Tag Archives: Michael A. King

Peace, Polarization, Politics

The Sand Fight

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One cousin was already at the beach. When the other topped the dune and they spied one another, both galloped across sand and their different ages, three and nearly five, arms outstretched.

It was a thrill to watch, this pure delight.

Then they met. She yanked off his hat. He hurled sand in her face. They probably both meant more to tease than assault. Yet in seconds they were tussling, mutually enraged. Grownups ran to separate them. Screams of anger and pain burst forth.

Sorrow flowing. Delight drowning. So lovely. So quickly so nasty. Just those few moments, yet within them lurked the human condition writ large. We thrill to companionship. And constantly we scan: Is our share of love, voice, justice, place in the community safe?

As the beach fight raged, it pointed mostly to the usual work of growing up. But it also became a microcosm of the nuclear furies world leaders threaten, the claims to “blood and soil” with which some assault those they believe to be stealing it, the growing inability of adults, including the most powerful one in the world, to do better than yank hats, throw sand, egg on violences of mind, spirit, and body.

It still hurts to remember the sand fight. Not because the combatants were terrible; they were acting their age. After grownups reinforced the norms of civilized behavior, they didn’t forswear battle but could often be spied whispering under a blanket, sharing books, even cuddling. What hurts is how quickly the joy fizzled, a cloud spreading over that sun-drenched beach precisely as beauty raced toward fulfillment.

What hurts is that the image of missing each other precisely when on the cusp of finding each other seems to capture our current national and planetary condition. There is so much to be awed by, so much wonder crying out for attention, so much human yearning to embrace the other and challenges of the day before the planet shuts us down. Yet the thermometers measuring our hate and Earth itself show global temperatures soaring as we yank hats and throw sand. This is why in the August 14, 2017, issue of The New Yorker, Robin Wright asks, “Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?” This is why the January 17, 2018, New York Times analysis of the 2017 U.S. tax cut is headlined, “Sharper State Divide in Congress Seen as ‘New Civil War.’”

Extrapolating from children is dangerous. But I wonder what might have happened if adults had egged on instead of pacifying the cousins. And I find myself asking what adult intervention looks like when the grownups themselves regress to childhood. How far does the hate spread? How many casualties are suffered? What finally enables combatants to recapture their vision of delight long enough once more to pursue it?

When Adam and Eve lost their way in Eden, God warned of trouble ahead and that an angel with a flaming sword would bar their return. But next, Genesis reports, they “made love,” setting in motion the births of Cain and then Abel. No return to Eden here as soon they rolled in the sand and Abel was dead. Still, the ending of Genesis 4 reports, Adam and Eve made love again, Seth was born, Seth had son Enosh, and “At that time people began to call on the name of the Lord.”

Now we fumble toward the next chapters in our and (we pray) God’s story. I wonder if it’s precisely when we honor a story larger than our own—which is what adults intervening in the sand fight called for—that we grow back up and into delight.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which first published this post.

gratitude, inspiration

18.6 Gallons

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When it hits, I fear it may be a stroke such as traumatized an uncle. I break the airport security I’ve just cleared enroute to working from the road with my wife Joan, who is on assignment in Montana.

On to doctor, who looks in eyes and ears, manipulates body, then cheerfully pronounces just BPPV (Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo), see lots as people get older, inner-ear crystals and whatnot, just need medicine and vertigo exercises.

“Well, I was headed to Montana. Can I fly?”

“Sure, people may think you’re having a stroke, they may think you’re going to vomit, you might even actually vomit, but you won’t be having a stroke.”

So I fly though forced to look only at the floor when walking.

As Joan picks me up in Bozeman, the vertigo fades. After her next work day I’m happy to drive us to her Kalispell assignment. But as interstate speed limits rise crazily by Eastern standards, we hit curvy mountains. Vertigo returns.

So my poor exhausted wife is driving. GPS says shorter this way. We’d stopped for a snack while I was driving and agreed gas later. Joan obeys GPS. But it doesn’t occur to either of us that GPS will take us through wilderness for oh, 2,822 miles. We have nice chats in between my covering my eyes.

Suddenly Joan stops talking. No matter what I say she just drives. What? Marriage over? What? Ah, she can’t handle my aging process now that she sees how it’s going to go. Okay, Joan: Why aren’t you saying anything?

“I was hoping not to have to tell you before I fixed it.”

“What? What?”

“We’re running out of gas.”

“WHAT? HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?! Why didn’t we (YOU) get gas? Where are we?”

