wife unconscious? One: smash the vase over the baby’s head and the shock will knock her cold.

I am flabbergasted by the force with which a dead baby can be thrown. Returning to Grand Rapids, I dared to partake in my stated political philosophy: listen first. I listened to a radio program on a professed-to-be Christian station, to prove to myself that I could be a moderate. I perceived the program to have a neoconservative agenda, not that I am an expert on domestic politics. I do know that the United States is trillions of dollars in debt and that its congress is struggling to agree on the proper tack for approaching a national budget. A Midwestern democrat made an unusual thrust at his opponents, stating that one of the major parties had decayed into a ‘cult’ that preserves tax breaks for the rich. That is my belief, as a closet liberal, but I prepared to be edified; I thought the neoconservative guru and alleged Christian figure was going to continue making his case about frivolous farm subsidies in that congressman’s state. Brazil would LOVE the U.S. to dump soy-subsidies and I might not be against a few Brazilian farmers getting paid, if someone persuaded me. Amazingly, the conservative radio host threw some dead babies at the issue. “We’re not the cult!—they’re the baby murderers!” Planned Parenthood, said he, was a critical drain on the nation’s treasuries. Is it just me or were we talking about farm subsidies a minute ago? Not only that, what about the defense budget? Can we not find some other line-items?

Stop me if you have heard this one before~ Q: How many sermons can a man with social difficulties and no theological training preach? A: It depends on how many are dead-baby sermons. I was briefly involved with a young adult group led by a well-intentioned young man. As the ministry floundered, he could not resist throwing a dead-baby at the congregation to stimulate their fervor. He said that every abortion was a blood-sacrifice laid on Satan’s altar. That bought him some time. It bought George W. Bush a few votes. If more people could hold a polar bear cub in their arms and appreciate how precious that life is, then Al Gore might have carried the day with an environmental policy platform. The cuteness factor is virtually the same but there are plenty of convenient, hominoid American babies to prop platforms with, stuff into snapping jaws or smash over our heads when all else fails. Dead babies are just another smoke-bomb in the utility belt...

Before I proceed, I need to take a step back and answer the question floating to the top of your mind: does John Daniel Gore hate babies? Fuck babies, I say. When I visited my nine-month-old cousin, he groused at me just for being a stranger and wiggled impotently on the floor. At his age, my dog Buster was just as stubborn but he was well socialized and had a neat, mole-exterminating instinct that saved me time and labor. Even my cousin’s cat, at nine months, could make himself useful by nipping mice from the barn. Live babies are a drain on time and capital because they are actual children. Babies are a threat to social interaction with other adults and therefore contribute to dyadic withdrawal, which can bring about the demise of partnerships. Live babies grow into larger, more mobile children and eventually start puberty, continuing to drain resources and becoming harder to control. Given the amount of time and investment put into conception versus the actual demands of parenthood, an escape clause is logical. A dead baby may just be a lesson learned but a live baby means years of financial struggle and interpersonal distress for unfit parents. Far from a blood sacrifice, abortion is the preclusion of an investment.

Dehumanizing arguments are part of the enticing battery of double-think strategies used to overlook homicide. My favorite piece of ‘choice’ propaganda featured a cracked-chicken egg, an acorn and an illustration of an ovum and sperm connecting (with a tiny lightning bolt, for effect). The captions read, respectively, “this is not a chicken, this is not an oak tree, this is not a person.” It would be clever, if not for the total collapse of the analogy. The egg was unfertilized and the acorn had not germinated: they were sources of nourishment, not actual off-spring. In the class Mammalia, mothers are the nourishment—the analogy fails. Tiny lightning bolt or not, a pair of gametes is not off-spring; they are no better than a pair of random cells. A few years ago, I read an article about sexist language in the reproductive discourse. The author warned not to bestow “mere cellular entities” with personhood. Musingly, I started probing for the line between person and nonperson, trying to create criteria that fit my values. Knowing no ghosts, golems or otherwise magical beings, I concluded that all people are mere cellular entities but that each has an essence of their own attached that builds through experience but starts with their unique DNA. A uterus is not a person any more than an acorn is a tree but a sapling is a soft young tree, just like a fetus is a soft young person. Bark or birth come in time but the moment itself is arbitrary: life has already started. Debates spawn, endlessly, about the potential and viability of that life but no other criteria is so inclusive. I prefer that the first mitosis be the recognized beginning of life because it cannot be undone by any circumstance we know. Nevertheless, I can imagine extrapolating my conclusions about viability in reverse so that the point of personhood were later, closer to puberty, when abstract thought becomes possible. Perhaps the point of language acquisition, for arguments’ sake. A fetus has never started bawling in a restaurant, for example, but infants do. Infants are milk-fed, tender and probably quite juicy—a family could redeem their short investment in a savory, thanksgiving supper. Most of us cannot stomach the idea of eating older children, especially with all the preservatives they consume via cheap sweets and microwave dinners. I digress.

There is no pupating-point.

In reality, I believe children are developing people, like myself. We experience no metamorphosis as complete as in the insect world: everyone is a developing person until they die and when a person dies should not be ours to determine. I qualify as being ‘pro-life’; I oppose war, capital punishment and the poaching of dolphins. If I cannot squash a jumping spider without feeling sad, I doubt I could actually kill and eat children, even if I can joke about it remorselessly. My love for humanity overpowers any disdain for babies. Given enough love and opportunity, they each contain possibilities for our species. I cannot stand to think they would become medical waste but I fear they are reduced to political waste by the same pundits who would save their fetal bodies. Without a heavy commitment to education, their potential cannot be developed. Perhaps it is easier to rub babies on the budget problem before they get beyond the point of being human pets.

