Zealots

2000 years ago, there were many players on the stage leading to the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ. Among them were the Roman overloads and their lackeys, the priests, Pharisees and scribes, the mob, zealots, the disciples, and the Christ.

The zealots dreamed of the coming Messiah riding at the head of an army driving the Romans out of Jerusalem, and reining in there place. What they mostly did was attack people whom they considered sympathizers to the Romans, in other words they attacked those they claimed to be fighting for, much the way modern terrorist routinely attack what they consider soft targets. Some scholars believe Judas, a zealot, betrayed Jesus in an attempt to force Him to start this final war.

It is sad the Hutaree, the so called Christian militia making news this last week, did not learn the lesson Judas offers them. Evan if everything their paranoia led them to believe is true; they still chose Judas as a model for their actions. Evan if they plotted to kill no one, they still advocated buying guns for the coming battle and taught themselves to kill. Give them every benefit of the doubt and they still betray Christ and give fuel to all who would discredit Him. They ignore the command “Be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of His might.” Eph 6:10,
And the admonition, “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood,” Eph 6:12a.

Repent, you zealots, turn from your own fear and fear and trust in the Lord. It is the beginning of wisdom for you.

Thou Shall Not Lie

In the eighties I lived in a little town in Wisconsin about sixty miles north of Madison. I used to go to this dinner on highway 51 to drink coffee where in the corner James Wickstrom used to sit, holding court, recruiting for the Posse Comitatus, a pre cursor of the militia patriot movement.

They believed in the threat of a New World Order led by a cabal of the usual suspects, bankers, and politicians, the U.N. They held that all federal authority was in cahoots with, or were at least unwitting goons controlled by the cabal and therefore enemies of the people, i.e. the Posse and like-minded individuals. They called on all God fearing patriots to rise up against this insidious plot. They particularly didn’t like the DNR (Department of Natural Resources) and judges, particularly the ones that their members came up against in a court of law and found them guilty of various crimes, or the ones that had a liberal civil rights record or pro DNR rulings.

I remember a mimeographed flyer in particular showing a judge lynched from a light pole and something about citizens rising up in righteous indignation. The Posse also had connections with some group called The Order, if I recall, advocating the use of black people as farm animals and killing Jews out right. The thing that all these New World Order nut jobs had in common was the belief in the Jewish bankers behind it all.

Do I have to say it? These Hutaree people are whacked. God does not call anyone to arm themselves for the coming end times.
Thou Shall Not Kill. There are no exceptions made in the command. There is no arming one’s self just in case God changes his mind. Plea self defense, plea anything you want, but it is not a Christian act to arm oneself with assault rifles and practice killing in the name of God.

Please, beloved, do not be silent about this, about some one on Facebook playing lip service to the idea that this is God fearing, that the idea of a Jewish cabal behind the destruction of the World Trade Center is anything less than racism, that it was an inside job is anything less than right wing paranoid propaganda. God does not call us to shoot abortion doctors or excuse people who do. We are not called to vilify our political opponents. Quit listening to these blow hard radio people who exhibit the opposite of Christian values. Baring false witness is sin. Spreading unfounded propaganda is baring false witness.

You who call yourselves spiritual, leaders of the church, or at least your congregations, call sin a sin, be a light in the darkness, do not listen to false prophets and say nothing.

Happy Birthday Julie

Today’s blog is dedicated to Julie, my fabulous occupational therapist who heals people and makes them smile at the Jessie Brown VA on Damen, with out which my fingers would not be able to negotiate these keys allowing me to write a coherent sentence. She is an angle, though if she’s wearing a disguise, I can’t tell, although she might be dressed as a flower child from the sixties.

Happy birthday Julie from a great big fan.

Being Civil

In an unprecedented move, Christians from both sides of the isle signed a document pledging civility towards one another. They further agreed not to disparage each other with lies and innuendo.

The admonition to “love one another” was brought to their attention by its stark absence in the health care debate. “That’s right,” said one surprised follower of Christ. “We’re supposed to be nice to each other, aren’t we?”

With the mention of Glen Beck, a prominent Mormon and commentator, it was disclosed mister Beck is outside the pale and therefore not covered by the Civility Covenant, allowing him to be disparaged with impunity.

