Photo by Ricardas Brogys on Unsplash
Has it been three months already?
On the Friday morning after the Tuesday when New Jersey’s governor was re-elected, on the Friday morning after the Thursday evening when our staff celebrated with good wine, great food and matchless camaraderie, I officially joined the ranks of the consciously uncoupled from the working world.
It wasn’t my first retirement, but it was my first voluntary one.
After I read Sarah Miller’s compelling New Yorker column “Cancel New Year’s Eve Forever,” not only did I agree, but I got to thinking about why people make such a big deal about the so-called new beginning the replacement calendar brings.
First of all, how many beginnings do each of us get? If the beginning involves a new craft, a new skill, a new project, a new way to improve our lives and the lives of others, then the answer is “an infinite number.” Because each of us should be ticking off items from a bottomless bucket list every day of our short and precious lives. The world is too big — the universe is too vastly big — for any of us to box ourselves in and limit our literal and figurative diets to corn flakes and fast-food cheeseburgers. Do you want fries with that?
A little over 45 years ago, I stood in the living room of my college advisor, a beautifully wild man with wild hair and a creative spirit that had lit a fire in me and under me.
I was helping him pack.
He had not been granted tenure, and his contract was up, so he and his young family were heading out to his wife’s family home to work on their next steps.
It was, I recall him saying, the first time in 32 years that he would not be going back to school on Labor Day.
Back to school.
A homily for the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 26, 2020
1 Kgs 3:5, 7-12, Rom 8:28-30, Mt 13:44-52
Have you ever asked for something? Asked Mom or Dad or Uncle Mike or Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny?
Did you get it? After you got it, was it really what you wanted? And even if you thought it was, did you get tired of it after a while? Or, after a long while, did you realize that, no, it really wasn’t what you wanted after all?
A homily for a weekday in Holy Week
Two years ago, I had the honor and privilege of preaching at an interfaith Holy Week service, reflecting on what Jesus did, how he got there, and how our lives affected his. I offer it to you again.
Have you ever gotten a splinter?
A little shard of wood in your fingertip or palm?
Maybe in that spot between the first and second joints on your pointer?
The splinter might have been pretty long, or didn’t go in that far, and you could pull it out quickly, in one piece.
It might have buried itself deep, or the end snapped off, and you had to find some tweezers or stick the end of a pin in a match flame to dig it out.
Perhaps you didn’t get it out right away, and it got irritated, infected, red and sore and maybe really gross. You could get blood poisoning, and at this point you’d need a doctor.
For a splinter. This long. Weighing so little that only a scientific scale can measure it.
A splinter.
Jesus of Nazareth got splinters. As a contractor, as a carpenter in the first century, he worked with simple tools, rudimentary tools. Hand saws, hand planes, mallets, wedges. Nothing stamped “Craftsman” on the side, even though stories about him say he indeed was a craftsman.
His supplies came from around him – trees he or someone cut down, rocks chiseled and split, mud and mortar hand-mixed. Carried on his back, hauled in a barrow, dragged at the end of a rope. No Home Depot cart; no Lumber Liquidators delivery truck. Just the strength of a hard-working man.
Jesus got splinters.
And God though he was, it’s painfully likely that he mis-hit a nail and smashed his thumb with a hammer once or twice. Rocks and bricks gave him blisters and calluses and absolutely scraped his knuckles.
Jesus worked with simple tools and rough materials: Aleppo pine, Hawthorn, Sycamore, Laurel, Willow, cut not at a sawmill nor sanded smooth. The carpenter had his work cut out for him.
Jesus worked with simple tools and rough materials: tax collectors and prostitutes and fishermen. Andrew, James and John. Simon Peter. None of them sanded smooth. The rabbi had his work cut out for him. He preached in parables to keep his message understandable, relatable. He preached a new covenant of divine peace and a baptism of water and the spirit.
Jesus still works with rough materials: us.
Men and women who sin, who turn their backs on our loving God and Creator, who refuse to see Christ in all of Creation, and especially not in their sisters and brothers. Sinners who see differences as the key to labeling and sorting and, once everyone has had some sort of triangle stapled onto them, the most efficient way of pushing people to the margins. Once these undesirables are at arm’s length, it’s easy for those who turn their back on God to build walls to keep them out.
