Walking Into 2020

January 1st, 2020  |   

Walking into the first day of 2020, the New Year’s Eve frivolity has passed on like a shooting star. Human beings must now face the regularity of the predictable sun and moon, rising and setting, like our lives that also rise and set.

Yesterday began with news from a friend that his son had committed suicide. The message was followed by a long-distance phone call from the hospital bedside of a dear friend, his wife informing me that he seemed to be nearing the end of his life.

If I had wanted to drink all of this away, including the news last week that my longtime friend and colleague-priest, Barry Miller, had died, New Year’s Eve would have been the perfect occasion for a knockout drunk.

I chose not to imbibe but to use the final hours of 2019 reading in bed, while wrapped in the clean sheets I’d washed earlier in the day.

T.S. Eliot has served me well over the years. Introduced to his writings while a student in college, I go back to his words addictively for meditation and direction. As 2020 arrives, he does it again with a couple of lines from his poem, Little Gidding. So, I shall pass them on to you.

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. 

And next year’s words await another voice.

And to make an end is to make a beginning.”

I smile at the numbers attached to this new year, 20-20. In an eye examination, they indicate excellent eyesight. I intend to pray for that, the grace to see clearly at all times and in all places. Which of course would mean being able to see the interdependent connection between my personal life, piety, and politics . Not a bad thought in an election year.

A significant task ahead of me is to remember past blessings, so many of them. I shall start today by remembering the birth of daughter  Elizabeth on January 1, 1963. A revived memory is one of Judy in an Alexandria, Virginia hospital bed, smiling and holding tiny Beth in her arms. 

If you should catch sight of me this year, like walking around town, please know that you are looking at a very fortunate man, with a grateful heart. No other alternative is acceptable. 

 

Add comment January 1st, 2020

Abortion

August 4th, 2019  |   

He Holds A Bible While Yelling At Me

Why won’t you worship King Jesus?

The man is yelling in my face.

You’ve been leading people astray for 40 years!

Only a few feet away from me, he holds an open Bible.

Because you are serving another God—another God!

I am standing at the entrance of the Women’s Health Center of WV.

Serving another God!

On the front of my jacket is the word ESCORT.

You know who it is?

Behind me, women are being accompanied into the Center.

His name is LuciferSatan! The one who fell from heaven?

He waves his Bible in my face.

You want to follow the one who fell, cast out of heaven?

I stand there while he yells for three hours.

The noise, the anger is all about abortion—I have a long history with abortion, almost five decades worth of remembrances. I must not forget that history, particularly when someone is holding a Bible and yelling in my face, as I accompany women having safe, legal abortions.

A Life-Changing Meeting

Almost fifty years ago, when I was the pastor of Trinity Episcopal Church in Martinsburg, West Virginia, I flew to Charleston for a meeting at the First Presbyterian Church that changed my life.  A dozen clergy from around the State were invited to meet and deliberate around the subject of abortion.

That was the early 1970s. New York State had just legalized abortion. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that affirmed access to a safe and constitutionally legal abortion, was three years in the offing. The Rev. Howard Moody, the minister from Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, convened the meeting. Moody was the most unusual Baptist minister I had ever met. A WW II Marine, he served Judson Memorial Church for 35 years; developed avant-garde theater in the sanctuary; organized civil rights, anti-war and anti-censorship efforts; as well as having advocated for the decriminalization of prostitution and marijuana.

In the 1960s, thousands of women died from unsafe abortions, mostly poor women of color, as women of means did the procedure quietly with private physicians. Adoption was readily available as a solution to an “unwanted pregnancy.”

Moody’s organizing work around abortion was brave and prophetic. He, along with other clergy, founded the pre-Roe v. Wade Clergy Consultation Service, the New York based, national referral point for women. He was known as the “Harriet Tubman of the abortion rights movement.”

I left Charleston and returned home as one of the clergy members of the West Virginia branch of the Clergy Consultation Service. That meant that I would be identified as the clergy-person in the Eastern Panhandle willing to counsel with, and refer women to New York for abortions.

“It is hard to draw any other conclusion from the background and history of the present law,” wrote Moody, “than that it is directly calculated, whether conscious or unconscious, to be an excessive and self-righteous punishment, physically and psychologically, of women. This example of severe sanction against women may have been understandable when men were convinced that women were witches and demons, but in the latter part of the 20th century, it is a cruel travesty on equal justice and a primitive form of retribution unworthy of both our theological and democratic traditions.”

