Praytell

Friday, July 30, 2010

Migration of Pastel and Watercolor

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Winged Migration is perhaps the most beautiful film I have ever seen.  My wife told me I’d like it, and said she wanted me to see it, but at first I didn’t heed her suggestion.  It was a DVD, our computer was not much, and DVD players seemed complicated, so I kept putting it off.

Finally, I relented, allowing her suggestion to find its way home.

Over the next hour or so, I fell into its currents, its story, marveling with every new film of birds flying north, resting, nesting, and then once again flying back home.  The “together” nature of these migrations was, to me at least, sacred in and of itself.  Were the birds people I’d say they had courage, endurance, and purpose.  People must summon courage, must find ways to endure, and must find purpose in their lives.  Birds just do it.

Parts of the film were heart-wrenching.  After a thousand mile migration, ducks look for a place to rest and land in oil patches around a factory in Romania that is world-famous for its pollution.  Hunters bring down geese, seemingly unaware that their quarry had just flown several thousand miles.  In an instant, the geese fall from the sky that held them.  Lest you think I am anti-hunting, I am not, though I do not do it myself.  It’s just that once when I saw a bird, I saw nothing but the bird.  Thanks to this film, I now saw its migration.

Migration.

People migrate.

The Irish migrated to North America when famine stalked their land.  Norwegians migrated to Minnesota when the same happened in their country.  Italians migrated.   Poles migrated.  Germans migrated.  The Puritans migrated.  Each migration calls for purpose, endurance, and courage.

I have migrated.  Born in California (don’t tell anybody), raised in Colorado, touched by the coal fields of Kentucky, blessed by time in Switzerland and France, finding Maine a place to start a family, called to New York City, curious about southwestern Minnesota, finding home in Montana, and now Minneapolis.  All of it a matter of migration.

Migration.  Millions of Iraqis migrate from the violence of their country, in hope of something better.  Burmese migrate to Thailand in search of the same. The list, as you can see, goes on and on.  Lebanese migrate, Persians migrate, Liberians migrate, Salvadorans, Hondurans, Mexicans.

But so do the attempts to stop these migrations.  “This is ours, not yours,” we hear.  There is nothing has quite as much organizing power as the word “NO.”  Unless, of course, it is migration itself.

In Mexico, once, we visited a school on a barren hillside.  It was indeed desolate.  The school, a missionary endeavor, took care to feed the children knowing if they didn’t there would be no food at home.  Who were these people living on such an insecure edge?  They are the “parachutistas,” I was told.  One day, they simply appeared, seeming to have dropped from the sky.  There were some tensions.  Just whose land was it?  What about titles?  Deeds?  What about “passport control.”

But there they were.  Migrants.

Winged migration.  The painter in me, wants to note that shadows also migrate, as does the earth itself.   We migrate towards the light each and every day of our lives until we are finally home.

Migrants.  As human beings we are part of a winged migration that brings our very soul to the light.  Better to accept it than deny it or think we can stop it.  It seems to me that truth demands it.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Wisdom Study #1: But What Is That?

Minneapolis, Minnesota

I awake full of both gratitude and astonishment.

The astonishment stems from an increasing awareness of how much I have yet to learn, understand, and take to heart.

The gratitude comes from my regular Wednesday morning practice of walking across the street to a church I do not attend on Sundays, but wouldn’t think of missing on Wednesday mornings as about eight of us gather around the word that will form Sunday’s sermon.

The first reading came from Ecclesiastes.

If you have never read Ecclesiastes, it may surprise you that it is in the Bible at all.  How did a book that begins with “Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities.  All is vanity,” ever make it into the Bible?

There are peace churches, hope churches, trinity churches, and countless churches named after saints.  But it is for sure there is no First United Church of Vanity, just as there is no First Congregational Church of Lamentation.  We’d prefer not to dwell in a world of wisdom.  We seem to prefer success.  We want things to work.  We’d rather not say life is a matter  “chasing the wind.”

But then Brian spoke.

I do not know Brian well.  I’ve gathered that his life has not been easy, and a month or so ago he had a heart attack.  “Welcome to the club,” I said.  But I do sense that in a world of all too many ups and downs, he clings to something more, something deeper, something more compelling.  Let’s call it faith, or let’s call it Christ.  Whatever its name, he has been found, denied, tested, lost and regained.

“I love this book,” he said.  “I read a chapter every day.”

