Pray for Them That Spitefully Use You

 Of late, I have found myself praying for Kellyanne Conway, who has served in the current presidential administration for several years. Her husband, George, is an attorney; they have four children, including Claudia, who is 15 and active on social media.

Mrs. Conway has been a loyal face of the administration, and the election is less than three months from now: closer to two months, actually. So why did she recently abandon ship, announcing that she was resigning to spend more time with her family? Mr. Conway similarly is stepping away from his work on The Lincoln Project.

Usually, when a political figure says that, it's code for: "I messed up so badly that I'll just show myself to the door." But I really believe Mrs. Conway, which, I think, is why I find myself praying for her and her family.

Mr. Conway has publicly criticized the administration and its actions. So has Miss Conway. Even going just by the publicly available snippets, this family of six is at sixes and sevens over the administration and the coming elections.

I believe Mrs. Conway when she says she and Mr. Conway want to heal strained family relations. And that's why I've been praying for the Conway family.

Is Mrs. Conway my enemy? Has she spitefully used me? Depends on how you define your terms. I really hesitate to say that someone is my enemy. She and I have opposing views on what promotes healing and wholeness in our society. She coined the description "alternative facts," which disturbs me. She has enabled and promoted actions that I find repugnant.

And I am saddened by some of the glee and sarcasm I've seen in response to her decision to resign. "But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you" (Matthew 5:43-44, KJV).

I'm not as comfortable with the idea that "prayer changes things" as I am with the goal that "prayer changes me." So as I pray for the Conway family, I pray that praying for them ... changes me.

From a Distance

 In connection with the movie Beaches, starring Barbara Hershey and Bette Midler, Miss Midler released a song that got a lot of airplay on the radio in late 1989 and took on a second life being sung at weddings, funerals, and family reunions. The song is "The Wind Beneath My Wings."[1]

"Thank you, thank you, thank God for you, the wind beneath my wings," the character sings. Mirroring the plot of the movie, a popular and famous woman tells her dying friend, who was always in the star's shadow, that it was in fact their friendship that sustained the celebrity.

Miss Midler followed that song with another hit, "From a Distance," written by Julie Gold and first recorded by Nanci Griffith. "God is watching us," Miss Midler sings, "from a distance."[2] The songwriter says that she believes in the immanence of God and that her thoughts were more about the difference between how things appear and how they are.

Because of a pandemic, the SARS-Cov2-19, also known as a novel coronavirus or simply COVID, we're doing a lot of our loving from a distance these days, most painfully with the people in our lives who have always been the wind beneath our wings. The ones who have sustained us, helped launch us (sometimes more than once), given us lift, and run along the beach as we soared.

I was reminded of this just this past weekend. My parents have been married 58 years, uniting in matrimony on August 24, 1962, my dad's 28th birthday. The hubs and I packed a cooler with freshly cut fruit; turkey, lettuce, and bread; and a package of miniature cupcakes, and we drove east for a sort of a visit. 

Our family is famous, or maybe infamous, among ourselves for the frequency and quality of our hugs. Not in the last five months. 

On Saturday, we sat - my dad at one end of the dining table, the hubs at the other end, and me perched on the kitchen step stool, so that we were six or seven feet apart, and ate the simple supper I put together and talked, about baseball and marriage and birthdays. Even so, we were taking a chance, one I pray does not have health consequences.

Before we left, I phoned my mother, who for two years has been residing in an assisted-living facility some ten minutes from the family home, and we had a good conversation.

The hubs and I waved to my dad when we arrived, and we waved when we left. 

We didn't touch, not even when I handed over the cards and a small wrapped package. 

Dad's just turned 86. I know how blessed I am that I still get to enjoy my parents' company on this planet. They've been the wind beneath my wings for a long time. Maybe now I get to be the wind beneath theirs, a little, sometimes. 

But - along with everyone else - I'm wretched at this love from a distance thing. 

Rereading Job (as one does) recently helped put things in perspective. Job, a narrative folk tale that was being passed along orally more than a thousand years before the birth of Jesus, tells of a bet between God and Satan that raises questions about the whys and wherefores of evil but does not attempt to answer them.

In the end, Carl Sagan wrote (at the conclusion to his novel Contact), such vastness as the universe is bearable to such small creatures as we only with the promise of love, and the promise of presence.[3]

From a distance, or not - we are never alone.

