Mr. Trump’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

I have to say, I like it when President Tweet has a very bad day. I love my country, I care deeply about justice, and I treasure this beleaguered planet; so when the man-child is pouting, I’m feeling upbeat. I know that probably doesn’t make any sense, because when he’s grumpy, he’s likely to lash out and do something stupid like fire one of our last remaining respectable public servants or drop a bomb or something.

Still, I’m as petty as the next pastor.

You know, it’s a damn good thing I’m serving on the pastoral team at my church right now because I’m forced to maintain some kind of online decorum, such as it is. Otherwise, I might stoop to the level of the new White House Director of Communications. Well, OK, I couldn’t be that despicable if I tried.

Actually, this fine fellow, Don Vito Corleone, likely provided President Tweet with his only smiles yesterday when he called up and spewed physical threats and utterly crass sexual obscenities about several of his colleagues at the White House. Oh, you missed that? It’s a must read for any American (adults only).

This guy — actual name Anthony Scaramucci, and not technically a mafia Don that we know of — is our president’s new best friend. He makes the president’s pu#$&y grabbing look like a game of Tiddlywinks.

Anyway, the man-child’s giggles after Scaramucci’s bit of fun didn’t last long.

Sorry Boy Scouts

Imagine his chagrin when the Boy Scouts of America found it necessary to apologize for the presidential (not) speech given at their annual jamboree. And he’d thought it was such a good speech — he even got the kids to boo our last president! While President Tweet’s mental illness clearly prevents him from experiencing shame, at least the Boy Scout’s official apology shamed everyone else involved, so that’s good.

But Boy Scouts, soy sprouts, right? What difference do they make to a big, important boy who grew up to be President of the United States? Not much. However, the next Big Boys to fire a salvo yesterday carry more than toy guns, and their weapons are loaded with real bullets.

Big Boys with Real Guns

The Joint Chiefs of Staff — the freaking military Joint Chiefs  — publicly blew off their Commander in Chief’s tweeted order to discriminate against transgender troops. They basically said, we aren’t going to do anything until he gets his act together. Period. Oh, and they also included a pretty direct hit on their Commander: “In the meantime, we will continue to treat all of our personnel with respect.”

Ouch.

Senate Charade

But the biggest ouch came very late in the day, actually in the wee hours of this morning when the courageous GOP was trying to cram through a “healthcare” bill that they crafted over lunch and released at 10 p.m., just hours before the vote. You know, the one that Senator Lindsey Graham called a “fraud” and “a disgrace” and then voted for anyway? That one.

Mind you, I used to work in politics. I’ve seen it all when it comes to dirty politics. I saw a senator trade his vote to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in a tennis game bet. No lie.

Worth a tennis bet, right?

Nevertheless, I have never seen anything as shameful as what I witnessed last night, watching Republican senators refuse to allow the Democrats to make comments or even ask questions on the bill they had just received, a life and death measure affecting every American. No hearings, no markups of legislation, no public input, no expert witnesses, no rule of law.

Late Night Miracle

I stayed up watching the vote on CNN, cheering on the Democrats who kept trying to interrupt the GOP monologue, and praying very hard that in some Republican office, some Senator was going to be smitten by an attack of conscience, common sense, and/or patriotism and decide to vote against the sham.

Two brave GOP women senators –Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski — had put up with haranguing from their male colleagues all week, yet continued in their principled stand against the bill. But with the Vice President pacing the Senate floor waiting to break a tie vote, the women would not be enough.

That wasn’t the only thing Pence was there to break. In a back room, he twisted Senator John McCain’s bad arm (OK, OK, hyperbole) for twenty minutes before the vote, but the old POW had seen far worse in Vietnam.

McCain can recall when the Senate used to be “the greatest deliberative body in the world,” and with nothing to lose as he heads into brain cancer treatment, McCain just said no.

No.

And with that, millions of Americans (myself included) breathed easier, knowing that they will have healthcare a while longer. And the man-child’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day got markedly worse.

A bad day for President Tweet is a good day for most of us

Trump’s Discrimination Against Transgender Americans

I wanted to write about tea — it’s the word prompt of the day, and a subject about which I am very passionate. Then the latest presidential tweet was vomited forth, and I must instead write about a different type of T.

The T in LGBTQ.

I have 4 transgender friends that I know of: one I’ve known since he was a child, one I worked with for more than a decade, one’s a neighbor, and one’s a new friend from Wild Goose Festival.

My heart is just breaking for them today. The president of the United States is harnessing the ignorant hatred that many Americans hold for them and using it for political gain. There are no words to describe my feelings. I am just so, so sorry. I feel sick for you, my friends.