I had no inkling back then that four years later, in 1974, I would become the pastor of St. John’s Church, Charleston, just down the street from the the First Presbyterian Church where I had encountered Howard Moody. Roe v. Wade in place, St. John’s would become the next location with abortion on my agenda.

Fingerprints

A 62-year-old man, traveling from Singapore to the U.S., puzzled customs officials. A routine fingerprint scan showed that he had no fingerprints. Wondering if the aging process finally claims those identity points, I look at my own hands. Sure enough, the decrease in the elasticity of aging skin, older than the man from Singapore, has muted my fingerprints. Barely there, they are disappearing.

In 1958, my fingerprints were captured for record when I joined the Marine Corps. The thick ridges were clearly discernible and the furrows observably narrow. Over the years, after doing civil disobedience, on more than one occasion, my fingerprints were captured for record, left on file in Michigan, Virginia, Delaware, and West Virginia.

Fingerprints, universally define each and every one of us. They also chart a person’s identity. They trace my presence, everywhere I lay my hands. A Biblical aphorism says: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:21) It might well read: Where your fingerprints are, there your heart will be also. 

But fingerprints are more than the ink that captures and transfers them to files. I am speaking of the invisible, indelible fingerprints that have forged me into existence. Fashioned me like a potter shapes clay. Years and years of having had people touch me, physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. Fingerprints laid on me by family, friends, teachers, and colleagues, even enemies, along with so many who have touched me through books they have written, music, drama, and art they have created. Would you believe I have W.H. Auden’s, Mary Oliver’s, Beethoven’s, Van Gogh’s, Shakespeare’s Elizabeth Taylor’s and Abbot and Costello’s fingerprints on me?

I am loaded with fingerprints, having been touched by so many people, in so many ways. And when it comes time to evaluate my life, what better way is there to proceed than by looking at how many people bear my fingerprints. It’s all about touching one another, isn’t it?

Stephen’s Hands

I have had thoughts and dreams recently about my son, Stephen. Perhaps that’s because the first anniversary of his death is creeping up on the calendar. Stephen had large hands, like my father’s, and escorting women for abortions has brought a four-decade-old memory of those hands back to me. I was in the pulpit of Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, just across the street from St. John’s and the First Presbyterian Church, where I had met Howard Moody. There, as an invited guest preacher, Harry, a local anti-abortion advocate was in the congregation. Because planning for the creation of the Women’s Health Center took place in an office at St. John’s, he had gone to the local newspaper with the story that he would pull me from the pulpit if I showed up. He called me a “known abortionist” because I had authorized the office space.

On Sunday morning, stepping into the pulpit, I was surprised to see Stephen in the front pew. As Harry moved down the aisle toward me, Stephen got up from his seat and also moved toward me.  Before I could even begin my sermon, ironically on the subject of ecumenical unity, Harry had his hands on me. What I remember most were Stephens’s hands, a restraining hand on Harry, a protective hand on me.

A father would know that he leaves fingerprints on his children. But children also leave prints on their parents. On that tense day, in a parish pulpit, Stephen had laid hands on me.

An Old-Fashioned Adoption

Judy’s birthday rolls around in two days. On August 7th she would have been 83. Her fingerprints are all over me, over 60 years worth of permanent, indelible fingerprints. Both of us supportive of women’s reproductive rights, I recall our lives together in the 1960s when Roe v. Wade was waiting in the wings. When choices for pregnant women were limited, and adoption was uniformly normative.

I can still call to mind Judy and I driving up the highway, from Martinsburg toward Hagerstown, crossing the Mason-Dixon Line, the marker for the northern limit of slave-owning states. Our destination was a rural city in Pennsylvania. Inside the local hospital, we waited in the lobby until a young woman, dressed in a hospital gown, exited an elevator. She carried a newborn baby.

She was required, either by hospital procedure or state law, to hand the baby over to someone authorized to receive the child. As the pastor of Trinity Episcopal Church, I had arranged for this woman to live in a friend’s home in Pennsylvania during the course of her pregnancy.

Approaching us, with a nurse accompanying her, she handed the baby over to Judy. I do not remember what, if any, words were exchanged, just the memory of a woman’s hands releasing a baby, and another woman’s hands, Judy’s, taking the newborn infant.

Back on the highway headed south, we went to a parishioner’s home, just outside of Martinsburg. It was there, with a lawyer from the church, who had done all the legal work, that Judy handed the baby over into the hands of the adoptive family.

Think of it, all those hands in motion, fingerprints all over the place.