“I don’t know.”

“How far to civilization?”

“I don’t know.”

I ask Joan’s phone (mine has no signal) where gas is. It won’t say. Because now her phone has no signal.

“How far down is the gas?”

“It’s been in the red a long time,” reports Joan, not quite her usual inspirational self.

“Joan, we’re in big trouble.”

“I know. I know I know.

We get to a sign promising gas/lodging that way. We go that way. Nothing.

A man in a dusty pickup comes toward us. I open my door, I wave wave wave. He looks at the lunatic. Hard look. But he stops. He lowers his window.

I stagger over and cling to his truck. “Sorry to bother you but we’re those crazy Easterners who come to Montana and then run out of gas. Do you know where we can get some?”

“How much do you have left?”

“Almost none.”

“Can you make it 15 miles?”

“Maybe. Not sure. Maybe.”

“Okay, if you keep going that way you’ll get to this intersection with a Sinclair.”

Okay. Ipod off. Can’t stand it. No talking. Except a strangled occasional query from Joan: How many more miles? 12, says GPS. 11.9. 6.25. At times Joan’s speed drops. Why? Gas gone? No, slowing down from 80.

5.7. Get us at least within 3. Then we can walk or stagger. 2.5 miles. 1.5. Green and red glimmer. Oasis! Heaven! Nirvana! The Meaning of Life in Car Crazy America! Who cares about climate change and fossil fuels and the collapse of civilization. The SINCLAIR!

I pull out the rental car manual. Gas tank capacity: 18.75.

“How much did you put in?”

“18.6. I was praying,” she said.

“People pray and bad things still happen,” I said.

“But we made it.”

“You’re right.”

I don’t know how to theologize about this. But I am grateful.

—Michael A. King is publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which first published this post.

Future of the church, inspiration

Weaving the New

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When our commencement speaker falls ill, we two deans at Eastern Mennonite Seminary become co-presenters. I prepare based on what I notice enroute to commencement:

Prisoners in Israel-Palestine go on hunger strike to protest prison conditions. Opponents hold a barbecue outside to blow in meat smells. So minor. Yet so cruel an example of ways we’re slicing each other’s souls.

After historic drought come record rainy-season California downpours. Sacramento rivers tear out tents and underbrush, ripping even that home from the homeless while mansion dwellers pursue trillion-dollar tax cuts.

Celebrating her husband Jason in the New York Times, Anne Krause Rosenthal concludes,

I want more time with Jason. . . . with my children. . . . at the Green Mill Jazz Club. . . . But . . . . I probably have only . . . days left. . . . So why I am doing this?

I am wrapping this up on Valentine’s Day, and the most genuine, non-vase-oriented gift I can hope for is that the right person reads this, finds Jason, and another love story begins.

Days later, Anne dies.

Barbecuing as torture. Climate change, wars, oppressions razing homes of millions, including the flying and swimming and crawling creatures God pronounced good. Death stalking as it always has, the Annes forced to release loved ones, the Jasons required to rebuild.

As sometimes it seemed all things must be made new, I remembered years ago teasingly comparing a seminary student to a biblical character whose name she shares. That stung, she courageously reported: she faced a void which in the biblical story is miraculously filled.

Recently, as she gave permission to share, Sarah Payne completed an EMS capstone on that very void. I told her of being sensitized to it when she confronted my teasing and of now being touched because a loved one feared the same void. She gave me prayer beads to pass on. Without meeting, student and loved one prayed, with tears, for each other.

Another student. A painter. Linking seminary studies and art, gospel and today’s realities. Meanwhile I spend over a year discerning: continue at EMS or try new adventures? After choosing the new, I receive a gift during my final EMS chapel: a painting by that student, Rebekah Nolt. The blacks and grays, whites and purples remind me of hair-rising thunderstorm and beautiful day merging.

Rebekah Nolt painting, “Spill Paint, Not Blood”

The artist note says the painting is from a series reacting to “the many tragedies or injustices of 2016,” each “just that, a reaction of emotional energy, without purpose, without vision.” As Rebekah hurled paint, she “realized how glad I was it was just paint . . . and not angry words or stones, because I was really not happy how this was turning out.” The paint wasn’t fully dry so she “got to work, not certain . . . I could even make something out of the mess. . . .” Yet what she made is a cherished memento.