“What?” I instantly thought for a moment.  Why would one read about vanity every day?  How could it be a tonic to read, “The heart of the wise is in the  house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. Better is the end of a thing than its beginning, the patient in spirit are better than the proud in spirit.”

True, true, and once again true.  But then he shared, which, of course, is what Bible study is all about.

I used to live a life of outrage, he said.  “I’d end the day reviewing all the things that went wrong, all the things that shouldn’t have been, I nursed grudges.  I could hardly wait to lay into everything that angered me.  But what good did all that worry and outrage do?  None.”

We are fixated on events.  There’s something more, says the Teacher.  Get a grip, we hear.  Streams flow into the ocean, and still it is not full.  That’s the way it is, the way it is going to be.  We must cling to something more.  In Little Big Man, a man determines it is a good day to die, so he goes to a hilltop and waits to die.  Then he doesn’t.  Too bad, he says.  Must have had the wrong day.  We can’t help but smile.  Yep, you thought this was going to happen but something else did.

The world of opinion begins to fade away.  The culture of outrage we are so likely to stoke is shown to be nothing.

One translation replaces “vanity” with “illusion.”  My hearing, being what it is not, isn’t sure if the word is “illusive” or “elusive.”  I hope it’s the second.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.  Either way, the Teacher comes into a new light, and I am so grateful for the chance to open a book I knew “about” but have not known.

And you?

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

O Healing River

Minneapolis, Minnesota

I want to talk about healing.

But I do not want to do it in a hospital.

I do not begrudge them, nor is there a chip on my shoulder.  Well, on second thought, perhaps there is.  And perhaps there even should be.  In my view the Military Industrial Complex that Eisenhower spoke of so prophetically when he left office, is matched by the Medical Industrial Complex that is intent on technological interventions and cures that will no-doubt be profitable.  So yes, I’m not impressed, though I am thankful for a few interventions that have saved my life.

But still.

I want to talk about healing but I do not want to do it in a hospital.  I want to go “out there” where we begin to live out the implications of our expensive stay.  I want to go “out there,” when rehabilitation ends and life begins to re-configure itself.  I want to go “out there” where healing happens because life extends itself, renews itself, replaces wounds with scars and then moves along with the dawn of each new day.  I want to be “out there” where it happens almost accidentally, in places we least expect it, in places we love it and make way for it.

I want to talk about healing.

I want to talk about life.

I’d like for us to open our eyes.  Churches long ago ceeded healing to the healing industries, insurance companies, the medical/industrial complex.  They do not perceive themselves as arenas of healing.  If they do, if we do, we quickly begin to follow the medical model, and almost want to turn church into either a gym or a mini-clinic (though doughnuts remain by the coffee urn).

Yes, churches can give blood pressure readings.  Yes, they can have walking clubs.  Yes, they can remind folks of immunizations.  Yes, they can learn the ins and outs of various disease.

But what I want to talk about, and find, is deeper than that, it is broader than that.  Most of all, it is more beautiful than that.

It is found in the way people care for each other, respond to each other, learn from each other.  It is found in the way we say, “Happy birthday” to Gertrude, who has been a member of our church for 80 years, and is now about to turn 98.  There is no intervention to stop the passing of years.  But there are blessings to love it, to honor it, to bring it fully into the light of love and wisdom.

“What are you doing here?” a pastor once asked the intern who had been assigned to his church.  The startled intern didn’t know just what to say.  He was at his desk, at church, waiting for something to happen.

“Get out there,” said the pastor.

“Where?”

“Out there,” said the pastor.  Out there on the sidewalks, in the cafes, on the porches of people, in their gardens, in their homes, in their lives.

I want to talk about healing.

“So do we,” say its practitioners.

“Good,” I say.  “Then let’s go.  Let’s listen.  Let’s look.”

A healing river awaits us.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Hope in Black and White

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Several weeks ago I shared with you how deeply I believe in the power of letters.  There is nothing quite like a well thought-out letter, I wrote.  But in our era of scanners, I found that the responses to my Washington-bound letter had little to do with my actual questions or point of view.

