Tag Archives: life experiences

The Surprising Loss of My Virginity

30 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by in Death, Events, Faith, Growing up, Gullibility, Health, Innocence, Learning from mistakes, Suffering

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3 Owls

The fall of my sophomore year at Illinois Wesleyan began with high expectations. I had finished my freshman year with straight A’s. I had a steady girlfriend.  I was newly elected president of the Methodist Student Movement. I was enjoying my classes including “Greek II,” “Creative Writing,” and “Biology,” which I hadn’t gotten to take in high school. And I was preparing for the next summer to be spent in Mexico with a Catholic student work project. But after the first few weeks I began to suffer sharp pains in my back, which only grew worse as I grew weaker every day. Finally, early on one weekday morning in October, I made it into the dormitory bathroom with severe pain in my bladder and penis, pouring bloody urine into the toilet until I passed out. When I awoke and the blood was just oozing, I dressed and headed for the campus health service. I thought I was dying.

Nurse Velma Arnold looked at me knowingly as I explained what had happened. “You have VD,” she said. It took a minute for that to soak in, before I said, “But that is impossible.” And she said, “That’s what they all say. Obviously I can’t help you. You will have to see Dr. Cunningham. I will need to know who your sexual partners have been.” It was hard to make her believe that I couldn’t answer the last question, since I hadn’t had any. She finally let me go anyway.

Later that day, still in misery, I saw Dr. Cunningham, who seemed to take a broader view of the matter. He recommended that I drink as much beer as I could while I was waiting to see Dr. Killough, the urologist. He suspected that I was experiencing kidney stones or a urinary tract infection or both, which is what it turned out to be. Having never drunk an alcoholic beverage, and being 19, under the legal drinking age, on a campus where possession of alcohol was considered cause for expulsion, I was not inclined to take his advice about the beer. He didn’t give me a prescription for beer, but he did give me an antibiotic sulfa drug. By the time I saw Dr. Killough, a day or two later, and he confirmed the double diagnosis with a cystoscope, I was also beginning to show the hives of an allergic reaction to the sulfa drug. The cystoscope, experienced regularly during the next several months, along with a few days in the hospital over Christmas break, removed every ounce of false modesty that I had developed in my 19 years. I had discovered more about my own genitalia than I ever wanted to know.

 

 

I was not completely clear of infection or signs of kidney stones until the next summer. The plans for a Mexican work trip cancelled, I wished my Catholic friends and girlfriend farewell, took a summer course in the history of Christianity, and looked for something else to do.

Responding to the Kerner Commission Report

27 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by in Caring, Citizenship, Events, Faith, Growing up, Gullibility, Learning from mistakes, Racial Prejudice, Small town life

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hot-owl-southern-white-faced-owl-in-botswana-trying-to-keep-coolAgain in the last semester of my senior year, the Illinois Wesleyan Political Science Department gave two other students and me another opportunity to represent the school at a special gathering, the annual Public Affairs Conference at Principia College. (By that time I was also taking the first political science course of my college career.) The conference theme was “Combatting Racism.”

 

The agenda of the conference included a variety of experts. The immediate background of the theme was the February 29,1968, release of the Kerner Commission Report, formally called the President’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which branded racism as the primary cause of the surge of riots that had recently swept several major American cities. It was the conference objective to consider and design programs and laws that would reverse the separation of America into two racial cultures that were separate and unequal. It was an ambitious undertaking, especially considering that minority groups were barely represented among the participants.

 

With the division into working groups, I found that my group had one young eloquent black man. He dispensed with the group assignment with the observation that we could imagine many fine ideas for state and federal action that would go nowhere. Instead, we could design goals for ourselves working in the families and communities in which we lived, and these might have some chance of accomplishing something if we were courageous enough to follow through. I was hooked, and so were the other members of the group. Around the circle we considered the actions and processes that would disturb the racism that prevailed where we lived. It was not comfortable, but it was real.