Teasing linking to a void to prayer beads to a Holy Spirit throbbing through all. Anger yielding a mess transformed. Or this: My father dies. A student tells me of having been in jail. My dad, prison chaplain, had inspired him to enroll at EMS.

As so much unravels, many turn to novels of dystopia more for guidance than escape. And so many, collaborating with unseen hands, weave the new.

—Michael A. King is dean, seminary and graduate programs, Eastern Mennonite University. This is posted on his last day in that role as he transitions to running Cascadia Publishing House LLC and to other activities as writer, speaker, and consultant in communications, administration, and pastoral leadership. King writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which first published this post.

justice, loving viewpoint enemies

Wishing for a Treaty

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In distress, my daughter who loves the music of Leonard Cohen phoned us parents just after the November U.S. elections. Cohen, she said, was dead. I was reminded of the prior Sunday when Cohen’s just-released “Treaty” came on the radio and we heard it, rapt, for the first time.

Now Cohen is dead at 82. An election has been held. A presidential transition has been completed. Shock and awe is underway. We yearn for safe passage across unmapped terrain. I wonder if in “Treaty” Cohen gives clues. In lyrics that, as so often with Cohen, echo the Bible, he evokes turning water into wine, Jubilee, the snake baffled by sin. Wishing “there was a treaty we could sign,” Cohen sings of being angry and tired and not caring “who takes this bloody hill.” He wishes for a treaty “Between your love and mine.”

“Treaty” also reminds me of Will Campbell’s journey during dynamics so different yet so connected with today’s. A Baptist minister who sharply challenged his own denomination’s racism, Campbell was a fiery civil rights fighter in the 1960s. In Brother to a Dragonfly (Continuum, 1977, pp. 245-247), a heartrending memoir of brokenness and justice and grace, Campbell tells of putting his life on the line for civil rights—while gradually realizing that even the “enemy,” the KKK, deserved some understanding.

Campbell tells of President Johnson’s nationally televised warning to the Klan, in which Johnson says, “Get out of the Klan, and back into decent society while there is still time.” Then he says this:

The closing five words must certainly have been heard by those in the Klan as a threat from an impending police state. And the President did not tell them just how they could get into the decent society of which he spoke, how they could break out of the cycle of milltown squalor, generations of poverty, a racist society presided over, not by a pitiful and powerless few people marching around a burning cross in a Carolina cow pasture, not by a Georgia farmer who didn’t know his left hand from his right, but by those in the “decent society” to which the President referred, the mammas and the daddies of the young radicals who would soon go home to run the mills, the factories, the courthouses and legislative halls, the universities and churches and prisons they were then threatening to burn to the ground.

Campbell is not interested in justifying the Klan. But he is realizing that the Klan is not only a fount of evil, though it is that, but also a product of the “same social forces” that have produced national structures of violence and violation, including the then-raging Vietnam War.

As he grapples with tragedies of race and class and cruelty shredding 1960s America, Campbell remains a fierce prophet. Listening to leaders like Stokely Carmichael, Campbell also concludes that “to do something in race relations maybe we should go work with our own people” and that in relation to the Klan he was “learner more than I was teacher.”

Offering a striking echo in The New York Times, Trevor Noah insists that “We can be unwavering in our commitment to racial equality while still breaking bread with the same racist people who’ve oppressed us.”

Presidents, governors, politicians scorn opponents. Executive edicts are issued and political “nuclear options” are launched. The wheel of power turns; the flamethrowers rotate; the prior regime’s goals burst into flame. The next regime, somehow always sure its era will forever endure, happily starts piling the tinder for its (and maybe our) own demise.

There are stunningly problematic trends strengthening in the U.S. as brothers and sisters belonging to vulnerable populations are reviled or barred, scriptural commands to take special care of the strangers and sojourners are violated,  money talks louder than ever, a fragile earth is trampled. Prophetic naming of travesties is called for. Yet if we can do no better than vilify, will the turning of the wheel ever stop?

Writing of her quest to participate in a women’s march in a spirit of “Solidarity Without Enmity,” Lindsey Paris-Lopez says that

the spirit of solidarity that infused Saturday’s marches worldwide was hopeful and invigorating. But solidarity can be channeled over and against enemies, or it can be channeled toward a vision of ever-widening inclusivity that rejects the concept of enmity altogether. Such a vision is fueled by fierce love that doesn’t let injustice stand, but honors the truth that even perpetrators of injustice can be redeemed. It acknowledges that we have come and are coming together through reconciliation and mercy, and it offers to extend the same mercy and reconciliation to the people behind the oppressive systems that must be torn down. May such a fierce love guide the movement birthed in these women’s marches around the nation and around the world.

