Zooming In On Ideas Floating Around

November 4th, 2014  |   

“I have no idea where it came from, I think the idea was floating along the train and looking for someone, and my mind was vacant enough, so it decided to zoom in there.”         J.K. Rowling

I am intrigued by J.K. Rowling’s observation about how she got the idea for the Harry Potter books. She just plucked the story as it floated around the train on which she traveled. She is describing an experience and an understanding of mysticism that I’m drawn to, seek after, and feed upon.

I would simply add one more observation. If you don’t zoom in on stories and insights that float around you, they will wither and die, or fly away forgotten and go someplace else, a place where someone else will zoom in on and capture them.

Unlike Ms. Rowling, I have not been traveling on a train recently. Instead, I have been spending time with lots of people, some dying, while trying to keep up with apocalyptic-like events around the world.

So, I’ll zoom in on, and pluck a few spiritually embryonic stories and observations that have been floating around inside my vacant-enough mind.

Tossing a Football On The Way To A Funeral

“What the two dogs, both Belgian Malinois, did was stop a man who had managed to get over the fence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. at 7:15 p.m. Wednesday…Fans of Hurricane and Jordan quickly suggested Thursday that the doggy duo be awarded a presidential medal.”   Seattle Times

A friend I haven’t seen for a long time wonders if I have just plain disappeared. If I don’t get out and about soon, I might see my face on a sheet of paper, tacked up on a pole, like one of those lost dogs, gone-missing in the neighborhood. I am on my way to a funeral. It’s only a two-block walk from my house to the church.

Dressed in my black suit, priestly white collar around my neck, I’m carrying a blue funeral home bag. It’s heavy, but I think to myself, “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.” You, see, I’m taking a freshly cremated friend to the church for his burial service. For the past eleven weeks, I’d been visiting this man daily at the hospital just around the corner. And now, he’s gone, disappeared, reduced to ashes in an urn. 

Halfway to the church, a vehicle pulls up beside me. Through the window, a friend, whose wife died shortly after Judy, informs me that a close friend of his is now dying. It’s like a relay race where the baton is death, passed between runners headed toward a finish line .We talk about people’s disappearance as traffic rushes by. It’s a beautiful, blue-sky day but a cloud of grief has suddenly appeared over us.

Continuing my walk, one block from Church, I spot Robin and Joe, owners of the neighborhood fish market. They are taking a break from peddling fish and shrimp. They’re out in the parking lot tossing a football back and forth. I stop, grin at them, and put the funeral bag down. For just two or three minutes, I’m 18-years-old again, catching passes while Tom waits close by.

A number of touchdowns later, I’m off to church to celebrate the life of my friend in the blue bag. After the church service, I will place him in the garden columbarium, just a few spaces from my beloved Judy. And I say to myself, “May the souls of the departed rest in peace,” as the rest of us go on living.

I found no lost dog pictures on poles. There is, however, a dog in the news. A security dog is being called a “hero” for having attacked a mentally deranged man who jumped the White House fence. White House fence-jumpers aren’t “terrorists” but a tribe of homeless, mentally ill, often military veterans. Our lust for heroes has quite literally “gone to the dogs.”

A thought: Perhaps inside the scrambled brain of White House fence-jumpers is the hope that the President will protect them from the Dogs of War and Homelessness Hell. Perhaps they are acting-out the hopes and fears of us Non-Fence-Jumpers.

Planet Earth, Our Island Home

 “Theater of War: This term denotes properly such a portion of the space over which war prevails as has its boundaries protected, and thus possesses a kind of independence.”   On War:  Carl von Clausewitz

It is interesting to note that what Clausewitz called a “Theater of War” is precisely that place where lines are drawn, barriers are constructed, walls are erected, and boundaries guarded and defended. An “us-versus-them” mentality emerges. This is obvious when we hear loud voices rant and rage about Latino immigrants crossing the Mexican border, ISIS terrorists coming to behead us, and Ebola creeping into our health care system.

