It’s the shortest day of the year —
the winter solstice — for light. I
got up at seven-fifteen and it was

dark. I entered my morning routine
that involves a few meds and many
supplements and flossing and brush-

ing and making a pot of coffee from
freshly ground gourmet coffee beans
and filtered water and the reading

of three meditations and two poems
and by then, as I sit at the computer
typing out the lines of a poem, I

see the light arrive in the neighbor-
hood. That routine feels really good.
Then I’m off to the service station

to have the oil changed in the car
and then a few more errands and then
home for homemade soup, an afternoon

of some exercise, reading and the ex-
perience of anticipating watching the
light recede and darkness descend early

and I’m already starting to yawn.

Such banality, superficiality, cruelty,
Such shallowness, nastiness, greediness —
the new, but old, normal?
Greek and Roman gods fought
over just such things striving for
dignity, nobility, humility.
Native peoples creation myths
put us in touch with earth, sky
and the connection between
all things that walk, run, swim and fly.
Adam and Eve left Eden for a long,
slow day to die.
Cain slaying his brother Abel
speeded up the dying
and we have been killing each other
ever since long before
the Hebrews’ creation myth
described us to the core.
Is it any different now in this
dangerous culture of
such banality, superficiality, cruelty,
such shallowness, nastiness, greediness?
Is this but again the new, but old, normal?
Where in this bleak house
is dignity, nobility, humility,
justice, mercy, peace, self-sacrificial love
to be found?
If as it has been purported and proclaimed,
we are with God and God is with us
as Jesus, the Buddha, Lao Tzu aimed,
then in deep prayer we must remain
and in non-violent protest we must proclaim
creation rights and human rights for
glorious, wonderful universal life to be attained
and, by the grace of God, exclaiming
faith, hope and love
and watching, once again, for the descent of the dove.

This is a note I wrote to a friend:

Below is an interesting and sad take on Buechner’s term of teaching at Harvard Divinity School.

He missed community. I also sense that he is blaming it on “pluralism,” which I think is a mistake as I believe there can be “unity in diversity; holding us together in loving mystery.”

I think he was just a lonely guy and it makes me sad for him at that time in his life. He accuses students of being “dead fish.” I think he was a fish out of water.

My experience at Western Theological Seminary (a denominational seminary and not a divinity school) was just the opposite; it was four years filled with community, love and affirmation — perhaps it had more in loco parentis for fledgling clergy just learning to spread their spiritual wings and that was just fine even for those who were 21 to 25 and older chronologically but babes in faith, some might say “lambs before the slaughter.”

Perhaps there was too much “sameness” in those years, and I chafed at it a bit, and, of course, was never shy about speaking up, much to the chagrin of faculty, I’m sure. Then later I developed a theology/spirituality of prophet, priest on my own (something to fit my personality), but the nurturing spirit prepared me to go on my own in search and affirmation of community elsewhere — campus ministry, installed ministry, hospice ministry, interim ministry, adjunct teaching in pastoral care and preaching at Western, the RCA, PC(USA), the UCC and finally a sense of being a part of all of it and, yet, none of it anymore and that’s okay. I’m content being where I am, on the way as Dorothy Day would say: “All the way to Heaven is heaven, because He said, ‘I am the Way.'”

By the way, my wife Chris who just read Buechner’s meditation, wondered if he was just talking about himself and not bringing the students in at a place they could relate, say at the place of their “issues.” Perhaps his “sharing of secrets” was too threatening for them and he could have drawn them in over something less personal but important, nevertheless, and perhaps, thus giving them the courage to share on a more personal, feeling level. I knew there was a reason I married her.

Bob

Pluralism

HARVARD DIVINITY School was proud, and justly so, of what it called its pluralism—feminists, humanists, theists, liberation theologians all pursuing truth together—but the price that pluralism can cost was dramatized one day in a way that I have never forgotten. I had been speaking as candidly and personally as I knew how about my own faith and how I had tried over the years to express it in language. At the same time I had been trying to get the class to respond in kind. For the most part none of them were responding at all but just sitting there taking it in without saying a word. Finally I had to tell them what I thought. I said they reminded me of a lot of dead fish lying on cracked ice in a fish store window with their round blank eyes. There I was, making a fool of myself spilling out to them the secrets of my heart, and there they were, not telling me what they believed about anything beneath the level of their various causes. It was at that point that a black African student got up and spoke. “The reason I do not say anything about what I believe,” he said in his stately African English, “is that I’m afraid it will be shot down.”

