Assurances and Hopes

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats “ The Second Coming”

What is faith? Is it an unshakable conviction? Is it the bottom line for what we believe? Is faith a certainty? Is it sometimes  fragile trust in God?  Is it a hope that battles with doubt?

Certainty

“Faith of our Fathers . . . We will be true to thee till death.”

“T’is so sweet to trust in Jesus, Just to take him at his word . . . Just to know, Thus saith the Lord.”

“Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.”

These lines of favorite old Protestant hymns reminded me that nothing has been more sure than my faith in God. In a life that might be upset, faith was a guarantee that I  was safe and confident. My parents and grandparents passed down a faith that could not be shaken.

In Sunday School I was taught that faith was the opposite of doubt.  Cautionary tales of doubting were important: Peter walking on the water till his confidence failed, and he sank;  Zechariah struck dumb by his lack of faith that his wife would become pregnant with John the Baptist; “Doubting Thomas” challenging the resurrection until he touched the nail prints in the hands of Jesus.

Faith was an available commodity we could pass on, but should not lose. We needed to be steadfast: “We will be true to thee till death.”  Our unsaved friends also treated faith as a commodity. “I wish I had your faith,” some said to me, as if I had a stash of it in my wallet.  It existed as a scarce, but reliable resource.

Jesus reinforced this concept of faith by scolding his disciples for their lack of faith, especially in the Gospel of Matthew (6:30, 8:26, 14:31; 16:8;17:20; 21:21). Yet Mark shows the paradox of having faith, yet needing faith, in the healing of the boy possessed by demons. When Jesus tells the father of the possessed boy, “All things can be done for the one who believes,” the father exclaims, “I believe; help my unbelief! (Mark 8:24).”  Jesus proceeded to heal the son despite the father’s admission of doubt.

Matthew’s concept that faith defied doubt and physical evidence found its way into the dictionary definition of faith:

  1. “unquestioning belief that does not require proof or evidence” (Webster’s New World College Dictionary)

Constancy in faith is the understanding that does not require “proof or evidence.” True faith dismissed the appearance of things. Jesus healed contrary to the evidence of hopeless infirmity. Jesus ignored the political predicament of his people. He also counseled against fortifying our material security with wealth in Matthew (6:19-21).  The only reality was the coming of an invisible kingdom, “not of this world.”

In my family our middle class poverty was compensated by our future heavenly wealth. A lack of regard for money was considered a sign of faith.   My mother’s favorite hymn was:

This world is not my home

I’m just a-passing through

My treasures are laid up

Somewhere beyond the blue

It can be liberating to cast off materialistic goals, but in our family it minimized our savings or investment for retirement.  We imagined spiritual wealth, and so believed we were never poor, even though a day never went by when my Dad did not say, “We can’t afford . . . .”

Because of our hope for heaven, we did not see social and political events as consequential. For example, we saw the Civil Rights movement in the 1960’s as a compromise of faith in our future heavenly liberation. Faith meant that the material world did not matter as much as the spiritual world.

Faith devoted to permanent beliefs, independent of experience, could be described as “dogmatic” from the Latin word meaning “an opinion which one believes.” Experience does not threaten or revise dogmatic beliefs.

In my early experience, faith was certainty, and certainty became a disregard for material reality, a detachment from facts and evidence. Peter walking on water was total faith; his sinking in the waves was a loss of faith.  Enduring faith dismissed the material circumstances of life.

Uncertainty

After a mid-life battle with doubt, I looked back at what the Christian Bible said about faith. I found a new definition in the Epistle to the Hebrews, attributed to a contemporary of the Apostle Paul:

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.  (Hebrews 11:1)

This version of faith seemed more paradoxical, less certain than what I had been taught.

“Convictions” and “assurance” were something we chose to believe. Not banked commodities, but high-stakes beliefs.  As defined in Hebrews, faith seemed less a legacy or acquisition, but a gift. This faith is “organic,” because experience could revise our beliefs, allowing us to grow in understanding, as well as faith.

The biblical epistles are likely to show faith as a gift, as in the letter to the Ephesians “By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (2:8). Or when enumerating the gifts of the Spirit, Paul says, “To one is given the utterance of wisdom . . , to another faith by the same Spirit (I Corinthians 12:9).