Jesus still works with simple tools. No implement of his is simpler or more elegant than the Law of Love.
Love God, the source of love, and thereby live in love.
Love your neighbor as yourself, for the love of God.
Jesus wrote this law not in ink, but in blood, his blood. Shed for us, for our salvation, on a cross of wood at a filthy place named for rotted corpses. A cross of wood exactly like the wood he had cut and trimmed and smoothed from his boyhood. Exactly like the wood that undoubtedly gave him splinters.
Just for a moment, let’s compare splinters to sin.
If you track sins in bookkeeper-fashion, if you count each stolen candy bar or bigger-than-a-little-white lie – or far worse transgression – as a sin, as a mark against you in the Book of Life, then any one of us could have contributed mightily to the wood of the cross, one splinter at a time.
But if you view sin holistically, if you consider sin to be a life lived in the darkness, committed by a person rejecting the Light of Christ, then you can see how all those splinters combined – millions and billions of them squeezed together like modern plywood – all those splinters gave the Sanhedrin and the Romans plenty of wood to hang Jesus on.
The sins of everyone who ever lived or ever would live.
History is hazy on how much of the cross the Christ drag-carried to Golgotha. A typical prisoner of the Romans who had been condemned carried the crosspiece, something like the landscaping ties we use in our gardens today. Estimated weight: 75 to 125 pounds.
The Nazarean was no ordinary prisoner, though, and to make a horrible example of him, the Romans may have forced him to carry the upright and the crosspiece, some 300 pounds of wood. No wonder the Cyrenean was pressed into service to assist Jesus. Despite his years of work, and the rugged body that came with it, the scourged 33-year-old with blood flowing from razor-sharp thorns mashed into his head had to struggle up Mount Calvary.
In Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” the ghost of Jacob Marley tells Scrooge about his fetters: “I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.” Marley speaks of the sins he and Scrooge committed by choosing to steal, to extort. For him, for them, the sins accumulated as chain links.
Jesus was nailed to the cross all of humanity created. We made it splinter by splinter, and yard by yard.
We’re still adding to it.
Jesus accepted the will of the Father; he felt the pain, the agonizing, physical pain that mirrored the emotional pain our loving God feels when we walk in darkness, when we break our family ties with God.
And on our behalf, as a true representative of all humanity, Jesus conquered the cross. He conquered sin. Every sin. Millions and billions.
His resurrection from the dead gave us the new birth that we all need, that we all should choose.
In coming down from the cross and rising from the dead, Jesus shattered all misconceptions about how people are to treat each other on this earth, and how we are to daily renew and strengthen our relationship with God. To embrace the Law of Love.
We do this by avoiding the big sins that masquerade as tiny splinters, and by plucking out the ones we cannot avoid. We pray for forgiveness and healing and the grace of God to stay away from repeat injury.
We do this by never becoming splinters in the lives of our sisters and brothers whoever and wherever they may be, and by never being polluting splinters that diminish the glory of God’s creation.
We do this by remembering how the wood of the cross came to be, and by remembering how painful even the tiniest splinter can be.
To ourselves.
To God.
For two days — once in late December, once on Jan. 13 — crowds gathered outside the New Jersey State House chanting “Kill the bill!”
They opposed proposed legislation that would have drastically reduced the number of exemptions parents could cite when deciding not to vaccinate their children. Most of the exemptions that were being stripped qualified as religious in nature.
The anti-vaxxers and their small fry were carrying placards, of course.
My God. My child. My choice.
You’re pHARMing my child.
Not MY Government.
… and other variations on the theme.
On an issue of public health — public health — the operative word was “my.”
All through the day, I, me, mine, I, me, mine, I, me, mine. No one’s frightened of saying it.
“Hagar the Horrible,” the comic strip by Dik and Chris Browne in which the eponymous character’s job is pillaging and stealing, takes a backhanded swipe at this notion. Hagar’s motto?
“I Got Mine.”