Today the man in the White House tweeted – TWEETED – his decision that trans people can no longer serve in the military. I don’t know what that means for the 15,000-plus who are already in the military. I guess they’re fired.

So the coward who avoided the draft because his feet hurt (but not enough to slow down his tennis game) is now firing service men and women because of who they are. And why? Here’s why:

In case you can’t read that, it’s a reporter who was told by a White House official that this is a good wedge issue for the 2018 election. Democrats will be forced to defend LGBTQ people in states where a lot of blue collar workers hate them.

There you have it, folks. That’s your president.

And just for the irony of it, I will tell you that on this very day in 1948, President Harry Truman signed an executive order that banned discrimination in the military.

It’s probably best that I not spew my raw outrage and despair. There’s enough ugliness out there, and as a Christ-follower, I hope not to contribute to it. I’d like to write about tea, but I can’t.

I’ll just share this old poem from Martin Niemöller, which grows more relevant each day:

Muslims, Hispanics, Pre-existing conditions, Transgender . . .

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Further Heresy: Sage & Crystals

I’ve been burning a sage stick lately. I just wanted to get that out there and let the “Happy Housewife” Christian lady know. After all, confession is good for the soul.

I purchased the sage stick at a rock and mineral swap in a tiny town in New Hampshire, where I also bought a lovely piece of quartz with opalescent slivers inside it. Yes, quartz is a crystal, which some Christians believe is just about as heretical as a sage stick.

They think that crystals are “new age,” or “false idols” or “occult.” Never mind that Saint Theresa of Avila’s beloved sixteenth-century spiritual classic “Interior Castle” is based on the contemplation of a crystal:

“I thought of the soul as resembling a castle, formed of a single diamond or a very transparent crystal, and containing many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions . . . there are many rooms in this castle, of which some are above, some below, others at the side; in the centre, in the very midst of them all, is the principal chamber in which God and the soul hold their most secret intercourse.”

Contemplating nature is a time-honored way to reflect upon and connect with the holy. Jesus was forever talking about sparrows and types of soil and grains of wheat. He found lessons about God in everything around him. I feel closer to God in nature than anywhere else, so it stands to reason that I would want to use natural elements in my prayer time.

I light my sage stick and walk around my house, asking God to fill my home with Her spirit of peace and love and joy. I ask that She fill every space with the fragrance of Christ. (I don’t do this if my cat is downstairs, because it gives her a violent sneezing fit.)

I don’t believe crystals and sage sticks are magical or contain or control spirits; I think they are relaxing and beautiful. God made the rocks and the plants, and She gave us an appreciation for rich aromas and beautiful objects. We are intimately and organically connected to the plants and to the elements, and that’s why they help us embody our spirituality and connect with the Creator.

Here’s another confession: I am still a tad annoyed at the internet assaults launched by the Happy-Housewife Christian lady. So although she has already condemned me to hell for loving gay people, I am hoping to further annoy her with my hippy prayer practices. So there.

At least I am not cozying up to power and engaging in idol worship of a political leader like some other pastor-types.

Headed to Hell with the Homosexuals

A nice Christian lady just told me I was going to hell, apparently accompanied by many of my friends. “What kind of person are you?” she squawked. (Even over the anonymous internet, I could tell she was squawking.)

What set her off was my saying that I love my gay friends and family just the way they are, and so does God.

I’m headed to hell, she says, for “condemning the homosexuals to eternal death by allowing them to live in their sin.” (I wonder how many she has “saved” from this fate with her loving and compassionate spirit?)

I told her I hoped that God would bless her with a gay loved one who would have the courage to withstand her scorn and perhaps help her to see the Divine in every single person.

She assured me that she never scorned anyone and followed that up by telling me I was a liar and a fraud and should be ashamed of myself. 

“Happy Housewife” (her online name) told me that I am directly contradicting the teachings of Christ, who repeatedly said that homosexuals will never see heaven. I pointed out to her several times that no, actually, Jesus never said word one about homosexuality. She said what about Leviticus, and I said that, um, Leviticus was written well before Christ’s birth, and anyway if she cared to look into the cultural context and etymology of the verse, it clearly refers to temple prostitutes and sex slaves, not to two gay people sharing a loving relationship.

She said she didn’t want to hear any of my “cultural crap,” that she had heard enough of my “homosexual lies.”

I blocked her, lest I be tempted to waste any more time.