There is little doubt that fear lies at the heart of the hysteria that grips Americans whenever we feel that our turf is threatened. We certainly understand that all of us live in a globalized economy, share ecological destinies over matters pertaining to land, air and water, and see outer space as an enveloping atmosphere for linking people through worldwide communication and travel. But such insight has its limitations, and we discover those limitations when fear rears its ugly head.

Deportation, containment, quarantines, and segregation are quick and easy remedies utilized when human beings feel their health and welfare and way of life is threatened.

I feel compelled to point out the racial component to so many of these fears. When people of color crowd what is perceived as white people’s space, xenophobic behavior emerges. Racism, often times unbeknownst or denied, surfaces as a contagion that connects a person’s dark hued skin with dirt, disease, dangerous behavior, and subversively threatening politics.

The chatter is out there; you’ve heard it. The horde of immigrants coming across our border from Mexico and Central America are entering illegally, degrading our way of life. They carry drugs, are potential terrorists, and even come here pregnant with babies that will be born here as U.S. citizens to be trained as terrorists. Keep them out; send them back when they’re here. We must build a wall, stretch barbed wire, and police the border with helicopters and drones and armed militia.

Yak, yak, yak. ISIS, Middle Eastern terrorists, are coming to bomb us, gas us, behead us, and force their Muslim beliefs and Sharia Law on us. If we thought Al Qaeda was bad, and the Taliban a terrible threat, ISIS, or is it ISIL, whomever they are, wherever they are, is even worse. We must kill them before they kill us; bomb them before they attack our homeland.

Yada, yada, yada.  And if the horde of immigrants and ISIS terrorists weren’t enough to do us in, now we have Ebola to deal with. West Africa, with close to 5,000 people dead, is one thing, but it’s on its way here. My God, an American has already died! We must ban all flights into the United States from West African countries where Ebola is present. Quarantine people, like that nurse in Maine who touched Ebola patients in West Africa. And did you hear that ISIS might use Ebola as a weapon?

We were able to see the earth as a “Blue Marble,” after the first full-view space photo of our planet was snapped in 1972. Subsequently, conversation about globalization should have convinced everyone that all of us are connected. Isolation is impossible on a globe. Even before then, John Donne’s “No man is an island,” on what The Episcopal Prayer Book calls “this planet earth, our island home,” has been hovering over us since the seventeenth as part of our psychic and spiritual DNA.

Interestingly enough, Donne wrote those words while he was critically ill with a mysterious malady, thought-to-be typhoid fever.

An Outstretched Hand

“Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise…The one way of making people hang together is to give ‘em a spell of the plague… No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all.     The Plague:  Albert Camus

Just before bedtime, I like to close out the day in my bedroom reading and watching a bit of television news. I can count on hearing a train whistle from the tracks across the Kanawha River. It’s one of those old-fashioned sounds still appreciated by a man like me. trying to make sense out of the news flashing furiously from my television set, hyperventilated “Breaking News.”

Since I can’t board the train, it carries coal, and offers no place to lay my head even if I were to hitch a ride on it, I have to settle for a mythical ride on a helicopter that has flown into my bedroom.  

Thanks to CNN, I am, flying above an ambulance, with its red lights blinking. The passenger is the nurse being transported from Frederick to the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Because she touched a Nigerian man, who later died from Ebola, she is wrapped in a space-suit-like outfit, attended to by people in space-suit-like garments. Skin will not touch skin. Human hands cannot touch her.

Frederick, as I knew it years ago, comes to mind as I watch the ambulance. When I was in seminary, I spent a portion of a summer there, not far from where this nurse landed in her journey from Texas. I was an intern in training at All Saint’s Episcopal Church. One of my jobs was to work with students in a summer vacation Bible school.

One day I asked my group of teenagers to paint a picture of a difficult Frederick scene, a trying situation familiar to them. One of the girls painted a simple stick-figure person, alone inside a well-defined box. When asked to describe the scene, she said it was a girlfriend who had been caught drunk, having sex with a boy. The girl’s family had isolated her, and her closest friend’s parents had forbidden them to contact her. She was alone, shunned, out of touch. The picture, I felt, was an apt portrayal of Hell—that awful place beyond human touch.

