Yooks and Zooks and Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroos

“Grandpa!” I shouted. “Be careful! Oh, gee!
Who’s going to drop it?
Will you …? Or will he?”
“Be patient,” said Grandpa. “We’ll see.
We will see …”

So ends The Butter Battle Book, Dr. Seuss’s cold war classic chronicling the increasing tension as the arms race between the Yooks and the Zooks spirals out of control. At issue is which side of the bread to spread the butter, Yooks on the top, Zooks on the bottom, and each convinced the other “has kinks in his soul.” The thinly disguised critique of the cold war with its doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) seems at first to be dated in a post-Soviet world. But the race to acquire the “Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo” (named by Dr. Seuss for Fat Man and Little Boy, the first two atomic bombs) continues. Iran and North Korea defy all sanctions in their quest for a nuclear arsenal and terrorists the world over seek the holy-grail – a nuclear weapon small enough to be smuggled into a targeted city – a Bitsy Boomeroo.

Events of the past few weeks raised for Americans the specter of mass destruction. The Boston Marathon bombings and the industrial explosion in West, Texas once again shattered the illusion of impregnable Fortress-America. Two home-grown terrorists sent one of America’s greatest cities into hiding, and a sleepy Texas town vanished in the blink of an eye. Boston the victim of ideologues with kinks in their souls; West, Texas the meeting place of greed, failed safety regulations, and human error and frailty. Our response? We must have hearings! Who is to blame? Someone in Government must pay!

Jesus warned us that the future will mirror the past. This is the price we pay for being human. “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen … Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.” (Matt. 24:6-7) “Do not be afraid” seems hopelessly naïve in the face of such situations, yet Jesus is being brutally honest. We will not on our own turn swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, nor will we foresee and prevent every terrible accident.

The alternatives set before us are starkly contrasted: to live our lives, trusting in God, fearlessly determined to preserve our freedoms or to follow the Chief Yookeroo’s order “to stay safe underground while the Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo is around.”

They were all bravely marching,
With banners aflutter,
Down a hole! For their country!
And Right-Side-Up Butter!

One way is an affirmation of life. The other is paralysis. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews reminded those early Christians, facing intense persecution, of God’s promise to Israel as they prepared to enter the Promised Land: “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.” And to this promise is added the Psalmist’s bold assertion: “So we say with confidence, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?’” Such admonitions are easier read than lived, but live we must. How we live is the question — fully alive or with kinks in our souls.

Two paths lie before us. At the end of The Butter Battle Book you cannot tell the difference between the Yooks and the Zooks as they stand eyeball to eyeball, Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroos in hand.

We’ll see. We will see …

A Bebop of Electric Hues, Furious Reds, and Poison Greens

I avoid Janney’s Lane during the day. The fifteen-miles per hour school zone coupled with the two motorcycle policemen, who seem rooted to the same spot day in and day out creating a notorious speed trap, make an otherwise useful shortcut between King Street and Quaker Lane singularly unattractive. I have paid the city of Alexandria enough money in traffic fines over the years. But occasionally I just don’t have the time to go around; so it was the other day. I turned onto Janney’s Lane in front of a blue taxi, the driver of which was determined to either pass me or force me to speed up. Most of us have experienced the surging driver who charges our rear bumper, only to fall off and surge again. It’s an aggressive maneuver intended to intimidate us into either going faster or to pull over and let the other car pass. I did neither.  Finally, after attempting unsuccessfully to pass me on the right in the school-bus loading zone, the taxi sped passed me, crossing the double stripe into oncoming traffic. Remember the two motorcycle cops?