I shared that I’d written a letter, not an e-mail, not a twitter feed, but an actual letter, sealed with a stamp, to the Secretary of Labor in Washington DC.  My concern was the welfare of workers who clean the floors of grocery stores in the wee hours of the night.  They do not work for generous corporations such as Target for whom community relations actually do matter.  Instead, they work for holding companies that makes a deal with corporations to clean stores when the world is asleep.  Nobody knows the names of these companies who care not all that much about the welfare of their workers.  And so Target cleaners aren’t working for Target; Rainbow cleaners aren’t working for Rainbow.  What a surprise.  I asked her who in the Department of Labor oversees their working conditions, and their attempt to earn a living wage.

Then I said, “I’m still waiting for an answer.”  There was a tone in those words.  The tone said, “I’ll bet this is another lost cause.”

I was wrong.

Last week I received a letter from the U.S. Department of Labor, E030 Room N3408, 200 Constitution Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20210

I opened it.  I expected, for a brief moment, to see a computer-generated letter.  But that is not what I found.  The opening paragraph explained that the Secretary of Labor had forwarded my letter to this office for a response.  The letter was hand signed, with real ink, and a real name.  She had read my letter with some care.

Some of it, of course, was a bit over my head.  She cited the laws the protect workers who want to form a union.  She cited laws intended to keep workers safe.  She cited labor laws by both name and number.

“You mentioned in your letter corporations such as Target, Cub, WalMart, and Rainbow.”  Then she noted that they do have the legal right to outsource some of their labor market.

It was not a one-page letter.  It was a two-page letter.

I mentioned in my column about the power of letters that they restore hope in my heart.  I am going to write her back, and thank her for taking the time.

I doesn’t mean, of course, that there isn’t work to be done.  There were laws protecting the West Virginia miners, and the safety of drilling rigs.  I suspect that good-will corporations have no idea how their night-time non-employees are being treated, and that if they did they’d intervene in a helpful, useful, and thoughtful way.  At least that’s my hope.  If so, we can escape the confines of black and white thinking.

And so . . . here’s the painting in color.

Same Painting in the Colors of Hope

And now?

It’s time to  move on to a new round of letters asking for the change, awareness, and compassion

Saturday, July 24, 2010

"We're Here"

Minneapolis, Minnesota

It cost a dollar.

The new library card, that is.

“I lost my card,” I said to the attendant at the check out desk.  “Can I get another?”

“Do you have ID?” he asked.

“I do,” I said, showing him my license.

“It’ll be a dollar,” he said.

“A dollar?  You mean access to all these books costs just a dollar?”

“Yes,” he said.  He didn’t pick up on the joyful impossibility of a single dollar allowing me to wander the book aisles on four flours of the sunlit beautiful library.  When I was upon sabbatical once upon a time, I spent hours each day just perusing the stacks at Eden Theological Seminary, wondering what titles would catch my eye.  There was no rhyme or purpose to my search, it wasn’t even a search.  It was a wandering.

One day I saw title about the Civil War written from a southern point of view.  I’d never read anything like that.  And I knew I just don’t “get” the south.  So I figured I’d better read it.   It contained a letter written by a white woman, describe the plunder of her town when the Union troops entered its gates.  They burnt schools, she said, libraries, and even a hospital.  What manner of human being could do that?  The costs of war, any war, once again came into view.  She didn’t write about the slave trade.  She wrote about something else.

That’s what libraries do.  They bless us by giving a new perspective.  And that’s what blessing does, it also gives us a new perspective to help us navigate our times.  Blessings are free, and library cards cost a dollar.  Astonishing how powerful both of them are.  You may be thinking, “It’s not a single dollar.  There are tax dollars.  It’s part of the city budget.”  I know that.  And it makes me appreciate the library all the more.

I read on an airplane once that during the Great Depression not a single library was closed in the entire United States.  Could that be true?  I wondered.  If it is, what a miracle.  When all was lost the libraries survived.  Now it is my generation’s turn to live a recession/depression.  From what I’ve heard, libraries are dropping like flies.  Besides who needs them with the web?

I do.

We do.

We ran out or space, and so I lifted a book shelf to the back of my desk.  Four layers of titles greet me.  The poetry of William Stafford, a few hymnals, a few bibles, A History of the Christian Church, watercolor books, Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, Reconciliation, Native American History, Civilization, Sibley’s Field Guide to Birds, . . . and so on.  The readings speak to my heart and perhaps even my mind, an  d to a world of joy when I marvel that I just saw a Red-breasted Grosbeak.  Over and over again, the creation and discovery of hope, the destruction of that same hope when the tide turns another way.  It is not all beautiful, but all of it is essential.

One dollar.

