It's not about Alnitak, Alnilam & Mintaka
Predawn writing and thinking leaning back here in my most comfortable chair of chairs, my preference of thought is to express regrets for anyone who missed last evening’s event at Holy Nativity Episcopal Church, the annual service of Lessons & Carols. Incomparable came to mind, but it was beyond that in loveliness, beyond incomparable. L&C ranks with and above Christmas Eve and Easter Day services, and I don’t know how anyone can bear to miss it. It’s even perfectly timed, just after Thanksgiving at the beginning of Advent, to bless the Holiday Season and whet the wait for Christmas.
But what’s on and in mind is distress about myself, the extreme blindness of my not even peripheral grasp of what is. My failure, inability because of who what where when I am, to sense what’s cooking, simmers, bubbles and steams.
Two mornings in Theology class stay with me. Professor was the brilliant, internationally renown Lutheran scholar Robert Jenson who helped me with many things, including the question “Who or what is God?” Stays with me our last morning of class, it would have been December 1980, when Jenson urged us as pastors not to fade mentally into a banal lifetime of parish administration but to challenge ourselves intellectually, to continue reading and studying. I try: it keeps me from worrying that the Altar candles are not lighted in the correct order.
Earlier in the semester, the other morning I’ve related here before. I don’t recall what the subject was, but Jenson came into the classroom as we were chortling over something outrageous that some fundamentalist pastor had said, that had made the news. Something that seemed incredibly, laughably stupid, naive. Jenson suggested we not be so certain of ourselves, saying, “They may be right and we may be wrong.”
That morning, Jenson healed me of certainty. I say the Nicene Creed because it’s our tradition and because it says “We believe” and not “I know.” I love singing the Christmas carols and the Easter hymns, all of which are part of my being. Never mind the poetry. I am not waffling and ambivalent, not skeptical; I simply realize that “I believe” is not the same as “I know” and that belief does not make it so, assertion does not create truth. So, I can sing.
Where is this going? Not through thick brush and brambles, but down a path. When someone has a view, a position opposed to my own, I am always skeptical of myself. So much so that from time to time, even Speaker Boehner makes me wonder if I’m wrong. The instant issue of Ferguson Brown is now Eric Garner. Calmed is Zimmerman Martin, the best living and dead proof that nothing whatsoever will come of Ferguson Garner. Let the reader understand. In the short term and in our shortsightedness, the best thing that can happen for us whites is everybody calms down and goes back to as we like it. Trayvon is buried and Zimmerman’s stupidities no longer make the evening news. Life Is Good, eh.
No, it isn’t.
Looking at a star, I miss its constellation. The Ferguson grand jury was right, clearly so to me, right and rational. But that wasn’t the constellation, it wasn’t about Brown or the officer. From what I watched of the sidewalk scuffle, the Staten Island grand jury is dead wrong. But I don’t understand anyway, and besides, it’s not the grand jury, it’s the constellation, the culture. Rioting again this morning, or still. When the dead person’s family calls for calm they, like me, don’t understand that the outrage is not about their star, it’s about Orion; its about the universe. This too shall pass; calm, tragically, will come, order quickly restore itself or riots be put down and order be restored.
Several newspapers arrive in my email every day and I scan them. I read these because they don’t say what I think, and I cannot learn a thing by reading damn fools who parrot my views. So I read NYT and TWP. The best this morning is Charles M. Blow, whom I do not know but who helps me understand myself. As Jenson did half my lifetime ago. Here, though nobody will tap it, is Blow’s column. He does understand.
In our Lessons & Carols the first lesson is about the Lord God trying to keep a straight face at the man’s stupidity. The original narcissist, Adam can’t take responsibility for his own actions. Caught still chewing a bite of the apple, he points and blurts, “The woman!" My problem too, is myself, thank you Robert Jenson, I have forty years of knowing that one fact. I'm my problem. I’m outside peering in the window, trying to see the facts of others and understand that their problems are mine.
TW