Everyone Who Left Us

I clipped and saved this poem from The Atlantic Monthly in April, 2000 and have moved it from notebook to notebook. Over the years, I have returned to it several times. I find it’s message very powerful and moving. I am also fascinated by the line-rhyming technique the poet used in constructing it. The verse rhythm works so well with the mood of the poem and is technically incredible. I hope you will find as much in it as I have.

EVERYONE WHO LEFT US

Everyone who left us we find everywhere.
It’s easier now to look them in the eyes —
A gravesites, in bed, when the phone rings.
Of course, we wonder if they think of us.

It’s easier now to look them in the eyes,
Imagine touching a hand, listening to them talk.
Of course, we wonder if they think of us
When nights, like tonight, turn salty, warm.

Imagine touching a hand, listening to them talk—
Hard to believe they’re capable of such coldness.
When nights, like tonight, turn salty, warm,
We think of calling them, leaving messages.

Hard to believe they’re capable of such coldness—
No color, no pulse, not even a nerve reaction.
We think of calling them, leaving them messages
Vivid with news we’re sure they’d want to know.

No color, no pulse, not even a nerve reaction:
We close our eyes in order not to see them.
Vivid with news we’re sure they’d want to know
We don’t blame them, really. They weren’t cruel.

We close our eyes in order not to see them
Reading, making love, or falling asleep.
We don’t blame them. Really, they weren’t cruel,
Though it hurts every time we think of them

Reading, making love, or falling asleep,
Enjoying the usual pleasures and boredoms,
Though it hurts every time we think of them
Like a taste we can’t swallow. Their names stay,

Enjoying the usual pleasures and boredoms,
Then they leave us the look of their faces
Like a taste we can’t swallow. Their names stay,
Diminishing our own, getting in the way

At gravesites, in bed, when the phone rings.
Everyone who left us we find everywhere,
Then they leave us, the look of their faces
Diminishing, our own getting in the way.

— Steven Cramer

(The Atlantic Monthly, April 2000, p. 108.)

A wrong right is always left behind

A friend of mine recently sent me an e-mail telling me she had taken a comment I had made off her "Facebook" page. The comment was about Norm Coleman and the GOP hijacking democracy in the Minnesota senatorial race with Al Franken. It wasn't dirty or nasty or anything like that. It seems to me that Norm Coleman is trying to make the argument for dragging this thing out by saying that he's "trying to protect the vote of the little guy." It's all about the "little guy." The GOP? Norm Coleman? When has that ever happened? I found her action very surprising since she is such a strong Democrat and is not shy about that.

Anyway, she took it off her page because she has some relatives who are staunch "GOPers," as she calls them, who might get upset about my comment. She said, "I have to sort of do that delicate dance!" Now, by no means am I upset with her. (Who could be? She's a really great person). I'm just sad about the fear that is running over our society and smudging the face of honest discourse.

Below is most of my response to her:

Dear ...

I understand what you are saying about having to do a "delicate dance." It must be difficult for you to have to protect one group of friends from the thoughts and ideas of another group of friends.

That's a big job these days for anyone and it takes a lot of psychic energy. It's too bad your "GOPers" are unable to differentiate between the reasoned thoughts of one of your friends as distinct from your own thoughts. I believe that inability may be part of the birth defect they all seem to suffer.

Or maybe that's the way it is with those on the right — they think their political designation as "right" also applies to their political philosophies, which means that if they are "right" (in this black and white world of theirs), then the rest of us (those on "the left") must be wrong. After all, haven't left-handed people always been suspect?

If I were you, I'd give up the "dancing" with GOPers, but only after I told them that I don't have the power or energy to protect them any more.

Don't worry. I'm not upset with you at all. But on a national scale, I am just amazed and worried about the frightened and confusing spirits that have overtaken so many people on "the right" since the election. (And by "spirits" I do mean "spirits"--something outside of the visible world that is causing all the frantic lashing out and crazy thoughts.) We can talk more about that when I come home in July.

I never thought I'd find myself longing for the likes of Arnie Carlson, Al Quie, Dave Durenberger, Elmer L. Anderson, and other real Republicans. And in the same way, I also long for some rock-ribbed Democrats like Humphrey and Mondale who were not afraid to stand up and defend the progressive cause.

But you know that I am almost a socialist (ala the Danish variety). I hope that won't freak out some of your friends. But then, maybe that's okay. They may come to see that all socialists don't have fangs and want to take all your money.

Enough.

Peace,

Tom

Remember: Wilbur Wright did not have a pilot's license.