The next day I asked the class to bring good news, a solution, to the situations they had painted the day before. The girl, who had drawn the stick-finger encapsulated girl, simply drew the scene again, but this time had someone’s arm reaching inside the box. The hand on the intruding arm was touching the girl, taking her hand and drawing her out of her isolation, redeemed by a hand.

People talk about the hand of God but, quite frankly, all I ever see of God is flesh and blood. It’s skin and bones, arms and legs, hands and faces that save human beings from isolation.

A Warm And Tender Hand

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who instead of giving advice, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.”           Henri Nouwen

Nurses and doctors and health care providers are meant to touch people. There are times when I think it is an almost-lost art. In the hospital I see plenty of hands touching computers, gloved hands, and hearts listened to through hospital gowns. I love it when the physical therapists enter the scene, taking hold of limbs, manipulating body parts, and applying body to bone and skin to skin.

I recently read and appreciated a comment from a doctor at Stanford Hospital. In response to the possibility of a vision of a time when robots might replace people in a hospital setting, this doctor offered a wise comment. “If you have all these senses — vision, hearing, taste, touch and smell,” she said, “and someone took them away from you one by one, which is the last you would give up? Almost everyone says vision, but for me, it would be touch.”     

Back to my helicopter ride, the train has passed through the valley, it’s close to midnight, and I have had my fill of watching, from above, that ambulance as it snakes its way from Frederick to Bethesda on U.S. Interstate 270. I know I’ll have to bail out of this helicopter because it’s late and I need my sleep in the bed next to my chair, the one with a voracious appetite, intent on swallowing me.

Alone in bed, Judy no longer beside me, I hear a helicopter overhead. This one’s for real. It’s not on my television set. I can hear it. It’s delivering someone to the hospital roof just down the street. I think of that nurse and her destination—Bethesda.

Bethesda—the Hebrew word is a double entendre. It means “house of mercy” or ironically it could mean “house of disgrace and shame.” The pool at Bethesda, now located in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem, is that special place in the Bible where invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed—were healed. Since these folks, like lepers, were looked upon as shameful, it is a beautiful moment when Jesus is there, present with them as they are healed.

So I pull my blanket up to cover my neck, turn out my bedside light, and dive into my pillow in search of sleep. Tomorrow will be another day for me, for train engineers, and for helicopter pilots. And, lest I forget them, the Ebola patients and the people who treat them. We must be rested if we hope to make the most of a new day.

Is Ebola A Gift From God?

“I feel profoundly blessed to be alive, and in the same breath aware of the global inequities that allowed me to be flown to an American hospital when so many Liberians die alone with minimal care.”   Ashoka Mupko:  NBC Cameraman

“I was brought down to a place I needed to be.” Those are the words I heard a man say to me not long ago. I listened to him as if I were his priest hearing confession, even though he does not go to church, nor is he asking for absolution. He is about to tell me something important about how his life has taken a turn upward, after he plummeted down into a dreadful place in his life. One hell of a place. I could call it a resurrection story, this side of the grave. I think I will. 

I have never believed that God sends us dreadful conditions, hellish situations, in order to teach us lessons. You know, like a bit of misery sent your way so that you can learn something worthwhile. A package that explodes when opened. Here’s some cancer for you, or a dose of lava to consume your home, or a flood to claim your family, or a war to teach you lessons after it claims your legs, all from a God who, with your best interests at heart, dishes out pain and suffering.

That said, the conversation with this man validates an important experiential truth. Waist deep in Big Muddy, sinking rapidly, something deeply positive often materializes. Not always, but sometimes, and it is gracious when it does occur. He can even give thanks for that muddy, quicksand-like place that threatened to swallow him.

