Little green heron

 Little green heron 

I played golf yesterday, the first time in at least a year — at least a year since I’d held a club in my hands. It is such a bizarre concept, hitting a ball with a crooked stick across fields, hoping to find a hole it will fit in.
     The origins of the game must be something like that: spheroid, crooked stick, fields, hole. A shepherd hitting frozen sheep turds with his crook until he lodges one back in one of the sheep. Practice. Then, he comes on another shepherd: “Watch this!” “Wait! I’ve got to try that.”

We no longer live in the Scottish hills of that far-off, innocent time. We live under bustling Western Capitalism run amok. So games’ origins must be scraped away so associations can rise up to organize them, industries to supply them. Consider the evolution of the baseball mitt from a pancake to protect the hand to a Venus flytrap the size of a rhino’s head. Consider how in golf not only does a sheep turd become gutta percha become balata become Surlyn but hickory will become steel will become sixteen different grades of glass, and two legs will become four wheels with a motor.

I shot 90 from the so-called senior tees, which I allowed myself as I was afraid to swing more than a 4-iron given the state of my lower back, even fortified by 600 mg of Ibuprofen.
     I started with a seven on the opening par-5, but then I had three pars in a row, and I thought I might know what I was doing. I didn’t. I hit the ball well all day and still shot 90.

    But the course we played, near Luray, is nestled into the Blue Ridge, and there were some lovely views — the close-mowed meadows of the fairways bumping into the mountains, the mountains bumping into a sky like a shell, the way it is in Genesis 1, the firm-ament.

I used to like playing golf, a kid with other kids, humping seven clubs around the shaggy course in Beeburg (where Uncle Darrow made part of his living), trying to make the ball move in different directions without cutting it. Sometimes, running between shots, we’d play nine in less than an hour, less than forty-five minutes! Then, we would lie on our stomachs in the grass by the first tee to look down at the girls lying by the pool on their towels in swimsuits like tropical birds. Summer, we were sure, would not end this year.
      Hard to remember. Our round cost us four hours (with motor).

A typical golf shot, from the time you take the club head away from the ball until the time you strike it, must be at most a second-and-a-half. So, out of 240 minutes, you’re actually playing about two-and-a-quarter minutes if you shoot 90 like I did. (Those that have claimed that golf is better than sex, incidentally: what does that say about them?)
     Anyway, I made it through eighteen holes without minimal embarrassment.

The highlight of the round: We may have seen a green heron, but we couldn’t be sure. But then
     “It's hard these days to be sure of anything,” as my golfing friend Hamlin Moody (aka Jackass Jones) likes to say.*

                                                                            08.22.23 

_______________
* See here and here about the time he played with Donald Trump.

It's been a while, but at last

 Another parable 

I continue to hear stories from Scripture as parables. For aren’t they all finally, in one way or another, about “the kingdom of God”? Especially the stories the prophets tell: They are about what God is going to do when God gets around to doing it, sometimes now, sometimes later, and sometimes already? They begin really as Jesus’ parables do, “The kingdom of God - it’s like this, isn’t it?”

     In today’s lesson, from the first chapter of Malachi, what God has already been doing — it’s hating and loving; they are inextricably linked: Our little minds cannot separate them.

Who have ears, my children, let them hear.

The parable of the Jacob and Esau according to Malachi, the prophet.
Listen: 

 You can find links to other stories from that notorious biblical paraphrase, the Ted Riich Version, by clicking here: the TRV. You can read the parable here.

                                                                           08.17.23 

Homecoming

 Homecoming 

I had seventeen emails when we got home. One was from Gaspar Stephens, one of three people that read the blog regularly, or more or less regularly: “How was your trip? I thought you’d be writing about it?”
     “I might have been,” I wrote back, “but my laptop wasn’t working. But I will. Soon.”

Lebanon water tower, but in Missouri,
so not the one John fell from.

