Spring Cleaning My Cluttered Thoughts

April 23rd, 2009  |   

Short, snappy messages on bumper stickers, ads, slogan buttons, posters, refrigerator magnets, Internet blurbs, and greeting cards, often stick in my head like flies to flypaper.

The one in my cluttered brain today is, “A clean desk is the sign of a sick mind.” When I first saw that little jewel, I thought that maybe I had struck gold.

Maybe those ten little words could deliver me a clean bill of mental health. Maybe my clutter was a testimony to my creativity.

Maybe I should hang a sign reading “Genius at Work” over my desk full of papers, my pile of unanswered letters, and my magazine and newspaper clippings resting in a heap on the floor next to my workplace.

Or, better still, maybe I should stop kidding myself that a clean desk or a cluttered one, for that matter, could absolutely define who I am. Justification by clutter, or lack of it, could not condemn or save my very soul.

Researchers at NEC-Mitsubishi, a maker of computer monitors, have turned the tables on the old slogan “A clean desk is the sign of a sick mind.” They say a messy workplace and a cluttered desk germinates what they have labeled “Irritable Desk Syndrome.”

In The Great Litany, in the Episcopal Church Book of Common Prayer, folks pray to be delivered from a host of things—blindness of heart, the crafts and assaults of the devil, earthquake, fire, flood, plague, pestilence, famine, battle, murder, and sudden death. The list of adversaries threatens to drive me to a warm, safe bed and a thumb to suck on.

I add to that list a new prayer: “Good Lord, deliver us from Irritable Desk Syndrome.”

Having added that request to my prayer life, a still, small voice whispers in my ear, “Okay, so I hear you, now let us begin by you spring-cleaning some of the clutter you have collected.”

So I’ll do just that—clear some of the clutter that has piled up around my desk and in my mind since my last issue of Notes.   

Shaking Hands With An Untouchable

When the President of the United States enters the scene in a public place, the band strikes up the march, “Hail to the Chief.”

Maybe that tune should be retired and some rap artist commissioned to write a new entrance song for President Obama. Something like:

Unclean, unclean/I touched somebody mean/you know what I mean/now I ain’t so keen/unclean, unclean/I touched somebody mean/that Venezuelan dude/You know/crude, crude/slick like oil/ crude, crude/the Dude’s so crude/unclean, unclean/I been seen/I been seen/with that Dude who ain’t clean/now I’m a lean, mean, unclean not-so-keen Dude.

Now, be honest, didn’t each and every one of you feel the earth move under your feet when you saw that picture of President Obama shaking hands with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela?

I mean really! Didn’t he put the whole world in jeopardy when he grabbed hold of Chavez’s hand? Maybe he should have put his hand on the red phone in the Oval Office to send a nuke down on Chavez’s head, instead of shaking his hand. 

Chavez is like those gay people out to destroy marriage. Like those immigrants out to destroy our country. Like those antiwar yellow-bellies, who ought to leave our country because they sure don’t love our country.  Like the liberals, who syndicated talk show foul-mouth Michael Savage says suffer from mental illness and threaten our way of life.

Chavez is like one of those untouchables in India. Like one of those people Jesus touched—the people who were marginalized, ostracized and declared untouchable and unredeemable. Don’t touch them! Marginalize them! Pulverize them!

Get a load of this clipping! It’s from back in August of 2005—a few words uttered by evangelist Pat Robertson about Chavez.

“Without question, this is a dangerous enemy to our south, controlling a huge pool of oil, that could hurt us very badly. We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with.”

I asked if you felt the earth move under your feet when Obama shook hands with Chavez. Well, for me, the earth did feel like it moved in a good direction when I saw that picture.

I felt like we now had a president willing to reach out to someone we call our enemy. Why it was a downright decent thing to do, and for some of us a downright Christian gesture. It felt like a step away from what has been called “weaponized Christianity,” the kind of Christianity Pat Robertson embodies.