Faith was not about guarantees, but about hopes. Faith was not about a substitute reality, but about a conviction we could not empirically prove.  Therefore, faith was not certain, not a foregone conclusion,  but an “organic” faith that could change with experience. We had a faith that could struggle with doubt.

I think of the Yeats poem, quoted above, as prophetic for this time and place. My alternatives for faith relate to the famous lines from “The Second Coming:”

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity

 

Sometimes “passionate intensity” can be dangerous.  With passionate intensity, Crusaders killed Muslims; Muslims killed Crusaders.  With passionate intensity the Spanish Inquisition killed both.  With passionate intensity Protestants killed Catholics in the war Yeats wrote about.

There’s something about the tension between faith and doubt that makes us humble. We are not so vindictive, when we realize we are blessed with a gift of faith, not a guarantee.  It may be all right to have convictions, not certainties.  We can hope to listen and hope we can be heard.

Little Shop of Horrors

Is the sixty-three year old tale The Little Shop of Horrors a tragedy, a comedy, tragi-comedy, a farce? Yes!

But there are at least three versions of the story– a 1960 movie, 1982 musical, a 1986 revised movie musical with two endings.

All three versions have the same principal actors, the innocent, bumbling Seymour Krelborn; the sweet, victimized girl he works with, Audrey;  their irritable, materialistic boss, Mr. Mushnik; and the voracious exotic plant that consumes them all–Audrey II.

 In the ’60 original, Audrey Jr. hypnotizes Seymour into doing his bidding  . . . . The cops discover that the plant has been eating people and they chase Seymour through the streets of Skid Row. He comes back to Mushnick’s shop and tries to kill Audrey Jr. once and for all, but fails, and is himself eaten. https://widescreenworld.blogspot.com/2015/10/little-shop-of-horrors-1960-vs-1986-and.html

In the original stage musical of 1982, not only does Audrey II also kill Seymour, Audrey and Mushnick, it spreads all over the country, enticing other people the same way it enticed Seymour with promises of fame and fortune. (https://widescreenworld.blogspot.com/2015/10/little-shop-of-horrors-1960-vs-1986-and.html). The final number “Don’t Feed the Plants” suggests a world wide takeover is in progress. Yet the music tends to carry the story back toward comedy.

 

 

 

However, in the musical filmed in 1986, the grim ending of the previous versions was re-designed for the popular whim that Seymour and Audrey should fulfill their dreams and live happily ever after in suburbia. The director, Frank Oz, originally conceived the ending as gleefully hinting of plant takeover, and was bitterly disappointed with the ultimate product.

What about the latest rendition, just finishing a run in the Cincinnati suburb of Finneytown? This version offers more of the sinister take-over of Audrey, but her offspring appear as the familiar main characters sporting the flowery coronas around their heads. Everyone seems delighted with the absurd invasion of Audrey’s descendants.

However, the absurdist excitement is almost overwhelmed by the soul-grabbing solos of the leads, Audrey (Anya Revelle), singing “Somewhere That’s Green”  and Seymour (Marcus Miller) singing “Suddenly Seymour,” who give the musical a romantic updraft. We are  pulling for these two down-and-outers so much that their ingestion by Audrey II feels too tragic to be redeemed by sunny little flower buds around their heads at the end.

Does the booming-voiced (Brennen Volz) monster Audrey II become a warning against materialism and the passion for fame? Do we hear a message amidst the merriment of Little Shop of Horrors?

The finale, which retains the warning “Don’t Feed the Plants,” retains its glee, but no dire warnings. It’s a horror musical with a thin filling of caution. Even the sadistic dentist (Brady Volz) returns looking less threatening.

We noticed exceptional stage managing of props and set, organized by Jason George, and exceptional drama enhanced by spotlights under the steady hand of Karah George.  Their under-appreciated skill behind the scenes make a grand musical so much grander.

So what is it- a tragedy,  comedy, farce,  some maniacal concoction of all three?  Every performance brings a different taste of the botanical marvel, and sometimes your mood determines what you see in Audrey II.

“Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.”― La Bruyere

 

Cardinals Alert!

@MozeliakJohn

Sign Jordan Montgomery! His market value is down, but his value is high. He was the best pitcher the Cardinals had last year, and you let him go. But you can bargain for him now and make up for that.

The Cardinals cannot survive on false hopes as they did last year. The average age of their starting rotation is 35. Each one was on the injured reserve list in 2023. Three had losing records.  You can’t depend on full performance from any of them.