The cost of this hurry is sometimes felt in the wallet, but more often it is not felt at all for a long time. We go through life unaware of the tension, unaware of the pressure building inside our overstressed bodies until, like a whistling tea kettle, it can’t be ignored.  Social, professional, and family relations may all become casualties. We tell ourselves it is just the price we pay for living in the Twenty-first Century, the price we pay for modernity. Is it? Walker Evans, a Fortune magazine photographer in the 1950s, wrote of those photographers using the new medium of color film, “Many photographers are apt to confuse color with noise and to congratulate themselves when they have almost blown you away with screeching hues alone – a bebop of electric hues, furious reds, and poison greens.”[1] We have confused action with noise, convincing ourselves that frenetic activity is achievement, breathless hurrying is progress, and impatience is merely a sign of our commitment to program and schedule. We have blown ourselves away, painting our lives in screeching hues alone. And this we have done for others.

There is a more fulfilling way. That is to confront ourselves, deliberately, with the essentials of life. What is really important, not what is determined or demanded by others, but what is of overmastering value. Often it takes a crisis, as Thoreau says, to bring us to our “molting season”, where we can divest ourselves of the electric hues of accumulated culture, revealing the person we were always meant to be. As Solomon writes: “As water reflects a face, so a man’s heart reflects the man.” Too many of us have yet to see that person. In Baker Farm,  Thoreau wrote, “Through want of enterprise and faith men are what they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.”

There is freedom, but it requires effort; it requires both enterprise and faith.  There is a yearning in most of us for the eternal, the transcendent good that brings an end to ceaseless striving, a Sabbath rest. That rest can only be found at the spiritual center, the place where God dwells. The heart is a restless wanderer until it finds its true home. It is to this home that Jesus calls us. “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” The alternative is forever to be caught up and carried along by the surging traffic around us, living a caricature of real life – a bebop of electric hues, furious reds, and poison greens.

 

 

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[1] Quoted in Harry M. Callahan, ed., Ansel Adams in Color (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1993), 20.

An Easter Message

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress begins: “I dreamed, and behold, I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked and saw him open the book, and read therein; and as he read, he wept and trembled; and not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, ‘What shall I do?’” In a few words, Bunyan captures the state of millions who perish inwardly as they ask the same question: What shall I do? Carrying the great burden of loneliness and despair, they search desperately for meaning, for forgiveness, for peace – a look, a touch, a kind word.

We learn all too early the power of regret and guilt. The child learns the irrevocable nature of the slung stone, the sting of rejection. Dag Hammarskjöld wrote, “Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.” But in the modern world, a world come of age, there remains no place for miracles. We have explained the world away, and in so doing, we have left no room for God, no room for forgiveness.

There is another way. This Easter, Christians around the world will celebrate the One who can take away their burden. For millennia, men and women have come to the cross of Jesus and found that what is broken can be made whole again and what is soiled can be made clean again. For them, there is a new beginning in a world filled with meaning, filled with love, and filled with God. The Church of Christ has proclaimed this message for countless ages, proclaiming it in its preaching, in its fellowship, and in its outreach to a wounded and weary world. Not everyone will hear the good news of Jesus, but for those who do, there awaits a great tradition, a great movement flowing through history, a river of humanity that refuses to accept a world without love, without hope, without God. Come and join us this Easter.

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
(Langston Hughes)

Misty Mountains

On my wall as I write hangs a silk scroll of misty mountains, bases wreathed in clouds. In the distance, a narrow bridge spans a winding river, across which a single peasant scurries, balancing a heavy load. In the foreground a tea house nestles among pine trees. I bought the scroll, unsigned and painted in the style of Wang Hui, many years ago in Japan. It is the perfect backdrop for sipping a winter-afternoon cup of tea. The mountains are not real, of course. They are stylized, and like a good watercolor poem they speak of all mountains, whether outside of Beijing or Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. The scene is timeless and beyond all geographies because it connects at a deep level with our need for harmony.

The tranquil landscape belies modern Asian urban life, whether in Tokyo, Taipei, or Shanghai, where the roar of traffic and the crush of the crowds are an impossible distance from the imagined scholar, taking tea on his covered porch. Mega-cities all. We are not immune. You would not be far wrong if you labeled the mid-Atlantic the Baltimore-Washington-Richmond Metropolitan Area. A city hundreds of miles across, with hardly a greenspace separating its boroughs, connected by six and eight-lane highways and interconnecting beltways. This is not a future Fritz Lang Metropolis, it is now.

