Rural Free Delivery

Mary and I just completed an epic five-week trip that included a very successful research stopover in Memphis and a jaunt across upstate New York, Vermont (I think I’m in love!), and down the eastern seaboard, seeing old friends and making new ones.

Our stopover in far western New York included a couple of nights in the villages of Fredonia, Dunkirk and Lily Dale. Perhaps you saw the recent HBO documentary on Lily Dale. Or perhaps you’ve read Christine Wicker’s Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town That Talks to the Dead. If you haven’t, Lily Dale needs a little backstory.

This is home of the American Spiritualist movement. About 150 years ago, a movement sprang up composed of people who believed you could gain wisdom (and perhaps salvation) by speaking with the dead. Mediums. Seances. Ghostly rappings. That sort of thing. Today Lily Dale is a small village (you have to pay an admission fee to even enter the place during the summer) almost entire composed who still believe. Before you can practice (or put out a shingle), you have to be certified by the Lily Dale Assembly.

The village is entirely untouched since the 1800s — it looks like a set from Meet Me in St. Louis. (Well, except for all of the fairies, dolphins, spirits, witches, sacred herbs, and crystals everywhere.) Everything is brightly painted, every garden is a delight, and every other person you meet is a medium. Throughout the summer, an array of guest speakers, famous mediums, ghost-hunters, and authors give talks, seminars and demonstrations. It is, of course, a trip.

Now, not everybody would probably enjoy spending an afternoon in Lily Dale. I know there are folks who believe all of this stuff is of Satan. There are others who dismiss it out of hand. But Mary and I enjoyed it anyway. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why I got a kick out of the place until I read this passage in Christine’s book. It’s her description of Shelley Takei, a psychologist who summers at Lily Dale and who founded the Lower Archy of the Pink Sisterhood of the Metafuzzies and the Blissninnies. The group’s motto is: “We don’t know jack ***, but we care.”

Their motto reminded me of the controversial church t-shirt I mentioned a couple of posts back. This clearly works for the folks in Lily Dale. Nobody hassled us. Nobody preached to us. Nobody told us were were going to hell if we didn’t vote for a certain political party who shall remain nameless. Everybody was very nice.

Does it work for me? No.

It did get me to thinking about what I do believe. My beliefs have changed over the decades. I used to be pretty sure I knew all of the answers. I was a little dogmatic. I was judgmental. Now, not so much. I don’t sweat the petty stuff anymore (nor do I pet the sweaty stuff), particularly as it pertains to other people.

Instead, I’m kind of like David Oliveria’s mom. At least how David depicts her in his poem “Why I’m Not a Vegetarian”:

As my mother would say,
“Live and let live—
Just keep the details to yourself,
And pass the ketchup, please.”

(David Oliveira, from A Little Travel Story. © Harbor Mountain Press, 2008.)

And yet …

And yet … there is something I do believe strongly. Perhaps you’ve heard the story of Gavin Bryars, a well-known jazz musician. The short version is, while living in England in the 1970s, he was employed as a sound technician for a documentary on the homeless. Somewhere around King’s Cross, he recorded a nameless hobo singing a little ditty, which he recorded — and promptly forgot about for many years.

Eventually, he re-discovered the audio tape and played it back. Something about the little tramp’s voice struck him, so Bryars made a loop of the little ditty — it works like a “round” (like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”) — extending it to 90 minutes. When he returned from tea, a group of people were standing around this studio, listening and crying.

Bryars took the raw vocals and eventually over-lay dozens of string instruments, creating an ebb and flow of music behind the voice, culminating with Tom Waits singing a duet with the nameless man for the final minutes.

Jesus’ Love Failed Me Yet was an underground hit. Bryars then returned to U.K., but never found the little man again. This CD has spoken to me in ways that few sermons ever have and I’ve used it to calm the storms of my life on many occasions. I’ve also given away numerous copies. And this all the little tramp sings:

Jesus’ love never failed me yet/Never failed me yet/Jesus’ love never failed me yet/This one thing I know/That he loves me so/Jesus’ love never failed me yet

That’s it. That’s what I know. Everything else peripheral.