And your books?

Are they saying, “We’re here?”  Or are they saying, “We’re still here.”

Friday, July 23, 2010

The Art of Ministry

Minneapolis, Minnesota

I begin with a confession.

Compelling ideas are a side affect of my strokes.  When an idea hits, when a concept comes home, when a thought takes wing, it lodges itself in every cell of my body, mind, and soul.  Perception runs around the bases not once but three times.

I was interviewing the president of Methodist Healthcare in Memphis, Tennessee when such a thing happened.  The painting on a wall of his office utterly captivated me.  A column of stones, far more beautiful than the one I have sketched out here, framed the reality of his profession.  Move any one stone and the entire column would fall.  The balance of the strong stones was fragile.

Hmmmm, I thought to myself.  The stones of a hospital . . . how many are there?  Medicare?  Insurance?  Employee moral?  Infection rates?  The cost of equipment?  Chronic conditions?  The health of the foundation?  A recession in which people still get sick?  Through the interview I kept thinking about those stones, and the responsibility of finding the line of gravity that would keep them in balance.

What’s true of hospitals is also true of ministry.

If one preaches too strongly about this, that or the other thing, somebody will be offended.  If one doesn’t preach about this, that or the other thing, somebody will be offended.  We may call ourselves the United Methodist Church, or the United Church of Christ, but in actuality we aren’t all that united about . . . the kinds of chairs that should, and should not, be in the sanctuary; the kinds of prayers to be offered; what hospitality means; what should be opened to discussion and what is off-limits.  Barbers know that while everyone would like to talk about religion and politics, one keeps customers by appreciating what they say but not crossing boundaries.

Ministry.

Like healing, it is an art.  Like law, it is a practice. It is always searching for what good can be done, and what things are best tolerated.

One should care about principles, not feelings, but any ministry worth its salt cares a great deal about feelings that help us read the heart and makes sense of life.  Ministry without feeling isn’t much of a ministry.  And that keeps us off balance.  In a wonderful, meaningful, useful way, it keeps us off balance.

Jesus “read” the lepers who wanted to be healed.  He “read” Zaccheus who wanted to meet him.  He “read” Mary and Martha.  Pastors learn to “read” people in the blink of an eye, and then find out just where it is these feelings lead.  Indeed we often carry those feelings home with us, wondering how to make sense of them.  It is both a burden and a blessing.

“Oh our church,” an elderly woman in Wisconsin said to me last week, as I looked for stones a billion and a half year old in a field beside her farm.  “I love small churches,” she said as I explained our small church is looking to refurbish a big old church.   “But we’ve got problems,” she said.    It’s nice on the outside, but we’re not getting along.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “Churches are challenging.  In the end that’s what keeps us alive.  I hope you’ll make it.”

“We will,” she said.

The the plumb line of life always calls us.  And so I say, “Thank God for the art of ministry, that keeps us a little off balance as we lay a new foundation each and every day.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Minneapolis, Minnesota

You may have noticed in these pages how often I refer to church.

It is, perhaps, because in church we talk about life.  Sometimes, to my great regret, we’re quite sure that truth is to be found in an unending litany of complaint.  But sometimes when we are authentic enough, and caring enough, to talk about the way it really is, authenticity unlocks a meaningful conversation.

When I went to seminary I had no intention of becoming a pastor.  Something else caused us to leave coastal Maine for Manhattan island and Union Theological Seminary.  One day, the president of Union Theological Seminary, just across the street from the famed Riverside Church, stopped by a group of new students.  “Can you believe it?” he asked  us.  “We’re here to actually make sense of God.”

Unbelievable.

Who would pay for such an endeavor?  Who would value such an endeavor?  Who would actually do such an impossible task?

I remember nodding my head in agreement with his fundamental perception.  And that’s why I went to seminary.  If there was a God, one should pay attention.  That’s what seminaries did.  They paid attention to God.  Some were conservative, some liberal.  It didn’t matter to me.  Either way, they paid attention to a central question:  If there is a God, what bearing would that have on life?

At this point, a story emerges.  I was eking out a living by being a consultant.  “Isn’t that the title one what when one doesn’t have a” friend asked me.  “Yes,” I answered, though my pride took a hit.  I’d been writing about “church.”  But then I realized my assumptions were all too many, and my understandings all too few.  How could I write about church when I had never led one?