Ebola is no gift from God. Disease never is, despite some warped messages delivered by manipulative, guilt-based religion. Looking for authentic religious conviction, I think of Father Damien who went to the Hawaiian island of Moloka’i to care for the needs of lepers who were there under government-sanctioned quarantine. After 16 years on the island, he eventually died from the disease.

Father Damien lived in what was seen as a shameful place, an island for the shunned, one of those places where people were in need of his merciful care. Let it be said that he died from leprosy, but that he lived a life that was born out of his empathy.

Ashoka Mupko is the freelance NBC who contracted Ebola in Liberia. Treated back home, he’s now disease-free. He says that having been infected, he now has empathy for the people who don’t have adequate medical care and who suffer because of global inequities that divide the rich from the poor.

Our nation has traveled to West Africa for slaves, oil, and rubber. Poverty there, like Ebola, is epidemic. Disease grows in poverty. Liberia, for example, has only 51 doctors to serve more than 4 million people. It’s time now to return, as we have begun to do, with major financial and medical help.

Let’s just say it’s because we live on the “Blue Marble.”

The Source Of One’s Substance 

“Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet, and one of the reasons Darwin so shocked his time – and still bothers ours – is that he showed this bone-crushing, blood-drinking drama in all of its elementality and necessity: Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening.  To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises it’s head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.”   Escape From Evil:  Ernest Becker

Watching a woman breast-feed a baby is a visually obvious reminder that all of us, from birth to death, feed off of other living organisms. We sup not only from the plants and animals of the earth, but, also, from the flesh and blood of human beings, who feed us physically, emotionally and spiritually. We take sustenance from one another, those close to us and those at arms-length, those present and those absent, the living and the dead. As Becker puts it, “Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms.”

A list of all the people who have fed me during my lifetime would include a father who brought home a paycheck to my mother, who then transubstantiated it into a roast and potatoes to grace our table while human flesh was being slaughtered in Europe and Asia in a war I could never quite accept as the “Good War.”

This morning I put on underpants made in China and a shirt from Indonesia, then I ate blueberries harvested in Chile, and a slice of toast most likely grown and harvested in a Midwestern breadbasket community. Muscles, tendons, flesh and blood were spent on my behalf, in order that I might be clothed and fed. They have fingerprints on the clothes I wear and the food I eat.

If those workers who do their work on my behalf, whose faces I have never encountered, are in any way treated unjustly, you might well say that I have been provided for at their expense. In order that I might feel good about how I look, and satisfied after a good meal, there must be something I, and others like me, can do to address whatever pain, poverty, and injustice infects their lives.

I might add that I am not just talking about my buttocks, back and belly. I’ve fed from a trough full of teachers, coaches, friends, colleagues in ministry, and a sizeable number of writers. God knows, Judy was the cornucopia of plentiful gifts that fed and sustained my body and soul. And our not-to-be-forgotten children? They have fed me, and their mother, and still do feed me now that she is no longer here. I picture baby birds feeding Papa Bird.

The Thanksgiving season hymn refrain, “All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above” is my mantra. I wake up every morning and go to bed every night, thankful for the hands that have put clothes on my back and food in my belly. And, lest I forget, the price to be paid for the life given me is my acknowledgement that blood, sweat and tears are involved in keeping me clothed, fed and nurtured. How can I smile into the sun and declare life good, if I ignore such truth?   

Terrorism As Theater

“(Menachem) Begin declared an armed rebellion against the British Mandate. “We shall fight, every Jew in the homeland will fight,” he proclaimed. There will be no retreat. Freedom—or death.” Begin intuitively understood that terror is theater. Murder was not the object, even if it was the inevitable result. His idea was to create a number of showy attacks that would make headlines in London and New York and provoke repressive countermeasures”   Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at  Camp David:  Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright has written an informative book about the 1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. His observations about Menachem Begin, the prime minister of Israel, are enlightening, even though disturbing to people who can only see terrorism as limited to extremists, who happen to be Muslims.