The Boy In The Striped Pajamas

This past week, as a part of Yom HaShoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day—I went to the Charleston Town Center Mall and read out loud the names of holocaust victims. The list, shared by a host of readers, lasted for seven hours.

I just finished the book (now a movie) “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.” It’s a fable written by Irish writer John Boyne. It tells the story of Bruno, a naïve nine-year-old German boy and his privileged family. The boy is forced to move from Berlin, and away from his grandparents and friends, because his father has been promoted by Hitler to a senior position at Auschwitz.

This is a book that one reader has said could be read by a nine-year-old and should be read by adults. It proves the case that a good children’s book is also a good adult read.

A mere 50 feet away from Bruno’s home is a high barbed wire fence, behind which he sees, from his bedroom window, a large number of huts and square buildings, and a multitude of people wearing striped pajamas and caps.

One day, unbeknownst to his parents, Bruno’s curiosity drives him toward the barbed wire. On the other side of the fence, he meets Shmuel, an emaciated boy his own age. It’s the beginning of a secret friendship which drives the story to a painful yet profound conclusion.

Both boys are living in places they did not choose, in a setting divided by a fence, unaware of the demonic forces that have brought them to this place. Despite this, they discover a mutual friendship and a common destiny that neither of them could have anticipated.

In a totally unexpected turn of events they share a common death.

Early on in the story, as the family unpacks, Bruno tells his mother “I think this move was a bad idea.”

His mother replies, “We don’t have the luxury of thinking.”

Those words haunt me. “We don’t have the luxury of thinking.”

I think that living one’s life without the luxury of thinking is living one’s life in hell.

It’s a hell known by the man who knows his work is destructive, even immoral, but remains silent because he needs the job in order to feed his family.

It’s a hell experienced by a woman who spreads her legs for money and numbs her mind as a prostitute because she must at all cost provide for her children.

It’s a hell known by men in combat who kill and then return home to violent memories—flashbacks buried beyond thought when they pulled the trigger in a far away place in a war that has come to make no sense.

It’s the hell that awaits any one of us when we are fortunate enough to have the luxury of thinking yet squander it because we are lazy, fearful or preoccupied.

It is, I think, somehow a part of American’s paralyzed psyche which refuses to think about the torture we have inflicted on human beings on the other side of the fence in places like Guantanamo. People we have captured, tortured, and without due process of law, have labeled terrorists.

Making It Look Easy

Every spring, no matter how old I am, my thoughts turn to the game of lacrosse—the game I played and loved as a young person. Like a salmon driven to swim upstream, I feel the innate urge to slide down the basement stairs and retrieve a dusty lacrosse stick.

While coaching on the lacrosse staff at the Naval Academy during my first four years of ordained ministry, I saw a kid with my name—Jimmy Lewis—put on the Navy blue and gold uniform. He was the best attackman I ever saw play the game.

Occasionally someone would say to me that Jimmy made it look so easy. That would always prompt me to say, “You’re right. But you should be here on practice days when Jimmy comes early and stays late and works hard, very hard, to perfect his moves.”

Judy teaches me the same lesson whenever we have friends in for supper, as we did last Sunday night. I see how hard she works to get the table and the meal just right. And then, I am delighted to see how much she enjoys the meal and our friends. She works hard, but she makes it look easy, because she loves what she is doing. I think that’s a pretty good way to live. 

I hear people always talking about turning everything over to God, and I know the wisdom of what they are saying. Life would somehow be easier, I am told. But every time I fall back on that formula, as if it and it alone could rescue me from a hard day’s work, I hear that pesky still, small voice calling me to get to work—hard work at that.

When I do get the luxury to think and rest and play and ponder, and yes, to write, I hope I don’t forget the folks who are out there working hard to make our lives easier.