Which means that I’ll tend to my bidness and be happy. And I’ll be happy that you’re happy while you’re tending to your bidness, be it in Waco or Lily Dale or elsewhere.

Or, as another great poet once wrote:

Whatever gets you through the night ’s all right, ’s all right
It’s your money or life ’s all right, ’s all right
Don’t need a sword to cut through flowers oh no, oh no

– John Lennon, “Whatever Gets You Through the Night”

Eilan Landon Menjivar, by Mark Menjivar

Don’t the hours grow shorter as the days go by
You never get to stop and open your eyes
One day you’re waiting for the sky to fall
The next you’re dazzled by the beauty of it all
When you’re lovers in a dangerous time
Lovers in a dangerous time
– Bruce Cockburn

Our Sunday sermon was delivered by the always brilliant, invariably funny Dr. Lai Ling Ngan. She chose as her text 1 Kings 17:8-24. It’s the familiar story of the prophet Elijah. Times are bad, with famine and drought on the land. Elijah makes the mistake of telling the king it’s his fault and — naturally — has to flee into the wilderness to save his life. He is fed by ravens (who are, as Dr. Ngan points out, carrion eaters).

Eventually he meets a woman who is about to make a final meal for herself and her son. There is no more food and death will soon follow. Elijah asks her to share her last meal, which she does, and he then creates an endless supply of food for them. But the child dies anyway. Elijah prays to the LORD and raises the child from the dead.

Elijah is usually cited as the hero of the story. But Dr. Ngan points out that the woman is pretty brave, too. She supports her argument by citing Heidi Neumark:

There is no point in romanticizing poverty. There is, however, a point in recognizing the power of those who fight for life and bear witness to a death-defying hope. We could say that Elijah, the male prophet, does this and therefore deserves the spotlight in the lectionary text. After all, he raises someone from the dead. But the widow raises the child — without a husband, without a safety net, without welfare or workfare. She does it in a time of idolatrous national arrogance, famine and drought. Raising the dead requires a single act of trust and prayer from Elijah. Raising a child requires countless acts of trust and many prayers, especially for a single mother.

I have a new grandson, Eilan Landon Menjivar, pictured above. Great little guy. Doesn’t say much. He’s got great parents, Mark and Rachel, who have acted in trust and faith and brought him (and his older brother Asa) into a confused and dangerous world. Bless them. Bless all those who choose to bring children into this Fallen World. I’m not sure I have the faith or the strength to do it now.

And bless those who choose to adopt. Or choose to be Big Brothers/Big Sisters. And bless those who marry and choose not to have kids. Bless ‘em all.

I don’t listen to the radio stations or watch the TV shows where  the hosts(generally white males) shout and threaten and villify and demonize people who disagree with them. I don’t read magazines or newspapers or blogs or even e-mails from the extremists who claim to have all of the answers … and who believe in a theology derived from bumper stickers.

But I do try to listen to Asa and Eilan and Claire and Lucy and Luke and John and Helen and all of the really smart little kids I’m fortune to be surrounded by. I wish I could leave them a better world. I’m working on it, but things are looking a bit dicey at the moment.

It’s almost enough to make a guy despair.

Almost…

But then I stumbled on this quote. It is cited in a memoir by one of the survivors of the Civil Rights Movement, Julius Lester, who survived living in the Jim Crow South, the savage beatings in Danbury and St. Augustine, the hoses and dogs in Birmingham, the nightsticks and horses in Selma, the bricks and rocks in Chicago. Julius Lester and all of the heroes of the Movement truly lived in dangerous times. And yet he chooses to open his book Falling Pieces of the Broken Sky with this quote:

The entire Universe will be broken into a thousand pieces in the general ruin …chaos will return and will vanquish the gods and men … the Earth and Sea will be engulfed by the Planets wandering in the Heavens. Of all the generations, it is we who have been designated to merit this fate, to be crushed by the falling pieces of the broken sky. — Seneca

And thus has it ever been. Demi-gods and demogogues, reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries, fundamentalists and self-righteous Puritans — they’ve always been with us. Like the poor, they’ll be with us until the end, be it fire or ice.