 

I had grown up in a northern community that was thoroughly segregated, even though it was only a few miles from Chanute Air Force Base. Air Force families of many racial backgrounds lived off-base, but only white families lived in Paxton, where people still boasted a “sunset law” that threatened any darker-skinned person who might be caught there after sunset. I had spoken about racial justice in the few sermons I was invited to preach in my home church, but I had not approached the members of the Paxton City Council that I knew, who had it in their power to renounce the “sunset” idea and prepare the town to be open to all.

 

Black friends lived in neighboring towns, but they would not risk coming to Paxton, even to take part in such common activities as bowling, seeing a movie, swimming, or roller-skating. I was welcome in their homes to eat meals and enjoy their company, and they were welcome in my home, which was miles from town in the countryside. The town’s segregating attitude had to change. That would change, I was confident, as the months went by.

 

We resolved to implement the plans we made.  The other groups reported ambitious government programs that would take large scale political action. Our group’s report seemed pale and meager in comparison. In hindsight, few of the ambitious goals that were formulated there, or in the Kerner Report, came to be embodied in actions in the decades that followed.

 

I returned to my home town and approached the public officials that I knew. To a one, they thought it was “too soon” or “too radical” to do what I was suggesting. Furthermore, the time for me to do the organizing that was needed even to accomplish such a modest goal was short, as I was preparing to marry and begin my graduate education in Chicago. There, in Chicago, I would learn what life in an integrated community was like, and how deprived my own background had been.

 

Fifty years later, returning to Paxton, finding a mix of people in the school system, working in the businesses, and living in the town, I wonder why it took us so long, and why we still have so far to go. There is still a lot of room for both large-scale and meager goals and the courage to embody them.

 

Those Poor Dead Rabbits

17 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Caring, Farm, Growing up, Learning from mistakes

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Raising rabbits was the occupation and 4-H project that was handed down from brother to brother to brother in my family, like the outgrown clothes. I was the third in line, and around the age of nine or ten I inherited the population of twenty to thirty New Zealand white rabbits.  With them came the hutches that my oldest brother had made—a single hutch, a double hutch, and a dandy triple decker with three pens on each level. The triple decker not only had woven “wire cloth” floors like the others; underneath the wire, it also had a tin slanted floor that allowed rabbit feces to roll down the ramp and out the rear to form a nice pile behind the hutch, handy for carrying to the garden that was next to it.

Every couple of years we went down to the Okaw Valley Rabbitary and bought a couple more to keep our population from getting too inbred. We had two or three breeding seasons a year, and most of the rabbits became dinner for our neighbors, although once in while someone bought live rabbits for their own breeding programs or pets.

Taking care of rabbits was relatively simple. I fed them morning before school and after school with Purina Rabbit Chow and occasionally hay and green leafy vegetables, put water in their coffee can waterers, refreshed the salt block in each pen occasionally and some fresh wood to chew on, so they’d leave their bed boxes and the hutch itself alone, kept the hutch clean, and provided shelter, straw, heat lamps, and unfrozen water in winter. When the time was right I put a male into the hutch with a female and watched them go at it, putting one and one together to get more than two, as farm kids learned more than math in those days. Then when the female started to nest with her own fur, I prepared to count the babies, because there wasn’t much else to do but watch the mother care for her brood or not.

When the cute  little rabbits ate their way into being big rabbits, I learned to slit their throats quickly, skin them and hang their pelts to dry, and butcher those rabbits for the fine meat our neighbors and we enjoyed. I don’t remember what we sold them for—maybe a couple of bucks apiece, about as much as the rabbit chow cost to feed them probably. I kept records for the 4-H project book every year, and I don’t think we ever made a profit that would match the amount of work involved.

When the weather was good, of course I played with them, took them out one by one and played in the grass or the garden. As I enjoyed the stories of Peter Rabbit and all of his kin, I never considered that I was the mean old farmer who would mercilessly put them to death. It was just the expected cycle of things.

My most embarrassing rabbit moment came in the last 4-H Fair where I exhibited a pair of rabbits as usual. I had always gotten a first place blue ribbon. Only my pair in that last year was two females, because I had sold or butchered all my young males. I figured two sisters was as much a pair as a male and female, but the judge did not agree. I had to be satisfied with a red ribbon, and face my competitors who thought I could not tell the difference.

