Bumping along in Leviticus, I read through endless sacrificial offerings, which are flat-out weird with their sprinkling of blood on the horns of the altar, on the right ear, the thumb and great toe. Arriving at a chapter that defines incest and other aberrant sexual behavior, I am struck by the assertion that the LAND will "spew out" those who so defile it. It reminds me of a King Arthur movie where adultery darkens the land, causing great suffering among the people. This notion of the earth responding to our deviant behavior runs through-out the Bible, beginning with Cain murdering Abel: Cain's brother's blood crying out from the ground, the cursed land no longer yielding its strength.
As we pass through earth day, I am intrigued by the sharp division between those who perceive the physical ramifications of personal sin, and those who look for corporate and governmental action to solve environmental issues. It is one of those cases where the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, and vice versa. Even worse, the two hands regularly shake their fists at each other, muttering curses and accusations out of both sides of the mouth. It's very odd.
"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen." ~Winston Churchill
If we are going to walk together, if there is any hope in healing our land, it will not be by one camp triumphing and coercing the other to fall into line. Coercion only leads to reactive rebellion. Rather, hope lies in listening deeply to the concerns of the opposition and searching diligently for... common ground.
"Who overcomes by force hath overcome but half his foe." -John Milton
Years ago, before airport security went ballistic, I dropped someone off at a gate and was walking back, sipping a coke and full of myself, when I came upon a guy who sat at a table surrounded by inflammatory signs: More Nukes Less Kooks, Feed Jane Fonda to the Whales. Without pausing or missing a step, I poured three-quarters of an extra-large coke over his table as I passed. I will spare you the details of the ensuing melee, which included the guy in a wheel chair effecting a citizen arrest. Enough to say that my husband never bought me a T-shirt emblazoned with "Coke the Nukes."
Now I see things like "Feed Sarah Palin to the Wolves" posted on facebook. The tables have turned. Old play, stock characters. Punch and Judy at it again. And I'm fresh out of Coke.
"Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is." ~William James
We could use all six of you at The Word Shop. Summer is coming with the usual shuffling of volunteers. Here are some shift options that are, or soon will be available: every other Monday 1-3, Tuesdays 12-3 or 3-6, Wednesdays 10 -12 or 1 - 3, we could even open weekends if you'd like to.
Needless to say, the thought of covering all these shifts by myself leaves me contemplating the virtues of the iPad: $500 is cheaper than $2,500 a year. There's enough free content out there to keep me reading for the rest of my life. You don't have to dust the iPad. The only thing I'd miss are the oddballs who walk through door. And a place to gather for writer's groups, classes and tea parties. And the conversations that ensue when some of you drop by. And this odd sense of community that somehow extends beyond the physical store to all sorts of people, all over the country, who reside on both sides of various fences and who are, nonetheless, connected to my heart and the heart of God.
"The first duty of love is to listen." ~Paul Tillich
Not even to mention the books: the mix of joy and drudgery in sorting through a box of books. The amazing stories of lives, real and imagined, stacked on the shelves. The ideas, circling through time, that writers and artists have struggled to wrest from the clouds of thought, have labored to birth into a concrete reality; ideas that I can hold in my hand. The sheer fun of passing that reality from hand to hand, of discussing and sharing books with friends and strangers. The company of saints, encapsulated in pages, whose spirits watch from the surrounding walls--the great cloud of witnesses.
Right. We also need some folk who are willing to fill in once or twice a month for people going out of town or suddenly sick, or.... The staff requirements are that you know Jesus as Lord, are able to offer hospitality to a wide range of people and can be happy for a couple of quiet hours surrounded by books. It would be nice if you also liked to dust.
"There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew." ~Marshall McLuhan
I am tremendously proud of the Publishing Project team, which is managing to keep on keeping on despite our collective weirdness. We hold divergent beliefs on many issues, not the least of which is the proper placement of commas and periods. Buzz issues and litmus test delineations are determinedly ignored. Somehow in the midst of our various struggles, laughter rises and love flows. W@W! We are stitching together an amazing compendium of stories, poems, and art, ranging from a memoir on having tea with Roosevelt, to a twisted tale of a demonic motorcycle. First projected publishing date was last Christmas. I'm now hoping for family camp....
"The best things come from the talents that are members of a group." ~Henry James
Meanwhile, Publish-On-Demand books proliferate at an astonishing rate. Soon the only people who buy books will be writers, who are willing to pay exorbitant prices in order to hold their ideas in their hands: For $500 you can have your book packaged by a publish-on-demand company who will give you one free copy and expect you to pay 70% of the cover price for additional copies. Of course you get a royalties of around 10% from the usually less then 20 copies that someone else will order from the company. Why is it that the person who makes money from publishing is so rarely the author?
Digital publishing isn't shaping up to be much better. You can watch Amazon, ibooks and Google duke it out with each other and the large publishing companies in a fight to become the next gate keeper, the next conglomerate to figure out how to bilk the largest profit from the authors and the ever shrinking reading public. An interesting thing about digital books is that they effectively erase both the local retail market and the used-book market. For example, I can't order a mp3 or a digital book for a customer. Nor can you legally resell or even give away a digital book. Passing books from hand to hand is suddenly illegal.
"When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze." -Thomas Carlyle
Jeff Mendoza sent me a copy of his book, Strengthen the Things that Remain, which identifies common weaknesses within the evangelical church. The book presents biblical arguments and suggestions for pastors and leaders. Jeff said nice things about me in his acknowledgments, even though I warned him that in my experience pastors aren't all that open to suggestions on how they should preach and order worship. I do remember a time I emailed a priest and told him that something he said made me sad. The priest responded by saying that it made him sad too, and that it wouldn't happen again--an event now marked in my personal annals as the sweetest response to a sermon criticism, ever received. Unlike, for example, the time I told another priest that what he said was "unbelievably stupid," which, oddly enough, was not well received.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
I've only spent three years as a consistent member of an evangelical church; something that was possible because I was simultaneously a consistent member of a liturgical church. However, I've bumped around enough to agree with Jeff about including solid hymns in the worship. I remember Dave Talbot, who leads the hymn sings at Mount Herman, despairing over the next generation losing their heritage, losing the richness of their musical history. On the other hand, I also remember fighting hard to get a simple renewal chorus, one that you could sing with your eyes closed, included in a line-up of un-singable hymns. We stagger down the hallway like a drunken man, bouncing off the walls.
"Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Given our multiple voices, it is hard to hear each other through the din. May we listen deeply to the opposition, lest in our lust for media attention we move from community discussion to cutting remarks and inflammatory deprecations; lest we move from shouts, to knives and guns, and find ourselves blowing up subways, oil rigs and schools; destroying all that is precious in this fragile life that we share.
"When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say." ~Maggie Kuhn
Blessings,
Alliee +