I have, in-the-can, an essay about another piece of ‘choice’ propaganda I saw, a poster which begged the question “if the fetus you save turns out to be gay, will you still defend his/her rights?” My answer was “yes!” but the pro-choice patrol rebuked me. The piece’s intent was to weaken my pro-life stance with the anti-gay stance I am expected to have as a religious person. I was called “anti-women’s rights”, though I would gladly protest for equal pay, and “anti-choice”, as if I were dictating what goes on their hamburger or something similarly arbitrary. All of these terms are nothing more than buzzwords; miscalibrated bifurcation strikes again, with silly results. It were as if freedoms were more important than love or honor. My decisions to be pro-life and pro-gay both came from compassion and a sense of justice. I do not believe my detractors are anti-life any more than I am necessarily anti-liberty. In my canned essay, I accuse my peers of never removing their “policy-goggles”. The trope of this piece is that my policy goggles are stretched tightly over my face right now:

Throw the babies out, the bath-water is radioactive. Without proper care, they are destined to become the welfare mutants that these same politicians will use as scapegoats. Unborn children have become a device to distract from unsustainable practices tainted by corporate interest and election thirst. Let the children die, instead. I believe that government’s most important function in the twenty-first century is to protect individuals and the environment from exploitation by other institutions. If sensitivity for the unborn is such an effective screen for those who are unwilling to do that, then the cost of pity is too great. Our pity only wants an end to personal discomfort and right-to-life-campaigns give many people something to feel righteous about without asking them to embrace the complexity and difficulty of these issues or a change in their beliefs and life-style; it turns religion into an opiate instead of a stimulant. In a grim world, I am probing the line between true compassion and mere pity. True compassion might require me to acknowledge that I will not save the world’s unwed mothers any time soon. Perhaps I need to go back to the pro-choice ranks, where there is a better chance that we can support the children we already have so that they mature to be less like the people who only ‘saved’ them long enough to get better ratings or more votes.

I think that is as much text as anyone can stand in a blog entry. Peace be with you all.

Rebels' Fatherland

Flag Day was several days ago and The Fourth of July is not far behind. My mother, sister and I are going North to visit Lake Huron at Alpena and the big bridge between peninsulas at Mackinac. Before Labor Day dawns on the United States, I will be in another country working as a missionary. It was not long ago that I was on my grandmother’s couch, watching a Memorial Day special on the battle of Gettysburg and studying the reenacted patriotic acts of Americans fighting Americans—the men in grey who fought for economic strength versus those in blue who fought for the freedom of men and the unification of the land. Neither line was wanting for men of character and conviction who loved this country above safety and family.

I lost the patriotic stirrings of my youth and I probe, pacing my apartment, for an eloquent way to explain why I do not want them back. Patriotism’s close association with war is not helpful. As a boy, I was moved to tears by the sepia images of brave men sacrificing themselves, playing like a newsreel in my imagination. A decade hence, a schoolmate of mine returned from Iraq with a serious case of PTSD that he ‘caught’ the moment his truck exploded and splattered friends’ entrails onto his face. The heroics of the silver screen era were long ago tinted red by more realistic portrayals but I believe even those images have not lost their power, whether it is determination embodied as the flag is raised on Iwo Jima or determination, again, when the flag is planted on our Moon. Someone might get the buzz watching “Saving Private Ryan” or “Apollo 13” (thanks, Tom Hanks).

Rhetorically speaking, the key phrases are worn from too much nationalistic wordsmithing. JFK promised the USA would be on the Moon before the 60s were finished. Among several iconic sound bites, he left us “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country,” a stirring piece of Americana that is also a device. There was no less pride or dedication from the citizens of Imperial Japan—to the contrary, there is a collectivist sentiment in it; ‘Do not be concerned with your own desires, determine what you can do for the nation’, or perhaps another nation. Adolf Hitler “liberated” Poland as he spurred the Third Reich across Europe. Stalin’s Soviet Union “liberated” them again. Finally, the Poles liberated Poland. Decades later, a group of desperate Al Qaeda members hijacked aircraft and crashed them into New York City buildings. Why? My guess is that they believed it was to help free souls from worldly corruption. The United States brought the most powerful military forces in the world to their homeland in the name of “enduring freedom”. I have deleted as many examples from this paragraph as are left behind. The point is that the words are just a fresh coat of paint on a given agenda: take resources from China, ethnically cleanse Europe, score points for Jihad, establish presence in the Middle East. Still, I cannot say that “liberty and justice for all” are not important, even if battling tyranny sometimes looks suspiciously like being tyrannical.

I wondered if my patriotism could be cut down by the actual lapses in liberty and justice. Hundreds of broken treaties with native peoples litter the United States’ history; that alone is enough to shame me. Our economy was at one time built upon slaves, then upon freed slaves exploited as tenant farmers. Thousands of Japanese Americans were put into concentration camps so that white people could feel more comfortable. Women still have trouble getting equitable pay in this country. I could go on without even leaving our borders. To be honest, though, I can overlook all of that. I knew all of those things at sixteen and still managed to convince myself that our nation’s mistakes were in the past. At the end, I believed my country would make restitution to the best of its abilities.