Why did the rabbits come back to haunt me in my dreams years later, after I had given up raising rabbits and moved on to theology and philosophy? I would dream that I had forgotten to feed and water them, neglected to put up the corrugated sheet shelter that protected them from ice and snow, starved them to death, let them freeze, and the dreams would not just come once; they recurred. Not night after night, but every few weeks the rabbit dream recurred. If I was not the irresponsible, neglectful person while I had the rabbits, I certainly was when I got rid of them. They came back to haunt me, and remind me that diligence and attentiveness were required if I was to care for living beings. I was about sixteen when I gave up rabbit culture. The last time I dreamed of rabbits was about fifty years later.

Celebrating Pierre Trudeau’s Election

14 Saturday Jan 2017

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When Pierre Trudeau was elected Prime Minister of Canada in the winter of 1968, Rick Kelsey and I were at Ann Arbor, Michigan, at a Canadian-American Conference, representing the Illinois Wesleyan political science department. I had never taken a poli-sci course at IWU, but Rick was the star student, my friend, and he persuaded Dr. Brown to take me along. Trudeau’s election electrified the conference. The status of Quebec and the possibility of its independence was one of the issues tackled by the conference, against the background of increasing division over the war in Vietnam in the USA. Trudeau was a French Canadian and an intellectual, committed to a united Canada as fully as he was to a multilingual nation. Quebec’s separatists were seeking a vote and sure to get one. Trudeau would seek to bridge the gap and keep Canada whole (which he did when four years later the vote for separation was defeated).

Canadian and US academics, students, and politicians joined in presentations and debates about the future, made murky by the hostility and polarization disturbing each of the neighbor countries. We might not be able to help each other find solutions, but at least we could commiserate and share our concerns.

A philosophical voice belonged to the leading American politician present there, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine.  He was both realistic about the severity of the problems and optimistic about the likelihood of resolving them, uniting Canada with the new leadership provided by Trudeau, and finding a way out of quagmire war in Vietnam, with the growing awareness that US efforts could not accomplish what the Vietnamese people themselves did not support.  During that year he would become the Democratic Party vice-presidential candidate, and, as doubtful as I was about Humphrey, I felt hopeful about the man Muskie I met in a small group that evening. The Labatt ale tasted good, too.

The confidence in Trudeau was well-placed, as his leadership became an inspiration to many people around the world, providing major improvements in Canada’s welfare and economy. The political divisions continued in both countries, but persistence did resolve the issues that seemed intractable for the next generation at least.

I learned that a young man of my age, with my same name, would soon be residing in Toronto, seeking Canadian citizenship and avoiding the draft. I was in no danger from the draft, but his actions would place my name on a suspicious list for a few years. Other US citizens would trade their citizenship for the that status in Canada, and somewhat more rarely some would come south.

Fifty years can give some perspective, and make us pause and ponder. Justin Trudeau now serves in his father’s office, and Canadian separatism appears quiet for the time being. Partisan division in the US has returned with a vengeance as war and fear again provoke American reactions, and the newly elected US President brings baggage in corruption and questionable motives that remind us of the President elected in 1968. The University of Michigan still sponsors forums for commiserating with each other’s problems, and Labatt ale is still good.

Farm Worker Ministry

05 Thursday Jan 2017

Posted by in Caring, Church, Citizenship, Farm, People, Small town life, Suffering, Volunteering

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I was elected to represent the Illinois Conference of the United Church of Christ (UCC) at the Illinois Conference of Churches (ICOC) in 1976. I considered it an honor and an opportunity to work on the ecumenical relationships that I hoped would deepen as the years progressed. As it turned out, the ICOC Forum where we served was mostly an opportunity to be informed about what the leaders of the denominations in Illinois were doing, not to exercise any influence or activity ourselves. I stayed on, learning what I could. At the end of my four-year term, I had decided that the place of real ministry, where I might contribute, was an arm of the ICOC, called the Illinois Farm Worker Ministry (IFWM). There the denominations, including the Roman Catholic Church, were cooperating in providing a ministry to people who needed and deserved it—the mostly seasonal farm workers in Illinois, although many who formerly followed seasonal crop needs had “settled out” and adapted to work opportunities in various locales in the state. I asked for a place on the Illinois Farm Worker board and received it for the next two terms until 1988.