This is where the Founding Fathers totally screwed up. As children of The Enlightenment, they believed in the innate goodness and essential superiority of the individual, and in the notion that individual exceptionalism would serve the common good.
The way the Whigs in wigs figured it, the more rights each individual was accorded, the greater society would become.
That worked somewhat well when people were in close proximity. If your exercising your right to spit, for example, brought about a tuberculosis outbreak, you usually knew to refrain from expectoration. You used your rights judiciously because you could see the immediate impact of anything you did.
Civility guided behavior … often, if not always.
But Westward Ho! added “rugged” to the notion of individualism, because prairie people usually had no one to rely on but themselves. So it’s understandable that they came to believe that nobody else knew what they were going through because, of course, nobody else was going through exactly what they were.
Understandable.
What’s not understandable is how rugged individualism born of necessity on the Great Plains morphed into a nationwide I Know Better Than Anybody Else.
Into I Got Mine And It Sucks To Be You.
Climate change? Denied.
Vaccinations for “herd immunity”? Not for My Child.
The road’s shoulder? My personal right-turn lane.
A long line on the exit ramp? I’ll jam in up front.
Ten items or fewer? I only have 13; that’s close enough.
The store closes at 8? C’mon, it’s only 8:03.
In the civil society the Founders envisioned — the kind they hoped Congress and the executive and judicial would embody — people who revel in their individual rights also remember that other people have rights, too.
The Earth belongs to our children, not us.
My baby, too young to get vaccinated — though she will — could die from the measles your child gave her.
You’ll get to the intersection soon enough — and there’s no turn on red, anyway.
The people waiting to exit are just as late as you are, and where they’re going might be more important than your destination.
The shopper with only five items has a family waiting for dinner.
The cashier put in a full day. He really wants to get home and feed his dog and then get off his feet.
Rugged individuals may have had unique solo experiences. In our interconnected world, we’re all going through the same annoyances.
I, Me, Mine?
We, Us, Ours.
The all-night Pathmark had an ambiance and a community all its own.
Well, maybe “community” is stretching it. At 2 a.m., the Pathmark had an assortment of fellow travelers who only slightly acknowledged each other’s presence as they scooped up everything from the cliché bread and milk to a full week’s — or full fortnight’s — load of groceries.
Those folks — often, myself included — qualified as visitors, or as casual members of the aforementioned community. The permanent “residents” — shelf stockers, Michelle the cashier who did other stuff but I’m not sure what, truck unloaders — to them, Pathmark in the wee hours was their temple.
People who work at night, or whose jobs start at zero dark thirty or end at bar-closing time, might as well be elves, considering how they’re often viewed. What they do seems to happen magically, reliably, predictably. Often quite creatively. Just as often, not. And that’s OK. It’s all necessary.
Think about who those folks are. We’ve met the Pathmark natives; the visitors included women in surgical scrubs, men and women ostensibly in the custodial field, the occasional peace office or first responder, new parents (usually dads) lost in the baby food aisle, fashionably dressed commuter-type people, and past-deadline journalists.
Every one of them — every one of us — are doing something at night so the rest of the world can function during the day.
Though it’s been years since I worked the evening or night shift steadily, I still come alive after the sun goes down. It’s odd, considering I have … well, not exactly a fear of the dark, but a low, unconscious dread of what may lurk in the uncertainty that darkness engenders.
I find I’m most creative and most productive under artificial light, the gloom barely an arm’s length away. Other people draw more deeply into their own selves as any given day winds down, which offers me the solitude I need to concentrate most fully.
I love people, but, oh, that Cone of Silence!
I think again of the night crew at the late, lamented Pathmark.
I was in the store more than once when Michelle announced lunch break (hey, it’s lunch when it’s in the middle of your day, regardless of what hours you consider to be your day). But unlike the chatty, energetic midday meals shared by coworkers I came to see in my 9-to-5 days, the night guys scattered, ate quietly, and with their body language threw a DMZ around themselves.
Which made me review the others in the store. Most of them, and especially the regulars, had portable DMZs around themselves. Not antisocial, but asocial.
Because this was their time, whether by choice in the first place or by making the best of the situation.