What irks me about American patriotism is the insistence that this is the best nation in the world: an addiction to the superlative. It reminds me of small-minded little boys arguing about whose Dad is the best. “My Dad has the biggest guns” “My Dad is the toughest” “My Dad buys me more stuff” “My Dad is the smartest and the nicest” Patriotism, after all, comes from the prefix “patri”, from the Latin “pater”, meaning father . That is why I have declared so bitterly that I am not patriotic and hope never to be. If our country has become the fatherland, then ours is a rich, manipulative father who gives lavishly and then expects unquestioning loyalty, like a mob boss. Our Dad is the one all the other Dads quietly hate but have to tolerate because he has clout. Our Dad buys cheap medical insurance and maxes-out his credit card on flashy, dangerous toys. Our Dad drives his SUV around the neighborhood, giving unsolicited advice. Some of the other Dads complain but most quietly wait for the bank to foreclose on him. At a bar in Belize, some locals laughingly criticized the United States’ people for electing an obvious fool like George W. Bush. I was helpless—Americans are too much like Yankee fans: our country overspends on strong arms every year and we love them for being the ‘best’. Those Belizeans are like Cubs fans: their country is theirs and that is all that matters. They do not need to be the ‘best’ to stay proud.

Entrenched in these thoughts on grandma’s couch, again, I found an unwelcome epiphany. Playing on the television was a Harrison Ford film where he plays a police officer; Brad Pitt plays his Irish houseguest, who we discover is an Irish Republican Army operative. Pitt’s character demolishes a group of gangsters in order to collect several crates of missiles to smuggle back to Ireland. On his way to New York Harbor, he has to shoot Ford’s partner to evade capture. Meanwhile, Ford refuses to help a British agent locate him, choosing to track him personally. As the film draws to a close, Ford boards the hijacked fishing vessel and insists that Pitt turn the boat around before “more innocent people die”. In my mind I knew that was right but in my heart I felt like he should go with him. In the end, the Irish American Cop shoots the IRA man. I was disappointed. Something in me wanted him to return to Ireland and blow-up some buildings.

It was my sense of patriotism. Though it may be wrong, this raw brand of Irish patriotism resonates in me.

I pushed cognitively against the thought but it pushed back much harder. When I took my stance on the Israeli conflict at a church conference I acted as if I were merely disgusted with the Israeli government yet, I admit now, I was also refusing to be disgusted with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. It makes me wince to hear them called “terrorists” when they are clearly trying to oust a foreign occupancy—like Poles in Poland, Irish in Ireland or Indians in India. I am a sympathizer. The image of an Arab boy throwing rocks at soldiers carries a familiar meme and I, in spite of myself, carry its receptor. I admire the rebels, not invaders, occupiers or even loyalists; the Royalists of our Revolutionary period must have believed that it was ‘best’ to remain part of the British empire. They were excellent patriots (God, King and Country!) but history books revere the trouble-makers who did not want to pay their tea tax. Our “founders” had even less right than the IRA and PLO to claim the land as their own, yet I remain a fan of their rebels’ patriotism. The more I think about that, the more I begin to believe that my discontent and nasty criticism for the United States actually brings me closer to the spirit that created this country. The United States that we celebrate does not share enough features with the canonized one.

If you want to see a film that makes me feel more patriotic than any other, watch a Jim Carrey movie called The Majestic; the final courtroom scene clearly places the ideological America against the historical one and allows the legend of our nation to win in a convincing way. He might not change the entire course of American history but he does marry the girl and live happily ever after.

Children With Knives

Saturday night, I had a disturbing dream. Everyone was the same size: the third and fifth graders I work with and I are all the same size. I am accused of a vile crime—I am certain I did nothing wrong but I cannot remember what actually happened. The child vigilantes stalk toward me with long kitchen knives, resolute to remove the evil from their midst. I should go to the police for protection, to someone bigger and higher, but I try desperately to explain. Each of their faces is painted beautiful and innocent, in hues of chocolate, caramel and vanilla, yet in their hands are “watermelon slayers” and chillingly-long bread cutters. They are all children, still, as they brandish frightening weapons. I warn that I do not want to kill any of them. I would if I must: I know that I could. They charge and I begin to recognize them, each, in turn. From my belt I pull my ‘slayer’ and swing it like a machete at Juan’s neck. He collapses, bleeding mortally. My heart falls five stories from my chest to my guts: he might die. In the commotion, I run for my own life, sobbing bitterly. I dial 9-1-1 on my cell to call for help—to fix what I have done. I have no signal whatsoever...

Instead, I run across the landscapes of my mind as Abdi, the handsome class-clown, trails me. I run past the ‘dark shore’—a tremendous fjord or lake with no beach where the water is deepest navy just feet from shore. I run toward old mountains covered in rain-forest but stumble, instead, into the hilly woods of the Grayling Fingers. Never tiring, I come upon a white church in the middle of the forest, with a lady pastor and a small multicultural congregation (like mine). I think I can hide in the bell-tower, so I climb a spiral staircase and then up a ladder to the roof. Abdi finds me and approaches, almost emotionless, with a serrated knife as long as my arm. The last I remembered, I managed to grab the knife and bend it in thirds; I gripped the mangled knife and wrestled it from him. I wondered if I should use it on him but I threw it from the roof—did I throw it? I woke-up.