All of the planning and paper work for this adoption had taken place in my church office, the same office where, after 1970, I met with women who had chosen to use my help with the abortion services available in New York City, the Clergy Consultation Service.

When I was called in 1974 to become the pastor of St. John’s, Charleston, I took with me all that I had learned at the hands of women who faced the struggle for their reproductive rights. 

Abortion Shows Up In North Carolina

In 1987, I joined the staff of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina as the director of Christian Social Ministries. My desk was full of volatile issues, a war with Iraq that took me to Baghdad; trips to Central America; work with immigrants fleeing Central America for fieldwork and poultry plant jobs; and gender and sexual orientation struggles. Abortion was off my radar. Well, not exactly.

In July of 1994, Dr. John Britton, the brother of the wife of a bishop on the diocesan staff, was gunned down outside the Pensacola Ladies Center, where he performed abortions. A retired Air Force WWII, Korean and Vietnam veteran was also killed. He was serving as a volunteer escort for women entering the clinic. The shooter was a former Presbyterian minister who believed killing an abortion doctor was Biblically justified. Dr. Britton’s wife was also wounded.

Before he was murdered, Dr. Britton had been warned at least twice about death threats. Nevertheless, he went to the clinic once a week dressed in a bulletproof vest. “Being shot by a madman has always been a risk.” He believed women should be allowed to exercise their right to abortion. “I won’t be bluffed by fanatics.”

Dr. Britton’s brother, when interviewed, after his death, said: “If a woman needed help, he would help, that’s what he died for.”

Since living and dying are inevitably linked to one’s lifetime, I must be direct, in a simple manner, about what I live for, as a Christian, when it comes to the difficult matter of abortion. And, likewise, for all other matters as well, that call for my attention and commitment.

A Ministry Of Accompaniment

The man screaming at me for three hours outside the Women’s Health Center is convinced that I am a follower of Lucifer, a fallen angel. Despite his distorted image of me, perhaps he has a point. Hey, I’d settle for being a fallen angel, one that was hurled, through my mother’s womb, into a land East of Eden, a place named Baltimore. That place where I began my sojourn, moving from place to place, person to person, community to community, in my search for meaning, a purpose for my life. Call it a way of life.

Pascal’s aphorism has always appealed to me. “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” Those words are like a sweet, fresh breeze that sweeps into an overheated, polluted valley, cleansing me through and through.

So what’s that got to do with my decision to support women’s reproductive rights? Forget reason, even though I count my reasoning abilities as important. Baptized, as a baby, in a tiny Episcopal Church in the neighborhood that President Trump is presently besmirching, I was set on a long and winding path to discover over and over again the most basic truth about Jesus. It was a penetrating question asked of the Disciples, and all who are committed to the Christian way of Life.

“Do you have eyes, but fail to see? Do you have ears, but fail to hear?” (Mark 8:18)

Committed to living a life with eyes wide open and ears unplugged, I am required, even commanded to pay attention to people around me, wherever I happen to be. As a priest of the church, I have accompanied many women through their struggles for reproductive rights.

I choose to call it a ministry of accompaniment. And so I shall do my part, for that’s where my heart leads me. I am an escort.

Add comment August 4th, 2019

The 4th Of July–An Afterthought

July 4th, 2019  |   

Kudos For President Trump

At the risk of losing some of my readers, who can’t imagine me giving any bouquets to President Trump, I shall write what I shall write anyway. I have a penchant for taking risks, and these words have found me, so I am compelled to let them see the light of day.

I applaud the President for having lifted the veil that hangs over the Fourth of July celebrations. Of course I love the harmony that gathers momentum around hot dogs, watermelon, flag decorated cakes, ice cream, and fireworks. With no hesitation, I can be moved by one of Sousa’s Marches, and the skin tingling brass of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man is powerful. A reading from the writings of Walt Whitman or Frederick Douglass goeth down sweetly and satisfieth my thirsty soul. But there is more at stake than my soul. It is vital for all of us to see the full force of the militaristic power that drives our economy and, therefore, our nation into war. President Trump made that visible.

So we were forced to attention, because this Commander in Chief is a master of political hocus-pocus. He has all the elements of violence, all the instruments of war, up his sleeve. His political legerdemain is remarkable.

Alone this evening, with a slice of kielbasa, a salad, and a bowl of ice cream, I broke a vow I had made earlier, not to watch the President’s attention-getting fiasco in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I turned the damn thing on. And I saw the troops being used as fashionable props in a political arena, wrapped in military history. Spit-polished Marines from their Eighth and Eye Barracks, military brass, and the eye-catching aircraft, “flying high into the sky” became the advance campaign forerunners for our National Entertainer President’s reelection run in 2020.