In an opposing argument some well-known Christian leaders sighted The Almighty’s wraths and judgment over blatant sin.

"Look what happened to Haiti and Godless New Orleans. “If you love me, you will obey my word.” They said, quoting such prominent personalities as Charles Manson and David Koresh. “It’s a passing fad. I’m sure in due time we’ll return to the fundamentally rigid views of our past. This notion of tolerance of views in opposition to the right ones has got to stop.”

Calling

So, I haven’t written in the blog for days and now I’m getting guilty and that just makes things more difficult. I start thinking I’m somehow betraying somebody or myself because I feel this supposed to vibe.

Of course it’s me giving it out, maybe all the time, thinking there’s always something I’m supposed to be doing that I’m not. The problem is I think that’s accurate, that there’s always some call I’m not heeding, always some lack in myself. Understandable seeing I am a finite being and woefully incapable of understanding everything and, to my way of thinking, it’s kind of silly to think I’m not screwing something up, proceeding with not enough information down a path with a fork in the road every time I blink.

I mean, isn’t it true? I face countless decisions every day, probably most of which I don’t even take the time to notice I’ve decided anything at all, doing things because that’s the way I do them, living life with a mostly unconscious, barely examined, or even acknowledged pride in my own way of thinking.

I am a man, after all. I’ve been around the block more then a few times and have gained a certain amount of street smarts, some bit of gut instinct that, in all honesty, has helped out quite a bit over the years. However, the statement falls apart if examined even a little bit. We do not use the words we use by accident. They have meaning beyond our intended discourse. To use a literary term, we are unreliable narrators of our own stories, leavening unintended clues behind often disclosing the opposite of what we claim. This phrase, “I’ve been around the block a few times,” used to convey a wider understanding then that of the average Joe, totally misses the fact “Been around the block” is a uniquely individual and local event and fails to acknowledge the wider world I have not been around. It doesn’t matter how big the block is, it’s still just my block lived in isolation. The truth is, everything I know is suspect.

The truth is I will never have enough information, will never run out of things I’m supposed to be doing, there will always be something I’m called to that I haven’t started yet, always a place to go He will show me.

That’s a good thing. It would be kind of boring otherwise, don’t you think?

A Wing And A Prayer

I’m trying everything I can think of, including this blog, to find a freelance writing gig. Professionally, I have no experience. I have been writing for over thirty years, have a degree, had a few thing published. And now here I am, flying on a wing and a prayer.

In my experience with life and spiritual things, God likes sudden death overtimes. He likes to wait until the last moment before He sends in the reinforcements. I hope that’s not what He’s waiting for. I hope more He’s not giving me over into the hands of the Philistines, another thing He has been known to do. The trouble with delusion is, you’re deluded and you don’t recognize it.

That’s also the trouble with being human. We are finite creature trying to decide the right thing to do with only a tiny fraction of the facts. We delude ourselves, sighting our supposedly big brains and reason and science and our five senses into believing we can figure at least some of life out. We think since we know that one and one make two we can jump to the conclusion that one thing and another thing make something we can define categorically, systematically naming its parts and catalogue it and write every thing in a book so we can tell ourselves we have the facts, inconvertible truth that we know what we’re talking about.

The difference between people of faith and those not making the claim is not that people of faith don’t claim to know, but that we make it with the knowledge our claim is suspect, that there is something greater out there than us we hope is good or at least benign. If we understand at all we try and live with the idea it is only in part that we know and there is far more mystery than understanding.

So I don’t know. Maybe I was given time to write. Maybe I’m just taking it because I can’t figure out anything else to do? I’m taking it on faith that all things work together for good for those in Christ Jesus. I don’t get to know before hand. Sometimes I don’t get to know after. Frankly I don’t always have enough information to recognize the good if it did happen.

I think if you’re honest with yourself, neither do you. How many times in your life have things you thought sucked turned out to be the best thing ever. I think living by faith is part of the human condition and we only get to choose what we have faith in.

So I'm open for employment, having faith I've at least demonstrated my talent for creative problem solving and writing a coherent sentence.