The Farm Worker Ministry gave support to organizing efforts of farm workers on the national level and in the state, provided resource people for several locations where workers had found more or less permanent work and homes, served both spiritual and material needs as we discovered them, and, after the Immigration Reform and Control Act was finally signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, supported the educational and citizenship qualification efforts of thousands of Illinois residents. The capable leader of IFWM was Olgha Sandman, the wife of my mentor in the UCC, Robert Sandman, and soon an equally important mentor to me as well. We worked alongside farm workers to improve conditions in their work and for their families. That included such matters as documenting the use and abuse of pesticides and the exposure of people to chemicals that would harm them.

Olgha made every possible effort to bring her board members into close contact with farm worker leaders and people. We visited sites in Onarga, Princeton, and elsewhere, where farm workers were gathering, organizing, and needing services. We met and worked with scores of wonderful, hard-working, non-citizens and new and would-be citizens. The dedication of so many people who had come to work, make a living, and settle down, was evident as those who had come or been brought into the country without papers or permanent papers before 1982, and had stayed here for at least five years without any legal problems, took advantage of the classes to learn English and familiarity with US history and government. There were many who could not provide the necessary proof of their work history or long-term residency who were just as qualified by character as those who succeeded at that time, but those were the limits of the 1986 legislation, and no efforts since then have made such an opportunity possible again.

As communities of farm workers have continued to mature, most of their leadership has emerged from among their own ranks, and many of the various regional groups that used to provide a ministry have declined, including the IFWM after Olgha’s retirement. The need for people to advocate with them and on their behalf has not declined. Various industries and employers have continued to bring people into the country without papers and to employ those who are here, without the legal support or rights of citizenship, therefore taking advantage of their status to provide low wages, no benefits, and poor working conditions. In the end that has not been an advantage to either the immigrants who have come for a better life or to the rest of the workers in the country already, whether they were recent immigrants or not.

We could do much better and much more for hard-working people who come for a better life. The willingness to welcome such people has been a tradition of this country for centuries, before and after “legal papers” became an issue, receiving the vast majority of our ancestors. We have also seen the persistent practice of getting other people “to do our work for us,” and “to do what we are not willing to do,” and “to do what we have not enough skilled and knowledgeable people to do.”  

The fraction of people who have come in recent decades is much smaller than most of our history, and the people who come have proven to be less dangerous than those who already live here. A variety of paths to new citizenship are appropriate, and the church always has a duty to provide hospitality to the stranger and sojourner. Having an opportunity to know and work with farm workers leads most of us to the same conclusions.

Starting Out and Starting Over

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

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Through ten years, between 1964 and 1973, scholarships, fellowships, and grants got me through college and seminary. I worked and studied mostly through the benevolence of others. The savings from my work before college disappeared in costs for the first year. What I earned during the summers or working during the school years disappeared almost immediately. I felt fortunate to leave the years of private institutional education with no debts and no bank account, a talented wife and two small children. I needed a job.

For months I interviewed with churches and church-related institutions. I felt qualified to be a pastor, or a college or hospital chaplain, or a librarian based on years of working in and for libraries.  My academic record no longer impressed anyone. My denominational connections were tenuous. Clearly wealthy suburban congregations did not see anything in my resume or presentations that convinced them. I was going to start small or as an assistant to someone. Who and where?

In the interviews I was my own worst enemy. I asked questions that no one wanted to hear. How often do you examine social issues, such as race and war and poverty and hunger, in preaching and study groups? How many bible study or issue study groups do you have? (Study groups? What are they?) Is the church involved in serving its community? Providing food, housing, help in finding jobs? (I couldn’t find my own job, let alone help someone else find employment.) One church was offended when they bragged about the success of their dartball teams, and I asked them what dartball was. The discussion went downhill after that. Clearly I was on a different wavelength than my interviewers.