I also had a letter from Moira I talked to Dr. Feight about. She had gone to a movie with her friend Gretchen Moore and Gretchen’s friend John and Gretchen’s cousin John. Both Johns died young; both died in 1970, Friend John, just graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota, by stepping on a land mine in Vietnam, and Cousin John in a drunken fall from a water tower between his sophomore and junior years at Emory & Henry. He was visiting a classmate in Illinois, the son of a Methodist minister. He died on the third day, and, according to Moira, “He remains a young and callow fellow but extremely handsome — almost as handsome, though not nearly as pretty, as Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy, the movie we saw.
      “You wouldn't imagine it would be shown here, would you? Not only because it is about male prostitution and grinding, not humble and uplifting poverty (like Naomi and Ruth’s or Mary and Joseph’s), but because it is the saddest damn movie ever made, at least that I’ve seen. And it’s sad because love doesn’t redeem anything at all, and hope leads exactly nowhere. So, to paraphrase The Apostle (as you call him), ‘Death on a bus, hope, and love; and the greatest of these is death on a bus.’
     “We went for coffee after the movie, but only your high-school buddy Phil Allingham was there, watching a baseball game. He’d never seen the movie, he said, and he’d never wanted to. Gretchen replied that she’d never seen a baseball game or ever wanted to. Phil didn’t care; he only turned back to watching his. Plus, I think she was lying.
     “Her friend John said after we sat down that he didn’t much like it — it was too grim. Hadn’t he died, ‘and gone to heaven,’ he added with a grin, ‘to escape such sordidness or, more to the point, to see how it had been redeemed?’ He didn’t want to be reminded that it hadn’t.
     “‘It’s where the Christian faith fails, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Christ has died to redeem the world, but it hasn’t changed a whit. People cannot escape the messes they have gotten themselves into. Or, if they do, it isn’t by the grace of God but either by dumb luck or because they know someone with money or influence or, more likely, both.’
     “‘If you had gone to Harvard instead of Carleton,’ Gretchen said, ‘you wouldn’t have died in Vietnam.’
     “‘I’d never have gone to Harvard,’ John answered.
     “‘Me neither,’ John the cousin said. ‘I was lucky to get into Emory.’
     “Afterward, Gretchen went away with her friend John, and her cousin John said he would walk me home if I liked. A worldly gesture — no need for it here — but I said, ‘Sure,’ he was so good to look at even if not as pretty as Jon Voight in the movie. He was about as bright as Joe Buck though, I would add if I weren’t obliged always to be kind.”

There is a P.S.: “Is Gretchen’s friend John right about the Christian faith, that it promises redemption but doesn’t truly deliver? Or maybe it just hasn’t delivered yet? That’s one theme in the New Testament, right? — Christ will come again and reverse every ill, and there will be peace and no more tears?
     “What do you think?”

“So, what do you respond?” Dr. Feight said softly after I had lapsed into silence. The silence must either have lasted or have been “pregnant,” because he seldom speaks. When he does, it is softly, as if he doesn’t want to wake me if I have fallen asleep. But I hadn’t. Still, I waited. Sometimes, probably out of sheer cussedness, you want people to have to wait with you.
     “I was going to ask Axel — Axel Sundstrøm — what he thought,” I said. “Or Uncle Albert. But I decided not to.”
     “Oh?”
     “What I think?”
     He didn’t say anything more, which I took to mean “yes.” Or he was making me wait,which I didn’t.
     “My first thought was that we had never given redemption a chance. We couldn’t embrace Jesus — love and peace and healing, and concern for the poor and oppressed — at least not so that we were willing to give up wealth and power, all wealth and power. And pride. All pride.
     “Then I thought, though this is much the same thing: ‘Whose fault is that?’ Christ could not redeem the world because in Jesus of Nazareth God came not in power but in weakness, and the world could never embrace that. The few followers that did maybe were soon pushed aside by those that knew better. You don’t get on in the world without organizing, and you can’t organize without a hierarchy, a power structure. Power, then, cannot be truly shared, much less no-power — what is that anyway? And before long, the Jerusalem disciples would claim a monopoly on baptism by the spirit, Peter is judging Ananias and Sapphira, and Paul is judging everyone, including Peter, never mind that he is going to be the first Pope at Rome.
     “Then, I was thinking, ‘Who was the second?’”
     “Linus,” Dr. Feight said. Softly.

                                                                         08.04.23