Process Talk

I’m editing a first draft of a typical first week aboard a SSBN. I think that stands for submarine ship ballistic nuclear.
I’m doing a lot of slashing and burning, which is probably good. I don’t want it to bog things down but I need to let the audience in on how things are done and where thing are, give them a general overview of sub life so later on it doesn’t distract from what’s going on.

It’s been a very long process writing this novel and it’s kind of a relief seeing an end in sight. I’ve been working on it maybe ten years, off and on. Life and work kept getting in the way.

It started out as a first person thing. I was thinking Moby Dick. The first line was even, “Call me Paradise.” And I started out following Melville’s movement. I didn’t follow it close, but I thought about Moby Dick all the time. It’s still there floating around somewhere in my brain when I work on this, which might be the same thing as saying, when I’m awake. I don’t think my book would have been possible with out it. So, thanks, Herman.

I got 198 type-written, double space, 12 point pages before I decided it had to be third person. For one thing Danny Paradise couldn’t get the parts right when he got too drunk. There were also forces working behind the scenes that I wanted to comment on Danny knew nothing about. Danny is little more than a kid grappling with issues far beyond him and from his point of view he is just stumbling through. First person was too confining for the story I’m trying to tell.

I started over at the beginning. No cutting and pasting. I had the first person draft, which I had spent time polishing, at my side, but I retyped every word. Switching to third person opened the novel up far beyond Danny's ability to describe or comprehend. I think it will make for a better, weightier novel. Hopefully you will be able to tell me some day in the not to distant future.

Out And About

Last night was the first night I went out by myself since the stroke. Sunday my wife dropped me off at the story week events on Lincoln Ave, but all I had to do was cross the street and Patricia McNair drove me home so that doesn’t count. Last night my wife Jackie dropped me off at the Brown Line stop on Belmont and I took the el to see Joyce Carol Oates, who is a funny lady.

It started at six. She read a piece of fiction based on the rape of a friend, adding that the friend was okay with the story. She talked a lot about her process. It gave me hope when she talked about a fragment she kept glancing at over the years eventually becoming a novella, I believe. There was a novel inspired by Jon Benet Ramsey where she changed her into a little ice skater and a novel spurred on by thinking about OJ’s kids. It was reveling how her life and thought pushed her art.

The event was held at the Harold Washington Library. It’s a gorgeous place with a lot of marble and granite and escalators. I’ve developed a phobia for going down on an escalator. It’s not severe. Going up isn’t as bad as going down. The first time I had to go down one was at the Barns and Nobel at Webster Place. I went up to the second floor to get Steven King’s ON WRITING. It’s pretty good. He doesn’t pull any punches.

Anyway, I’m at the top of the escalator looking down, way down. The metal stair teeth are hurtling toward the bottom, grinding whatever it is they grind beneath them. Fresh out of the hospital with my new cane I watch the stairs one after another spinning by. I screwed up my courage and there at the top I fidgeted. I hemmed and hawed. I let an older woman go in front to me. I stuck out my foot, made my timing judgment, and took the plunge. I rode those stairs like an incompetent skier looking for something at the bottom to stop me after the stairs spit me out. I survived. I felt pretty good about myself when I took the escalator down to the auditorium to see Joyce Carol Oates.

One of the thing you might not know about a stroke is it messes with you going to the john. One side of the muscles you use doesn’t work right so you can never quite get it all out. You wind up going to the bathroom a lot. After Joyce, I had to go to the bathroom. It was on the third floor.

Before I go on, I want to tell whose ever asinine idea it was not to put a john on every floor has effectively barred my wife and who knows how many other people with disabilities from using the public library, so I hope you feel real good about your self and someday come to some form of repentance for your narcissistic ways.

So I got to the third floor.

“It right over there next to the elevators.” The third floor is as low as the elevators go. “They’re cleaning them right now. You have to go to the fourth floor. They’re in the same place, right above the other ones.”

Four floors of escalators. On the way down I didn’t have to let anyone go in front of me, but then again, there wasn’t all that many people using the escalators.

Out side it was dark. I made it back to Belmont fine. I walked east on Belmont feeling weak and vulnerable. I got a double-tall latte at the Starbucks on Clark, and then I went and caught the grad reading at the Schoolhouse. They’ve changed it since I used to read poetry there, years ago. Some time back then I might have known Achy Obejas as a fellow poet reading around town, at the Mill, or Weeds, or Estelle’s.