Along the way, the United Church of Tilton, where I had served part-time for a year as a pastoral intern, asked me to come for an interview. Tilton was an industrial village at the edge of the much larger community of Danville, Illinois. The General Motors Foundry was the largest employer, but there were several other factories and a railroad yard in the town. This congregation had blended a few Methodists with a few Congregational-Christians and started over. They built a new building, in large part with volunteer labor, and they had started building a new parsonage. They only had thirty members, but they obviously had courage and faith. Would I take the chance to be their first full-time pastor in decades?

I had grown up on a farm fifty miles away, but this mostly union-member, blue collar community, with decidedly southern accents, was like foreign territory. Racial prejudice lay barely under the surface of a lot of comments, and a college education was suspect among some of them. Biblical literalism was the standard, and the church songbook came right out of old-time Gospel radio. Could I serve them?

The commitment and devotion of this small group won me over. They took a chance on me, and Jan and I took a chance on them and accepted their invitation. A year later they gathered around me in an ordination. Within a few years the membership had doubled and then doubled again and again. Their per capita stewardship led the Illinois Conference of the United Church of Christ, although the composition of the congregation looked decidedly different than most of the rural and urban congregations of the UCC.

We had our challenges there. School desegregation, poor economy and loss of jobs, religious fundamentalism and the critical judgment of other Christians, problem pregnancy counseling, competition among congregations for members and support, physical and emotional abuse in families, drugs and alcohol—these all brought plenty of tearful times. We also had successes—reorganizing the abandoned town cemetery, senior adult meals, youth programs and work trips, men’s and women’s and couple’s fellowship experiences, and, yes, study groups. After seven more years I thought that it was time to move on and seek new ministries, and let them show that their faith could keep growing with new leadership, which of course they did.

The Problem Pregnancy Counseling Service

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

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My move to my first full-time parish at Tilton coincided with an important national decision—the Supreme Court ruling in Roe vs. Wade. Legal abortion, formerly restricted to a few states and people of wealth, was then available through qualified medical facilities to every first and second trimester pregnant woman at relatively low cost. Two local obstetrician-gynecologists and workers in the county health department realized that they had a challenge on their hands. Who would provide counseling to the many women who now had a choice that they did not have previously?

The doctors and health workers did not feel ready or able to counsel at length with women who were facing new and legal options for which they had not prepared. The two OB-GYNE doctors disagreed between themselves about the morality of the new option. The health workers had mixed feelings. They turned to local ministers, asking for ministers and other counselors who were concerned to join in providing free, confidential, and non-directive counseling to women who desired it. Eight ministers and counselors responded.

The sticking point was the need to be non-directive, not to tell women what to do, not to impose a religious position, but to be willing to listen to different circumstances and needs and religious positions, explore feelings, provide information that was as objective as possible, and let women make their own final decisions. We all faced a steep learning curve, gathering information on all options that were available, including the medical facilities that provided abortions, procedures used, and costs involved, as well as the ethical and psychological considerations that women and their partners and families might face, whichever decision they made. Available resources for supporting a new child or adoption were necessary as well. Before we began, we developed a standard list of themes that would be a part of each session, and we revised it regularly.

The Problem Pregnancy Counseling Service continued for the next seven years. The counselors met together regularly to compare and enhance what we were learning, to recruit and replace counselors, and to support one another in emotional struggles. Not everyone of the original group could maintain the standards that we had imposed on ourselves, nor did new volunteers find them easy. At the end of that time, the polarization of abortion as an issue had grown to make non-directive counseling sound like ‘permissive’ or ‘encouraging’ to outsiders, so the counseling pool had shrunk and recruitment of new counselors became politicized. Women and doctors were more familiar with their own options as people had made their separate decisions and shared them with others. Fewer women were asking for counseling. We disbanded.

What had we learned as counselors? There was no standard case of a woman coming for counseling. Women’s motivations and circumstances varied enormously, and our awareness of heart-wrenching circumstances and difficult decisions expanded. Male partners were seldom available for support. We varied among ourselves in our ability to empathize or offer emotional support to those who came to us. We also had to deal with our own grief and depend on others for support. The politics of the issue made abortion more accessible to some and more difficult for many. What had long been an illegal underground activity remained part of an emotionally charged secret, as ‘underground’ as ever, although usually without the dire medical consequences of local illegal abortions.