I wrote out an application.  When I say “wrote,” I do mean “wrote.”  I did not type it.  I wrote it longhand.  And sent it in.  Soon, there was a response from a little church in southwestern Minnesota, out there on the edge of the prairie.  They were struck that my application, unlike all the others that were up-to-date and up-to-speed were carefully and precisely typed.

They asked, “Would you consider coming here?”

“Where?” I asked.  I found Montevideo on a map, not far from the South Dakota border in southwestern Minnesota.

I flew to Minneapolis.  The man who met me, Bob Reed, raised a sign over his head at the airport.  It said, “Pray.”  “It was a bit odd,” he later said.

It was a good visit.  But I wasn’t sure.  That consultancy thing, you see, still held power though no power did it hold.  And so, they invited my wife, Connie, to pay a visit.  She went.  And she returned.  “I don’t know where you’re going,” she said when she returned to Manhattan.  “I’m going to Montevideo.”

I knew in that moment that the Spirit wasn’t working through me.  It was working through her.  It said, “Go.”  And so I did.  It was the best decision of my life.  When I say “church,” I think of the way the First Congregational Churches I served  in Montevideo, Minnesota, Grand Marais and Big Timber Montana, taught me the meaning of love.

It’s the meaning of love.

That’s what churches are about.

Come to think of it, that’s what healing is about too.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Figuring It Out

Madison, Wisconsin

“What is comes down to,” my father said to me as he rested from physical therapy, and waited for something to happen in his hospital/nursing home bed, “is simple.  I have to figure out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”

The nursing home does things, to help him learn to walk again after the broken hip of a few months ago.  They take him to meals.  They take him to therapy.  They clean his room every so often.  But that’s about it.  Actually, they don’t do much.

And so he has lots of time to think and lots of time to wonder. The absence of activity makes these reflections a necessity.

Our conversations are heartfelt.

“I’m 91,” he says.

“I know,” I say.

“The strange part of this is seeing others who can walk, who can drive, who can do pretty much what they want to.  They just do it.  I wonder how that’s possible.  How can they do it?”

His reflection takes me back 25 years.  I wasn’t yet 40.  But for some time I’d had a deep ache in my left arm, leaving me to wonder what I’d lifted that could have caused such an ache.  And my chest, it ached too.  I’d walk up Broadway, and notice how effortlessly other people walked in and out of doors, how quickly they moved up and down the sidewalk.  How could they do that so easily? I wondered.

I just couldn’t keep up.  A gulf between me and everyone else had arisen, spread, and deepened.  A few days later I was in cardiac intensive care.  Now I knew the reason for “distance.”  So when my father watches others, and wonders how they can move so easily, I am at home with the his perception.  I get it.

We’re both aware that we cannot turn back the clock, though we would both like to do exactly that.  We both must adjust to a “new normal.”

We may not even be aware when we have done so.  Our culture’s addiction to cures means living with one disability or another is second best.  It is so pervasive that we are not aware that maybe, just maybe, our lives can still be a blessing.

We’re in the rehabilitation room, and he is walking with the help of two parallel bars.  In college he worked the rings in gymnastics.  And here, all these years later he’s working the parallel bars.  Then physical therapists wants him to walk down a very, very, very long hallway.  He puts a strap around dad, and asked me to keep the wheelchair close, just in case.

We walk the first ten feet.  A man, perhaps in his late 60s, sits beside his mother, who looks to be in her late 90s.  He sees my father take one, two, three, four slow steps.   He looks over to his mother.  “That’s you tomorrow, mom,” he says.

Who would have thought four steps would inspire hope in another?  Here we are, figuring out what to do with the rest of our lives.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And you?

Monday, July 19, 2010

The Road Home

Madison, Wisconsin

It is 276 miles from our apartment to the nursing home where my parents heal.  I leave Minneapolis in the late afternoon, knowing I’ll arrive in Madison long after sun has set.  There is a rhythm to these drives.  As the sun sets National Public Radio rounds out the day.  Then I switch stations, wondering who else inhabits the night air.

The answer is that religious broadcasters own the night.  They are “so pleased,” to bring us the word, and would we please send a donation to keep them on the air.  In some ways, there isn’t much difference between them and NPR.  The later it gets, the more fervent their voices, the more urgent their call.  I could, of course, listen only to those with whom I agree, but curiosity will not allow it.  And besides, these strange but random broadcasts invite me to filter once again what I do, and do not believe.