At least for a moment we all saw, I think, that the danger of pluralism is that it becomes factionalism, and that if factions grind their separate axes too vociferously, something mutual, precious, and human is in danger of being drowned out and lost. I had good times as well as bad ones that winter term. I was able to say a few things that some of my students seemed to find valuable, and some of them said things that I value still, but if there was anything like a community to draw strength and comfort from there at Harvard as years before there had been at Union, I for one was not lucky enough to discover it.

– Originally published in Telling Secrets

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The sun sets or the earth rotates
into a beautiful sunset just a dune away.
The sun rises or the earth rotates
into a beautiful sunrise just a dune away.
Are the beautiful start
and the beautiful end
just a dune away from my heart
or is my heart there,
anticipating, waiting,
never hesitating to run
for that which is just a dune away
and if I stop and wait
will I know that love has come my way
bright and shining, above me
just on this side of the dune today?
Or is it, like the sunrise and sunset,
always just a dune away?

Dune grass,
Once blowing in the wind,
Leans to the west,
Wind from the east,
Snow halfway up the blades,
Still in frozen splendor
Like a thousand immobile mimes
Getting ready to lean east
All at the same time
When the snow melts and
The west wind blows.

It’s Christmas time, a time to feel just fine
and wallow in this hallowed, wonderful Jesus’

time, a time when advertisements dominate time
and all to testify to a heart warming time of

goodwill and compassion to shine, but at this
time in time the pharmaceutical company is do-

ing it’s time to flood the market with drugs
that will addict a billion children in time,

a very short time, and will bring huge profits
to the company at this most holy time. Merry

Christmas, Happy Hanukah and Happy Holidays —
holy days good for Vulture Capitalism in this

blessed demonic time of USA’s capitalism’s
robber time and evangelical, white Christian’s

holy time of going to heaven when they die
in time and to hell with everyone else

in this and every other most holy time
and have a Merry Christmas this holy time.

The black-capped chickadee
swayed on the branch of the red pine tree
while the red-headed woodpecker
played percussion on the trunk of the red pine tree.
The chimes chimed in
from the balcony
and singing came from the wind
while a gray-haired squirrel stopped to
listen before climbing home on a white pine tree.
The man shivered on the deck
looking down on the tracks in the snow
where deer and rabbits recently did go.
He wondered if they do come back, if they
will stop and stand
and listen for free
to the symphony
in the backyard, winter wonderland.

The man rubbed the scar on his chin
and thought back sixty-eight years
to flying over the handlebar of his

trike, landing chin down in the cinder
strewn alley. Then memory took him
to Dr. Was’ office where the family

physician numbed the then six-year-
old’s chin, pulled out the cinders
with tweezers, rinsed the wound and

clamped the torn skin together while
noticing that the boy’s father was
turning white and telling the father

to sit before he fainted. The man
remembered his father sitting and
then fainting and later hearing his

father say, “I couldn’t stand to see
you injured like that. I think it
hurt me more than it hurt you. You

were very brave, son. ” With that
fond memory, the man continued to
rub the smooth scar and the two-

day-old stubble around it.

Would someone please pick up the ball and run with it?
Would someone please pick a poem and send it?
Garrison Keillor sinned and now we readers
are punished for it.
Each day, I looked forward to reading three
poems in my inbox, my favorite predictably
being the one from The Writer’s Almanac.
“One is the loneliest number that you’ll
ever do;
two can be as bad as one; it’s the loneliest
number since the number one.”
Three Dog Night had it right.
It takes three dogs to keep you
warm on a cold night.
It takes three poems in the morning
to keep me from mourning.
Three, that’s three poems everyday,
it’s the perfect number
Three Dog Night might even say.
Would someone please pick up the ball and run with it?
Would someone please pick a poem and send it?
Garrison Keillor sinned and now we readers
are punished for it.

The retro (p)resident likes to
play the alpha male
shouting out that an assertive
woman should go to jail.
The retro-retro kicked off the bench twice
alleged pedophile judge on a horse brandishing a gun
thought that he should have won
the senate race
in the deep red state,
but he was a dollar short
and a day late
and full of hate.
So, the wannabe tough guys —
the (p)resident and the disgraced judge
and the disheveled fascist behind them both
are proving to be the real three stooges
and a really, really, really bad joke.