The grad reading started at 9:30, my usual bedtime these days. Chris Deguire drove me home. I hope I spelled his name right.

Rehab

Rehabilitation is a bit fat pain in the butt, but you got to do what you got to do because if you don’t you don’t get to do much of anything.
Right now I’m trying to achieve lying flat on my back. The first step is getting to the floor. It seems I don’t remember how I used to get down. All you wise guys that are snickering and thinking to yourselves that I never really knew how in the first place, point taken. But you know that’s not what I’m talking about that.
I’m going through a paradigm shift, physically, mentally, and spiritually - a complete reworking of how I used to do things, how I used to be, how I made myself manifest in the world. That I had to relearn how to walk and talk is an indication that the work is starting back at the basics and what’s coming for me is a new way of being.
It’s a bit daunting, realizing it’s still early on in the process. I realize I’m making a fantastic recovery from what the head neurologist at the VA called a major stroke. I also have a long way to go. I don’t know how people without faith do it. It would terrify me if I had to do this alone.
Don’t get me wrong. I am overjoyed and thankful to have a strong community behind me. But if that was all I had, I think that would scare me more than doing it by myself. No offence. It’s that we humans don’t have a really good track record for pulling together for an altruistic cause. So I’m really grateful for a God that is, above all, loving and good. It also helps that He’s big enough and bad enough to do what He wants.
So even though I’ve got a long road ahead of me, and I don’t know where He’s taking me, you wise guys better watch out. On the other end of this I’m going to teach you a thing or two about how to get down. I know you know what I’m talking about.

Coloring Outside The Lines

My old English teachers still mess with me, especially when reinforced by somebody’s good intentions, a person who thinks writing is all about being proper and following the rules.

It’s a hard thing to struggle against. We are raised in a culture where rules are important, where you get rewarded for following them: good grades, good schools, good jobs. If you keep to the straight and narrow, you got your path laid out in front of you: career, marriage with 2.5 kids, vacations, retire to Arizona, a European cruise, reasonable health care. It’s a life with no adventure.

It’s a life with no faith. Nobody in a rule driven life can go to a place they are yet to be shown. That’s not being careful. You cannot be careful and move into the unknown at the same time. Faith is a risky business.

So is writing. Real writing is putting words on the page one at a time, not knowing where you will end up. It is a courageous act of discovery not suited to the faint of heart. You have to be willing to break a few rules, get your page a little messy, be unafraid not to clean it up too much you take all the gristle and bone out of it.

If you do it right, what you will write is a living thing, going where it wants to go. You might have a leash on it, but there aint no choker and the better it is the bigger dog you got hold of following its nose. You got to put your trust in something besides yourself and what you know about writing. You got to trust it knows where it wants to go.

It’s just like faith when you put your trust in something bigger than you are and trust where He’s leading you. It’s not about right and wrong. It’s about who you are and where you’re going. There are times when you need to ignore those old teachers and not be afraid to color outside the lines.

Take Your Best Shot

I feel like I’ve gotten the rest of me back, the part I laid aside when making a living and providing for family became a priority. I squeezed in writing when I could, which was not often.

It’s odd that along with the stroke I’ve gotten the gift of time. I’m writing six plus hours a day. It’s not been much over a month that I’ve been doing it. I feel like I’ve still got a bit of rust to shake off. But I don’t know how to say how good this feels. Time to write. I’ve been dreaming about it, praying for years. I thought maybe when I retire. Maybe?

Now here it is, the shot I’ve always said I wanted. I feel very blessed. I think most people, for one reason or another, don’t get their shot. I guess I think most people don’t get as far as dreaming about a shot they would like to get. And here I am early into it.

Another thing I think most people don’t get is to know if they had the shot, would they take it? And having taken their shot, did they make it?

Well, I’m in the process of taking it. I know that much. But to carry it through, that’s another question. Back when I was going to Columbia College, near the end of the school year, I read SONNY’S BLUES by James Baldwin. My reaction to it, besides it being a fantastic story was “Holy Shit.” It was my first clear realization of how hard I was going to have to work if I wanted to write the way I wanted to write. I didn’t know if I wanted to work that hard and I didn’t right at all that summer. I went back to school in the fall and in my naiveté, I answered yes.