The “buzz” on the radio and across the internet is that Osama Bin Laden is reported dead. Social media served its highest purpose, carrying the discourse across network boundaries. I was impressed by the banner of celebration stretched across my Facebook news-feed this morning. Since then, the conscientious have engineered their own posts but the first I saw was Wil’s:

This excitement over death is really disturbing me. As a Christian, that whole, love your enemy thing is really convicting me, that blessed are the peacemakers stuff and the fact that Jesus died for Bin Laden's sin as well as mine really has me thinking about this differently. But that's why I worship Christ and don't worship America...I refuse to be afraid –Wil Wilson, my peer from New Jersey

Though none were offered by the celebrators, an assortment of Judeo-Christian scripture has surfaced: Proverbs 24:17, Ezekiel 33:11, Isaiah 14:29 and, tangentially, the beatitudes of Matthew 5. Sarah Nadeau recalled the words of a 20^th century peace-maker:

"Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars." --Dr. Martin Luther King Jr

Now that MLK was in the mix (and the Ghandi quote was inevitable), it was almost time to respond in my own words but I elected to visit the park before work instead. When I returned to the web-iverse, I found NPR had addressed my concerns in summary. A featured quote showed that a century of time has not inhibited Mark Twain’s ability to flavor our discourse:

I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure. –-Mark Twain

I would like to challenge my readers to put aside the iconic image of the great author, and his white mustached and cigar-scented authenticity, and imagine Lewis Black sputtering those same words with both hands laid flat on the desk in an intense rant. The synesthesia of my aesthetic gives each of them an essence of horse-radish. I find the words apt but this mouth-watering sentiment belongs on the lips of comedians, not our spiritual and political leaders. The Roman Catholic Church did justice to its catholic name when they released this statement:

Faced with the death of a man, a Christian never rejoices, but reflects on the serious responsibility of everyone before God and man, and hopes and pledges that every event is not an opportunity for a further growth of hatred, but of peace. –Position of the Roman Catholic Church as reported by NPR

My cynicism is scraped to a great sharpness. Hours before Osama Bin Laden was declared dead, I listened to a story about the national debt on “All Things Considered”. The wages of war are not only death—they are wages. Wages not placed in education, energy innovation or paying down a prodigious loan. Forgiveness, in this context, is not just a Christian principle but a sound financial strategy. It is also a sound PR strategy for a Middle East that knows the United States for the spread of its decadence and the strength of its violent capabilities. The other cynics are out there, too:

Im not sure why we are celebrating, we just opened up the position for someone far better at the job.

-Kim Miller, a high school class-mate

Another Jihadist cell will rise but I can make that point any time. I want to put aside the practical and political so I can talk about justice and peace because we are not talking about the NFL lock-out but about life and soul. Thousands of civilians lost their lives in terrible ways on September 11^th, 2001. There is nothing wrong with being sad and angry because of that. We should cry; I’m crying a little. As long as we ache together, we can still heal as one. Survivors of that day and the family of service members have reached-out to express their relief that the man who orchestrated that event can never again cause suffering. If you believe that Bin Laden’s cell should not be operating, I agree. If you believe our military acted on behalf of humanity to dispel that cell then I agree again. Yet our attitudes are a liability to our efforts for peace, in the world and in hearts. The callus humor it requires to revel in one person’s murder differs only in scale from the dancing that took place in other parts of the world when the towers fell. Bin Laden was smart. He found the emblems of Western power and imbued them with traces of evil; when the United States returned with a vengeance he was not surprised but vindicated. For ten years, Bin Laden was an emblem. Meanwhile, the extremists continued to oppress other Muslims and the banks defrauded us: the figureheads have toppled but the evils are still there.Worse, we are too far separated to amend them together.

I want the children to understand that disposing of one person or two or a whole group cannot resolve their issues. It is so human of them to make this mistake; it is fundamental attribution error extrapolated. They fail to see that the harmful behavior jumps from person to person, never calling any one home. Over and over again, we review the rules. They all know the rules and believe in them unquestioningly but their attitude leads them into self-serving caveats and cruel indulgences. Without constant policing, my group turns into "The Lord of the Flies". If there is any reason not to rejoice at Osama Bin Laden’s death—I mean really take it into one’s nostrils like so much cocaine—it is because such a putrid strain of non-compassion and rationalized sadism should never become second-nature. It would be better to ache at both ends of tragedy than to numb our hearts with the liquor of revenge. It is better to stomach anguish and become stronger for it.

Undeniably, these reflections bend through the lens of my faith. On the radio-show this morning, the host noted there is nothing about God loving humanity in the Quran. If that is true (I cannot verify) then Bin Laden was disadvantaged from birth, serving a God that was merciful at best. What can we reasonably expect from a faith based in fear and awe other than scariness and sensational acts? Jesus said to judge the tree by the fruit: fig trees do not bear olives, olive trees do not bear grapes. To condemn the celebration at ground zero would be to dismiss the celebrators as damned; I want to caution and rebuke because I fear a poisonous shoot will be grafted into our hearts. After a while, our beliefs and behaviors mutate to match and that yields more caveats to love, less of the Kinawind we need. Another classmate offered these almost-famous words:

‎Like many people, I feel like celebrating. Remember this feeling. It is human, and can help us understand when others express bloodlust. –Jeff Lakin quoting John Green

In that idea laid the greatest value for me, a pacifist. As the radio-show continued, a military mother called-in to recall the story her son told after his first sniper assignment. He expected a rush when their bodies collapsed but instead he felt a surge of heaviness. He prayed for their souls, right there, but reminded himself that others’ lives were saved. “Your son,” said the radio-host, “is the kind of man I want serving my country.”

Because of my dream, I think I was able to feel some compassion for the sniper. I might not be sure if he should be over-seas at all but I can respect that moment because he seemed to grasp what a terrible trade he had to make.