I want to invite my readers to take seriously Wright’s observation that terrorism is theater. That’s right, theater—terrorism as theater. Such an effort might very well help reduce the misunderstanding and even hatred that continues to be directed toward Muslims, and anyone else we want to label as “terrorists.”  

Begin’s militant organization, Irgun, was considered a terrorist organization. Members of the organization were intent upon putting an end to the British Mandate, the colonial occupation of Palestine. The goal of driving the British out of Palestine was achieved by bombings, like the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the slaughter of thousands of Palestinians, and the destruction of about 400 Palestinian villages and towns. Torture was not uncommon.

These violent activities were theater, in the sense that they were staged terror attacks designed to get the British to strike back in a violent and repressive way. “Predictably,” says Wright, “British authorities would resort to mass internments, brutal interrogations, and exemplary executions; the Jews of Palestine would be increasingly alienated and aroused; and Britain’s standing in the world community would suffer, as would support for the Mandate in Britain itself.”

That’s how Israel would break free from British colonialism. It would take place when British response to Jewish terrorism became so extensively violent. Only then could empathy grow for Jews, and the end of British occupation take place with the establishment of Israel as a nation.

I do believe that ISIS, with its theatrically staged beheadings and violent military attacks, is a theater troupe that wants to anger and lure the United States into military action that will inevitably inspire newly recruited support for their political and geographical goals.

I fear that our nation, in the last moments of the Obama Administration, and with a new President and Congress, will fall prey to the brutality being perpetrated by ISIS forces. They have set the trap for us, and more military strikes and boots and planes and drones in the fray will only escalate the violence as we get drawn deeper and deeper into the conflict.

Beheadings and massive killing of Iraqis, even Americans, along with ISIS capturing more and more territory, have already precipitated hundreds of U.S. air strikes in Syria and Iraq. More killing will take place, be sure of that, until such time as what is unthinkable right now must take place if peace is to be archived in the region.

And what you ask is the unthinkably inevitable, hardly imaginable, not possible now thing of which I speak?  Déjà vu Camp David, a negotiated peace settlement will have to be struck with ISIS.

A Mystical Experience Would Be Wasted On Me 

“You can draw from perception the same way a mystic would draw from a vision…a mystical experience would be wasted on me. Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me.”       From A Paris Review Interview With Marilynne Robinson

 I began this extended edition of Notes From Under the Fig Tree with ideas floating around a train, like the one I heard from across the river, and the helicopter I took a ride on without even leaving my bedroom. I shall end it in the same fashion, with a down-to-earth thought about numinosity.

I’m frequently asked how I got “the call” to be a minister. Well, it didn’t happen over the phone. Like one of those political adds that says, “You will be a priest, Jim Lewis. I am God, and I authorize this message.”

Maybe I’m thought to have had a vision, an apparition, an extraterrestrial figure with a message “Jim Lewis,” says the translucent messenger, “forget about joining the family business. You were meant to preach, by God, and don’t forget to always take up an offering.”

I am reading Marilynne Robinson’s new book, “Lila,” the third volume of a trilogy that involves clergy characters and their families. I find her books challenging. Her Calvinist background coupled with a linguistic ability to create earthy characters that embody metaphysical attributes, is more than charming, it’s compelling and enlightening. 

In an interview with The Paris Review, she said, “You can draw from perception the same way a mystic would draw from a vision.” Then she went on to say that, “a mystical experience would be wasted on me. Ordinary things have always seemed numinous to me.”

Marilynne Robinson’s words say what I want to say whenever anyone comes to me for answers about an above-and-beyond reality that transcendent experience. I echo Ms. Robinson: “A mystical experience would be wasted on me.” It is quite enough for me to say that everyday encounters with the natural, political, historical, and personal world I live in are numinous, filled with enough transcendent physicality to satisfy my spiritual needs.

If I hunger for heavenly food, the earth right here beneath my feet offers me an abundant and succulent banquet. The only question I then must face is whether or not I am willing to taste and see how good it is—the bitter and the sweet.

Entry Filed under: A Fig Just Dropped Archives