If any of them fail, there is no insurance policy to salvage the season.

The Caribbean – Days 9-10

Cruising

Infinite horizon:  pastel pink

Sweeping gray waves,

sun popping up round, splitting

A spherical fission.

Brisk, warming breeze

     From bow to stern

                                                                                  Layering the sweeping tide

                                                                                Sliding aft-ward

Day Nine, the last day of cruising. Already we are gathering our luggage to set out by nine tonight. Ten days hurried like waves past our balcony.  The last three days slowed the pace by keeping us on board, the churning waves keeping us from Grand Cayman.  I regret missing the island,  because it was part of my reason for taking this particular cruise. But with the driving pace of days after our stop at the Panama Canal, it was a relief to spend three days relaxing and letting time expand, instead of gravitating from one event to the next.

Waking up with radiating sun and a delivered breakfast, choosing a movie, a lecture, an entertainer for the day, made it feel more like a vacation and less like an itinerary.  Enjoyed a cocktail hour before a leisurely, four-course dinner. Nothing like our life at home, even the life of retirement with fewer demands on our time.

Cruising was all I hoped it would be. Settled in a cabin for the duration.  Constant movement and at rest. New port waiting in the morning.  The athletic, singing trombone player. The synchrony of the Vivace violin duet.  The three-course, four-star dinner menu.  And the dawn breaking over our balcony.

Fort Lauderdale again.

 

 

 

Day 8- The Sloth Sanctuary

One of the best days so far, we spent at the Sloth Sanctuary in Limon, Costa Rica.

According to the website sponsored by the family of Judy Avey-Arroyo and the late Luis Arroyo, “The Sloth Sanctuary of Costa Rica is the original rescue center for injured, orphaned and abandoned sloths.”

The Arroyos originally used their  320-acre property as a bird reserve for tourists to visit. As a result of an earthquake that hit the island in 1991, the sanctuary was ruined.

In 1992 a neighbor brought them a baby sloth injured by an auto accident. As their website explains: “Although Judy and Luis sought assistance, not even zoos or wildlife rescue centers knew how to guide them in sloth care. So, they observed the wild sloths on their property, and used their common sense to raise this infant sloth.”

The property was declared an official sanctuary in 1997. Today the  sanctuary is the official home to two-toed and three-toed sloths, some to be released, but many requiring the special care of the sanctuary. See https://www.slothsanctuary.com/about-us .

Below, some sloths we met in rehab. Many of them are not self-sufficient to be released into the wild. For example, they must be taught to distinguish a few edible leaves from the many toxic leaves in the rain forest.  Below center, a blind sloth in permanent residence.

Some young rescued sloths are being prepared for release, if they are promising. Below some photos of “sloth kindergarten” during their morning outing. Some are too young for exercise, but others show great aptitude on the available climbing bars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Indoors they have a “Neo-natal” room for the youngest rescued sloths, who may need round-the-clock care, administered by co-founder Judy Avey-Arroyo.

Sloths are very inquisitive, but cannot be handled except by licensed care providers. They become attached to people like the daughter of Avey-Arroyo, who gave us a tour of the facilities.

Their reputation for laziness is not deserved, said our guide. They have a very slow digestive system, taking hours to digest one meal. So they rest.

 

Eating vegetables off a plate.

Pants on Fire

Speaker Mike Johnson insists he is not taking orders from Donald Trump, yet continues to rubber stamp the former President’s demand to shoot down any Democrat-initiated immigration legislation in advance of the election.

Can the Speaker point to one instance he has not been a mouthpiece for the former President? He has relentlessly agreed with him since the Election denial campaign of 2020. The evidence favors a House Speaker with his “pants on fire.”

The Speaker depends on the short memory of American voters. When no one was listening, he said,

“The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House,”  in a lengthy post on Facebook on Aug. 7, 2015, before he was elected to Congress and a day after the first Republican primary debate of the campaign cycle. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/us/politics/mike-johnson-donald-trump.html ]

Challenged in the comments page by someone defending Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson responded: “I am afraid he would break more things than he fixes. He is a hot head by nature, and that is a dangerous trait to have in a Commander in Chief.”