And babies will be born in the eye of the storm. New love will emerge in the ruins. Old lovers will stand and re-affirm their faith and love in the maelstrom.

We’ve always been — and there have always been — lovers in a dangerous time.

And bless us all.

The intersection between African American sacred music and the labor movement in this country is one of the areas I’m exploring as I research Nothing But Love in God’s Water: The Influence of Black Sacred Music on the Civil Rights Movement. Spirituals quickly found their way into the brave labor actions of the first part of the 20th century, during a time when the wholesale slaughter of workers and activists was sanctioned by Big Business and Big Government alike.

One of the heroes of the labor movement was Ralph Chaplin, a brilliant labor activist, writer, and artist. It is Chaplin who pens the lyrics for the famed union anthem ”Solidarity Forever,” for instance.

It is in the pages of Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology* — where I found numerous examples of old spirituals transformed into stirring labor songs  — that I encountered this lovely, heart-breaking poem by Chaplin, written while unjustly imprisoned, following the officially sanctioned murder of yet another labor activist:

Mourn Not the Dead

Morn not the dead that in the cool earth lie/Dust unto dust/The calm, sweet earth that mothers all who die/As all men must;

Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell/Too strong to strive/Within each steel-bound coffin of a cell/Buried alive;

But rather mourn the apathetic throng/The cowed and the meek/Who see the world’s great anguish and its wrong/And dare not speak!

* Industrial Workers of the World (or the “Wobblies”), “An Injury to One is an Injury to All”

On the surface, Daniel Okrent’s new book, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, sounds like another interesting read about a quaint tradition from the distant past. But as reviewer David Oshinsky makes clear, there are some chilling parallels with today — but NOT in the areas I was expecting.

First, I was sadly unaware of the many connections, both sinister and innocent, that led to the 18th Amendment. As Oshinsky notes, there are studies a’plenty on Carry Nation, Billy Sunday, Al Capone, and the rest. But only Okrent puts the 18th fully in context:

“Knowing that alcohol taxes accounted for about one-third of all federal revenue, temperance leaders campaigned successfully for a federal income tax to make up the difference. Believing that women were more likely than men to support restrictions on alcohol, these leaders strongly supported women’s suffrage. And when America entered World War I in 1917, helped fan the flames of anti-German hysteria by accusing the Busch family and other brewers of harboring sympathies for the kaiser (a charge, not entirely untrue, that turned beer drinking into a disloyal act).”

There’s much more, of course. In the end, Oshinsky notes that Last Call resists the temptation to link what happened in the 1920s to what’s happening now in the political climate. Okrent may resist — but Oshinsky does not:

“About a century ago, a group of determined activists mobilized to confront the moral decay they claimed was destroying their country. Their public demon was alcohol. but their real enemy was an alien culture reflected by city dwellers, recent immigrants and educated elites. Always a minority, the forces of Prohibition drove the political agenda by concentrating relentlessly on their goal, voting in lock-step on a single issue and threatening politicians who did not sufficiently back their demands. They triumphed because they faced no organized opposition. Americans were too distracted — perhaps too busy drinking — to notice what they had lost. It’s a story with an eerily familiar ring.”

My research into the roots of black sacred music as protest music takes me, at last, to the great African American writer, educator and leader, W.E.B. Du Bois.

In his Autobiography, he closes with advice to his recently born great-grandson. Du Boise is 90 as he pens these words; his Autobiography was first published in the United States in 1968. It is remarkably appopriate for today, not just for May and June graduates, but for all of us:

The most distinguished guest of this festive occasion is none other than my great-grandson, Arthur Edward McFarlane II, who was born this last Christmas Day. He had kindly consented to permit me to read to you a bit of advice which, as he remarked with a sign of resignation, great-grandparents are supposed usually to inflict on the helpless young. This then is my word of advice:

As men go, I have had a reasonably happy and successful life, I have had enough to eat and drink, have been suitably clothed and, as you see, have had many friends. But the thing which has been the secret of whatever I have done is the fact that I have been able to earn a living by doing the work which I wanted to do and work that the world needed done.

