Leftovers

December 30th, 2009  |   

During the month of December our refrigerator has been in the nervous breakdown mode. That’s because we crammed it full of food for the holiday season meals with family and friends. Now that the season has wound down, it has gone into the nearly-new mode. It has become a repository for leftovers.

As I write, Judy has a pot of soup boiling on the stove. It’s  full of vegetables and meat bones—leftovers from Christmas dinner. Like highway buzzards, we have already picked over the remains of a prosperous roast beef, several stalks of asparagus, a tangy fruited Jello dish, and a loaf of home-baked pumpkin bread. Ah, leftovers!

When I think of leftovers I recall the story of Jesus feeding 5,000 people on the hillside close by the Sea of Galilee. I remember that there were baskets full of leftovers after all the people had eaten their fill of fish and bread. Don’t press me on the details of that story as to whether it is literally true. I wasn’t there so how can I know. And besides that, I refuse to get lost in the thicket of literal accuracy, particularly when poetic, life-saving truth is involved.

One thing I am sure of is the fact that Manna Meal, our local feeding program for the poor, serves breakfast and lunch to hundreds of people every day of the year and all the food comes in daily by way of donations. It’s all about abundance and surplus and it mimics the spirit of the feeding of the 5,000 story.

I also know that leftovers give visible and tangible evidence about abundance and grace. And when I say grace I’m not talking about what’s said over food before the meal, as important as that is, but rather what’s left over after eating  a meal. Relationships renewed over food with family and friends exceeds all calculated serving sizes. It’s a downright gracious experience! It continues to feed one’s spirit long after the digestive tract has taken care of its bodily function.

Leftovers have a seasonal place in our calendar as well. At the end of each year, just prior to the beginning of a new year, it’s customary to indulge in leftovers.

Last Sunday’s New York Times was full of leftovers. One section of the paper was full of pictures of major events for the year 2009 as well as brief  articles recollecting each year of the decade. The magazine section ran full page articles on noteworthy people who had died this past year. Critics will take a stab at choosing what they think are this past year’s best books, movies, plays, and televisions shows.

On a personal level, the departure of 2009 provides folks with an opportunity to reflect on what’s leftover from their own 2009—memories of the past, and perhaps and anticipation of what the new year—2010—might bring. Hopes and fears are commingled—life and death symbolized with the departure of Father Time and the arrival of the fresh new babe wrapped in a 2010 banner. It’s enough to boggle my brain—and  I do have brains on my mind right now, as you will soon see, if you care to read on.                        

This issue of Notes From Under the Fig Tree, the final one for 2009, is full of leftovers—bits and pieces of this-and-that for my readers to chew on.

Nursing Home Visits On Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve I, along with my son Stephen, visited two nursing homes. For those who think I spend an inordinate amount of time at demonstrations and rallies for social justice issues, you need to know that hospital and nursing home visits have captured a large part of my life since I was ordained back in 1964.

I might add that the pastoral task of visiting people in nursing homes has, on occasion, dovetailed into prophetic demonstrations and rallies on behalf of hospital and nursing home employees who are poorly paid, work in intolerable situations, and are harassed when they attempt to organize. As always, the pastoral and prophetic tasks of ministry are, by necessity, linked.

Walking the nursing home halls this Christmas, I thought again about the mystery of the human brain. So many of the people I see are there in body but their minds are God-knows-where. The crying, screaming, endless jibber jaber, the vacant looks, all give testimony to the fact that the once-upon-a-time person is no longer present. Christmas past isn’t even a shadowy memory for so many of the drugged elderly and the urine stained and bed-ridden men and women. I can’t help but wonder who these people were as my eyes take in the person they have become.   

The human brain is like a ball of yarn composed of wired flesh and blood. Lodged in my head, it becomes action central for all my other organs, empowering me to think. Then, in a most spectacular way, it turns on itself with the power to study its own workings. And what is it about that yarn in someone’s head that causes it to tangle or come unraveled  as if some cosmic cat was playing games with it?

The Christmas lights on trees all over the city are rainbow bright with color, while I am reduced to thoughts about the grey matter which covers the cerebral hemispheres in our heads. Strange, don’t you think, that I should trade visions of seasonal sugar plums dancing in my head for thoughts so grey and smells so rancid? And yet, administering Communion to a man flat on his back in troubled pain, or holding a woman’s hand in prayer while someone down the hall screams incoherently, seem so right, so connected to the birth of a child in a stinking stable some 2000 years ago in occupied Palestine.
              