We have traded the beauty of the willow for towers of steel, the chorus of the rice paddy for the shrill cry of the street vendor, and the ripple of the river for the roar of the diesel. It is no wonder we have lost our way. With the loss of harmony has come the loss of civility, and we have learned what is valuable in community from its absence. A half century ago, Kahlil Gibran wrote in Sand and Foam, “I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.”

We are ungrateful. We are out of tune. As Lent approaches, perhaps we ought to consider modeling another way – not the negative way of the intolerant and unkind, but the way of charity. “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” This is not a Pollyannaish prescription for an easy life; rather, it is a difficult, narrow road through mountains. Injustices, insults, and injuries abound along the way, and like the world of the silk paintings, the narrow road is timeless, lying beyond all geographies. It is a way grounded in the heart, the imagined way of what could yet be.

“Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.” (Kahlil Gibran)

Imagine something different; act to make it real.

The Scandal of Christmas.

The Scandal of Christmas..

This is worth reading . Whole civilizations, like those of the Indus valley, expressed great truth in myth and story . How often do we capture facts but little truth ? Perhaps the reason we don´t have a holiday for Aristotle or a tree for Newton is that we hunger for greater truths, those of the Bible, the Mahabarata, and yes, even Tolkien.

Auld Lang Syne

Auld Lang Syne.

I have ushered in many a new year to the sound of Robert Burns’ 1788 classic, Auld Lang Syne. And for most of those years, I sang it without sheet music, paying little attention to the words. It’s just something you learn by following along with the crowd – some sentimental, others tipsy, others drunk, none really paying attention to what they were singing. But the original poem, written in a light Scottish dialect, is worth reading. The first stanza, in is actually an extended question.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne?

Burns asks if we should allow our old acquaintances and the events of our “old long since” to be forgotten? or can we truly forget? Is there not still some remnant remaining to intrude on our thoughts in quiet moments? As I grow older, I find that to be very much the case. Names and events from the long buried past come to mind – sometimes stirring up fond memories, sometimes not. Most often, what has come between me and friends from long ago is not some defining event; it is simply time and neglect.

As Burns concludes his poem:
But seas between us
Braid have roar’d
Since auld lang syne.

Broad seas have indeed intervened since that “old long since.” Neglected friends and broken relationships may be too far gone in time and space to recover. Others may yet be resurrected. Drink that cup of kindness now, while there is yet the opportunity to do so. As the New Year dawns, why not resolve to be a better friend, a more loving spouse, a more attentive brother or sister? Why not reach out to those around us and offer true friendship, true Christian love? The alternative is to let those around us slip away, only to realize too late that:

We two have run about the slopes
And picked the daises fine;
But we have wandered many a weary foot,
Since auld lang syne.

Should old acquaintances be forgotten and never brought to mind? The choice is ours.

A Christmas Carol

One of my favorite television ads repeats every weekday morning on the cable news outlet. By repeat, I mean repeat. The station plays the brief ad back-to-back, sometimes three times in succession. I can only guess that there is some contractual arrangement committing the station to play the ad a specified number of times per hour – the only way to reach the goal being to double up. Whatever the reason, every morning a lawyer appears, in a dapper suit and a cowboy hat. He implores us to contact him if we have taken any number of common prescription drugs or received implants and have suffered any of a bewildering array of side effects or have died. It’s the “died” part that I particularly enjoy. I imagine a dim wraith with outstretched skeletal fingers floating in his office negotiating fees while gleefully contemplating a cash settlement.