Some social scientists say that we need alone time in amounts that correspond directly with how deeply, how intensely we absorb the world around us, and especially how deeply we connect with other people, how much of their crosses we help them carry.
That may well explain it: This disconnection, enabled by a night schedule, can help people be better spouses, parents, friends, children of the Almighty. I prefer to believe this, and not that those people are cranky sourpusses.
Of course, with the store long gone, I’ll never know for sure.
A work in progress. Contributions welcome.
Years ago, when ads for smoking were permitted on television, one brand ginned up a faux debate about how grammatical its slogan was or wasn’t.
I have no idea why; did they think people intelligent enough to know spelling and syntax and the like were stupid enough to suck on cancer sticks?
Anyway, the fine folks from North Carolina staged a quibble-fest between their existing “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should” and “Winston tastes good, as a cigarette should.”
(Winston tastes like $#1t, as all cigarettes do. But that’s off the topic.)
This series of ads capitalized on the notion that language is always changing, evolving, reflecting the times and the people who speak it. Those of us who make, or have made, their livings shaping written or spoken communication know we walk a Wallenda-style tightrope balancing grammatical purists on one side and vernacular evolutionaries on the other.
My first real head-butt came early in my editing career when the estimable Robert Wright, he of later accomplishments and prestige in historical and scientific journalism, insisted on using “presently” interchangeably with “currently.” His insistence: It’s a variation of “at present,” having shed its “momentarily” definition the way a snake sheds its skin.
Bob and his allies won this battle; scarcely anyone outside of broadcasters on the BBC and scholars of Shakespeare use “presently” in its classical form. Far fewer people would understand it, even in context.
And so goes the vernacular. Language belongs to those who understand and are understood.
Still, I’d argue that we usually have a plethora of synonymous options that would obviate rewriting a definition merely because a word seems as if it should mean something it doesn’t. “Presently” has “present” within it, right? Or so goes the argument.
Interestingly enough, the clarity and spatiality that, first, CDs and now nonstop streaming services added to the flood of remastered 1960s rock also exposed us to lyrics we could only guess at when we heard them on 16-transistor Kent AM radios. British and some American lyricists peppered their tunes with allusions to Tolkien — “…in the darkest depths of Mordor / I met a girl so fair / But Gollum, the evil one, crept up / And slipped away with her” — and dozens of other literary lights who used florid language. Who used “presently” to mean “shortly.”
Please note, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” doesn’t count.
For reasons that will become clearer early this December, I’ve had The Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four” kicking around my brain a lot, and one adjective my mother’s mother used a lot — “dear” — has lost any meaning save “sweetheart.”
Every summer we can rent a cottage
In the Isle of Wight, if it’s not too dear
We shall scrimp and save…
Presently — Then: shortly, in a little while. Now: now.
Dear — Then: expensive. Now: loved, lovely, cute.
…to be continued. What are your words?
Some commercials are annoying. Some are outright embarrassments to anyone who has even attempted to act. Some — JSM — are both.
Television ads for certain products, especially for medicines or so-called biologics, make you wonder who skimmed off the production budget, because there’s no way the client got their money’s worth.
Let’s start with the commercial for Jardiance that features a band director just a little too into marching onto the field with her high schoolers. Hips sway, arms swing, she’s totally in control. We’re to believe her Type 2 diabetes is under control as well.
The commercial’s director decided a ground-level shot of the band would make the ad more interesting, and in most circumstances that would be true. But the shot captures the band marching onto the field, and John Philip Sousa must be turning over in his grave at how out of step these kids are.
The band director may be On It — per the slogan — but if her diabetes is being managed as well as the band’s routines, well….
Next is the “aww-ahh-ee-ahh” band for Humira, whose singer battles a serious intestinal disorder. It seems an odd career choice for someone whose condition is not yet being treated.
But let’s not discriminate. Musicians do get sick like the rest of us. It’s just that the whole storyboard and script for this travesty would be preposterous if no one in the band were debilitated.
In the alleged recording studio, the musicians are too close together, their mics are not properly filtered — the singer’s microphone definitely would pick up the drumming — and the keyboardist can’t see the rest of the band, until she is shocked and dismayed that the vocalist is heading for the loo.