I’d been thinking Sunday about just what a church is.  What differentiates it from a club or a political party (either right, or left)?  Is it because life rather than opinion is our gathering call?  Is it because birth and death are the bookends of our conversations?  Is it weaving worship with scripture, is it communion?   Or is there more than that?

A hundred miles from Madison a radio preacher earnestly addresses the congregation.  Don’t think there’s one thing you can do to be saved, he says.  If you are to be saved it is all God’s doing.  It seems to be a sermon about grace.  I didn’t expect that on such a station.

He then tells a story.  Turns out that after Gandhi read the New Testament he considered becoming a Christian.  So he went to church.  Once there the usher refused to sit him, and told him to go back with “his kind.”  Well, said Gandhi, since the Christians have their own caste system there’s no reason for me to change.  That’s sin, the preacher said.  I agree.  When church becomes exclusive it has moved away from God, or so it seems to me.

But then, the preacher’s tone becomes more urgent than ever.  He wants us to know with absolute certainty that every single thought, every intention, every action, every sin, every misdeed, every fib, every failure we’ve ever had in our lives will be judged by God when we die.  We must strive to be perfect.  Oh, he says, the shame, the despair, the fear of that judgment day.  Very few will survive this judgment, he says.  I recoil.  If he’s right, there is no such thing as grace or the forgiveness of sin.  There goes hope. Indeed, there goes life.

Its no wonder the words “church,” “Bible,” and “Jesus” no longer serve as the common threads of church.  They can become toxic.  Just where will the church Gandhi expected to find be found?

I pull into the lane I’ve driven up to the farm house a thousand times.  It is too late to go to the nursing home.  Tomorrow.

The night is quiet.  I look into the sky making out a handful of constellations.  Whatever they say, I’ll take it.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Falls, Rock and Stream: An Almost Study

Minneapolis, Minnesota

We have an innate desire to simplify.  Indeed, it is a neurological necessity.  There are too many things going on at any moment to make sense of the world, and so we look for trends, for patterns, for a few sign posts that point the way.

We find them on bumper stickers.  We hear them as campaign slogans.  The world is actually simple if we’d just do “this.”  I remember laughing at an Onion story about a man at a bar somewhere in Northern Wisconsin who after five or six beers just knew how the federal government could cut its budget, if somebody would just listen to him.  All that waste spending!  If he were in charge things would be different.  But nobody heeded his genius, his wisdom, his thinking.  Heck, nobody even paid for his beer(s).

As the North Korean soccer team headed home, I wondered what kind of a reception they would receive from the Dear Leader.  Clearly something had gone wrong.  They lost to Brazil by only one goal in the opening round, astonishing the entire world.

But then they played Portugal.  The end score was seven to one . . . they had the one.  Then I read what happened.  The Dear Leader was watching the match, and he had a word for his players.  They needed to go on the attack!  It was beneath the North Koreans to play a defense game.  Attack! he said through a sophisticated communication system to the North Korean coach.  Attack!  The Dear Leader knew nothing about the game of soccer, but he knew this . . . if you want to score you have to attack, you have to move away from a dishonorable game.  Attack!

And so the team fell apart.  One who knew nothing about soccer gave bumper sticker advice.  It is true that one must score to win.  But beyond that soccer is beautifully, mysteriously, maddeningly complex.  So is life.  There actually are unintended consequences to everything we do, or fail to do.  We recognize this in worship when we confess sins of both omission and commission.

Restoring an economy from the brink of oblivion is complex.  It is so complex that many get hurt along the way, that everyone has a price to pay.  Capping an oil well a mile down is complex.  I watch the jaws of a robotic submersible move the cap, and am astounded as they open and close with almost tender precision.  Who knew such machines even existed?

But we score points when we have a simple solution that cuts through the Gordian knot of complexity.

Perhaps a way out of the dilemma is to embrace simplicity that is far more complex than it seems.

Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself, we are taught.

Hmmm . . . just what does loving God mean?  Could we have false gods?  Might success have become more important that service?  Just what is this force called “love?”  And “Who is my neighbor?”  Does that include everyone?  Do we really forgive seven times 70 times to set the stage for loving one’s neighbor?

Attack, said the Dear Leader.  Seemed like a good idea, surely a propaganda poster, perhaps even a bumper sticker.

To which the beautiful game said, “No.  There is more to life than that.”

So the water, the stone, and the stream say to us once again.