I want to stress this. You will soon learn, my dear young man, that most human beings spend their lives doing work which they hate and work which the world does not need. It is therefore of prime importance that you early learn what you want to do; how you are fit to do it and whether or not the world needs this service. Here, in the next 20 years, your parents can be of use to you. You will soon begin to wonder just what parents are for besides interfering with your natural wishes. Let me therefore tell you: parents and their parents are inflicted upon you in order to show what kind of person you are; what sort of world you live in and what the persons who dwell here need for their happiness and well-being.

Income is not greenbacks, it is satisfaction; it is creation; it is beauty. It is the supreme sense of a world of men going forward, lurch and stagger thought it may, but slowly, inevitably going forward, and you, you yourself with your hand on the wheels. Make this choice, then, my son. Never hesitate, never falter.

And now comes the word of warning: the satisfaction with your work even at best will never be complete, since nothing on earth can be perfect. The forward pace of the world which you are pushing will be painfully slow. But what of that: the difference between a hundred and a thousand years is less than you now think. But doing what must be done, that is eternal even when it walks with poverty.

I had the very good fortune to be part of GospelFest 10 in Seattle a couple of weeks ago, along with my friend Dr. Jimmy Abbington. Jimmy and I spoke during the academic part of the conference. Then, on the following evening, we were guests at a program featuring some of the best choirs in the Pacific Northwest, directed by the top music directors in the area — Juan Huey-Ray, Elias Bullock, DaNell Daymon, Gary L. Wyatt, Cora Jackson and others.

But just before the music, the organizer of the festival, Dr. Stephen Newby of Seattle Pacifici University (which hosted the event), asked me to give a history of gospel music at the beginning of the program. In “four minutes or less.”

Thanks, Stephen.

That’s not really possible, of course. So I spoke (in 2 1/2 minutes, no less) on the historic nature of the closing concert/service. It is my belief that gospel music, more than any other American musical form, has been handed down from the first African slaves who were brought to North America. The African distinctives of their music remain in African-African music today. In fact, they form the basis of all popular music in this country — ragtime, jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll, rap — as well as gospel.

The gospel blues and jubilee and the spirituals combined together to create black gospel music.

It is an unbroken, almost apostolic, succession. That music, that message still endure. It has been, for most of its history, transmitted orally. There are people alive who learned it from the Rev. Thomas Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, Roberta Martin and the others who were there when it was first dubbed “gospel.” And John P. Kee, Donnie McClurkin, Yolanda Adams, and the others learned from them. And so it goes …

So any time gospel music is sung, it is the same song those who came before sang. There is more of a beat now and the sometimes I fear the electronic instruments will swamp the Message. But at GospelFest 10, that didn’t happen.

Instead, brothers and sisters, we had CHURCH for three very, very short hours … 

(Photo of the Eufaula, Alabama, church choir, circa 1950s)

I recently gave the keynote at the East Texas Christian University Christian Writers Conference. It was good to be among good people amid the blooming azaleas and dogwood trees and to smell the pines again. My talk was titled “The Redemptive Power of Humor.” It was based, in part, on my recent book by the same name and I really wanted urge all of these Christian writers to use more humor — or at least accept more humor — in their writing and lives.

My thesis: “11 a.m. on Sunday mornings used to be the most segregated hour in America. It still is. But it is also the most dour hour.”

The talk went great. I used lots of funny Power Point slides, played “Bulbous Bouffant,” played the spoons (!), and told a story or three.

When I came to the section on writing with humor, I emphasized that the essential element of humor in real life and in writing is surprise. (That’s why we should always preface a joke with, “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before …”. Without the surprise, a joke ain’t a joke anymore.) When I got to this moment, I showed the slide of the t-shirt depicted above.