One of the ironies present during the Trump presidency deserves our utmost attention. Fogged-in when it comes to informational transparency, we are left stumbling around in the land of lies. And yet, the Commander in Chief, on the Fourth of July, has filled the sky over Washington, and paraded the streets with the symbolic evidence of a traditional imperial killing-force the likes of which the world has never seen. What Eisenhower called “the military industrial complex” is even more gargantuan now, more prone to war as a military industrial, politically infused, entertainment-saturated complex.

Three Jeers For The Red White And Blue Bikini?

Since March 27th, American flags have had front-and-center attention. Three cheers for the Red, White, and Blue, from Memorial Day to D-Day to Flag Day, and now, Independence Day.

In this, the 83rd year of my life, the Fourth of July, 2019, I have given thought to my relationship with the American flag. I have, as a United State Marine, saluted it; faced it while our National Anthem is sung at the ballpark; seen athletes with it sewed on their uniforms; watched it folded properly and handed to a veteran’s family at a graveside; observed it worn as a lapel pin; seen it tattooed on various body parts; driven behind flag-bearing license plates and bumper stickers tagged with it; and seen Old Glory flown on flag poles and porches everywhere I have lived.

And then there are the legions of advertisements that sport a flag. Flags sell merchandise. How’s this for a moneymaking piece of beachwear? An American Flag Bikini advertised as “a great way to show your American pride, especially during Fourth of July pool parties…conforms to your figure…outfitted with elastic for a snug fit”

Novelist Tom Wolfe has written: “That flag is a symbol we attach our emotions to, but it isn’t the emotion itself and it isn’t the thing we really care about. Sometimes we don’t even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols.” I won’t attempt to analyze Wolfe’s observation when it comes to the subject of a bikini. But I will say that covering our flag with lies or hiding it behind  ignorance will inevitably result in a patriotism that sings the National Anthem off key.

From Smedley Butler To Smedley Butler, Then Home Again

I had to be extra careful. Vomit was everywhere, making the ship’s passageways and ladders, from the Main Deck to the Mess Deck, literally, stinking slippery.

That was the situation in late January 1960 as I watched the San Diego harbor drift out of sight. Our troopship was carrying a reinforced Marine battalion on a long trip across the Pacific Ocean. We were the proud Fifth Marines, an infantry unit prepared to do battle in Southeast Asia, if and when situations called for it.

At that time, there were only a reported 900 American troops in Vietnam. Our mission was to be battle-ready to fight in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

California lights extinguished, the sea turned angry, and troop stomachs followed suit. For a goodly number of Marines, food that had left San Diego in Marine stomachs was deposited on board and overboard. Yes indeed, we were proud but sick, even sad.

I designate that day as one of the saddest days of my life. Judy was in Batavia, New York, living with her parents, and our son Stephen, born 10 days before I left San Diego.

On board that ship, sailing into the night, bound for our base in northern Okinawa, was another Marine who had left his wife, Kathy, back home, pregnant and ready to give birth to their first child. Sam and Kathy, Judy and I, had been through basic training in Quantico Virginia, and then lived next door to one another for a year in California while preparing for our departure overseas.

Of note is the fact that we had begun our training at camp Butler in Quantico, named after General Smedley D. Butler, and arrived at Camp Smedley D. Butler, a collection of camp facilities and satellite installations scattered throughout Okinawa. Butler was a 34 year Marine veteran who earned two Congressional Medals of Honor while fighting in the Spanish-American War, WW I, and numerous battles in Central America. He was lauded as an American hero, and then shunned when he spoke out about war.

“I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

Two weeks ago I received word that Kathy had died. I called Sam to gather the details of her difficult death and to share our common sorrow. St. Paul writes, “Nothing can separate us from the love of God.” I could well say the same for this friendship that was sealed in our early years when we moved from Smedley Butler to Smedley Butler, and back home again.   

Hiding From “Gooks” In His Bathtub

Thinking about Sam, the “Leatherneck” Marine, who went back to fight in Vietnam, brings to mind an old story that involves a late night telephone call that involved a young Vietnam veteran. It sticks in my mind like a bloodstain on a garment. In fact it involved blood and a garment.