The Bullying Pulpit

This was all in response to an article about yet another well-respected Christian leader and author being threatened by his publishing house and having all his speaking engagements canceled because he said in an interview that he would perform a same-sex marriage.

Here are the words of Reverend Eugene Peterson that shook the evangelical’s pulpits:

“I know a lot of people who are gay and lesbian and they seem to have as good a spiritual life as I do. I think that kind of debate about lesbians and gays might be over.”

Heresy! You will never publish or speak publicly again!

Within a day, Peterson had been bullied into retracting his words and repenting of his momentary slip into love. 

Here is a recent piece about the hub-bub by one of my favorite bloggers, John Pavlovitz, whom I got to hear speak at the Wild Goose Festival last week. He concludes:

“I can only keep working to make American Christianity a place of love for everyone. Meanwhile I’ll lament Eugene Peterson’s public change of heart because of what it says, perhaps not as much about him, as about my faith tradition’s sickness, about the way it has lost the plot, about the pain it causes.

Most of all I’ll grieve the damage still being done to beautiful people, simply trying to walk this planet without having to fear religious people.”

“Opinions may be mistaken. Love never is.”

— Harry Emerson Fosdick

 

Sacred Soil

I’m doing laundry, watching the last of the silty North Carolina river soil circle the drain and disappear. I’m always low when I first return from my annual pilgrimage to the Wild Goose Festival on the banks of the French Broad river. After spending four days with two-thousand-plus “spiritual misfits” immersed in spirit, justice, music and art, it’s hard to return to the “real” world.

My friends and I have been on sacred ground, sacred meaning “holy” or “set apart for or by God.” We set ourselves apart from our busy calendars and to-do lists and the traffic and the email and even wi-fi (!!!), and we dug our roots deep into the soil of truth and love and living spirit.

Standing on sacred ground at the Wild Goose Festival

Soil is what feeds us and nourishes us. It’s what we are made of. As the Bible says, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Down by the river, we remember. We remember our true selves. We remember that we are connected to every other wounded soul on the planet – past, present, and future. And we remember that we have responsibilities to all those other souls.

We are each called to heal and to become our best, healthiest selves, now more than ever. Our very planet depends on it. 

What soil will we choose for nourishment?

We can sink our roots into the polluted soil of judgement and contempt and divisiveness, or we can choose the sacred soil of love and openness and peacemaking.

For a few precious days, my thirsty roots penetrated deep into the sacred soil by the rushing river. It will take some time to see what grows. I have pages and pages of notes, and my head is full of rainbow flags and sung psalms and the smell of campfires. I’m not quite ready to write about it. If you are curious or impatient, you can use the search function on this blog to find my posts from past festivals while you breathlessly await my 2017 Goose musings. 

Moving Van

MOVING VAN:

My neighbor Van is moving. I was surprised to find myself fighting back tears yesterday when he stopped by to bid farewell. I have several real friends “on the hill” here in New Hampshire, but I’d considered Van more of an acquaintance — the guy who owns the pet cemetery down the road. I had not realized that I actually love the old fellow.

Over the years, I’ve spent countless hours sitting on the porch of Van’s little barn chatting about this and that, because that’s what folks up here do. This and that is front and center. Weather, wells, winters, tractors, pig slop, poison ivy . . . this and that.

Van occasionally beckons me inside the barn, a  country-style man cave, where he offers me a Budweiser and shows me his newest acquisitions, treasures like chicken-slaughtering implements, giant broken freezers that he’s going to fix one day, or burlap bags he’s stitched together to hold turkey feed.

We stroll in his garden and he points out what’s coming up and where the bugs have gotten to the squash and would I like some mint and basil? He shows me the latest improvements to his outdoor rainwater shower that he’s cobbled together from plastic pipe and a rusted industrial drum that once held God-knows-what.

Every week or so, I hear, “Anybody home?” and there he is at the back door, hands full of fresh eggs, cucumbers, and tomatoes. Occasionally he forgets I’m a vegetarian and brings me fresh bloody chicken breasts which I graciously accept and then quietly pass on to my other neighbors.

So that’s our relationship.

That, and politics.

Because here’s the thing: Van is a conservative. And not just a conservative, but a Trump-loving, NRA-supporting, “live free or die” New Hampshire conservative. The kind I’ve spent my entire environmental career fighting against. And I love him anyway. We tease each other, purposely provoke outrage, and shake our heads at our battling bumper stickers. And we laugh. Van has a glorious laugh.

Maybe that’s why I’m so sad that he’s leaving. In the time of trump, I wonder — will friendships like ours ever again be able to take root and grow?

My Friend