“I wish . . .” sings Leonard Cohen, as his life fades toward its end while a country divides, “I wish there was a treaty / Between your love and mine.”

—Michael A. King is dean of Eastern Mennonite University’s seminary and graduate programs. The Campbell section is indebted to King’s book Fractured Dance (Pandora Press U.S., 2001, pp. 174-176). He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review, which published an earlier version of this post.

apocalyptic, Grief and loss, inspiration

Apocalypse and the Stuffed Giraffe

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During a long, often frightening 2016 whose results only intensify the dynamics, a nation argues over whether to name its presidential candidates crooks, fascists, or worse.

At a lunch with a denomination’s representatives, talk turns to ways the polities of two denominations to which many seminary students belong are shifting. Just in pondering almost idly the effects, we find the conversation eddying across the many seminaries we personally know to be in crisis.

Terror strikes. Walls are breached or threatened. Police shoot away lives that matter and sometimes are shot. Temperatures hit constant global records while floods ravage Louisiana, fires burn across California’s Interstate 15, and Zillow.com projects nearly a trillion dollars worth of real estate possibly under coastal waters in our grandchildren’s lifetimes.

Fear stalks the land. Will we survive? I believe yes; here we are after millennia of catastrophes. But will our lives, communities, institutions, structures, countries, planet be recognizable?

Amid such questions my mother-in-law Mildred died of surgery complications after breaking a femur. The intensities, sorrows, and sometimes grace-filled moments of her final days unfolded as four family units scattered across the country had been scheduled to arrive for vacation in Maine by plane and car. Instead we kept vigil as she died. Now to get from her funeral in western New York to our remaining time in Maine we added a rented SUV to family cars.

After lunch that three-car, three-generational caravan of lacerated souls headed across 600 miles through hauntingly pastoral New York and New England landscapes as the sun faded hour by hour into the west and into late-afternoon sweet light. At a chaotic, crowded truck stop a rumpled man pestered us. So many disrupted days and nights and feelings had left us all shot. We didn’t want to talk. He wouldn’t stop.

Finally out of no sense of mission but hoping he’d then shut up, I engaged him. He launched into his story. He was a trucker from Las Vegas—where his wife with stage-4 cancer might, he’d just learned, be in her final hours. From the truck stop he’d try to drive straight to Vegas without pausing except for catnaps. Soon he left.

Then, enroute to his truck, he was back: with gifts of stuffed animals and candy for the children in our caravan. Weeks later came a photo of one reading books with her new giraffe snuggled beside her.

Across the under-maintained infrastructure of interstates, across an America at risk of apocalypse if we define it as the unraveling of stabilities and communal compassions as we’ve known them, an ordinary man, even a wearisomely intrusive man, races to say good-bye to his dying wife.

But in that liminal space between earth and Beyond, souls reach for each other. And amid all the anguishes of the era, as 2016 turns toward 2017, the images leap from the photo: A girl sitting on a rocker has swaddled a stuffed giraffe then tucked it in beside her. She sits with her picture books. The pages she’s focused on include an apple, a sippy cup, sneakers, a tractor, a boy on a toy car, an orange, a teddy bear, and much more. Her gaze shows that she is learning—even in these times—about the magic of the world she has been both cursed and blessed to be born into.

—Michael A. King is dean of Eastern Mennonite University seminary (where he drew on some of the materials in this column in a presentation) and graduate programs. He writes the column “Unseen Hands” for Mennonite World Review which first published this post.

inspiration

Madison, Max, and Angels Unaware

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MadisonKCPost-MAK300x300x72dpiThis is the story of how Cockatiel Max and Shih Tzu Madison enhanced the well-being of the church. My oversight caused it, but I later wondered if a larger Oversight was also in play.

For months Manuel, as I’ll call him, and I had been trying to coordinate  our schedules. Finally calendars said hallelujah, try this. When I told my wife Joan she thought great, but what about the animals?

Oh my goodness, I’d forgotten. The animals and I live an interesting life. For various reasons, including where Joan’s mother is and because Joan travels constantly providing behavioral health consulting wherever she’s called to, we actually live in two states. Also in the mix are Max and Madison. Six years ago we decided to test whether they’d flourish as commuter animals.