It’s maybe fifteen years later and here I am In front of that question again. I have to answer it every day. I’m always surprised how closely writing, for me anyway, parallels my faith. I am not so naive anymore. It’s the same question but I hear it a little differently now. If I want to write to the standard I want to write, am I willing to work that hard whether I make it as a writer or not?

I’ve got my shot. I’m going to take it. It’s a faith thing. I don’t get to know in advance. But, whatever happens, I’ll know I took the shot. I can live with that.

Interesting Times

My stroke fully manifested itself in three days affecting my right side. I am right handed. Along with the surrounding muscle my not insignificant bicep, I was after all a construction worker, turned into jelly and sloshed down to the under side of my forearm. After that, if I concentrated real hard, I could make my arm twitch. It lay at my side my hand curled into a fist.

I started to get movement back quickly. After a couple of days I could open my hand and my elbow started to work again. My upper arm, however, did not want to move. It eventually started to move with a lot of pain.

The thing is, one of the curious things about strokes is there is no pain associated with them. In me a small part of my brain died were working nerve connections had pathways that I used to tell different muscles what to do. The stroke, more or less, bulldozed those paths and I had to learn new ones.

There was a complication which explains the pain. Apparently I have an old rotator cuff injury. I’ve had trouble sleeping for over a year due to pain in my right shoulder. While I was still working, I was using the shoulder, keeping it moving. When I had the stroke, it stopped moving. It had time to freeze up.

I’m moving it now but I’m limited in my range of motion because of pain and that is interfering with me making those new pathways. It amazes me now how weak it is. It’s almost nine weeks after the stroke. I go to Bally’s three times a week. I’m working on the arm, but it’s slow going. I’m using the different machines to help strengthen the right side of my body. Everything is progressing really well, strength and movement wise, except the shoulder. With most of the shoulder machines, I can’t reach the handle. The one that I can reach, if I use it with the least weight possible and I start it out with my left hand, I can push it up about eight or nine times.

I got a cortisone shot about two weeks ago. It was supposed to help. I complained after a week it wasn’t helping very much. The orthopedic doctor told me to give it three weeks. It will be two weeks on Monday. At first they said it would maybe take a couple days to work.

They also said I might have a rotator cuff tare. That could mean surgery. Surgery means going off aspirin. They won’t let me do that for another four months. The usual test for a cuff tare is loss of strength. They can’t tell that because of the stroke. So I guess were waiting for the cortisone shot to officially not work and then they can schedule the much more expensive MRI to determine if I have the tare, in which case they can do something about it July.

So, just another reason that the ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times,” is no longer my favorite.

Sucking Up To Health Care

I’m having trouble making up my mind about the health care debate and it occurs to me the reason is: I don’t know whom to trust. Maybe I should rephrase that. I am afraid to trust any of them.

It’s the divide down the isle. They seem to have fortified it with trenches and barbed wire and a machinegun nest. Middle ground is a no-man’s-land where everybody dies.

Think about it. The Republicans disagree with everything the democrat’s say and visa-versa. There is no give and take. According to each side the other side is a bunch of imbeciles waiting to drag the country down to the gutter given half a chance. They accuse each other of being self-serving narcissist with only their own interest at heart.

I can’t help but wonder if they really believe anything their saying or if they’re all just trying to keep their paycheck coming. It seems they traded serving their constituents for pandering to them.

Some of the issues are hard to figure out, granted. But Canada has figured out how to sell us drugs cheaper than we can get them here. There are countries that give their citizens decent health care at a reasonable cost. It may not be great or the best, but it’s decent. I have to tell you, decent health care is better than health care that sucks. Right now we have health care that sucks. You don’t have to pass the mother of all health care bills. Please stop trying. Please stop painting your opponents in the worst possible light so you get a good sound bite on the boob tube, though I’m beginning to think you all belong there.

If you want to look good and get reelected do the whole country and yourselves a favor. Suck it up and work together.