Dead silence.

So, instead of quickly moving on like any intelligent person, I said, “Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that intriguing? I’d certainly check out a church that advertised itself that way. In fact, how many of you would check out a church like that?”

About 200 people in attendance. Three raised their hands. One of them was my wonderfully supportive wife Mary. More silence.

Dude.

Why does that slide, “We suck …” bother people so much? Or at least bother many religious people so much?

I’ve thought about that (lack of) response, that Power Point, a lot lately.

I think the response is tied into the reason why there’s NOT more laughter in churches these days. (But not the African American church, BTW. Every black church that Mary and I have attended rings with laughter before, during and after church.) 

It seems to me that, for many of us, church is place where we wear masks. Smiley masks. Everything’s good, everything’s great. Thanks for asking. But too often, it’s not a place where we unburden our hurts and pains and sorrows to people who genuinely love us and want what’s best for us.

I love my Sunday School class at 7th & James (Not-so-Baptist-that-you’d-know-it) Church. I’ve confessed and cried and prayed with the folks there for years. I know what’s said in that little classroom stays in that little classroom. But as much as I love 7th, I don’t think I could be as vulnerable and open with the entire church … even during times of desperate need. I just … couldn’t.

Through the years, people at other churches have told me much the same thing.

But Church SHOULD be a place like that … all the time, right?

I don’t have any answers. But I have a song, one written by the brilliant Ken Medema that helps sometimes:

The recent passing of legendary professor Bob Reid sent a chill through those of us who love Baylor. It was a reminder, once again, of a day when great teachers ruled. Not researchers or writers or administrators. Teachers. Inspiring men and women who knew how to move mountains with their words and — what is much more difficult — knew how to move the hearts and minds of hormone-ridden 18-year-old boys.

I wrote a feature on Bob Reid for The Baylor Line a few years ago. Perhaps it will be of interest to you. It was a bittersweet journey for me to read it again when The Line posted it on their website this week: http://www.bayloralumniassociation.com/content/baylor_line__online_publications/prof_robert_rei.asp

Re-reading it, I wondered if we’d ever see his like again.

Bob Reid did not have a Ph.D. He didn’t write scholarly, academic tomes. He loved teaching. He loved his students. And they loved — and still love — him.

He made Greek and Roman history come alive. He was passionate about it. He was a story-teller. Yes, there were dates and facts and figures mixed in from time to time, but you wanted to learn them because they were markers along the way that helped you remember the stories. He was a magician with words. The old Roman emperors and Greek philosophers lived in his classrooms as surely as they once lived in the ancient Mediterranean. He often spoke of past events in the present tense. Sometimes he spoke of them in the first person — then he would catch himself and laugh.

Oh, how we loved to hear him laugh!

Bob Reid believed that Baylor could best be served by inspiring young people, by filling them with a passion for learning and life. We talked about this a few times. The idea that a professor could be so caught up in his research that a student could be just an annoyance baffled him. The idea that research was its own reward and that teaching was something you did as little as possible of as you worked for your own greater academic glory through publishing frankly appalled him.

Bob Reid was a teacher.

Got a problem with that?

And, oh! How I’d love to hear him laugh again …

OK, I admit it. I was skeptical. I was nervous. I was, in fact, the typical Baylor University faculty member facing something new. And I was one of the four original members of Baylor’s first Academy of Teaching and Learning.

Oh, our captain — Dr. Gardner Campbell — assured us that by the end of the semester that we would be blogging and Twittering and whatevering as well as our students. And, more importantly, that we’d find it helpful both as a teaching tool and as a researching aid. But I wasn’t so sure. I wasn’t so much skeptical as over-whelmed. I learn by narrative. I have trouble with a list. And, in the beginning, blogging was just that — a list. Do that. Do this. Do it twice.

I blogged. Tentatively at first. I messed up. It got fixed. I messed up again. I fixed it. Big step.