The Susan Boyle’s Of The World

Internet and e-mail clutter piles up and needs to be swept out regularly. But I am glad that I didn’t trash the YouTube video a friend sent me weeks ago—a performance by a woman named Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent show. That video has now been seen by millions of people around the world.

If you haven’t seen the tape or followed the story, now massively saturating the media outlets, here’s the bottom line to the story.

The show is trying to uncover talent amidst a population undiscovered for their talent. Susan steps on the stage. She is heavy, no Madonna, strange, what some would call “frumpy.” The judges look at one another, the audience laughs, and viewers are prone to believe that this woman is about to make a fool of herself, and we will have fun at her ridiculous attempt to be a winning singer.

She opens her mouth and sings “I have a Dream” from the musical Les Miserables. Her voice is magnificent, the judges looked shocked, and the audience stands and screams approval. A diamond in the rough has been discovered. One judge says her appearance is a wakeup call for all cynics who make judgments by appearances. The old lesson—you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover—has suddenly taken on a new incarnation.

Here’s a clip from Tina Brown (Former editor of The New Yorker and now on line with The Daily Beast) that’s worth passing on. “We’re all getting sick of being bullied by bad values. Sick of disappearing everyone who’s plain or strange or not one of the cool crowd. This hero was no Captain Courageous. She just had to fight against being plain and a bit odd from mild early brain damage.”

Susan Boyle, says Brown, is one of the “Invisible Women: the unbeautiful 47 year-olds who don’t rate a second look and never get a chance to make their point in the meeting…aging women who feel dissed by popular culture and employers alike.”

How true. I know a lot of women like that (men as well) who are working hard, raising families, and who know the score of the game and how tilted the playing field is in the world in which they struggle.

I know a woman who was laid off work at an assembly line and is now working for an agency that has a workforce of women who clean people’s homes. This woman is married and has a child and is being messed over by her employers. She is forced to work off the clock (illegal) and makes peanuts (unjust) in a circus-of-a-corporation making big bucks off of her sweat, and the sweat of the women held captive to this work.

I say held captive, because she is like those people I have described above—the man who knows his work is destructive, even immoral—the woman who spreads her legs for money and numbs her mind as a prostitute—the combat soldier who kills and suffers because there are no jobs back home. Held captive because they have to sweat blood and tears in order to put bread on the table for their loved ones.

This week I was asked to speak at a West Virginia University class of students working on their master’s degree in social work. The class was made up of about 20 women and one man (a Vietnam veteran). They were young and older (Susan Boyle’s age bracket), black and white, rural and urban. They hold social work jobs in the day facing terrible problems both in the populations they serve and within the social service systems they represent. They have families to support and take “luxury time” to study so they can be more proficient in their work. 

What can I say to these folks? Hell, they are picking up the pieces of a world my generation helped create. They suffer from the economic woes generated by a demonic military industrial complex that sucked the nations financial coffers dry—a demon my generation didn’t exorcise.

Sure, I can pass on some tips, some clutter I’ve collected over the years born out of the organizing I have done inside the struggle, and I did just that. But best of all I just told them that they were all heroes to me—Susan Boyle’s in my midst—invisible, bullied by bad values, and yet powerful people capable of making changes by embodying values that count.

Forces are already at work to do an Eliza Doolittle makeover on Susan Boyle—Botox her, drape her in stylish threads, PR her personality, and reduce her weight. I hope she resists. She’s beautiful just as she is.

Susan Boyle is today’s Kate Smith, the 235 pound singer who was discovered back in the 1940’s by a man who recognized her talents. “Ted Collins,” she said, “was the first man who regarded me as a singer, and didn’t even seem to notice that I was a big girl…I’m big, and I sing, and boy, when I sing, I sing all over.”

Smith went on to be the only voice capable of singing “God Bless America.”

God bless you, Susan Boyle!

Entry Filed under: Fig Tree Notes Archives

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Nations will hammer swords into plows, their spears into sickles, there shall be no more training for war. Each person will sit under his or her fig tree in peace.
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