Rescue Us, Father

What follows is a Father's Day poem I wrote in the spring of 2003. In March, the U.S. had invaded Iraq and my son Peter was at the point of the invasion with the 3/7 Marines. We only knew of his location by reading the reports online from the "St. Louis Post-Dispatch" who had a reporter and a photographer embedded with the 3rd Marines.

At the same time as the invasion, I was in the middle of writing a series of daily devotions for Christ In Our Home and the text for the day was Isaiah 43:

But now thus says the LORD,
he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the LORD your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.

Rescue Us
We await the homecoming of our son from war. He is a Marine,
Weapons company, boots on the ground, tip of the spear, target.
Forty nights and days and more from March through April and into May
We heard no word, no delay of distant voice, no letters, no sound.
Was he brave? Was he lost in the fog of war, frightened?
Was he the reason or comforter of the dying
    whose faces we did not see.
What we knew we gleaned only from electronic images,
   sleepless dreams,
And each day’s sad hope sustained from no somber Marine at our door.

Isaiah sang his song to his people exiled in that far country—
   exotic and prodigal.
He sang his promises to a people
    terrified by the same inflamed spirits—
Hot winds from sacred fires threatening to consume
    the air they breathed,
Hardened metals hurled like lightning through swirling red sand skies,
Dervishes, spinning, exploding up from hidden places none could see,
All threatening to conceal with soot and blood the very face of God.

On many days during the waiting, I read aloud Isaiah’s spirit song.
I read it for myself. I read it for my son and those who fought.
I read it for all caught in the cross-fire of our precision terror. Then,
Tears dropped on the page as witnesses to a father’s heartache.
God’s heart aches for the homecoming of his children. Now,
I know in such times there is nothing a father hopes for more.
They will come. They will come home singing. Redeemed.

My heart still aches for the 4,500 who have not yet come home and the fathers who still wait for their children.

A Choice of Crosses

This is a continuation of “God Abandoned by God” below.

SOME WILL SAY that a theology of the cross is just another choice among many. 

I suppose you could have a Christ who is a Moses, Elijah, or one of the prophets and have a perfectly respectable religion that fulfills all the requirements of religion in society. The same with Christ who is John the Baptist redux. Even Peter's “You are the Christ-Christ” is perfectly suitable to the moods and needs of many in the world.

As long as Christ is seen as a continuation or even a projection of the past, any Christ will do and will attract the hearts and minds of the people. It is simply a matter of personal choice or personal relevance. And a choice of one is always relative to the choices of others, all are of equal value, and each has an equal claim on truth that cannot be debated because one's truth is as valid as the truth of the other.

Jesus said, “The Son of man must suffer many things, be rejected, and be killed and on the third day rise.” There is a finality there, a contingency that cuts off any discussion of choice or relevance of one's truth. “The Son of man must suffer” declares that the choices have already been made. Jesus becomes the end of choice, the end of preference, the end of religion.

Remain with your favorite brand of Christ and you will die with him. “Take up your cross” and follow him and you will follow him all the way through the suffering and death to the third day. Ultimately, one's belief is not a choice, nor does it belong solely to the individual. To take up the cross and follow, is to place all choices and faith in one who is more than anyone's faith and is more than the sum of everyone's experience or faith.

At the cross, God not only abandoned Jesus, all of humanity's religious choices were also abandoned; all the hopes and dreams of religious humans were crushed.

God Abandoned by God

Jesus cried from the cross, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" (My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?")

I've struggled with God's abandonment of Jesus on the cross for most of my ministry. Last week, while rereading Jurgen Moltmann's great book, The Crucified Messiah, an idea struck me and I wrote it down on the back endpapers. What follows is nearly verbatim and is very much a work in progress.

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THE ABANDONMENT OF JESUS on the cross is God's abandonment of his former self, the god of religion. God rejects the god of religion by actively participating in his own death (remember: "the Son of Man must suffer, be rejected, and be killed"), only to be raised up by the new God of grace and hope on the third day.

In the Flood, God promised Noah he would never again seek to destroy the world by water. Indeed, God made water a sign of redemption by saving the world through the water of Baptism. Once again, God is at work in opposites. But God never promised never to destroy himself — or at least the god of religion as claimed by humanity.

At the cross, God confronted the "powers and principalities" of religion (c.f. Walter Wink). Both the Jews who demanded Jesus' death and the Romans (the world) who carried out the death sentence were hyper-religious cultures. Both claimed to know who God is and how God would act, thereby thinking to control God. But in his abandonment and in the death of the righteous Jesus on the cross, God slipped away from the grasp of both the Romans and the Jews.

