Disappearance

March 20th, 2014  |   

I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low:

I hear those gentle voices calling “Old Black Joe.” Stephen Foster

Old Black Joe

Going through someone’s possessions after they have died can be difficult and yet rewarding. A person’s whole life can pass through your hands in but a moment in time. That has just happened to me as I gathered up and sorted out the things in Joe Wilson’s one room apartment.

Joe was an 84 year-old black man, a friend, who lived on a limited income. His life, however, was not limited. He had friends all over town, people who loved him. He walked the streets of Charleston, ate lunch daily at the church-sponsored Manna Meal, and could be found quite often in the downtown mall sitting with friends.

Joe came equipped with a pocket full of candy. He handed it out to people of all ages. I was a recipient of his generosity, my favorite being a miniature piece of Bit O Honey. The candy came with conversation about politics. Joe kept up with the news. Protesting the war in Iraq, he stood with me on more than one occasion at vigils. When I was sentenced to do community service on a garbage truck for having been arrested for occupying our congresswoman’s office, Joe showed up in the courtroom.

At the outdoor bus terminal near the mall, you might catch a glimpse of Joe loaning or giving money to someone in need. When I had seen him there a few weeks ago, he looked like one of the walking-dead. This tall, proud, distinguished gentleman was, indeed, walking toward his own death a few days later.

Joe left no one in charge to take care of what he left behind, no family, and no executor of what little property he had, so the court appointed me to see to his cremation, burial and the disposition of his property.

Details taken care of, about 60 people gathered in the columbarium/garden outside of St. John’s Episcopal Church, where Joe worshipped and ate meals. I was honored to be able to spread his ashes beneath a line of evergreen trees. A few feet from the trees is the columbarium wall into which my Judy’s ashes were placed back in September. Judy loved Joe and served him lunch every Monday as a Manna Meal volunteer. In my heart, I knew Judy would be delighted to have Joe next to her in that garden.

Joe loved the ladies. Yes, indeed, he loved women. It was a source of amusement between us. Five elderly women showed up for the memorial service. They had been nurses-in-training at a hospital where Joe worked years ago. The hospital is no longer there, but their memories of Joe are still vivid. The now-retired nurses spoke about how much he had helped them with his knowledge of the operating room where he had worked. In going through a photo album in Joe’s room, I discovered pictures of those nurses, along with their graduation program. Starched white, they look so young. 

The manager of the apartment house, full of elderly, poor and disabled people, tells me that a woman will be moving into Joe’s apartment. She has been homeless, living in a doghouse. How Joe would have loved that—a woman and poor. Alive, I feel certain that he would have graced her palm with some money and a piece of candy.

The Sanctuary Was Filthy And Yet Smelled Like Discipleship

I have never slept in a doghouse. Sure, in the Marine Corps I slept on a glacier during cold weather training, but I never slept in a doghouse.

I have lost some teeth, been bruised and hit hard on a number of football fields, but that was play. I’ve never been beaten and bruised, as was this woman in the doghouse.

I’ve slept in a Bedouin tent in rough, sandy soil, south of Beersheba, in Palestine, but shepherds kept me company. I was not isolated or, as the saying goes, treated like a dog.

I can only imagine what this woman has endured. Yet despite the grotesque image of a human being sleeping in a doghouse, one I’d just as soon turn away from, hope manages to squeeze into the picture. This woman, no candidate for a dog pound, has survived, has a place to live, and people that will offer support, and help her to no longer be a victim.

The new occupant of Joe’s room is within walking distance of seven churches. These churches share a common liturgical calendar. Their members, on the way to Easter, are moving through Lent, a penitential period in which the church’s soul is open for inspection. Members seek to discover if the faith they profess is in synch with the lives they are living. Does the church’s work and mission in the community jell with the life of Jesus, the template for Christian behavior? Is discipleship faithful and authentic?

In the 1980s I went to Central America on a number of occasions. I wanted to get a fix on how my country was involved militarily with repressive governments that were killing their own people. War was turning vast numbers of people into refugees and driving them north, across the border and into the very country supporting the oppression and killing. If you want to know why we have so many Latino immigrants now labeled “illegal,” just review that history of our illegal war against the people of Central America.

Embedded in my mind is a visit I paid to a church in the city of San Salvador. It was crammed full of people uprooted by war from their rural homes, and forced to flee to this church for refuge and food. People were sleeping on the floor and in hammocks. The area around the altar, space usually reserved for priests and acolytes, a holy place for the mass, was fully occupied with weary people. I talked with a woman, her feet caked with mud, filthy from having fled by foot from U.S. supported government troops that had destroyed her home and killed her husband.

