I was seven or eight I guess, when the neighbor kid picked me up and tossed me into their stock tank. I came up out of the water spewing and covered with slimy moss and what seemed to be cow slobber.
Traumatic event? My little psyche bent forever? Not a chance. This was horseplay, orneriness, stuff that boys did on hot summer days whether one was the victim or the perp. But I wish I knew at the time that satisfaction would come a few weeks later with the help of a horse.
She was a gentle old mare who let us ride her bareback. So when I saw him coming out to the pasture with a long length of rope and a wheat shovel I was puzzled at first. He tied one end of the rope to the shovel handle and looped the other around her neck. “We’ll take turns,” he said.
She didn’t like the rope. I’d never seen her so skittish. He laid the rope out on the ground, squatted down in the wheat shovel, whipped the rope hard and she took off.
Horse going at full gallop… Kid hanging on for dear life whooping and hollering… probably didn’t notice right away that she was heading for the pond.
I’ll never figure out why he didn’t bail out. She went around the edge of the pond and the long rope took him right through the water. I still remember his head just above the surface, moving through like the periscope on a submarine. When he came out the far side, she stopped.
It took him a while to gather up the rope and the shovel and make his way back to where I was standing. We didn’t exchange a single word all the way back to the barn, but while he was hanging the rope up, I couldn’t hold it in anymore and burst out laughing. I just howled with delight.
He chased me halfway home before giving up. I learned there that I could run faster scared than he could in a rage and trying to hold up his soggy trousers at the same time.
Catch me God when I run to my distracted life. I want to be immersed in your cosmic love.
I believe that early in our history, Americans began to practice a bad habit, a habit that has over the years grown out of proportion and has come to bite us in our anatomy. It runs contrary to that which is best in Christianity.
It’s “American Individualism.” It comes from the images of the single pioneer, the “mountain man,” the lone sodbuster, gunfighter, gold miner, gambler or school-marm. Americans venerated the exploits of the frontier marshals (who, by the way, disarmed just about everyone before trouble could start). Citizens heard of the exploits of individual heroes in World War I such as Sergeant York. Newspapers and radio told the story of the “Lone Eagle”; Charles Lindbergh, and World War II’s Audie Murphy - but not his comrades. We read Horatio Alger’s fictions about the poor kid who, through pluck and hard work, succeeded in adulthood. We had the Lone Ranger and superheroes Batman, and Wonder Woman… all individuals.
We don’t hear about civic duty anymore, or our responsibilities to the community. Driving a vehicle, sometimes unsafely, has become some sort of civil right. People who had draft deferments become high-level politicians who send other people’s children to die in battle. Tax-avoidance is a multibillion dollar industry, notwithstanding the roads, bridges, communications, schools and emergency services we wouldn’t have without the common effort of taxation. People boast about their manipulations to get out of jury duty. Government “of the people” is now “us and them” because we don’t want anyone telling us what to do and we don’t want tax-supported research to confront our faulty individual opinions and religious beliefs, and finally, those of us who see the poor as a threat to our wealth don’t want “the government” playing Robin Hood.
Jesus would have cried, as he cried over Jerusalem. The people had lost their direction and turned in on themselves.
Americanized Christianity has Jesus as a gun-toting, flag-waving white male American “patriot” who stands for the rights of churches to rule by misdirection. Realistically, Jesus seems to have been a man who was out for justice for his people, that is, fair play instead of poverty and brutality. Jesus taught equal access to God and equal access to God’s creation. And, shocking as it seems, there are people in the strangest places who are beginning to critique our present attitude.
Lloyd Blankfein was quoted in the Huffington Post as saying, “This country does a great job of creating wealth, but not a great job of distributing it.” Blankfein is the CEO of Goldman Sachs, a firm that I consider a predatory business that has caused considerable suffering among us because of greed and mismanagement.
In spite of these “blips” of morality, like Blankfein’s, we have no sense of community. We hate each other. Americans are on a rampage with guns and money.
So tax me. It doesn’t all go where I want it to go, but a lot of it goes to help people manage their retirement – people who do not have the capacity to do that otherwise, myself included. Some of it goes to level the playing field with health care. What we had before, “pay or die” healthcare is a shame and an injustice.
And pat me on the back when I choose to serve when called, even though it takes a chunk of time out of my life. When people do this the whole community is lifted up.
And tell the world that we’re not just a bunch of individuals, we’re a nation with a bond. And our religions, they bring a higher power into the mix.
Carole had a plumb-line installed in her office. It hangs from the ceiling, centered in front of the window at eye level.
It’s a perfectly turned and polished brass weight, tapered to a fine point and suspended by a thin filament of cord. Elegant.
She’s an architect. She knows that a plumb line may be the most ancient of precision instruments. Left undisturbed, it points unmoving and without fail to the center of the planet. Disturbed and left to swing free, it becomes a pendulum used to mark time for centuries.
As Carole matured, she became aware that life itself is movement, interspersed with quietude to make space for that movement.
Our language describes life as “function and growth” (Oxford Dictionary), “processing food for energy and growth” (Webster), “metabolism, reproduction, internally initiated adaptations to the environment” (Funk & Wagnalls). All these things are active, moving. And for humans, activity must cycle with rest so that there can be more activity – a continuation of life.
When Carole’s day gets frantic and full of aggravation… When struggles with forms and imagery and the people who pay for them raises her stress, she can stop for a moment and turn to look at her living anchor. She knows what it is and what it does and it brings her a God-like peace, so that life can begin again.
It’s okay to search for symbols that bring spiritual peace. Pictures of Jesus are repugnant to me, but a sleeping kitten reminds me that God creates life and peace constantly.
When I opened the door of my little truck there was a skunk there on the seat.
I jumped back and the skunk hopped down on the ground and started to amble away… then became a puppy, who turned around and came back to me. I was afraid. The puppy rolled over on its back and lay there like it wanted its tummy scratched… then I woke up.
How many things like this come from the inside of our sleeping brains, reprocessing and re-sorting what’s in there, and how many of these things come from an outside source?
The ancients believed that people in altered mental states were open to revelations from outside. Sleep or the lack of it, alcohol or other drugs, episodes of what we now call mental illness, injuries, meditation, massive changes in one’s life or one’s thinking, and other things, can trigger these events.
“Is Saul with the prophets again?” was said by people about Israel’s first king. Reading his story in the Old Testament it would seem that King Saul, by today’s standards, was mentally ill. It also seemed that there were bands of roving “prophets.” Were these people on the edge of insanity, making ecstatic proclamations and seen perhaps as channels of God’s words?
Faith and science put different spins on events like this. Can we entertain a balance in our lives in which the observations of science (a diagnosis or theory) can still leave room to see things as sourced from the unknown God, providing insight that we wouldn’t otherwise have, even with all the facts? Can a little child teach us about God? Someone with Down’s Syndrome? A crack whore? I’d like to think so.