I began this post without my Ghandi quote. A friend from ASMSU (student government) provides a balanced conclusion:

I join in the thankfullness of my country, however I remember that much more fighting lies ahead. Ghandi said, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind." So let us not gloat, but remember. I remember the countless victims of 9/11 and their families, I remember the troops killed in action in these "conflicts" and finally I remember the troops and their families still in the midst of these "conflicts" today. –Mary Burleson

The Supreme One

I brought four quarters to the Bring-a-buck Men’s Breakfast at Creston Church. Once the coffee was poured, Pastor Sean led us in a discussion about the account of Jesus’s entrance into Jerusalem according to Luke’s Gospel. The Pharisees demanded that Jesus rebuke his followers for their overt praises but he replied that the rocks would cry out in their place if the people were silent.

Our discussion swooped like a hawk from divine evidence in creation to reflecting Christ’s message in our lives each moment and then to the ‘practice’ in spiritual-practices. Together, we wondered why men fail to be involved with churches. The older gentlemen spoke warmly about why they found church so advantageous but my friend, Greg, suggested that personal advantage could not be our basis. The ‘uses and gratifications’ approach treats Church like entertainment, not community. Discipline is required or young men find reasons to be somewhere else, victims of false efficiency.

I offered the message that God has put on my heart. “Going back to the theme of spiritual ‘practice’, I find that I need a vision that goes beyond myself. I played my best, in community bands, because I focused on how much greater we could be if I were there every week.”
Scenes from my last year in high school band streamed on a loop, ghosted over houses as I walked home. I heard our first-flute chuckle at the notion that our band could get a Division I* rating at band festival. I slammed my locker door and erupted:
“Shut the fuck up!”



The evening after festival, I unsheathed my bubble-gum victory-cigar but not for the reason I had planned. Cloistered in my seat on the darkened bus, I sustained a solitary, masticatory stewing session. The judges gave us a division IV rating. I shuffled into the bathroom, once I knew, to clear my bladder and my head; a suspicious trickle of underclassmen followed.
“I sent them in there to make sure you didn’t hurt yourself or anything...”
“I don’t have anything to hurt myself about—MY performance was fine. I piss better by myself, too...”


Forgive my ragged Ojibwa but the original inhabitants of Michigan had three words for “us”. I get ‘ninwe’ and ‘ginwe’, confused; one means ‘a crowd of people, of which I am one’, and the other means ‘our group, as opposed to another’. The third word is ‘kinwe’ [keen-way], which means “all of us together”. I knew that my part was not always featured but the merits of coming together as a band were foreign ideas. To me, being a band was an outgrowth of the fact that I could not play all the parts myself. A jewel needs a crown to be a crown-jewel; I expected my high-school band to line-up behind me, supreme trumpet. The judges noted that attitude in their comments: the first trumpet part was always in the foreground, set-apart. I mean that not in the Holy sense but a disconnected one. I only had a vision for my self.

...I’ve come a long way to be here...


Moses flees Egypt as a fugitive, alone, but returns to lead Israel from bondage. Years later, God is disgusted with the Israelites and offers to make Moses a nation [Numbers 14:12&13]. According to the Old Testament, Moses insisted that God spare them. Whatever actually happened, sometimes I believe it takes a person who went solo in the wilderness to recognize the value of kinwe.

When Jesus fasted in the wilderness, he was tempted with visions of mastery and supremacy. This serpent voice calls every person out of the garden with misconceptions of grandeur. It convinces us to act like third graders in line, vying for a meaningless position at the front while we pace further away from unity and understanding the only One who can lead us away from oblivion. Christians often reverence Christ as the Son of God but Jesus called himself the Son of Man. Even if they denote the same person they connote differently. The Son of God vision was going to set Jesus apart, not in the Holy sense but disconnected. The Pharisees wanted a superlative Messiah, a god to put behind the inner-curtain, who would take his position at the top and smile upon their stratification. Whether an independent force of wickedness or bad brain-waves from a long fast, Satan offered Jesus all the world’s kingdoms if he would forfeit the kingdom of his destiny.

Jesus left that vision in the desert. He traveled with lower-class mugs, talked with skanks and touched lepers. If he was ‘set-apart’, it was self-imposed quarantine. Just before his grand entrance, James and John asked to be his superlative disciples—his left and right-hand men. Instead, Jesus called the crew together and said:


“You know that the rulers of this world lord it over their people, and officials flaunt their authority over those under them but among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be the leader among you must be your servant and whoever wants to be first among you must be the slave to everyone else. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many.”


Then the armed-guards stormed the garden at Gethsemane and this band, these disciples who wanted to be the greatest, broke like a rack of billiards and rolled away. Judas sold him for chump-change; Peter was willing to slice somebody’s ear off in the dark but by the light of the fire he just wanted to save his own skin; James and John go MIA. Jesus knew all of this beforehand but he still washed their crusty feet the night before. After the Resurrection, he made them a fish breakfast; Jesus reunited with the disciples and, rather than holding them accountable as deserters, loved them and equipped them to carry-on ministry.

Jesus had a vision greater than himself. He rode into town on an ass and forcibly reset the temple [Luke 19:28 — 20:8]. The Pharisees knew what He was and that he came to tear their curtains down. By Friday, they had him under control: nailed to a cross and dying.

“He saved others, let him save himself!”
“If he is really the king of the Jews, let him come down from the cross and we will believe.”