Behind an altar full of clothes, diapers, food, and people’s personal possessions, was a huge crucifix—a stark Jesus hanging on the Cross. The sanctuary was filthy, no smell of incense, or perfumed parishioners, yet to me it smelled like discipleship.

That experience, still fresh in my mind, surfaces the subject of discipleship. Does the body hanging on the cross, and the people there beneath it, have a claim on me, and the church I have been attached to ever since a cross was etched on my forehead when I was baptized? Am I able to behold Jesus and the people, gathered at the foot of the Cross, wherever I might be, and still find hope in the midst of suffering and death?

Taking Jesus Down From The Cross

These trips helped me discover, firsthand, that a person could lose his or her life for preaching, teaching or living the liberating message of Jesus. Liberated people were a threat to the political and economic powers-that-be, and the church leadership that profited by the status quo. As Jon Sobrino, the Jesuit priest and theologian from El Salvador put it: “We have learned that the world’s poor are practically of no consequence to anyone—not to the people who live in abundance nor to the people who have any kind of power.”

That kind of message caused Archbishop Oscar Romero, priests, teachers, labor leaders, and others, to be killed by the powers-that-be. I visited the University of Central America and talked with professors there prior to the brutal assassination by members of the military of six of those Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter. Jon Sobrino, traveling abroad at that time, escaped death.

He did not, however, escape admonishment from Rome, with repercussions in his own diocese. He was forbidden to teach theology or lecture in the archdiocese, nor at the very university where the assassinations had taken place. His books and writings were banned there. Lesson learned? Both political and church power can be formidable adversaries.

You will know why I am an admirer of John Sobrino when I tell you the title of two of his books: Jesus the Liberator and The Principle of Mercy: Taking the Crucified People from the Cross.

Boiled down to its essential basics, Jesus arrived on the scene with a liberating message about justice and mercy. He embodied, in his own life, a way for people to emulate an ethic of resistance against the powers that bind us—the powerful systems that trap people and keep them poor and immobilized. It required seeing mercy and justice as mutually inclusive. The church chastised Sobrino precisely because he emphasized the humanity of Jesus, and the political, economic and social dimensions of the message. No wonder he, and so many others were a threat.

In practical terms, the work of the church is quite simply to take “crucified people” off whatever crosses they are nailed to. That’s the liberation Jesus came to pronounce as the chief attribute of a radical and nonviolent way to live—the antithesis of imperial power run amok in its own violence and greed. He declared special honor in the Beatitudes to all who are merciful. The merciful are those who reach out to people who are being hung out to dry, forced to twist and turn in the economic, political or personal winds that threaten to cripple and destroy them. The church is called to handle bodies, the wounded people in need of healing. Handling bodies can be bloody and nasty, even frightening, but someone has to do it, and for Christians that someone is the church.

The jury is still out on the new Pope. But I sure do like what he said recently in an Apostolic Exhortation aimed at church leadership and members. “I prefer a church that is bruised, hurting and dirty,” he said, “because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church that is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”

Taking crucified people off the cross, or keeping them from being nailed to one, is the task at hand. From my perspective, a crucified person is taken off the cross when a woman is taken out of a doghouse. Likewise, helping boys and men understand that it’s not necessary to beat a woman in order to be a man, actually helps keep women from being nailed to a cross.

Crucified people are taken from the cross when wounded veterans come home from war, and get what they need in order to heal. Likewise, working to keep our nation from going off to senseless wars actually keeps lots of people from being nailed to a cross.

If taking Jesus down from the cross in Palestine long ago means anything at all, it has to be connected to the perpetuation of crucifixion today, as well as eradicating that practice.

On The Disappearance Of Flight 370

The disappearance of Malaysian Airlines 370 has captured media attention and hooked people all over the world. And why not? It’s like reading a mystery novel or a television series where chapter by chapter, episode to episode, we get hooked into a drama that is driving itself toward an unknown conclusion.

In the case of the Boeing 777, the daily dribble of information that’s leaked, and culled from a variety of sources, then analyzed by people anointed as experts, only adds to the confusion. The flight, now referred to as Triple 7 is shrouded in what I call Triple C—culled conjecture and confusion. Folks who are looking for answers, as if this were an aeronautic Rubik Cube that sheer logic is capable of solving, intrigue me.

