Peaches, again?

Tuesday, August 25, 2020                  (today’s lectionary)

Peaches, again?

Do not let yourself be shaken out of your minds.

Do not be alarmed by words of any kind

Do not be deceived by predictions about the day of the Lord.

Since my childhood I’ve been a chameleon changing colors when one person talks, and then another. My opinions are, to say the least, fluid. Perhaps while watching Mom and Dad’s arguments, often over me and rarely resolved, I decided I would just agree with everyone.

In high school I wrote a 12 page paper for Mr. Parker’s Economics class on the well-conceived 1967 US position in Vietnam. Of course the Communist menace needed to be stopped. The domino theory, that politics in one country would infect those of the next, was policy for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.

Stand firm and hold fast to the traditions you were taught.

My history teacher, Mr. Gathman, read the paper (on which I got an A) and gave me a few copies of The New Republic to read, just to round out my education. After these articles, I read Red Star Over China, by Edgar Snow. Snow focused on positive changes Mao Tse-Tung had made and dismissed fears of Chinese aggression.

So then I wrote a 50 page rebuttal to my first paper, and submitted that to Mr. Parker. He gave me another A.

In college at Valpo that fall, I helped coordinate Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s visit to our campus, then traveled to Milwaukee to campaign for him before the Wisconsin presidential primary. But in the spring of 1968, the world seemed to just explode.

Robert Kennedy entered the race for president, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, and then Kennedy himself was assassinated in Los Angeles.  Abroad, the Russian army invaded Czechoslovakia to stop the Czechs from leaving the Soviet bloc. Every day more people were shot trying to get across the barbed wire-topped Berlin Wall. In order to eliminate guerrilla hideouts in Vietnam, US helicopters sprayed napalm and Agent Orange over thousands of forest and rice fields. 16,000 US soldiers died there in 1968, alongside countless civilians and enemy soldiers.

That summer my friend Larry and I traveled to Chicago for a seminar at the Lutheran School of Theology. The seminar’s organizers decided we would learn much more on our feet downtown at the Democratic National Convention, so we spent the next few days down there.

Lately, Mr. Gathman and I have been exchanging ideas about which histories and biographies are good to read. Fifty-two years later, I am fascinated by history, but not sure what I can learn from it. There are so many sides to everything, and most of the time, I still don’t find a place to land. Fr. Richard Rohr, author and former farm-boy from Kansas, tells a tale of his own movement, which mirrors mine:

I began as a very conservative pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic, living in 1940’s and 1950’s Kansas, pious and law abiding, buffered and bounded by my parents’ stable marriage and many lovely liturgical traditions that sanctified my time and space. In this period of Order I was a very happy child and young man.

I grew in my experience and was gradually educated in a much larger world of the 1960s and 1970s, with degrees in philosophy and theology and a broad liberal arts education given me by the Franciscans. Darn it! I was heady with knowledge and “enlightenment” and was surely not in Kansas anymore. I had passed, like Dorothy, “over the rainbow.” My lovely innocence died in this time of Disorder.

As time passed, I became simultaneously very traditional and very progressive, and I have probably continued to be so to this day. I no longer fit in with either staunch liberals or strict conservatives. This was my first strong introduction to paradox, and it honed my ability to hold two seemingly opposite positions at the same time.

God, being God, does not get trapped on either side of a contradiction. God is love. It sounds strange to say it, but God doesn’t think, God DOES.

He has made the world firm, not to be moved.

He governs us with equity.

The word of God is living and effective.

So let us be glad, let the earth rejoice!

And let the trees of the forest clap their hands.

Jesus drives this home, not just with the Pharisees, but over and over with me.

Don’t think so much, David. Just do it! But pay attention to what matters in the world I’ve made for you:

Do not neglect the weightier things of law:

Judgment, and mercy, and fidelity.

Do not strain out the gnat, do not swallow the camel.

Cleanse the inside of your cup!

Rohr rejoices in French philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s restorative description of “your second naivete, a return to the joy of your first but now totally new, inclusive and mature.”

Come and get it!

This later phase of life allows me to be childlike without being childish. And it also allows my mind to entertain two conflicting, even contradictory ideas at the same time. This is called “holding a paradox.” It’s one of my favorite things to do.

Now I no longer need call myself a chameleon or feel guilty about having less defined positions in politics or religion or anything else that’s important in our life in community. Almost always, I need be neither obdurate nor vacillating. Instead of being uncertain and confused, I can “hold a paradox.”

Although it might sound like I’m poking fun at myself, I’m really not. I just don’t want to hold too tightly to this position, either. For the second time in a week, I think of myself a bit like T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock. “Do I dare to eat a peach?”

Oh, for Pete’s sake. Get up close, smell the peach, lick the peach, bite the peach, let the juice run down your chin, and eat the peach!

Or … well, maybe not. Not sure if that would be good for me.

Or … well, you get the picture.

May the Lord Christ himself and God our Father,

Who loves us and gives us everlasting encouragement,

Encourage your hearts and strengthen them

In every good word and deed.

            (2 Thessalonians 2, Psalm 96, Hebrews 4, Matthew 23)

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