Books Win

I went to a round table discussion last night about the Internet and the future of publishing. One of the main questions is online publication killing print. It seems I’ve heard this all my life; nobody reads anymore.
The idea that books, I mean pages between too covers, will ever die out, is absurd to me. I myself am a case in point.
I started reading comic books, Superman and Archie. I still remember my earliest notions of lust directed toward Betty and Veronica. Then came Mad Magazine and Weird Tales and the like. Finally by first real book, The Illustrated Man.
The problem was, I was a working class kid. Reading was all well and good, but eventually you had to go to work.
“Okay, come on, now,” my dad said. “Put down that nonsense.”
Then there was grade school. “In the third grade I wrote a poem for a class assignment. I remember in it I took exception to that poem about little boys being made out of snail and puppy dog tails. My beef was yes, but so much more. Apparently my teacher was quite charmed with it.
One day in class she mentioned in class how one of the poems our classmates wrote was very good and she decided to blind side me by having me read it in front of class. Shy kid that I was, this was horrifying. I read it to the twitters of my friends. Mind you this was the fifties and they all razzed me for the nice little faggy poem I wrote. I don’t remember the teacher ever encouraging me to write another.
About that time my spelling abilities went the way of the dinosaurs and from then through high school failed attempts at spelling were all that was brought to the attention of the class by my English teachers. Reading became this secret, somewhat shameful thing I did.
I think It all changed with 1984, the book, not the year. I found someone I could identify with, like me, reading in secret. After that I didn’t care. I had survived childhood by becoming a non-conformist. I started to read in earnest. I’ve been reading ever since.
I write and read against all odds. I started writing in 1973; bad love poems about a co-worker at the North Suburban postal facility in River Grove, Illinois. I haven’t stopped yet.
So I’m not worried about our culture killing books. It brought all it forces against one working class kid and tried to kill the idea of reading and writing.
Books won because the good ones give us a place to go that the powers that be cannot touch and they have no weapon against.

The Faith To Doubt

I did a search to find out, as some suggest that God is sending a new message with the increase in earthquakes? Apparently not as, statistically speaking, there has been no increase. In fact there has been a slight decrease.
There is a thing in us humans; we want to know what happens next. This is fortunate for writers of fiction. What happens next is our bread and butter.
However not all purveyors of fiction are benign. I’ll give those I am speaking about the benefit of the doubt and assume they are in denial of their fear of the future, of a God that does not fit in their box, and are only trying to figure things out. Explanations are easier to live with than a mysterious God.
I guess it’s no sin to speculate about when the end times is coming, or asking what we can learn from events around the world and beyond that God allows to happen. However I think it’s important to remember we don’t really know. Oh, I want to know and I want to know definitively, without doubt. The trouble with that is, and I don’t think I saying anything here that isn’t widely accepted as a Christian worldview, we are called to live by faith. It is only on the other side of our earthly bodies that we will have no questions.
I know it makes for a scarier world, living with the unknown, but we are called to this, to work out our faith in fear and trembling. We have confidence, but our confidence is in Him, not in our own understanding of why He allows earthquakes.

This Is Sad

Let’s just say this up front. Michael Jackson’s “doctor” and I do say it in quotes, listen up AMA, ought to be bared from practice. Maybe I’m uninformed and you’ve done it already, but I don’t remember hearing anything. I don’t know if you can call him a drug pusher but, as I recall, there is something in the oath you guys take about doing no harm and it seems clear he did do harm for profit. He ought to be prosecuted.

That said, there is Michael’s cupability. I watched “This Is It” the documentary made out of the rehearsal film for his come back concert set to start eight days after he died.

I had heard it would show me that the tragedy was that Michael was on his way back and his genius was cut short by an untimely tragic death. Certainly his death was tragic, but watching his rehearsals was a sad experience.

I love come back stories, fighting back after being brought low to come back in triumph. That’s what I wanted. What I got was a tired narcissist trying to perform his old tricks. He wasn’t up to it. I watched really great dancers fawning over their self-important idol. It had to be hard going through their moves with the King of Pop wearing no clothes.

Maybe, ultimately that’s what Michael died of, his youthful narcissism, his belief in his own hype. Whatever kind of childhood he had, the man was fifty years old. How much more blatant can you be? He lived on Neverland ranch and refused to grow up. Michael Jackson was a false god, incapable of rising from his own ashes. I'm sorry for his passing but he should not be idolized. The truth is he died of a really screw up life aided by some heavey duty meds.