Perhaps we have time-traveled back to the 1950s when a large area in the North Atlantic Ocean was designated as the Bermuda Triangle. It was the area where a slew of planes and ships are said to have disappeared. No explanation, mind you, they just plain disappeared.

I think of those people who have just plain disappeared. Where are those 239 people who boarded that airplane in Kuala Lumpur, destination Beijing, China, and have vanished? The word vanish is said with a chill. It comes from the Latin word, evanescere—“die away.” Fear of flying, or while flying, is umbilically attached to fear of dying. 

Appearance and disappearance are dialectic companions. You know how it works. Here today, gone tomorrow. Easy come, easy go. Now you see it, now you don’t. Nothing lasts forever. And one of the more colorful images to describe the transition from here to there, is the phrase, riding off into the sunset. And right out of the Bible is the familiar: The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.

I met twice in El Salvador with the Mothers of the Disappeared (Desaparecidos), women whose children had vanished from sight. The tyrannical government saw them as dangerous—labor leaders, teachers, Christians, political and non-profit organizers. I saw albums chocked full of pictures of the desaparecidos. It was common knowledge that government Death Squads had dropped some of these folks from helicopters into the sea.

Disappearance has many faces. Joe and Judy have disappeared. Here one day, gone the next. A daughter and two friends have had their dogs die. A friend tells me he has survived personnel cuts at work, but fellow-workers have been laid off; their jobs have disappeared. A business here in town went bankrupt—just disappeared. Early in January a chemical spill into our water caused drinkable water for some 300,000 people to disappear. Bright minds and strong backs have disappeared from West Virginia, especially young peoples, because jobs are someplace else.

Over 6,700 American men and women have died in Iraq and Afghanistan; they’ve disappeared from families and communities all across the country. Add to that the more than 50,000 troops who have returned home wounded, many whose arms and legs have disappeared.

Time, like a hyperactive child, refuses to stand still. A photo freezes a moment, but an album of photos tells us the truth. Time marches on, and rapidly at that. What we are left with of course is a pretty basic question worthy of attention. What are we doing with the time allotted us, that is, before it runs away to play again another day, maybe without us.

Have I Wasted My Time?

Over the years, I have read almost all of Philip Roth’s novels. Now that he has closed up shop saying he will not write any more books, one can only wonder if he will keep his promise. Like an athlete who retires, but returns for just one more season, will Philip Roth squeeze out just one more book.

Last year I began to say to myself, “Lewis you have been writing these Notes From Under the Fig Tree for over thirty years. Don’t you think it’s time to close up shop? Since Judy’s death in September, bringing with it more alone time, that question has become even more intense. When is it time to hang up your cleats, or in this case, walk away from the fig tree you have been sitting beneath for so long?

I was intrigued by the recent New York Times interview with Philip Roth. In it he speaks about his decision to stop writing. Even though I play with the alphabet and the construction of bridges made with sentences and paragraphs, I have no pretense that I am Philip Roth. Twice I ran in a marathon with the great runner, Bill Rodgers, he finished way ahead of me, but we did run in the same race. In like manner, Roth may outdistance me, but we have been on the same journey as writers, scrambling words in an attempt to surface some truth, some beauty, some revelation worthy of surfacing.

Here’s Roth on his decision to stop writing: “When I decided to stop writing about five years ago I did, as you say, sit down to reread the 31 books I’d published between 1959 and 2010. I wanted to see whether I’d wasted my time. You never can be sure, you know.”

I have decided to imitate what Phillip Roth has done and, beginning in April, read all the Notes From Under the Fig Tree I have written over the past 30 years. I hope to get a fix, as did Roth, on whether I’d wasted my time. I am confident that this exercise will also help me figure out what I will be doing with whatever time I have left in my life.

By way of anticipation, after finishing this task, I hope to arrive at the place where Roth found himself when he had completed his reading. In the interview, he relies on the words from his boxing hero, Joe Louis. Roth writes: “So when he was asked upon his retirement about his long career, Joe sweetly summed it up in just 10 words. ‘I did the best I could with what I had.’” As Roth says, “You never can be sure, you know.”

Did I do the best I could have done with what I had? When I think about my life, and especially the past fifty years of ordination, it seems to me that the question posed has always been there. Sometimes it was right there in front of me as stark and confrontational as a thief in the night, while other times it was more like a piece of lint on my jacket, noticed but easily brushed away on an over-scheduled day. The question is still there, and not to be treated as lint.

Entry Filed under: A Fig Just Dropped 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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