None of us were immune to the personal threats that were directed at us from abortion absolutists. Yet all of us had people come to us later thanking us for help in their difficult times.  We would face the same issues again wherever we were, but not with the frequency or intensity of those seven years.

A Church Finds Ways to Reach Out to Others

03 Tuesday Jan 2017

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St. Paul’s Church in Minonk supposedly had six hundred members when they called me to be their pastor. About fifty of that number turned out to have no names, but they were still a substantial congregation. Many were related to each other after four generations of German family intermarriage. The town of Minonk was 2400 in population and rapidly shrinking, due both to the elderly imbalance of its citizens and to the loss of industrial jobs in its area. Clearly St. Paul’s dominated the five congregations in the town in size, but that had not resulted in taking more responsibility for community life.

They did take part in the one social service project of the town, sponsored by the Ministerial Association (the four ministers—the fifth coming a distance only on Sunday), and that was home-delivered meals prepared by the nursing home and delivered by church volunteers. That was a beginning, anyway. Otherwise the town had only the local community services that were provided by town government, namely the police, fire and rescue services. Lions Club, Scouts, and 4-H did occasional helpful projects. As poor people moved into Minonk to take advantage of low-cost housing, there was not much more to serve their needs.

St. Paul’s had mostly looked after its own needs, caring for one another in family duty. When a 4-H club, led by congregation members, asked to use the church facilities for regular meetings, it was the first such request that any of the current leaders could remember. They hesitated, but the argument that they should serve more people in the community won the vote. There was not much sacrifice in providing a free location for a 4-H club.

The next steps were harder. It was clear that more people were having a difficult time making ends meet. Food banks were beginning to make an appearance in the larger communities in the region, and access to surplus and donated food was simple, given pick-up vehicles, a few volunteers, and a place to distribute. A few church members saw the need, provided some volunteers, two of whom loaned the use of their trucks. The city provided space in an  old city hall, if another organization took responsibility for staffing and liability insurance, which St. Paul’s insurance provider was willing to do. The Ministerial Association recruited a few more volunteers. With St. Paul’s members in the lead, the church gave its approval of the project. Food and money donations came in and the pantry was underway. (Several years later, outgrowing the old city hall, the church provided space in underused accessible rooms.)

After a few months, a local restauranteur volunteered to provide a Christmas party to needy children of the area, and she asked the food pantry to gather a list of children to be invited, along with gift requests. The food pantry clients happily cooperated. St. Paul’s and another congregation sought volunteer sponsors, and there were enough to cover the fifty children who were the anonymous recipients. St. Paul’s Youth agreed to wrap and identify the gifts with the number tags that maintained the anonymity. So, Santa’s Helpers was born, and continued year after year.

The people who had for several years gathered clothing to take to Goodwill and other groups in larger communities found that they could distribute coats and shoes and other items in town at the food pantry before they took the surplus to other places.

Requests for counseling increased as the newer residents found that they had a home in Minonk and people who cared about them. The four ministers reported that their counseling loads were increasing with people outside their congregations. We investigated the resources available in the area and places to refer people in need for those situations that exceeded our abilities.

Eventually St. Paul’s would hire an associate pastor who provided a children and family program for several years, although the funding for that effort became too great a burden to bear.

St. Paul’s Church always had plenty to do to take care of their own members, but a shrinking town population and the diminishing power of extended family ties did not keep them from growing in their care for others.

Moral Man and Immoral Society Reread

02 Monday Jan 2017

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It was 1968, for the last semester of my senior year at Illinois Wesleyan, and I requested permission from Paul Bushnell, the head of the history department, to join the senior seminar in history. That would not be surprising, but I had never taken a history course at IWU, except the History of Christianity that was taught in the religion department. My theory had been, “Why take a course in a field that was my hobby anyway?” Paul Bushnell invited me into the seminar.