Perhaps my imagination was fueled this morning by a late night of watching Jim Carrey’s performance in Disney’s A Christmas Carol, or possibly, “a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.” As Ebenezer Scrooge reminds Marley’s ghost, the senses are notoriously sensitive to little things, and a “slight disorder makes them cheats.” So it is with imagination. That of course is the whole point of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. This novella, written in haste and published in 1843, remains one of his most widely read novels and one of the Western world’s most beloved Christmas stories, but it is not a children’s story with jolly, fat Santas and eight, tiny reindeer. Ebenezer Scrooge is as successful in deluding himself as he is in money-changing. Although he would hotly defend his view of the world as the only rational approach to life in a harsh and competitive society – that the poor had better die and “reduce the surplus population” – Scrooge lives in an imaginary world where money and going about the business of business rule. The poor are poor through lack of ambition and effort. The wealthy are such because of their diligence and their unshakable commitment to the principle that we all get what we deserve. Unfortunately for Scrooge, his three spirit-visitors show him clearly what he deserves. It is not what he imagined.

Dickens’ social criticism and commitment to just treatment of the poor is understandable in light of his childhood experiences. His father, mother, and younger siblings were placed in debtors’ prison while he was forced at age twelve to work under harsh conditions in a blacking warehouse. Many of the his notable characters and his encyclopedic knowledge of the London poor come from this period and make their way into A Christmas Carol. An imaginative story, full of quirky, colorful characters, becomes a vehicle for exposing the ways in which western society renders the uncomfortable, the dirty and uneducated invisible, preferring an imaginary world of fairness and justice.

Jacob Marley’s chains are Ebenezer Scrooge’s chains, as yet unperceived by Scrooge, although as the story progresses, it is clear that everyone else can clearly see them. It is only Scrooge himself who is blind to what he has become and oblivious to the weight of accumulated guilt he has amassed through years of selfish disregard for others. The past and the present provide Scrooge with a picture of who he is. In conversation with the first two spirits, he comes to understand not only who and what he has become, but he is forced to confront what he has lost in the process. It is the third spirit, however, that is most terrifying – terrifying in appearance, terrifying in imperiousness, and terrifying in silence. He alone utters not a word.

We can and must continue in conversation with ourselves. In the quiet moments and secluded places of our minds, both past and present intrude, often in noisy, confused voices that if listened to, never fail to offer ample evidence of who we are – either, as the Apostle Paul reminds us, accusing or excusing us. It is through this conversation that Scrooge begins to understand who he really is, and it is through this same conversation that our eyes may be opened to see more clearly who we are and what our legacy will be. But it is the final ghost, the Ghost of Christmas Future, who most affects Scrooge. Though the past may haunt us, it is fixed, immovable. The future, however, is a great, dark unknown, shapeless and silent as a wraith. Scrooge can have no conversation with the “not yet”; he can only follow the pointing of its skeletal fingers. Ebenezer Scrooge learns in the end that the future is indeed dependent on the past, but unlike the past, it is not fixed. The future is still open to alternative endings.

This Christmas, what future would you choose? The word scrooge has entered our language, describing not only a miserly person, but also one who is bitter, angry, and humorless to boot. Jacob Marley’s return from the dead is only a story, but millions throughout the ages have believed and trusted that Jesus did return from the dead with a quite different message – one that not only banishes the darkness from the future but stands as a sharp corrective to the bitterness and anger of the world. Embrace this message this Christmas, and declare, if only for season, that there is another way, that neither the present nor the future need follow on the past. Paul tells us in his letter to the Corinthians, “And now these three remain: faith hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” Abiding in these three promises a different outcome – a different outcome for you and for those around you. That is the miracle of love and the miracle of Christmas. It begins with each one of us.

 

Father, mother, daughter, son

Each a treasure be

One candle’s light dispels the night

Now our eyes can see
Burning brighter than the sun

God bless us everyone

A miracle has just begun

God bless us everyone*

*God Bless Us Everyone, by Glen Ballard and Alan Silvestri, sung by Andrea Bocelli, in Walt Disney’s A Christmas Carol