And what band takes the stage without their singer unless she’s supposed to bounce out at a dramatic point in the song? Just standing around in front of a crowd?? Stage managers and crew would never let that happen, even if the band was naive enough to try.
Both of these ads are embarrassing because somebody convinced the suits somewhere that TV-watchers in America have no idea what goes on at high schools or at concerts.
The ads that drip into the Annoying Bucket usually involve clichéd characters, especially ones who appear in a continuing series — a continuing saga, if you will — and whose character development is cringe-worthy.
Progressive Insurance has Jamie. Liberty Mutual Insurance has Doug.
Ugh.
Here’s my overarching point:
Hard-working actors can and do use commercials as springboards into steadier gigs, especially actors whose recurring characters have some humanity to them.
Melanie Paxson (zillions of commercials, especially FiberOne), Milana Vayntrub (Lily of AT&T) and Morgan Smith (the red-haired Wendy’s salad spokeswoman) come to mind. I’m sure you recognize them. They’ve made the leap.
Commercial actors such as these get 60, 30 or even 15 seconds at a time to let their character skills be known and shown. When the character is ridiculous — I still feel sad for the Big Lots! human exclamation point woman — when the character is a joke, then whoever portrays Liberty-Bibberty Struggling Actor will remain just that.
Actors already struggle too much.
The range blew up the other night.
Well, not the entire range. Just one heating coil on the 20-ish-year-old GE freestanding stove.
It went kerblooey.
And then some.
From where I was sitting in the living room, kerblooey was more gerRANnerrrrazzZAPPP, with a light show that put the Grucci Brothers to shame.
After the excitement and a cooling-off period, the coil, from one of the two small burners, had a crater near its center, not big enough for the Eagle to land in but enough like Tranquility Base to commemorate Apollo 11.
Fortunately, no injuries to humans or felines, though there was a massive adrenaline rush. Nothing burned, although the flare-up blew the electrical cable off the end of the coil, knocked the connection bracket off the underside of the stove top, and welded the connector screw to the opening where the drip pan sits.
The service tech was nonplussed as, two days later, he assessed the damage. Something must have spilled, he said; that’s how these things short out and go up like that.
I wasn’t going to argue with him, even though that was not what we recall happening. This wasn’t spilled napalm; this was The Nader Effect.
Fifty-four years after Ralph Nader outed Planned Obsolescence in “Unsafe at Any Speed,” Andrea and I are swimming in a maelstrom of repairs and replacements.
Our phones are paid off. So the batteries don’t hold a charge as long as they used to.
New tires for me this week. New tires for Andrea last quarter.
New storm door two weeks ago.
And now, new stove.
Repairs to ol’ Bombs Bursting in Air would have equaled — if not exceeded — the cost of an exact replacement now on sale (it’s still called Columbus Day in New Jersey). So we buy instead of fix.
Folks who know us know we are crazy for maintenance. Oil changes on time. Wash and wax when the road salt sticks. Balance and rotate.
Our cars last 200K.
So it’s a doggone sin that Planned Obsolescence interrupts our rhythm, let alone our finances.
Now, I will concede that going-on-two-decades is a good run for any appliance, especially one that handles temperature extremes and the clang-banging of pots and pans.
But, still.
Planned Obsolescence? Must our disposable-consumer-goods economy, with tariffs slapped on so, so many items made in China or elsewhere, be the only model? Do we have to buy cheap?
I miss owning shoes whose soles could be mended, because what passes for shoes today wear out just when I get the leather on the uppers as soft as butter and as shiny as a mill pond, and I have to toss them and start breaking in new ones.
I still have — and often use — the hammer and Crescent wrench that hung from my backstage tool belt as a collegiate theater tech.
I still have — and occasionally wear — the scarf my Mom gave me in fourth grade, in the last century!
And even folks who are tortured by frequent software updates (where is 19H2, Microsoft?) will concede that the apps or OSes are better afterward.
So instead of Planned Obsolescence, instead of The Nader Effect, let’s transition to The Deacon’s Masterpiece.
Oh, Shay, can you see?
P.S. — I’m not that deacon.