Leo (a substitute for his real name) came to my office, full of torturous memories, exacerbated by drug addiction he’d acquired from his tour of duty in Vietnam. His wife accompanied him. She was the one on the phone, a call close to midnight that catapulted me out of bed, into the car, and down the road to their mobile home. I can still remember the bright moon that illuminated the Martinsburg hillside.

The first sight of blood was on the hallway floor. It marked a trail right into the bathroom. Leo was standing in the tub staring at me. His right arm was stitched with cuts, a whole string of self-inflicted bloody cuts from a razor blade that lay on the tiled floor.

Joining him in the tub, I held both arms, looked into his glazed eyes and said, “Leo, it’s me, Jim.” But I was no longer Jim because he screamed repeatedly, “You gook, you gook, you gook…” the derogatory name given the Vietnamese enemies.

What happened then took place outside the tub. Wrestling Leo to the hallway floor, I held him down until his wife called Judy, who then called a doctor in the parish. In what seemed like an interminable stretch of time, a rescue squad guy showed up. Leo, strapped to a carrier, then loaded into a van, his wife and I tailed the vehicle as it traveled the road to the VA Hospital, no more than 15 minutes down the road.

Arriving in the emergency room, a doctor looked down at Leo, still strapped to the carrier. At that point, I was no longer the gook. The Asian-American doctor became the enemy. As if caught in a jungle firefight, Leo exploded, firing loud and steady rounds of gook-scream at the white-jacketed doctor.

Back home, I shed my mustard-colored, blood soaked jacket. Getting into bed, Judy asked me if I was okay. I lied. A simple “I’m okay” was all I could give her. In the morning, she discovered the truth when she saw my jacket on the kitchen floor.

Give Me A Candidate I Can Vote For

The morning after the second Democratic Party debate, on my walk downtown, a friend, once a Republican, now a Democrat, pulled his car over to the curb and it wasn’t long before he asked me, “When are you Democrats going to give me a candidate I can vote for?”

Well, to begin with, as he is no longer a Republican, I am no longer a Democrat, and quite frankly, picking a candidate right now is like picking the winner of a horse race when the field of horses is just out of the starting gate. Furthermore, I have seen more than one jump-to-lead horse fizzle out, then cross the distant finish line far behind the winner. Politicians imitate race horses, so as of now, quite frankly, I am disinterested.

Don’t get me wrong; I am paying attention. I keep up with the swarm of candidates, and the political issues, but have weaned myself from what had become excessive cable TV news coverage. Anyone who knows me, or has followed my writing over the years, is aware that I keep my eyes on politics, connecting what goes on in Sunday worship with the political and social turmoil outside the church doors. Politics and piety, faith and activism, liturgy and life, a church altar and a voting booth are inextricably linked. 

Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass: A Theater Piece for Singers, Dancers, and Players” is one of my favorite scores. Performed for the opening of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1971, it spoke in a controversial way that linked protest and praise amidst the political turmoil that raged at that time. The Vietnam War, AIDS, drugs, and the shadow of a possible impending impeachment trial of a fiercely unhinged president in the White House made Bernstein’s Mass an important piece of theater for that moment. It could very well be that moment again.

“Half of the people are stoned/And the other half are waiting for the next election.” Those lines, written by Paul Simon for Bernstein’s “Mass,” have a contemporary feel to them. I agree with Kevin McCabe, who writes about Christian theology and ethics, when he says “The piece ends on a note of hope in the face of despair. It is the kind of new life that is only possible after the breaking of one’s heart and the dismantling of worldly idols.”

I can only ask: How many stoned hearts have to be broken, body’s as well, and how much more dismantling of this capitalist system is required before our nation gets to a rock-bottom point where new growth can take place? 

A Final Thought Before I Go To Bed

On my third floor, finishing this piece, I have heard the fireworks from the downtown levee on the Kanawha River. The day after the Fourth of July has already begun. It’s past my bedtime, and I must crawl into bed. But not before I offer one closing thought, stark but hopeful.

The Fourth of July extravaganza, I do believe, has strengthened President Trump’s bid for another term in the White House. That’s because he has linked military strength, war, and patriotism in a romantic, exuberant, celebratory way. The mislabeled “liberal media” will be hard-pressed to address what took place yesterday. And in answer to my car-stopping friend’s search for someone to vote for, I can only reply: “You will get one when the Democratic Party, or a third party no longer hesitant to claim the word Socialist, is willing to recognize, speak out, and organize around the message that war is the underlying issue that affects everything.

 

Add comment July 4th, 2019

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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.
Micah 4:3 - 4