They would have believed, too, in that sub-standard Messiah who cared more about proving his prowess than keeping the kinwe. He stayed because he knew what was required to shred the temple curtain and bring us under God together.
I wept for ten minutes, at least, when the force of this truth touched my core. The feeling was beautiful but the after-taste was scary. The connection between my thoughts about Jesus on the cross and these potent emotions felt foreign. I wondered what it was that brought my estranged parts together again and what it was that tore them apart—and how I could allow myself to be fragmented. The answer may be that when I try to be self-contained I make decay inevitable but when I allow my borders to blur, when I give-up supremacy and even individuality, my internal connections come alive again.
I still do not fully understand. At some point, I have to share these thoughts or they will never be complete.

A Hero

I like listening to a military band play John Philip Sousa marches. At this point in history, Sousa is my only patriot. I like rock bands that pay tribute to the troops too but, no matter what genre, I have mixed feelings as long as soldiers remain in Afghanistan. I respect them for the heroism that burns in their hearts. Such disregard for personal comfort and commitment is to be admired. While I want to honor their commitment, I condemn the mission our government charges them to complete. I worry that cycles of violence will never end as long as we celebrate myths of redemptive violence. Heaven knows, the decade-long onslaught of military spending and lost lives has not brought the Middle-East or Manhattan truer healing. When I was in New York for a few days, the tragedy of September eleventh, 2001, floated back into salience. Yet one night our host managed to put even that in perspective when she began to talk about the use of ‘comfort women’, human experimentation and other atrocities sanctioned by the Japanese government during their campaign to rule the Pacific. On the other side of the globe, Nazi Germany brought destruction and holocaust to every part of Europe they touched. Not only were people tortured, sterilized, executed and otherwise treated worse than animals but this happened, every day, by the order of powerful nation-states, spilling over their borders and threatening to dominate the world. Young men rose to the challenge of thwarting that tide of evil. One of them was my grandfather, Byron Lee Rice.

Byron flew bombing missions in a B-17 Flying Fortress based in Italy. As the grandson of a veteran, I might have heard a battery of heart-throttling war stories. He told me about how miserably cold is was in Colorado when he basic-training and how happy he was to join Cadets. He did mention a night when they took some flack in combat but several more times he told me about the time that a new crew-member lost his nerve and panicked. Byron turned the plane around and landed, against regulations. “I told them ‘this guy doesn’t have the heart, he’s going to make the mission dangerous for the whole crew’”. Being such a nice guy, Byron got the private a desk job. “The next time I saw him,” said my Grand-dad with a crooked smile and a chuckle, “the kid out-ranked me! Can you believe that?” Then, Grandpa would laugh and start talking about farming or ice-fishing again. My grandfather was never shot-down and, because of that, everyone wanted to be in his crew. It seemed like my grandfather acted out of duty rather than heroism: he got-in, got-out and got-home to Grandma, giving flack and fighters a wide-berth. The other guys benefited.

Can you believe that? I did for a while.

However, my grandfather was a hero. Heroism was thrust upon him. Rice was so mechanically inclined, it was like a super-power. He started flight-training as a co-pilot, cruising over barns in Iowa by the side of his college-educated pilot. One day, the pilot was taking pass after pass, unable to land the plane, and Byron started muttering directions to him. “If its so easy,” said the pilot, “then why don’t you just do it?”. He did it on the first try; he also did not like that pilot, partly because this officer impregnated a young-woman but refused to marry her. That pilot went down on another mission a few days before my grandfather flew his own first mission. He grew into a father-figure for his nearly teenage crew members. They were pulled out of bars by their shirt-collars, countless times, before big missions: Lieutenant Rice kept high-standards. They say he never cheated on Grandma and I believe it without corroboration: even at 23 years of age, my grandfather was made of honor and family loyalty. That was the hero I needed, after my Dad left my Mom—someone who persevered until death.

I knew him for being depression-grade thrifty and tough. Past the age of eighty, he was driving tractors and climbing into the trap-door above the stair-case to put ice-cream buckets under leaks in the attic. When the curators at the Kalamazoo ‘Air Zoo’ offered to help him into the cock-pit of a B-17, he grabbed the hole with both hands and hauled himself in unaided. I watched him trim brush with chainsaws and mow-down chipmunks with a 22-caliber rifle: he could do everything on a farm that needed doing. Yet, it still surprised me when I found-out that he was an unsung hero. After he died, while we were trying to figure-out why Grandpa saved empty cans of spray-paint, Grandma finally came forward with the medal. I was wrong: he did not steer clear of trouble—he out-flew it. That night they took a shot of flack, the plane was not just a little holey. An entire engine was blown away and over 300 holes riddled the fuselage—and the crew. The condition of the craft warranted a bail-out but some of his crew were in critical condition, too. Byron used his super-powers to get them home. He flew the would-be wreck for hours, one engine short, to get his boys the help they needed. Not one was lost. The United States’ government awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross... which he never mentioned to me once.

I was honored to play taps at his grave-site.

I knew my Grandfather to be a pacifist, of a quieter variety. “They told me it was the war to end all wars, Johnny,” he once said, “but it didn’t end’m,”. In spite of World War II, I think that Vietnam made him a pacifist. My uncle Alan came home with a hole in his leg (friendly fire) and brought with him months of hellish, jungle nightmares that everyone could hear. To fight a war is one thing; to send your child to war is another. “I asked him,” said my Grandmother, “why he never talked about his medal and he said ‘I never want to glorify war, Betty—war is terrible.’” By the time the Korean war was in progress, my Grandfather had followed my Grandmother into the Friends’ (Quaker) tradition. Grandma said he spent years talking to Reverend Tone, a veteran himself, about the possibility of people being in the factories he bombed—German people like his grandparents. It cut him to pieces.