They did. So now they know the routines and are eager to hit the road whenever it’s time to shift states. I’d scheduled the meeting with Manuel. But I’d forgotten Commuter Cockatiel and Shih Tzu. At first all looked fine–weather supposed to be cloudy and cool during the key period; they’d be okay in the car. Then the forecast shifted–sunny and 80s; death trap.

What to do? I wouldn’t return for weeks; trying for a petsitter made no sense. I e-mailed Manuel. Any picnic areas nearby? Could he stand a picnic with my animals if I brought food? He was flexible and understanding and gracious indeed. Absolutely!

At the appointed hour, Manuel told me where to park. There it was, a welcoming picnic table. I placed Max’s cage by the edge of the picnic area and tied Madison’s leash to a table leg.

Manuel broke into a wide grin. “I believe this is historic!”

Our broader context was also historic amid daily shifts in how individuals, congregations, conferences, and organizations linked to it are relating to our denomination.

Our agenda was simple: What might we learn from each other’s journeys? It was a good meeting. Sometimes heartrending as we learned of so much pain in so many places. Sometimes inspiring, as we pondered initiatives for hearing the Spirit within or beyond what is unraveling.

But this isn’t finally about that. It’s about how different it felt to sit in the sun and breezes with Max busily eating food in his cage and Madison exploring or dozing beside us. It didn’t feel like one more heavy meeting, heavy though the topics often were. It felt like a skylight had appeared in the ceiling of the sky and let in the universe. It felt like extra light and sweetness were shining on our picnic.

Time to go. Manuel networked a bit with Max and Madison before returning to his office and whatever cares awaited there. I put Max in his back seat spot and Madison in her dog bed beside me. We headed out this route and that one and finally on to the interstate with sunroof open, light streaming, wind ruffling.

Max and Alphonsa
Commuter Max back in the days he was joined by Alphonsa. Commuting beside them as they mostly ignored each other also used to be our cat Lily. Sadly, not only have Alphonsa and Lily been gone for years, but Max joined them in the great Beyond a few weeks ago.

Max preened before sticking his head under a wing and blissfully napping. Madison turned around and around to smooth out her bed for the six-thousandth time then with nose on paws fell into what seemed an unusually relaxed sleep. This thought arose: Max and Madison must have liked their picnic with Manuel and maybe being angels we entertained unaware.

beauty in blemishes, human finitude, inspiration

Perfect Lawns and Dandelion Wine

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DandelionsKCPost-MAKTheir very different personalities crossed my path just as the annual divide between dandelions as beauty or bane was in full bloom— and  unbidden came a mental image associating one of them with dandelion wine.

Next day as I walked to work paying particular attention, I noted just how stark are the differences in treatment of dandelions. First came a line of lawns radiating deep emerald green perfection. Then just as the eye got used to this as the norm came a ragged blanket of dandelions gone to seed, the line between barbaric chaos and the treated lawn beside it razor sharp.

After that came an unpredictable jumble. Sometimes back to emerald. Sometimes lawns whose owners clearly tolerated dandelions yet had recently mowed them into submission. Sometimes profusions of untidy stalks, heads gone old and gray and wild, gold mostly missing, mixed with unkempt grass and weeds. I haven’t done the demographic studies yet, but I do suspect they would show correlations between dandelion vistas and socio-economic variables.

Then to the personalities. One is more driven, restlessly surveying the horizon for the next opportunity, focused on achieving results, assessing outcomes, revising methods whenever the feedback loop calls for it. Here Big Data is today’s exciting new tool. The numbers are crunched, they point in promising directions, and in fact there is proof in the pudding: often amazing feats are indeed achieved and call for admiration.

The other is more laid back, not exactly somnolent but not driven, either. There may be hints, in more of a heart-softening than problematic form, of brushes with depression. Here data and numbers aren’t irrelevant but are one or two, maybe even three, levels down. First come people. People in all their beyond-statistics quirks, in their sufferings, their ragged edges, their lives sometimes golden but often in dandelion-esque fashion, beautiful today, gone to seed tomorrow.

Next came the progression toward dandelion wine. After spending time with the first personality, I did feel admiration. I also felt unsettled; does the grass really need to be that flawless? Might it be okay to let a few dandelions sneak into even well-manicured lawns— and personalities—to give us their annual saffron carpets, evanescent yet so lovely during their brief flowering? We’re learning that apples or tomatoes modified for beauty and long shelf-life lose their taste; the ones that bless your tongue are the heirloom varieties, blemished,  spots and lumps and oddities dancing with their tastes. Are people maybe sometimes like that too?