Flabbergasted By A Man With A Malformed Cerebellum

On Sunday, while working my way through the front section of the paper, I ran into Kim Peek’s obituary. That name may not be familiar to you, but perhaps you will remember who he was after I tell you more about him.

Kim Peek was born with severe brain abnormalities which, according to his obituary, “impaired his physical coordination and made ordinary reasoning difficult. He could not dress himself or brush his teeth without help. He found metaphoric language incomprehensible and conceptualization baffling.” Ah, but what he could do trumped what he couldn’t do.

Peek’s head was enlarged, his cerebellum was malformed and was missing the corpus callosum—the sheaf of nerve tissue that connects the two sides of the brain. Because of this, he was diagnosed as a savant—someone with an extraordinary depth of knowledge and the ability to recall it.

Described as “the Mount Everest of memory,” Peek could rattle off all the area codes, zip codes and television stations in the U.S., and could tell you where they were located.

As a child, a doctor said he was so retarded that he should be institutionalized; another doctor recommended a lobotomy. That is, until Peek read and memorized the first eight volumes of a set of encyclopedias.

Peek memorized so many Shakespearean plays that he would often interrupt an actor on stage when he would miss a line. As for musicals, he was known to stand up during a performance and say: “Wait a minute! The trombone is two notes off.”

By now you may know who Kim Peek was. He was the man portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the Oscar-winning movie, “Rain Man.” Barry Morrow, one of the “Rain Man” writers, gave Peek the Oscar he was awarded for best original screenplay. He said this about Peek: “I was absolutely flabbergasted that such a human being existed.”

Peek spent the rest of his life traveling about the country demonstrating his talent and advocating tolerance for the disabled. It is said that some 400,000 people hugged Morrow’s statuette. When asked by one admirer if he was a happy man, Peek responded: “I’m happy just to look at you.”

For folks who have had a family member or friend die during the year, December can be a cruel month. The holidays and the end of year celebrations, associated with the completion of the year, can be sad. Loved ones are remembered and missed. But perhaps it is the time for us all to risk tears and remember those we love who have died and seek the grace which allows us to say, “I’m happy just to have looked at you.”

The Young Man From Nigeria—What Was Going On In His Brain?

What the hell was going on in that young man’s head? What was Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab thinking when he set off an explosive device in his lap that, if all had gone as planned, would have taken down 279 passengers and 11 crew members on Northwest Flight 253?    

We may know what deadly substance this 23 year old Nigerian had in his underwear, but what did he have in his head? We know that he carried a syringe full of liquid detonator, but what kind of chemical reactions were taking place inside the more than 100 trillion synapses in his brain?

I don’t have the answers to those questions any more than I have answers about the grey matter in the heads of those folks I saw in the nursing homes on Christmas Eve.

What can be said at this point is that this young man is as mysterious as any suicide bomber, Patty Hearst, Timothy McVeigh, or a familiar killer in our midst who surprises those who knew him and never thought he would ever do such a thing.

It is reported that Mike Rimmer, who taught Mutallab in Togo, saw him as a model student, even though different from other students his age. When the teacher took the students into a pub, Mutallab complained. “Mr Rimmer, you should not be taking us into pubs. We do not want to be in a building associated with alcohol.”

“He was very interested in world affairs,” his teacher said, “and would stay behind after lessons to discuss issues. For a teacher, that was just wonderful. He was a very personable boy; he could have gone into politics. He could have become the president of Nigeria. But now his future doesn’t look bright at all.”

I look at pictures on television of this young man and, without pretending to know what really was going on in his life, feel like there are some explanations for his actions.

From a rich family (his father is a banker), and educated in private schools, he saw pretty clearly the cleavage between the rich and the poor in poverty stricken Yemen. An outsider with his peer group (in our terms, a religious nerd), classmates labeled him “The Pope” because of his “pious” and “high-minded” attitudes. He came to be called “Alfa” a local term meaning Islamic teacher.