In time, Gardner was right. Blogging can be a valuable tool. No, really! I like it. I get it. And this is what I get:

1. Blogging connects you to a world of scholars (or just plain fans). Magazines are nice. But you’ll never make community with the readers of a monthly or quarterly magazine. Now I talk to other true believers. We share stuff. I learn about things in my field that I otherwise would have taken months to find. And blogging connections begat more blogging connections. You’re not alone. There are a world of black gospel enthusiasts out there. It becomes a community of like-minded scholars in ways that an annual conference or a quarterly journal can’t be.

2. It helps me keep important stuff that I don’t know is important at the time. I find a snippet of information. I blog about it and it’s saved forever. Maybe I never use it in my research. But maybe it is just the thing the blogger in Carjackistan is looking for. I helped.

3. It helps me try out new approaches. I think better when I write.  I’ve tried out some intros and some connections and some thoughts in my blog about both writing and teaching.  Once something is expressed and organized like this, I can learn from it.

4. Here is a quote from William Safire. Substitute “blogs” for “diaries:”  “Diaries remind us of details that would otherwise fade from memory and make less vivid our recollection. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, whose private journal is an invaluable source for Civil War historians, watched Abraham Lincoln die in a room across the street from Ford’s Theater and later jotted down a detail that puts the reader in the room: ‘The giant sufferer lay extended diagonally across the bed, which was not long enough for him…’ ”

5. It makes me closer to the students I teach. They think in blogs and FaceBook and Twitter and texting and other forms of communication now, like it or not. Blogging is my first foray in this Brave New Language.

6. It makes me a step closer to effectively working with my colleagues who still fear these new technologies. I’m able now to say, “No, this is not a waste of time. I know we write all of the time. But this is … different. And here is how it can help…”

Six things I’ve learned this semester. Six new things. That’s a good semester’s work. Thank you, Gardner and Heidi and Debra and Mona and the ATL.

In return, here are three things that I have figured out (with the help, again of William Safire) that I’d like to share back:

A. You own the blog. The blog doesn’t own you.

B. Write for yourself.

C. Put down what cannot be reconstructed.

The Easter Bunny gets a bad rap. He (she?) symbolizes all that’s commercial, crass and probably pagan about Easter.

But there is one part of the commercial story that does resonate with me – finding the Easter eggs. Forget the Christian overlay over the original heathen tradition. I like the surprise part of it. Nothing’s more fun that seeing toddlers ravage through your azaleas hunting for eggs and — despite their best efforts — actually finding one! The Bun has a great job.

But surprise is the element most neglected in the re-telling of the Resurrection.

Remember, even the faithful women who went to Jesus’ tomb following the Sabbath were amazed that the Messiah wasn’t inside.

And despite hearing this message of Resurrection from Dan to Beer Sheeba over the past three and a half years, the disciples were utterly stunned to discover Jesus had, in fact, risen.

In fact, just about no one figured that the Christ would actually do what the Scriptures had prophesied He would do.

And yet, there He was.

And each time He appeared to the 11 disciples, walking through walls and disappearing along dusty roads, they were flabbergasted.

The Resurrection is all about surprise.

It’s the greatest surprise in the history of the universe. It’s the Deep Magic of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where what the Bad Guys think is happening is only half the story. The other half is bigger, grander, wilder and … well … more surprising than anyone ever dreamed possible.

But the Christ, who was abused and crucified, dead and buried, does, in fact, absolutely, completely, unreservedly RISE AGAIN.

And thus save us all.

Early in Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, that epic tale of love and loss in the Russian Revolution, he inexplicably inserts a hymn. He writes that ancient Rome is “a flea market of borrowed gods and conquered peoples,” an unholy mess of slaves, sinners, conquerors, peasants, mad emperors and, most frighteningly of all, “fish fed on the flesh of learned slaves.” It is the largest city in the history of the world. And everybody is desperately unhappy.

Then, unexpectedly, into this ghetto of despair, Jesus comes, “emphatically human, deliberately provincial.”

And the world is never the same again.

Surprise!

He is risen!