After being with the second personality, I realized life felt slower, gentler, calmer. The frenzy had faded. Outcomes mattered less and the tenderness of each passing minute mattered more.

Later that evening, in the afterglow, arrived the image of dandelion wine, which comes from Ray Bradbury’s 1957 novel of that title set in Green Town, Illinois, and of the summer in which Douglas Spaulding, age 12, experiences through dandelions and all that goes with them the very wine of life.

As Bradbury put it in a 1975 introduction, “Dandelion Wine is nothing if it is not the boy-hid-in-the-man playing on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood.”

And as part of telling of that boy growing up and old, Bradbury reports in one chapter, “The Lawns of Summer,” on this special grass, which I imagine creating perfect emerald lawns like the ones I walked by except for one more miracle: it grows to just the right height, then stops. Bill, Grandpa’s boarder, excitedly reports that he’ll plant the new grass and soon enough mowing will be done forever.

But Grandpa has this crazed notion that mowing grass and even pulling weeds can nurture the soul, can be, as he puts it, “a way of life.” The sound of lawn mowers and the smell of cut grass are gifts of being alive he wants never to lose. Not to mention that “a mess of dandelion greens is good eating once in a while” and that the bees will vanish as the high-tech grass kills off dandelions and clover.

He gets through to Bill. When Grandpa wakes from that afternoon’s nap, he hears the mower going again even though Bill had just cut the lawn that morning while anticipating the day the magic grass would put an end to all that. When Grandpa questions Bill, wondering if the sun has addled him, Bill just joyfully grins through a spray of green.

—Michael A. King is dean at Eastern Mennonite Seminary and a vice-president at Eastern Mennonite University; columnist, “Unseen Hands,” for Mennonite World Review;  blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC.

Awe and wonder, holiness, inspiration

Shot Through with Holiness

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HolinessKCPost-MAKAs I headed for retreat in Arizona’s Verde Valley, words of Eastern Mennonite Seminary colleague Linda Alley, insights honed as spiritual director, still rang: “I imagine it as a pilgrimage—the journey itself will teach you and not necessarily the destination. And . . . as every pilgrim comes back changed and brings gifts . . . , you will also. . . . I wish for you many holy moments.”

What happened? Three factors stand out:

First, during retreat, around when the Washington Post (Paul Schwartzman, March 6, 2016) said psychologists and massage therapists report client panic over apocalyptic election scenarios, a loved one called to process such anxiety. What, we pondered, is our hope if this really happens?

Montezuma Well provided one complex response. A spring has long fed this near-lake. Its waters probably originally fell on the Mogollon Ridge far above and miles away 10,000 years ago. Eventually the Well drew people, their cliff houses dating back a thousand years still visible in the rim. The water exits into a channel built perhaps by the Hohokam, who irrigated 60 acres of crops. The National Forest Service says that “For many cultures, Montezuma Well is . . . sacred. . . . a place of power, not to be visited lightly. . . .”

Almost forever, as known human history goes, that spring has fed that well. Now there I was, drawing hope from being alive in this moment, grateful to learn from prior journeyers. Complicating hope was that the cliff houses are empty. The Europeans who eventually arrived didn’t totally destroy the beauty and bounty, but local mesquite trees adapted to almost no rain are threatened as humans lower the water table.

Any hope for our own future will need to thread through the possibility that our culture is already shaping the ruins future civilizations will visit.

From Arizona I traveled into a second factor, politics juxtaposed with the convention of the National Council for Behavioral Health, Joan’s employer. I attended awards evening just as primary election results arrived. Often winning: being biggest, baddest, boldest; urging torture, war crimes, racism, xenophobia.

Although Christian language wasn’t explicit, awards in contrast celebrated serving, in effect, “the least of these,” those facing mental and behavioral challenges.

The climactic award went to a sheriff who talked down from suicide persons preparing to leap from the bridge he monitored. Though that was heroic enough, a standing ovation supported his naming his own depression and his walk with a suicide-tempted son.

Then in a few final Verde Valley hours, I showed Joan my places of pilgrimage. At Sycamore Community Park, she reacted as I had. Through a sometimes worn and dusty town (near tourist-ridden Sedona but entirely different) runs Beaver Creek, lined by ordinary houses, running under an ordinary bridge. Yet it carries the outflow of Montezuma Well. So in its ordinariness Beaver Creek bears millennia of hopes dashed and raised, cultures vanishing and rising.