We know that synapses in the human brain are affected by drugs such as curare, strychnine, cocaine, morphine, alcohol, LSD, and countless other chemical substances. Interestingly enough, curare, a paralyzing poison, has a history of having been used by South American indigenous people against enemies. One could easily suggest that Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, a bright young man with a social conscience not yet fully developed, may well have been poisoned by violent radicals who see violence as the way to confront the enemy. And speaking of violence as a way to confront an enemy, consider Joe Lieberman.

Joe Lieberman On Steroids, Testosterone Or Whatever

As the year comes to an end, Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman is back in the news with this message: “Iraq was yesterday’s war, Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively,Yemen will be tomorrow’s war.” That from a whiney sort of a guy who has never seen combat (he dodged Vietnam).

What’s going on in his brain? Is he wandering around in the halls of Congress in an amnesic state? Joe! Joe! The war in Iraq is going on today, not yesterday! And those troops on their way to Afghanistan are scheduled for a future date in a war that may have no end date. On top of that, while Joe can hardly wait for tomorrow’s war, he seems out of touch with the reality that our country has already been at war in Yemen. For some time now, prior to Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab’s pants-on-fire, our nation has been funding military support for what government they have in Yemen, giving military intelligence to them, and, you can bet your booties that our own drones and CIA activity, have been bombing and killing people in Yemen. 

Susan Brewer has written a book with an intriguing title: “Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq.”  In it she explores the propaganda—the screaming lies—behind our engagement in our long list of wars. Brewer “scours the record,” as one observer puts it, “to counter the historical amnesia of the public,” documenting how presidents at war portrayed themselves as travelers on the high road to peace and justice, not the low road to battle and dystopia.”

President Obama will be sorely tested by the lap fire on Northwest Flight 253. Don’t kid yourself, we are all imitators, from the time we are born until the time we die. That includes the President of the United States. All we can hope for, in this moment of U.S. “terrorist” frenzy, is that Obama will not mimic his White House predecessor. “Preemptive strike” are the two words I hope will not cross Obama’s mind, or, if they do, he will not go amnesic on us. Preemptive strikes only create more anger and violence.

As we approach the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, we would do well to take seriously the words he spoke one year to the day before his assassination. They are words that we as a nation, with over 700 military bases in 132 countries and an astronomical military budget, need to hear now: “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today (is) my own government.”

Real-Life Utopianism—A Paradise Built In Hell

How my brain and yours will react to trauma and crisis is, no matter how well we know ourselves, hardly predictable. The only thing that we human beings can predict with real certainty is that life, no matter how good it is at any particular moment, will deliver some degree of trauma and crisis to our doorstep.

That said, the chief question remains: How will we react to trauma and crisis when it comes knocking—both personal trauma and crisis, and the trauma and crisis we inevitably experience as citizens of this country?

Rebecca Solnit, in her book, “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster,” quotes a survivor of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. “What I remember most plainly about the earthquake was the human warmth and kindliness of everyone afterward…Mother and all our neighbors were busy from morning to night cooking meals. They gave away every extra garment they possessed…While  the crisis lasted, people loved each other.” That survivor was Dorothy Day, who, through the Catholic Worker movement gave herself to the care of the poor and the oppressed.

I will pause for a moment to let the cynics surface. I can hear them now: “Sure, but how about the looters, rapists and murderers who show up in the middle of a crisis—the con-artists and cheats who prey off people in the midst of trouble? You idealists puzzle me. Do you have amnesia? Have you forgotten the record of man’s inhumanity to man? ”

To my cynical friends, I say thanks for reminding me of the evil that lies close to the surface in all human beings and every institution constructed by human effort. Denial of that reality will get me in trouble. That said, I also have personal experience with an honest-to-God real-life utopianism lived out by people living in the most hellish situations that you can imagine. And not just during moments of trauma and crisis, but lived out well beyond those harsh moments.

I began this issue of Notes talking about leftovers, so I shall end that way.

As the new year—2010—is ushered in with bubbly spirited liquid—a worship service—quiet moments full of the memories of times past—frightful thoughts of what may yet be just around the corner—a traditional kiss and an embrace—a rousing rendition of “Auld Lang Syne” with the familiar words, “Should old acquaintance be forgot”—or whatever it is you wind up doing on the eve of this new year—may you find enough leftovers from a burned-out world to feed your soul as you hunger for love, justice and peace.

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