Somewhere in Mike Johnson’s evolution as a political animal, he became a henchman for the former President, became an Election Denier, and, complying with Trump’s expectations, now promises to block legislation to reinforce border security. Even his reluctant support could save lives and decrease illegal immigration in the short term. At least he could let the bill show its inadequacy until Trump was elected to a new administration. The danger is that it might succeed in alleviating the problem. How inconvenient that would be for Mr. Trump’s campaign!

Politicians have the prerogative to change their minds, but they probably should make a good story about why. Not political convenience. Not appeasement of power-brokers. Not compromising with a man who “lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House.” There’s no explaining how Rep. Mike Johnson became a born-again believer in Donald Trump.

And there’s no explanation of how a born-again believer could become a disciple of a man who “would break more things than he fixes.  . . . a hot head by nature . . . a dangerous trait to have in a Commander in Chief.”  Those were prophetic words about Donald Trump in 2015.   Not these words about Trump’s denial of the Election results of 2020:  “I take him at his word. I do believe he believes that.”  This is the same man Johnson said, “lacks a moral center.”

So how do we reconcile the Mike Johnson who warned us about Trump in 2015 with ““I’m all in for President Trump, I expect he’ll be our nominee, and he’s going to win it . . .” https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/14/politics/mike-johnson-donald-trump-endorsement-president/index.html.

I think someone’s pants are on fire.

 

 

 

 

Caribbean- Days 6 & 7

The great crossing though the Panama Locks transpired on Day 6. Below is a map of our approximate path through the new locks and the old.

First, we were on a cruise ship going through the first lock at Gatun Locks  (between #1 and #2 below)  then on life boats (aka “ferries”), water shuttles (from #3-#4 below ), buses (dotted road from #4-#9 in Gamboa)) and eventually ferries that took us through the olde Pedro Miguel and the Miraflores Locks (#14-15). 

Entering Port at Colon the Ruby Princess gave us our first acquaintance with the locking process early in the morning, sailing through the the newest installation at Gatun Lake. The lock walls, embedded in the side walls, slid across to block water from the front and back. The moving walls formed the container that would be pumped full of fresh water to raise the enclosed boat 85 feet above the bottom, which is higher than the ocean bottom. The fresh water avoids the ecological clash of merging one ocean’s sea water with the other.

 

Panama Canal - Wikipedia

The trip through the old locks was more adventurous, because we had another touring ferry on one side and a thirty-foot sailboat on the other. The sailboat was lashed to our starboard side, so we didn’t bounce against each other in transit.  So we inched into the Pedro Miguel Lock [#4), and the doors closed behind and in front of us. This time they closed on a hinge, as the early locks did (photograph below).

The entourage cleared the Pedro Miguel lock and spread out as they advanced on the Mirafloras lock (between 14 & 15).  Then back into formation for the second lock. No cubic foot of water was wasted to get four craft though the locks.

We circled Panama City, an impressive skyline with modern skyscrapers. It could be a skyline in Qatar or Dubai, except for the poverty in its shadow, which we got to witness on the bus ride home– one dilapidated building after another. 

City Skyline

The significant message of the day: that immigrants from the barrios of the U.S. and Canada came to Panama to build the canal for $1/ day, plus lodging. The initial locks were completed in 1914, but work continued a century later with the construction of the new locks, completed May 2016.

We bussed back to Colon in time for a late dinner– 8 p.m.

 

 

Bible Boy

Two characteristics explain most of my life: introversion and love of the Bible. Maybe they are related, since an introvert might become infatuated with Biblical stories and teachings, depending less on peer influence.  This took a turn in midlife, when peer opinions became more important and the teaching from the Bible more consequential than the Bible itself.

The Bible itself has controlled my self-image and guided my choices more than any person in my life. My father’s final word on every sermon and church we attended was “Is it biblical?” and I kind of agreed, although I didn’t always read the Bible the way he did. Some of my peers thought it was repetitive to read the same stories and messages every year, but to me the stories changed with every reading, and that was part of the magic of the Bible: it was an organic book that grew with you. There was no other book that grew on me that way.

Before I could read stories the Bible was real in Sunday School. My aunt taught little kids, and she used flannel graphs to illustrate the stories for the semi-literate. These were like artist easels covered with soft material, probably flannel, and with cut-out characters with flannel backing that would cling to the board, and allow the characters to take different positions on the board to tell the story.

When I could read, the same stories and excited my imagination. The Bible was like a series of stories with heroic characters and conflicts of faith. When you are in the K-5 range of reading, stories seemed real, and there was no difference between fiction and reality.