The Jews thought they knew God and that they were in control of the terms of being righteous. They thought God would consistently reward the righteous and punish the wicked. At the cross, they jeered Jesus, saying, "If you are the Son of God come down from the cross. If you are righteous, won't God come to save you?" But God was silent. "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?!" Jesus cried. God abandoned Jesus and he died with those painful words on his lips. God slipped away from the religious. Jesus was righteous, but God punished him as the worst kind of criminal. Jesus was the true Bar Mitzvah (son of the law) and Barabbas (son of the Father) — true Son of God and true son of man, yet God abandoned him.

The Romans, too, were a culture wrapped in religion, although theirs was a religion of the state and the religion of power and authority. The Roman Caesars had claimed divinity and ultimate power for themselves and the state, which was merely an extension of Caesar himself. Rome thought it had the power to define righteousness. Rome claimed it had absolute control over life and death of the millions under its control from Scotland to the gates of India. This was a control over life and death that extended even to the how of one's death, the circumstances, the amount of pain and suffering the criminal would endure. Their power even extended to defining the meaning of one's death. One could die as a noble hero of the state, thereby building the power of the state religion, or one could die a horrible death as an example for those who would oppose the power of the state (i.e. beheading, the stake, the cross, etc.).

But again, God slipped though their fingers. Jesus died too quickly. ("Is he already dead?" they asked.) He hadn't suffered enough to be a good "example" of Rome's religious authority over death and life.

In the end, Jesus died as a victim of the powers of Religion and the State. Jesus died to the powers of ethical religion (righteousness, obedience, compliance, law). His death proved the Jews right (or at least that is how they saw it). God punished the wicked and those who would upset Religion. 

Jesus died as a victim of the powers of the State. His death proved that Rome could do as it pleased, exercising full control over life and death and its meaning.

In the end, however, neither were able to control Jesus' (God's) destiny. He died to Religion of both kinds. He died under the sign, "King of the Jews," crowned by thorns, robed in slashes. He was enthroned on the cross, surrounded by his court — two thieves, and a group of women, the men having fled. Put on the cross by the State, he died as the state's victim (scapegoat) and as the state's vassal. But he died before Rome could exercise its full power (days on the cross serving as a lesson to those who oppose Rome).

God abandoned Religion's blasphemer and Religion's insurrectionist. God abandoned humanity's God.

For God to make a new creation (Paul), God had to ("must") begin with himself by putting an end to the false God of Religion and raising up a new God of grace and mercy, not righteousness and authority.

Thus, so far... (continued at A Choice of Crosses)

The Uneasy Balance

My father died Friday afternoon, March 20.

In the moment of time it takes to hear that sentence, life and death changed forever. The uneasy balances in all human relations, especially those between father and son, shifted suddenly, like the giant jigsaw plates that give shape to this earth.

“He died unexpectedly,” we said; as if any death is truly expected; or even if expected, is ever as casual as an unexpected guest; or as if by somehow anticipating it, we can alleviate the loneliness and abandonment that surrounds us upon hearing those words.

For me and my father, there was no time for either expectation or anticipation. We had only a then and a changed now with no transition. Then just became the reality — the message relayed on cell phones over 1500 miles to a son and a daughter here and a father dying there without a last “I love you.”

“Now what?” my sister and I asked each other as we snapped closed the cell phone.

“Now what?” is the only question that makes any sense to me. Why is answered only by silence. Where and when tell only of place and time. And how? How is too painful, too real to consider at such a distance. “Now what?” is the question best asked at the moment when we are between — between Florida and Minnesota, between then and now, between reason and disbelief. Suspended.

So now, two days later, I am driving somewhere in the center of this broad country without the answers and usual defenses of religion or professional jargon. I am trying to find again that balance point between death and life.

Jesus died on a Friday. And in the moment it takes to hear that sentence, life and death changed forever. The earth shook, the graves were opened, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom, and that always uneasy balance between son and father shifted. Jesus died with the painful question of why and God’s response was silence. But on the third day, God asked the question himself, “Now what?” and raised Jesus from the dead.

There are no simple answers when it comes to questions of death and life, no approved or assured responses that will stop the pain or keep the world from shaking itself apart. But if this ancient tragedy of a father and a son is to create a new balance between death and life, it must be this: That in death, as in sorrow and grief, guilt and shame, abandonment and hopelessness, all of us die first. When the darknesses overtake us, all the answers we thought we had fail, and we are as good as dead, unable to move between here and there, now and then. We are between. Suspended.

The uneasy balance that marks human relationships, human life, is created new when the father asks, “Now what?” and creates a universe or raises his son from the grave. Only from the grave and gate of death does God answer his own question with his affirmative now. It is into God's Now that all of us are pulled — the living and the dead — into the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sin, and life everlasting.