Almost

Truthfully, a Southerner, this one at least (and "least" is what this one is), doesn't know what to say-to or do-about Paula Deen. Which, as the italics show, is not herself the person, but the topic. The topic, the unspeakable topic. And the spread between unspeakable and unthinkable. It isn't about political correctness, which is as thin skin deep for sincerity as high-church pomp is for theology. It isn't about a -- word -- either. It's about the distance between seeming and be-ing; what is seen v. what is.

Many people have a "focus." For example, my teaching focus those years in Holy Nativity Episcopal School was the N.T. Greek word agape', which is a kind of love, love that is not a feeling but how you treat people; it's vital for Christians -- for anyone -- to be mindful of that. In the Paula Deen cavitation this morning, I remember the focus of an admiral I once knew. He's probably long dead now, but during a Navy tour in the Pentagon in the mid to late sixties, I worked around an admiral whose focus for us was "Image and Substance." Admiral Masterton never lost his focus, never let go of it, never quit talking about it, never let us lose sight of it. The first time I heard him talk about it (it would have been at a luncheon in 1966) I thought he was going to chide us about our organization's impeccable image, that what is important is substance, not image. He didn't. He did not. He made sure we knew that both are important, that image without substance is an empty box, and that substance without image is a lost cause. 

I hope my HNES kids, college students and young adults now, never forget what love is, just as, in the very center of me, I will always be mindful of Image and Substance. Paula Deen and the unmentionable word, not the person, is an empty box that both grieves and embarrasses me as a Southerner. And the grief is deeper than the embarrassment.

This is not something I talk about, but will briefly this morning. Born and raised a Southerner, some of my early heroes were old-timers, the incredibly ancient and oblivious Confederate soldiers riding in the open-top touring car at the end of parades down Harrison Avenue. To realize just how oblivious, read Flannery O'Connor's "A Late Encounter with the Enemy." I would like to think that what I was is extinct, that there are irretrievably none left, but it isn't so. This thought links to my view of knowing, of what I know for certain. Friends and folks in my Sunday School and Bible Seminar classes, heck, anyone who reads my blog, knows about my skepticism, scorn, even contempt for "knowing," for "knowledge" -- certainty, certitude. It's because I grew up knowing what a Southerner knew. And slowly coming to the surface of reality during my college years and realizing that what I knew was -- I'll use Saint Paul's N.T. Greek word skybalon, because I don't use the English s-word in my blog. (If I did, BMcD would kick my bee-you-tee-tee). When something is all you know, you know it. What I knew was a crock, it was wrong. Both irredeemably incorrect and obscenely immoral. Unspeakable, so unspeakable that it must become unthinkable; pushed farther and farther away and out. God help me, and wishing it was Lent, at nearly 78 I can look deep within and declare myself almost shriven. Almost.

Almost enough to cast the first stone at Paula Deen.

TW+