My father held that every page of the Bible was literally true, and when you started to question any part, say the story of Jonah, you were on a slippery slope that ended with apostasy.  So faith amounted to accepting the literal truth of the Bible. Remarkably, despite my bent toward literary study, I held that position with my father for most of my teenage years.

At some point I decided it didn’t matter what was real and what was figurative, because the message was the same and its application to your life was what mattered. Those who wanted to critic the Bible like any literary work did not ruffle my faith, because I  was intent on the message, whether it was the accepted interpretation or a changing sense of how the Bible spoke to me.

I am not sure when I took a more critical view of the Bible, but it could be in my first turn in graduate school. I was reading a lot of C. S. Lewis and how he saw mythology as the pre-figuring of the Bible, and I realized other literature was reflecting biblical themes. Literature became characterized as sacred and secular in my thinking, and I saw the Bible in the context of literature as a whole.

Sometime during my early teaching career I learned about genre study as a key to learning to write. When I actually taught genre study I was already teaching college. I was finally realizing that the Bible ws genre-driven, that it was never meant to be taught literally, but as a range of genres from myth to history to poetry to satire and the “good news” of the Gospels. This finally solved the problem of how to read the Bible, and the scriptures came alive to me again, as they had through the stages of my life.

 

Getting Closer

Let’s agree that the U.S. immigration policy is a mess, and if Congress had the will and the patience, they could do something about it.

Having said that, why are the American people so divided on immigration? Yes, we are divided about how many immigrants we should allow into the country in a given year, but we also divide about who should be admitted. For example, you rarely hear anyone complain about the number of Scandinavians or Germans or French people that should be allowed into the country. It is usually the number of Mexicans, Venezuelans, Moroccans or Iranians.  Could it have anything to do with skin color?

Clearly Donald Trump has no problem with Czechoslovakians and Slovenians, because he married them or issues with Germans and Scots, because he descended from them, but immigrants  of a darker skin he has less respect for.  And, yes, the matter of legal vs. illegal immigration plays a role in this. But legality has little to do with comments about the nationality and criminality of immigrants, such as

They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/02/trumps-most-insulting-violent-language-is-often-reserved-immigrants/

Yet Trump is not alone; millions of Americans applaud his every bigoted comment about immigrants.  There’s a distaste for the darker brothers and sisters that resonates with public sentiment. And in the back of the mind of so many white brothers and sisters there’s the real fear that in 2045 they will become a minority and darker skinned people will become the majority. Not any given nationality, but the darker-skinned people in general.

I came from a conservative Christian family, yet I was always told how dangerous Harlem was, how emotional the Black churches were, how Black families always depressed the real estate prices, and sure, these were all half-true. But we were also afraid of people we did not understand.

Suburban people stay out of the urban core, stay clear of mixed-race churches, enjoy singing the old Stephen Foster “My Old KentuckyHome,” which ends

The time has come when the darkies have to part,
Then my old Kentucky home, good night

We are not contemptuous, so much as fearful of the people who don’t look like us. The problem is how we deal with our fear. We put as much distance from our fear as we can. We stay out of their neighborhoods, we remain suspicious of their music, their poetry, their theater, their dance. We don’t like attempts to clarify the history of American racism. We keep our distance.

“You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, BryanYou have to get close,” she [Stevenson’s grandmother] told me all the time.” Bryan Stevenson reported this life-altering quote in his story Just Mercy.  

Stevenson met his grandmother’s expectations when he began a campaign to represent people on death row, black, white, young, old.  He founded the Equal Justice Initiative in 1989 to fulfill this mission. Its museum is one of most heart-rending records of the brutality of slavery in the country. He was not afraid to get close to the horrific legacy.

It is healthier to understand the underlying motives of racism than to point the finger. And it is healthier to examine them, than to give vent to judgment and outrage. Maybe we feel safer by distancing ourselves from “the other,” but we are not helping ourselves or trying to understand better.

Let’s work on immigration. God knows it needs all the help it can get. But let’s not let our fears control our agenda.  Let’s not solve the problem by pushing it back from the border. Let’s get closer to what scares us, to what threatens us.  Closer than we have let ourselves get before. Close enough to dispel some suspicion, some fear, the fear that keeps us apart.  Let’s deal with ourselves, as well as the problem we call “politics.”