[1] "The Wind Beneath My Wings." (c) 1989, Larry Henley and Jeff Silbar.
[2] "From a Distance." (c) 1987, Julie Gold. Miss Gold's interpretation of the meaning (c) 2005, "Here on Earth," Radio Without Borders, Wisconsin Public Radio on February 19, 2005.
[3]Contact (c) 1985. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Sacred Instrument

 "The right to vote is precious and almost sacred, and one of the most important blessings of our democracy. We must be vigilant in protecting that blessing. It is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democracy" - Rep. John Lewis (D-GA 5).

My hero died recently. It's not a word I use all that often. Hero, that is, not "recently." I think that in general, we overuse it as a descriptor. There are plenty of public and private figures whose lives, work, and character I admire, all of them flawed (like me!).

John Lewis might be the only person I consider my hero. It's been that way for 40 years, since I first heard of him at age 13 (yes, my name is Beth and I'm a precocious history nerd. Hi!). It wasn't much more than a year or two after that that I first picked up a sign and started protesting something (I believe it was the nuclear-arms race). 

I'm sad that advanced pancreatic cancer claimed him when he was just 80. But we are a better people, a better country, because John Lewis was. Because by age 6, he was preaching to the family chickens in Troy, Alabama, ducking the chores to sneak away and catch the bus to school. Because by age 25, while walking across a bridge as part of a nonviolent movement to ensure that all people in Alabama could exercise their constitutional right to vote, he survived being knocked down, clubbed with nightsticks, and attacked with tear gas - and because he never gave up hope, and never stopped encouraging nonviolent communication and community.

Since turning 18, I've never missed an election, though I was 18 in 1985, which means I still had to wait three years to vote in a presidential election. I once got to my polling place near the end of the 12-hour time to vote in a party primary runoff for County Clerk. I was the fifth vote recorded at that station.

Sometimes when I vote, I don't care a whole lot for either candidate. My response, though, is not to skip the vote. In a more prefect union, there would be a choice I liked better who might have a chance at being elected if I voted for her or him.

I recently read, in the Gospel according to Facebook, that voting is less like marriage and more like public transport. "You're not waiting for the one who is absolutely perfect. You are getting the bus. And if there isn't one getting exactly to your destination, you don't stay home and sulk - you take the one going closest to where you want to be."

The way the United States government is structured, we are a democratic republic. That means, as John Lewis said, the right to vote is "precious and almost sacred."

Sacred. Dedicated or set apart. We are governed by representatives whom we elect to represent us. The vote that each of us has, the vote that each of us gets to cast, has been dedicated to, or set apart for, the operation of our country, state, county, city. 

Holy books tend to be pretty clear about what you and I are to do with things that are sacred: protect them and use them as they are intended to be used.

Radio Silence

 First, an apology. I did not mean to go silent for seven months.

A few weeks after my last blog post, we entered the world of SARS-CoV2-19, more commonly known as COVID-19 or the coronavirus. For reasons of confidentiality, I can't say much about the specifics of what's been going on at my job as a chaplain on a senior-living campus. I can say that it wasn't long that, in accordance with the guidelines of the state synod and national denomination, the small church where I serve as pastor stopped meeting in person.(It has resumed, heavily modified, for about 10 people each week.) I continue to record YouTube videos of worship each week, which can be found by searching the YouTube site - leave a comment or contact me for the specifics.

So that's what I've been up to. But my blog, rather like a child that has left the nest, has been on my heart and on my mind, and I've always meant to continue.

Yesterday was an interesting day on a couple of fronts. At the beginning of the day, my plans for my day off got upended - which happens - and then it went south. I received some distressing news from one of the niblets (who is really too grown to be called a niblet any more, being nearly 26) as well as a note from a loved one with a trace of melancholy in the tone.

At the end of the day, though, a phone visit with the same loved one healed, restored, and reminded me of what I sometimes lose sight of. 

Despair is never the last word.

Death - and the black hole of despair - no longer have ultimate power over us, and have not because of God's gift to us in Jesus the Christ.

We are made to live in relationship. And relationship, which can feed the flames of distress and destruction, is also meant to be the force that draws us toward one another, and ultimately toward God.