Sycamore Creek Park
Beaver Creek, Arizona

“But it’s like the Branch,” Joan said.

Branch Creek, Pennsylvania
Branch Creek, Pennsylvania

Precisely. Creeks transposed and viewed from certain angles, only details would have told us which was which. Two-fold holiness: first, this site offered our souls a path into the holy. Second, it reminded that in our own ordinary lives there is, a quick walk from home, holiness as well.

The world does seem to teeter near apocalypse. We don’t know how much will die before resurrection. But I’m grateful for what Linda helped me see along the way.

—Michael A. King is dean at Eastern Mennonite Seminary and a vice-president at Eastern Mennonite University; columnist, “Unseen Hands,” for Mennonite World Review which first published this post;  blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC.

 

Awe and wonder, hope, inspiration

PawPaw, Rockets Whoosh

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“PawPaw,” he excitedly reported, “rockets go up in the air, whoosh!”

The image took me back, instantly, to when I was 14 and for six months lived for almost nothing but waiting for Apollo 11 to take off and turn the type of whooshing-rockets science fiction I loved into reality. If Apollo 11 managed to make it to the moon, who knew, maybe someday we’d arrive on Mars and learn that the haunting stories Ray Bradbury told in The Martian Chronicles were more history than fiction.

“Did you know, Kadyn,” I asked, “that a long long time ago rockets took off and landed on the moon?”

His eyes widened. “They went up, whoosh, to the MOON?”

“Yes, can you believe it? You know what? There are videos of it. Do you want to see one? We could Google it.”

“Yes, yes! Mom, Mom, PawPaw and I are going to watch videos of rockets going to the moon.”

So we Googled Apollo 11 blast-off videos. Of course there they were, link after link. We clicked. YouTube came up. A rocket was sitting there on the screen in the blue day, wisps of smoke puffing out every now and then.

Kadyn was transfixed. “Is it going to go up?”

He had just been singing a nursery song the day before that included “5-4-3-2-1 blastoff.”

“Yes,” I reported, “see those numbers on the screen? They’re counting down to blastoff, and when you hear them get to 5-4-3-2-1, up it will go.”

5-4-3-2-1 goes the count. A great cloud of fire, burning yellow and white and orange and who knows how many colors, surges around the rocket. For a while it just sits there, fire raging and raging.

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Then slowly slowly, startlingly slowly given the fury of the flames, story upon story of that Saturn V rocket crawl up past the holding arms.

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We watch  until the rocket is too far up to see except for the faint contrail.

Then the YouTube screen switches. We’re circling the moon. “Is that the moon, PawPaw? Did the rocket go all the way to the moon?”

We watch and watch. We see the moon lander detach from the moon orbiter. We see Neal Armstrong’s eyes, startlingly steady as they gaze at his flight instruments. We watch the moon’s surface grow closer and closer as Mission Control, down on Earth, monitors the countdown. We watch as the camera steadies. The Eagle has landed.

I found it hard not to shed tears, which I didn’t want to do, given that it would trigger “PawPaw, why are you crying?” and what in the world would I say to that?

I’m still not fully sure why the urge. Maybe because just like that I felt 14 again, before all that was to come, wonders and terrors, had befallen me and the planet. Maybe because it still stuns me that when I was a boy science fiction always primed us to expect more and then yet more. In 1969 we could only imagine what unbelievable things would be happening by 2016. Maybe not spaceships to the stars yet, but surely a colony on the moon? Some people on Mars at least long enough to lay a copy of The Martian Chronicles on the red sand like Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left earth equipment on the moon as Michael Collins waited above for them?

But no. When Kadyn and I watched the Eagle pop back up from the moon to return to Collins, it felt almost more like science fiction than when it first happened. So did it as the cameras panned over people of all races and nations and colors, all over the planet, gazing spellbound at TV screens. How did we do that? How did we manage to be unable now to do it again?

So maybe the tears were about the fading of some dreams. But maybe also about a few more things.

For one, even as Apollo 11 blasted off, people understandably wondered if this was the right way to spend the countless dollars and energies it had taken in a world so awash with deprivation and misery for so many. Barely more than months before, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had been killed. Race riots blazed across U.S. cities and napalm burned the flesh off those we considered our enemies in Vietnam.

Maybe the tears were partly awe that, so many decades later, the world could still produce grandchildren.