He knew what I intended to do, which was to study as much of Reinhold Niebuhr’s writing as possible, leading up to his 1932 work Moral Man and Immoral Society. Another course had required the reading of that book. My interest was to trace the historical sources of his insight, that there is a “basic difference between the morality of individuals and the morality of collectives” that makes it exceedingly hard for groups to check impulses, transcend their own needs, comprehend the needs of others, and restrain their own egoism. He did not imply that this is easy for individuals, just that it is much harder for groups.

The method for the course began with collecting every essay Niebuhr had written before his book was published, and many afterwards, since 1932 was just the beginning of his application of the insight into the development of the Third Reich. In addition to English, as a German reader and writer, his awareness of German developments exceeded most of his contemporaries. I had not even begun to read German yet, so I had to rely on others’ translations of his German essays. The library of the University of Illinois was nearby, and their collection provided over a hundred essays that I could not find elsewhere, as well as a photocopier that worked, and I emptied my wallet making copies.

I was lost in a forest of insights. How could a pastor, occupied with the needs of his Detroit parish, find the time to delve so deeply into the social conditions of his nation and his world? Some relief came with the personal reflections in Niebuhr’s Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. Niebuhr was human, after all. He was also totally immersed in thoughtful analysis of “the disproportions of power in society” and “the stubborn resistance of group egoism to all moral and inclusive social objectives.”  People hold onto their prejudices, hypocrisies, and dishonesties, and use them to justify the privileges they enjoy or seek. The powerful are more likely to be personally generous with a portion of their wealth than to grant structural change for social justice.

Essay by essay Niebuhr built a catalogue of social wrongs from police suppression of labor demonstrations, to legal and extra-legal racial discrimination, to Nazi scapegoating of Jews, Romani, and “non-Aryans.” He was a persistent witness to the continuing struggle of one group or class of people over another, seeking vengeance and employing vindictiveness in repositioning themselves, and using any and every means to justify their actions, even from a moral point of view. “Society needs greater equality, not only to advance but to survive….”

Occasionally I look over that dog-eared collection of essays and that most popular book that summarized them all, with its many underlined passages. Circumstances and characters have changed; in significant ways they remain the same. How contemporary the insights appear.

A Panegyric Upon Plymouth

24 Thursday Nov 2016

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The only time I have been invited to preach at a college chapel service was for Illinois Wesleyan University just before Thanksgiving in 1969. I chose the presumptuous title of “A Panegyric Upon Plymouth” as my sermon title, drawing from Soren Kierkegaard’s “A Panegyric Upon Abraham” and the historical fictions surrounding the founding of Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

A panegyric is supposed to be an oration or public address in praise of something or someone. By using the scripture of the Pharisee and the publican as the scripture text for the sermon, my praise was reserved for the publican who approached God humbly and with repentance, in contrast with the Pharisee who proudly thanked God that he was not like other people because he was so much better. With no small amount of sarcasm, I compared the Pharisee to the usual message of thanksgiving in America and expressed the hope that we would learn to use the publican as a model instead.

My delivery was not so good that evening. I recall that my wife compared it to a dirge, since it was slow and halting. I was nervous and had never preached to a college audience in such a formal setting. My mentor, Chaplain Bill White, gave me the benefit of the doubt and said that sometimes it takes a while for a message to sink in and later people come it understand it better. Probably they would understand it from someone else who spoke it more effectively.

Maybe no one else understands that message better, but I do. If the legend of Thanksgiving bears any truth, it is in the generosity and good will of the Wampanoag people in helping the pilgrims to survive, even though the Wampanoag themselves had suffered the worst decade of their own existence as a people. As a result of the pilgrims and the actions of later puritans, we can attest that “no good deed goes unpunished.”

When President Barack Obama addressed the Arab nations in Egypt early in his presidency, expressing regret for some of the actions and attitudes represented in United States’ interventions in the Middle East (never using the word ‘apology’ although that was later used by Obama’s critics), my thoughts returned to my earlier diagnosis of American pride. We have not learned to be humble supplicants to a gracious and merciful God. Our ideas of American greatness are distorted and deadly to the future of the earth. We need to appreciate the humanity that we share with people everywhere, and realize the failures that also come with that humanity. We need to learn humbly from each other. We can only be grateful that God has given much more, much more than we deserve, and perhaps we will have more chances to do some good with what we have received.