He was a greater man than he ever said, or allowed to be said, so that only death could make him shine. He was made of honor and family loyalty. My grandfather sat through virtually every band-concert my cousin, sister and I ever played-in. He would not admit that he could not hear well or that he didn’t even like music. He loved us. He could not have been happier to see me pick-up a book, not a gun, and go to college. Byron Lee Rice was a depression-grade father, too: my uncle Delbert told us that Grandpa made him apologize to a neighbor for something he had not done. “You might not have done it but she thinks you did—man-up and make it right.” This man poured himself into farming, which he loved, and into a trailer-factory job to support his four children. More than merely supply them, he set the standard for granite-hard determination. When Delbert was too sick with cancer to bring his crops in, my Grandfather donned his overalls and got the job done at age eighty-eight, just months before his own diagnosis. After dodging flack, working with heavy machinery and enduring open-heart surgery, Byron Lee Rice died of a powerful disease that could kill anybody: pancreatic cancer. He died a young-man’s death with the peace and dignity of the old.

My grandfather went to war to prevent terrible empires from over-running our planet. At the same time, boys and girls mistake our appreciation for an endorsement and that is unacceptable. My Grandfather went to war with the right heart but he would want us to learn from his lesson: war never ends. The only right way to honor my grandfather at his funeral was to tell stories about the farmer, family-man and man-of-God we loved for the better part of a century. I say, let us celebrate our veterans for what they do afterward, living lives of determination with missing limbs, rancid night-terrors or new careers—or all of the above, with courage burning in their hearts.

One of my Grandfather’s greatest acts of heroism took place in the relative peace of the eighties. Gary Wright, my Grandmother’s nephew, stood-up at Grandpa’s funeral and told us a story. When Gerald Wright died he left his sons land. Still, Gary did not have the resources to buy seed or pay for fuel to plant his share. Banks in the community turned him away, which hurt deeply because they knew him and his family. Perhaps Gary was just a risk to them but he was family to someone. Gary said, “Uncle Byron pulled me aside after church one day and he said ‘Gary, I’ve been talking with my brother Stan—we want to loan you the money to plant Gerald’s field.’” My Grandfather and his bachelor brother, a couple farmers who had genuinely sweat for every cent, were willing to take the risk the banks would not. That is heroism: they laid their hard-earned money on the line for a young man who might have gone bankrupt without them.

“—and I paid it back to the last dime,” said Gary.