Above all, I suspect they were caused by the gift of being able to witness the fresh wonder of a child gazing at images that thrilled his budding mind and spirit. As so much unravels today, his face fixed spellbound on the screen made me pray that, though I’ll be long gone, half a century from now he’ll be in my role. He too, I dream, will share with a grandchild what happened, oh so amazingly, back when he was a boy and the world was in such trouble yet look, yes, here we still are—and can you believe it, this really did happen. Let’s watch!

—Michael A. King is dean at Eastern Mennonite Seminary and a vice-president at Eastern Mennonite University; Mennonite World Review “Unseen Hands” columnist; blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC.

Islam, Peace, The other

Telling It Slant as the Raging Rolls

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KCMainBlogPostThumb200x200x72At a ShopRite in New Jersey some men were huddled. When Heba Macksoud passed by, she heard one mention the word Bible, then add, obscenity mixed in, “not like the Quran those Muslims read.”

The man who deliberately taunted Ms. Macksoud deserves to be called out. So do countless ones of us, incited by ever more startlingly anti-anyone-not-like-us and especially anti-Muslim rhetoric, prepared to treat others as less than human.

At the same time, I was struck that Samuel G. Freedman’s New York Times “Parable on Bigotry and Citizenship Plays Out in a Supermarket” was released just a few days after Farhad Manjoo’s article on “The Internet’s Loop of Action and Reaction Is Worsening.” Manjoo observes that “There is little room for indulging nuance, complexity, or flirting with the middle ground. In every issue, you are either with one aggrieved group or the other, and the more stridently you can express your disdain . . . the better reaction you’ll get.”

Manjoo’s insights suggest that social media is adding considerable complexity to our navigating of this historical moment in which we say ever more horrifying things about those we see as not “us.” This makes me wonder to what extent we need to assess not only content but also form of our communications.  Are there ways to speak nonviolently that bypass the up-the-ante battling frontal statements seem to be creating?

That takes me to  Emily Dickinson on “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” I’m no expert in Dickinson, and depending on what she means to say, I might not quite embrace her every nuance. Some analysts of her poem wonder if she is urging the telling of white lies; shading the truth to be kind, as when she suggests not quite explaining to children the full meaning of lightning; or possibly pointing poetically to aspects of her own life, including sexuality, she was unwilling to speak of directly, perhaps for good reason given her times and circumstances.

Then there’s the fact that today to think of something as “slanted” is often to view it negatively. Merriam Webster’s range of meanings include “to maliciously or dishonestly distort or falsify.” 

But whether I fully know how to understand or accept what Dickinson meant over a century ago by “tell it slant,” amid today’s raging and counter-raging her poem still seems worth attending to. There is something rich and deep going on in her probing of how we who are “infirm” might navigate the surprise and brightness of truth. Might telling it slant mean that instead of constantly beating each other with the clubs of our convictions we found ways to speak that the other could hear?

This seems congruent with data presented by Evan Soltas and Seth Stephens Davidowitz in “The Rise of Hate Search.” Drawing on Google search analysis, they conclude that

appealing to the better angels of an angry mob will most likely just backfire. Subtly provoking their curiosity, giving them new information, and offering them new images of the group that is stoking their rage: That may direct their thoughts in different, more positive directions.

Maybe it’s too much to hope, but I wonder if  the parable of Heba Macksoud is an example of telling it slant with potential to open us to curiosity instead of rage. Because in her story we do see today’s usual clubbing of the other with words of hate and denigration. Yet what we get next is not more hate hurled back.

Instead we’re privileged to learn about Ms. Macksoud’s pain. We can see the human toll of what has been done to her, the shock, the wounding, the exclusion, the fear she expresses to “the store’s assistant manager, Mark Egan. ‘I’m not done shopping,’ Ms. Macksoud recently recalled telling him, ‘but I don’t feel safe here.’”

By the end of the parable what we have taken in is not simply another position statement but the living, breathing realities of human beings. We’re drawn back toward those primal human qualities, compassion and empathy catalyzing justice, in such short supply as we feed the raging floods of action, reaction, counter-reaction. Although it certainly has a slant, the article doesn’t major in the screaming about how bad and wrong we are that often makes us shut down or scream back. We’re mostly allowed to wrestle for ourselves with what insights to draw from Heba Macksoud’s story.

I dare to hope that Emily Dickinson might view this parable as a form of telling it slant. I hope she might see it as honoring the insight with which she closes her poem:  “The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man [sic] be blind—.”

—Michael A. King is dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary and vice-president, Eastern Mennonite University; blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC.