To Nineveh With Love

It’s been—um—well let’s just say a lot of years since I was in the 4^th grade but I still very distinctively remember “Lacey Stackman,” this girl in my class who always reminded me of a diminutive bouffant-haired Barney Fife. One day when we were coming in from morning recess Lacey, who was in front of me in line, whirled around and with an accusatory voice inquired if I had ever been saved.  “Saved from what?” I asked, not understanding the question at all.  “Has Jesus ever saved your soul?” I had no idea what she was talking about and after I admitted this she triumphantly proclaimed that I was a sinner and that I was going straight to hell. I was mortified. What had I done to deserve such a fate? I was nine years old but I wasn’t stupid. I had watched Mod Squad and Hawaii Five-O, plus I rode a public school bus twice a day with high school kids, so I felt pretty well educated to the faces of evil. I didn’t think I fit the criteria. It wasn’t like I was shooting up heroin on the playground or dancing in a cage at Paul Gray’s Playlate Club.  And besides, God and I had never had a problem before. I hadn’t really been “raised in church,” still, I had from my earliest memory somehow been aware of my creator and we spoke frequently. So what was the deal with God sending Lacey to be the hatchet man? Why didn’t he just tell me himself? I thought we were good.

It was ages before I realized that what Lacey and I had experienced was a “failya to communycate.”  Lacey’s intentions were actually good though somewhat misguided, but I didn’t speak Southern Baptist. I had no idea what her terminology meant. I wasn’t educated in doctrine or dogma, I just knew what I knew internally, innately, instinctively.  I was like Helen Keller who just knew there was a God even before anybody else mentioned it.  As I relate this I am reminded that my eldest daughter doesn’t believe in Helen Keller.  Jacki believes that Helen was made up as an inspirational tool to shame school children into living up to their potential without excuse.  If you try to convince her otherwise, Jacki will roll her eyes and tell you that she has never SEEN Helen Keller, therefore she does not exist. If you insist that there are witnesses who knew her, my child will insist right back that it’s all lies. Photos are fake.  Anne Sullivan was a resume padder. No amount of evidence will ever persuade her. But I guess really nobody likes to look like a slacker and next to Helen Keller, who doesn’t look like a slacker?   

Anyway, over the years, I must say, that rather than resenting the Lacey Stackman interrogation of 1972, I am grateful for it.  If it weren’t for Lacey literally scaring the hell out of me I might not have ever cared enough to think about what I believe and why I believe it.  I also learned that you shouldn’t be obnoxious with your faith.  I faired pretty well with this experience but I’ve always been the kind of person who sorts things out analytically so I decided to do a little research. Other people swear off religion for the rest of their lives after being traumatized by such an encounter. Oh, but there’s that word.  Religion.  It has taken on a whole new meaning.  You can look up the old meaning in the dictionary and it will greatly differ from the new meaning of “Over the top-Westboro Baptist Church-hate spewing- judgmental-hypocritical-homophobic-misogynistic-King James Bible thumpers.”  “Step away from the word religion,” blasts the megaphone voice inside my head. No one wants to be associated with that word anymore. The new word is ‘spiritual.’  It’s okay to be spiritual because nobody knows what the devil that means. It’s kind of like “sending good thoughts.”  It’s not en vogue to pray anymore. . You send people “good thoughts,” a concept I cannot distinguish from prayer except maybe there’s no middle man? But I’m genuinely confused because what good is a ‘good thought’ if there’s no power or magic or some sort of cosmic energy or working force behind it? In reality doesn’t this just mean that you think this person is screwed and the only thing you can really do is to actively feel sorry for them?  Or maybe I’m just an old fool who doesn’t understand anything anymore. Maybe someone can enlighten me.

At any rate, as the years have flown by, I have met my share of Laceys and anti-Laceys as well, and being a student of human nature I always wonder what path brought them to the belief system they have today. We are all products of a great combination of things: genetics, culture, home-life, education, relationships, and way too much television—just to name a scant few. On the opposite end of the spectrum from the Lacy camp is the camp of Antitheological Scientism, a belief that the universe isn’t big enough for both God and science, who in their own way are just like Lacy. Instead of trying to save my soul though, they strive to save my intellect from the fires of the ignorance of my belief in the “illogical.”  They can’t iron out the creases between Science and God although God and even Darwin don’t seem to suffer from similar issues.  In chapter 6 of Origin, Darwin asks, “Have we any right to assume that the creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?”  And in Isaiah 55:8 God tells the prophet, "my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.”  

The constant bickering between the two sides of  Antitheological Scientism and Antiscientific Creationism reminds me of two of my favorite sisters—we will just call them Marlene and Miana to protect their true identities. When we were kids the two of them could not be in the same room without a war breaking out. It would start in the morning when they got out of bed. Miana would look at Marlene and sneer and Marlene would say “What are you looking at?”  And then Miana would say, “I don’t know WHAT IT IS!”  And then our older sister Melinda, who was in charge of getting us all ready for school and on the bus without anybody killing anybody, would come down from her room and say: “You know, the things we despise in other people are just the things we despise about ourselves but feel helpless to change.” And then in unison they would look up at her with identical brown eyes and deny being anything alike. My baby sister, Denise and I would just roll our eyes and shake our heads at the whole thing.  Denise and I were the non-confrontational type, avoiding controversy like the plague and therefore separating ourselves from it.

I haven’t changed much since then. I am a peace loving chick and I’m confused and upset by drama. I want no part of it and because of this I frequently fail to speak up for that which I believe. I am guilty of trying to set up housekeeping in a whale’s belly while pretending that Nineveh doesn’t even exist. But the things I see and hear lately baffle me and worry me, so rather than curl up in the fetal position and hide I will speak up.

The Internet is overflowing with information and some of it is true. But let’s face it, everything is posted for a reason. Everyone has an agenda and that agenda is to make you sympathetic to the writer’s cause, the truth be damned.  There’s a lot that has been ‘documented’ in the name of Christianity that isn’t Christian at all and there are several reasons for that including: 1) people who are radical nuts and just masquerading as Christians; 2) people who inherited their religion but actually haven’t bothered to learn anything about it; 3) and the perpetuation of big fat lies. BFLs, like all good lies, take a tiny bit of the truth to lend credibility to a story and then distort it into something more like a Picasso than a Norman Rockwell.  But let me say this to both sides of the fence: ruthlessly bashing someone for not thinking as you do is like setting yourself up as the measuring stick for all of humanity. You might want to check your internal agenda before you speak.  Do you really want to sway opinions or do you just enjoy the sport of tossing up other people’s world views and shooting them down like clay pigeons?  And do you seriously want to be friends with someone whose world view is so shallow that it can be changed by a meme on Facebook?

If you know me then you know that I am not a homophobe, I have never bombed an abortion clinic and I believe that God is the great scientist-creator. (I rather like the way my daughter, Julie, the science teacher, refers to The Big Bang as God’s Play Dough.)  Faith is not the antithesis of intelligence. Science requires a lot of faith too. I accept what scientists tell us as truth but honestly, they could be lying and I’d never know since I don’t own the Ginsu Home Atom Splitting Kit or a Ronco Carbon Dater.   

And as understanding of the universe increases, proven theories are disproven and discarded for more logical theories. (Feel free to Google this). I think that it takes more faith to believe that the intricacies of the human body, photosynthesis, gravity, and the vocal stylings of Al Greene are all just happy accidents than it does to believe in an intelligent creator. I have no problem marrying my Christianity and my science. The places where the two appear to contradict or show a disconnect are simply the places where we currently lack proper knowledge. I’m confused by how someone can make the argument that the universe is infinite—without beginning or end, but they cannot extend that same logic to an infinite creator. Where did God come from? Where did the catalyst for the Big Bang come from?

 As for the Christian faith—well, that is an umbrella term. The different sects are too numerous to count and they are divided by the very issues used to lump them all back together by those who either don’t know the difference or just want to stir up a stink to further their own agenda. I am a Christian but I’m not a Lacey Stackman Christian. I am not a fan of  TV preachers who beg for money or others who are loud and obnoxious with their beliefs. I once scolded that guy with the cross downtown for telling people they were going to hell for listening to music at Riverbend. And if I have a political disagreement with someone, it doesn’t mean that I hate them, it just means that I feel as passionately as they do about the topic. And sometimes it’s hard to let go of an argument when it feels like the world is spinning out of control and you only want to fix it.

I don’t believe that our thoughts and feelings and motivators are just random neurological occurrences. If that’s the case then I can’t even take credit for writing this and likewise, l would never have to take the blame for any of my actions.  I believe that each of us has a soul that is like a cosmic fingerprint. It’s who we are inside the human shell. Civilized cultures require that we get along with each other’s shells but lately the war has turned to attacking the inner person. Is this civilized? Is it intelligent? Is it beneficial? Laws can be made that affect your human shell but no external force can govern your internal being. My plea here is that we stop assuming the worst of each other—stop assuming things that we can’t possibly know. Lacy assumed through an error of semantics that I was a heathen. My nerdy friends assume that I cannot believe in God AND science. The guy dragging around the cross that day assumed that his personal convictions against music applied to me as well.  I can’t recall a time when hatefulness, negativity and petulance were the skills needed to win a persuasive argument, so why go there?            

My personal belief is that we are all born with a homing device deep within us that draws us back to the Creator, kind of like V-ger in that Star Trek movie. Through personal experience I have determined that there is someone out there who is way more intelligent than the human race that decided that asbestos was safe and that Fen-Phen, Agent Orange and Thalidomide were great ideas…someone who knows the truth about whether Pluto is really a planet or not. I HAVE to believe that there is someone out there smarter than I am who is watching out for me as I am pretty much a train wreck that miraculously keeps moving down the track. The point I’m struggling to make here is that there is most definitely a lot of bad out there that goes on in the name of religion, but we shouldn’t throw out the baby with the bath water. It would be really nice if we could all keep in mind that every single one of us is a flawed human being just trying to figure out life as it hurls events at us relentlessly. Maybe we could cut each other some slack. And what would it hurt if we traded mean spirited jabs for civilized discourse?   

So, that’s it, Nineveh, my love letter to you—my attempt to convey in words that which exceeds words. I could write a book because I have so much more to say but this will have to do for the time being.

.

           

Flag Waving, Elton John and the Wizard of Oz

I hopped in my car to leave work the other day and a song came on the oldies station that made me cry.  It made me long for the world that I used to know.  It made me long for the security of the familiar.  The current world seems so foreign to me.  Luckily for me, the flashing interstate message board hasn’t started to threaten crying drivers yet, (although I’m sure that’s considered distracted driving) but I’ll be needing a chauffeur if that ever becomes the case. What happened next would be explained as coincidence by some, but I know better.  My best friend, Susan, instinctively knew that something was wrong and sent me a text.  It’s not like we talk every day.  Sadly, we go months sometimes between conversations, but let me stub my toe and see if she doesn’t say, “ouch!”

Susan wants a time machine.  So do I.  She says she wants to go back to 1975 so she can get ready for the Bicentennial.  I laughed, but I understood what she meant.  While I struggled with an almost completely debilitating case of depression that marred the first half of 1975 for me, the second half holds nothing but blissful memories.  (Does that make me bipolar?)  That was the summer of “Philadelphia Freedom” by The Elton John Band.  (Yes, you read that right!)  Never mind that the song was written by two British guys, America ate it up.     

                                                             And yes, I own this single :)

 

We loved our American flag patches on our frayed cut offs.  We knew the words to the National Anthem without cheating and that it was really hard not to yell out, “play ball!” every time it ended.  We knew that Francis Scott Key wrote it, not about war, but about that one little spark of unrelenting hope that this still new country would retain the freedom to figure things out for itself.  We said the pledge to the flag, not as mind numbed robot children as some would paint it, but as respectful citizens who had been taught to seek out and do the right thing.  We had a flag at my house and we were very serious as kids not to let it touch the ground when we lowered it before dusk.  We learned to fold it in the official triangle fold and placed it in its box each evening to keep it clean.  It was just a flag.  It was pieces of colored cloth that held no magic.  In and of itself it couldn’t save us from anything.  It was just a symbol.  But symbols serve to remind us of what we strive to be more than what we are.  When we start to shun our symbols we begin to reject the notion that we ever were, or are, or ever will be anything of which to be proud.   

Were things perfect in my bliss filled version of 1975-76?  Was the government on the up and up with its citizens?  Was the rest of the world behaving itself?  Was it all homemade ice cream and fireworks, mom and apple pie?   I don’t believe in revisionist history and I won’t sugar coat it.  We were suffering the effects of Vietnam, Watergate wiretapping, OPEC, an unemployment rate of 9.2% and busing.  Jimmy Hoffa went missing and Patti Hearst was on the most wanted list for armed robbery.  President Ford bailed out an almost bankrupt New York City with a $2.3 billion dollar loan.  “The Son of Sam” pulled a gun and began terrorizing New York for the next year.  Three Gunmen abducted a school bus with 26 children and the driver near Chowchilla, California. And on and on and on.

Bad things were happening then just as they are now.   So why were we such flag wavers back in that era and why are we trying so hard to disassociate ourselves from any sort of patriotism now?  I can only give you my personal opinion and your own opinion may differ.  America is no longer that cute little baby of a country that it once was, so wide eyed and innocent.  America is now going through that awkward ugly recalcitrant teenager phase, rejecting everything that is, but unable to figure out what it wants to be.  I am beginning to believe that we have redefined “America” to mean THE GOVERNMENT instead of “WE THE PEOPLE.”  We have abandoned patriotism because we have forgotten that it’s about us and not them.  We are not pledging our allegiance to the “Patriot” Act, or to the absurdities of a corrupt 2 party system.  We pledge to be good neighbors and good citizens and generally decent people.  Our pledge is to each other.  We are also pledging that we will not allow the government to cause WE THE PEOPLE  to implode by using hot button issues to divide us while they hide behind a curtain of deception cooking up the nefarious—an idea they clearly stole from The Wizard of Oz.  The Wizard had no power except that which was given to him by his subjects.

When I was a kid they told us that this country was the greatest nation on earth.  As I grew older I realized that the same propaganda was sold to school children in every country.  Sometimes it’s hard to question things without becoming cynical.  In my old age though, I have decided that it’s like picking a favorite football team or your favorite character in a show.  We’re just rooting for our team/character here.  It doesn’t mean that we agree with all the players or even that we think the coaches are calling the right plays.  It means that we accept each other—warts and all, because ultimately we want our team to win.

The Upside of Being an Old Crone

When my youngest sister died at the tender age of 20, I made a promise to myself that I would never be one of those people who complained about the ugliness of aging. Since Denise-- who was the most deserving person ever born to this earth--would never get the chance to get married, have children, be saddled with a mortgage, make IRA decisions, and then grow old, I was going to handle whatever life sent my way-- with grace. At times, I must confess, this has been the grace of an elephant. After all, making a vow to oneself leaves a lot of room for interpretation and the 25 year old version of me had no idea what 50 would bring. 

                                       (Me at 25 with my kiddos and original hair color)

For instance, who knew that one's metabolism could just pack up and skip town in the middle of the night leaving no forwarding address?  The Internet says that women my age must work out an extra hour a day just to stay the weight they are. The good news is that since I've never really worked out in the first place my workout time should only be 1 hour which makes me super glad that I have been a virtual fitness sloth all these years! I'd really be hacked if I was already killing myself to be healthy and then had to add an extra hour. The bad news is that I hate to work out, not because it's hard, but because I find it excruciatingly boring. I have diagnosed myself with EADD--Exercise Attention Deficit Disorder. Maybe I just made that up, but it's A Thing. Trust me. I am not a lazy person by any means. I actually enjoy hard work and have held several manual labor jobs that I refer to as Man-Jobs because I had to lift heavy things, wield power tools, and climb steel. But that was meaningful work as opposed to flailing my arms and legs about in an attempt to somehow transform myself into a Victoria's Secret model. If you ever had a PE class with me you can attest to the fact that I have the motor skills of a drunken orangutan.  Anyway, while 40 is the new 20, fifty isn't cute at all. Pinterest is filled with guilt inducing memes that advise us to the contrary, but I promise you that I can name 1,000 different foods that taste better than skinny feels—starting with anything covered in chocolate or laced with alcohol. And on a side note: to all you 25 year old girls with protruding hip bones who want to preach to us old crones about diet and exercise, come back when you are 50 and then we will have this conversation.

But losing my girlish figure isn’t the only thing that I am struggling with. There are plenty of psychological issues that go along with this leg of my odyssey. The mere fact that my best friend, Susan, and I have been BFFs for 44 years must mean that we are ancient. Only old people have 44 year old friendships. We are like two old sea captains getting together at Panera Bread to rehash old war stories and fill each other in on the new events of growing old. For those of you who are counting, I am fully aware that I have used the word “old” five times (and now 6) in this paragraph, because doing so illustrates my point beautifully. There's just no escaping it if you stay on this side of the dirt. “Old” (7) will keep rearing its wrinkled, bald, toothless head to laugh at you like Grandpappy Amos in the Real McCoys. If you have any idea what I'm talking about, well, that just makes you old (8) too.

I know that age is a just number and that it really doesn't matter, but somebody needs to tell that to my feet. Every morning when I crawl out of bed and my feet hit the floor, I start looking for the gremlins that have been beating them with hammers while I sleep. Listen children: the sins of your youth will catch up with you. All those crazy things you did as a kid and bounced right back from will return like mean spirited ghosts to haunt you when you embark on the second half of your century. At 48, while jumping over an obstacle course wall, I discovered that my landing gear wasn't quite what it used to be. I thought that I had gotten away with all those bike wrecks and car wrecks and farming accidents; with those twisted ankles and broken bones, but no. They had all gathered for a big reunion and were waiting for me on the other side of that wall. “Surprise!” 

Then there's this whole deal of feeling generationally misunderstood. As a child, I was sure that life was not fair and I was roundly annoyed when people made fun of me for expressing this. Okay, maybe I was a whiner, but still...

                                      (I was very angry here about having the chicken pox)

As a teenager, I totally wrote the book on angst. Why couldn't anybody “get me?” I was positive that when I grew up my thoughts and opinions would finally be respected and recognized as nothing short of genius. But now that I am an old crone I have pretty much been advised that everything that I was ever taught since childhood or just believed on my own is wrong.  This illumination is usually provided from some sage guru who is about half my age. I’m really close to using the term “whipper-snapper” here.  Somebody please stop me. 

Hey Nineteen
That's 'Retha Franklin
She don't remember the Queen of Soul
It's hard times befallen
The sole survivors
She thinks I'm crazy
But I'm just growing old

I grew up in the era of civil rights, Vietnam, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In, Elton John, cigarette commercials, Roe v Wade, Living Bibles, the Pledge of Allegiance, the moon walk, New Math, and the energy crisis.  All of these things and many more helped shape my opinions about certain issues.  My worldview is one of kind-hearted intelligence. I have been no more or no less brain washed than the current young adult generation or any other. I remind my kids often that when they are old the next generation will vilify them for not pushing the envelope completely off the table.  So, in the words of my 4^th grade teacher, Mrs. Watkins, “Always be respectful of your elders, children—even if you disagree with them and if I catch you doing otherwise, I will stripe your legs.”           

I’ve spent an entire lifetime trying not to turn into Andy Rooney, cheekily yet intolerantly bemoaning life’s little annoyances.  I think, perhaps, that I have failed miserably, but I no longer care.  The upside to being an old crone is that society embraces us as “colorful characters” and we have permission to be humorously cranky.

                                               ( My Mammie aka future me)

 I’m really not complaining about having the opportunity to grow old, but the side effects will eventually kill you.  Still, even that has an upside, because when I jump over that final obstacle, I’m sure that Denise will be on the other side of that wall waiting to make fun of my graceless exit and equally graceless entrance—the part where I get one or both feet hung in the Pearly Gates.