Time Squared

It was just past the ides of March when I first visited Time Square. I and several other ministry candidates and I surfaced from a subway tunnel and almost immediately found the, sort of, kryptonite spire from which the New Year’s Eve ball drops. If all roads led to Rome in the first century, all fiber-optics lead to New York in the twenty-first. The brick and concrete of every edifice was a mere framework for Time Square’s splendor. There were billboards like giant wall-posters or studded with incandescent bulbs. Buildings were embroidered or even drenched with light, whether stitched with glowing cords of neon or seething with high-quality media. To say the least, Fred (my new camera) was put to work. I kept stride with my cohort, soaking my senses in the spectacle as I stepped, absently, around people of all shades. One of the others helped me get a picture of myself: in the middle of it all.
A Jewish-pride rally was breaking-out at one end of the square, at the feet of a giant staircase to nowhere. There I was too, with these people I had not known a few days before, clicking shots and posing for group-shots to be clicked, only barely noticing how wonderful it was to be there together. The ladies flashed a collective, luminous smile from a line on the crimson-lit steps. The guys clustered together for some face-time, too. “We,” I thought, “are now in photos together.”
My mind became an iridescent dragonfly, zooming through space and memory and reeking of reverie. I fussed with my camera, then glanced around for the back of a head. I saw only strangers. I listened for the familiar cadence of voices but heard only the chants of the congregants, waving the star of David. “Oh I lost them for a second...” I mumbled, scanning the crowds. I paced first around the stairs, then up them for a better vantage-point, then to a railing where I could rest. Initially, I was punch-drunkenly amused by this development. The scenario tasted like the extract of a G-rated movie-script: “Country Mouse: Lost in Time Square!” I clung to the edge of a metaphorical diving-board, waiting to jump into a quirky line when I saw a friendly face.
There is no scale to gage the magnitude of being alone nor schematics for tracing its dimensions. I plumbed a depth of alone that an autumnal beech in Oceana county* could not conjure. Lake Michigan gave me solitude that starry night, a state of being singular that becomes a spiritual practice. Loneliness, on the other hand, is the emotional state of suffering from separateness or from being separated. There is a bitter but cleansing vulnerability in being lonely, an injection of exposure and need. Darker ways to suffer alone exist, trading exposure for siege. A person can build deep trenches where no arrow can strike; yet strongholds become dungeons. Alone is the state I am in when the insidious whispers uncurl from between the iron bars of my memory.
There is something fascinating and unsettling about these reveries, like spurts of oil escaping the wrecked USS Arizona. Japan surrendered and the reefs grew in Pearl Harbor but the toxic succession of bubbles will not stop. Eighteen years of plotline melted away, leaving impressions from first and second grade. I know that I lived many recesses alone. I am uncertain why. The nose-picking would explain it at first glance but not entirely; one time, I drove away some other children because I was convinced I could become Bugs Bunny if only they would get out of my way. The more separated I became the more my parents consoled me with my own performance. The other children, they claimed, were just not as advanced as I was. So, loneliness never set-in where false-superiority already had its coils around me. As a child among children, I must have cast a chilling halo.
“Yes, but John:” said my Dad, once, “none of the friends you have made since then would recognize that description—would they?”
“I have come such a long way to be here,” I mused, drifting back to Manhattan. I wanted to keep moving, since I tend to be pacer, but the others could have gone in any direction. Reversing direction and catching a train back to Alma House was one option; second, to throw caution to the wind and have a lone-wolf excursion; the third was to keep my butt on its perch. I entertained the thought that the others were somewhere near time-square, searching. Forced to heed the advice I give to campers, I stayed and waited to be found. Each moment the cold nipped a little harder at my buttocks—and my fortitude. I turned my palms toward heaven and put a case forward. Hope wore to tatters and my crowd-scanning collapsed into darker thoughts. A game of blame-badminton erupted: someone had made a mistake. Demons came ripping out of the muck to join in the frenzy:
“John, be an adult; quit playing with your camera and pay attention. Space-cadet...”
“These people just want to enjoy the city; they don’t want to blow energy caring for you...”
“You probably did something creepy that you don’t even realize...”
“Those wankers: you could be back in Alma House studying for tomorrow’s interview...”
“This is the pattern that you fear: so close to connecting on the stairs BUT...”
“...bet they have the nerve to be pissed at you for making them turn back—if they turn-back...”
“There are probably limited spots abroad—maybe you should be relieved they aren’t very—“
But every few minutes another voice would cry out, like a canary in a mine, “LIES! LIES! These are competent, compassionate people! Push back your hurt and impatience—your fearfulness! There is no reason to believe a word of these doubts: have Faith!”
My heart was bungeed to my rib-cage by a thread of raw patience. I rose and paced. If they had gone back to the house or on to the bar I would have to take the subway by myself, anyway. I imagined myself catching the next train so I could go brood. Then, I could envenomate them with mid-western passive-aggression. There was a basement lounge to brew resentment in, alternatively, so that I could pretend I slipped-away on purpose. I recognized that there were additional options to consider. By choosing my attitude by default, I became chained to my emotions. It was crucial that I select my mindset intentionally. I actually wanted my new group to come running and give me hugs, hugs, hugs that lasted. Still, I was drawing curtains around myself to dull the pain of being lonely for them, exposed. In every hypothetical scenario, there were ‘fight’ and ‘flight’ responses. ‘Freeze’ is the third, more uncomfortable option. Staying engaged in that way exposes me to hurt and uncertainty: it requires endurance.
No matter how many times I repeated my brooding reveries, I could not get past the fact that I would be in ministry with these people. No matter what I did or how they treated me, I needed to love and forgive them so we could stay together. The circumstances of my success and my enjoyment and my being accepted and me, myself and I—none of that mattered more than us. I was not lost and they did not lose me: WE were fragmented. The Adversary, going back to the first lie, shifts focus onto our individual state—superior or out-casted (it’s all the same)— but the Holy Spirit wants all of us, together. Grace is available to me but not because I earned it or because it is given cheaply. Grace is given to me for them and their grace is really for me, in part—so WE can all be together with Christ. No curtains necessary.
I imagined them with the bright lights in their eyes, ecstatic and absent-minded for the next half-an-hour, just like I would be: role reversal. A sudden wave of panic would sweep over the group when they realized I was missing and they would search until they found me—because WE are competent, compassionate people.
As it turns out, my role-reversal rang truer than my anxieties. They ran into a cover-charge at a bar and decided to leave. A profound silence reverberated where one of my clever comments should have been. They used their digital cameras to trace the missing piece, John, back to Times Square. Their voices chimed above the din: “John! John!” James, Brinna, Wil, Rachel, Stephanie, Brittney, Debbie, Beth, Marjorie and Nick** were across the street. All of the fear, the pride and the resentment that had congealed around my heart melted away as soon as the first pair of arms came around me.
John: “I’m half sorry that I wasn’t paying attention...”
Rachel: “We’re half-sorry too...”
Brinna: “I almost had a heart-attack!”
That evening cast a new light on the ship wrecks in my past. For the first time, I went beyond the notion of forgiving my classmates for out-casting me and mourned for the WE that never happened. Bulging eyes and four beating wings, I relished every chance to be special—as evidenced by this incredibly obnoxious yearbook quote from high school:
“It is as if a halo of light illuminates and displays me. It shines according to the magnitude of the performance rendered. All ears rest on the performer’s sound and all eyes focus onto that bright spot of brass. The sound within my halo warms and empowers me, yet the brightness of the spotlight leaves me dizzy. I am barely aware of things outside of the halo at that point.”

I really had come a long way by the time we descended back into the subway. I can thank Jesus that I recognized I was only a piece of something: the Kingdom of God. The empty space in my heart, the missing synergy, is something that can only be held in common by people who value WE more than ME and LOVE more than all. When I saw that gang of missing want-to-be missionaries and community-workers appear again, I finally laid eyes on my peers. I was them and they were me and we were us again. We cannot do this without us, we know. For my part, I can hardly wait to expose my loneliness because I trust that these people are competent... and compassionate...

...and have a good sense of humor.

*one of the least populous counties in Michigan.
**Matt and Katie are also part of the collective WE; Katie’s feet were bothering her...