THE OREGON COAST

RACING MY SHADOW

Bicycling along Highway 101 on the Oregon Coast
with a strong early morning sun aiming sideways
my shadow pedals as hard as I do racing me
past ferns and groves of spruce and backwater bays
but it never moves out ahead and neither do I.

Later in the day when the sun is high my shadow
swirls on the road underneath my running bicycle
touching wheels and dancing with me a pas de deux
we’ve practiced many times never missing a step
and will dance until there is no sun, no music, no life.

CROSSING THE SEVEN-KILOMETER BRIDGE CONNECTING WASHINGTON STATE WITH ASTORIA, OREGON
Pity Poor Sisyphus.
The same rock, the same hill.

The curse was not the rock.
Work, even moving rocks, gives purpose and meaning
to human existence, enriching and lengthening life.

But the hill, the same hill every day.
Intolerable.

Clicking on a picture in the BLOG makes it bigger...

A FARM CUT OUT OF THE GREAT FOREST ON THE WESTERN SIDE OF THE HOOD CANALTHOUGHTS AFTER A DAY OF RIDING AND DODGING LITTLE CREATURES TRYING TO MAKE THEIR WAY ACROSS THE HIGHWAY. I could claim this is a picture of me, but it's Roland. Until they hear us speak, people continue to assume we're brothers. I took this photo as he came up behind me on Highway 101 north of Shelton, Washington.

IT ALL DEPENDS

Making its way through the grass
in a few square yards of meadow,
what does the inch worm see or feel of the world?
Maybe feeling is more important than seeing...
The turtle crossing a not-so-busy road
never knows the peril in its journey.
Running in the deep forest or grazing by the mountain stream,
the deer is in little danger if no hunter is near.

Mowing machines, trucks, and hungry wolves change everything.
A lone bicyclist on a real journey seldom thinks he is vulnerable.
Aloneness is delicious and for long stretches of time
the asphalt roadway is the only reality.
A looming log truck in the side mirror changes everything.

Zooming along her trajectory in the solar system,
Mother Earth, like the inch worm, is a tiny living thing
relative to the vastness of space and time.
She is no more aware of the approaching meteor
than the earthworm is of the hooves of grazing cattle
or the deer is of the hunter in the bushes.
Perspective is everything.
We impose terror on ourselves by knowing too well what can happen.

BY TRAIN TO SEATTLE
Friday, May 9, 2008

The underbelly of the world is reserved
for train tracks and cast offs,
but I remember once in France
a train fast as a bullet sped
though fields of sunflowers,
so maybe it’s only in New Jersey
and, oh yeah, San Diego
detritus accumulates where trains run.

But wait awhile and as with mourning
the worst of it disappears,
not all at once but in snatches
of beauty unexpected; I remember
a deer looking up unsurprised
at my train window in California
and there was the time in Canada
when a moose seemed not to notice.

MY RIDING BUDDY ROLAND AND I taking a break in Stanley Park near the Lion's Gate Bridge.

Western Canadians present the indigenous people of their region as more than afterthoughts. The artifacts of Native Canadians outnumber those of European and Asian citizens in parks and museums. In the U.S. we pretend that Native Americans are not in any way basic to our existence as a nation. When I was a college student in California in the 1950s, teachers and textbooks referred to the indigenous people of the Central Valley as “Digger Indians” because they included roots and acorns in their diet. The term “digger” was intended and understood to be a racial slur. In the first decade of the Twentieth Century, only thirty years before I was born, “hunting parties” regularly went out into the Feather River Canyon area above Oroville to find and kill “Indians.” Of course, it was against the law, but the law was not paying attention.
CANADIANS HAVE NOT ALWAYS BEEN KIND TO THEIR FIRST PEOPLE. Eastern Native Canadians were often forced into poverty and then ignored. Native children were routinely removed from their families and put into special schools far away from home. If they were successful in school, they were allowed to take jobs in cities. If they weren't successful students, they were sent back into the poverty of native villages. There is irony in the name "English Bay" given to the beautiful body of water near where the totem poles are clustered together in Stanley Park.

THE VIEW FROM VANCOUVER

With my eyes shut tightly and my other senses shifted to neutral I lift my imagination up to a satellite view of our blue planet. Our beautiful marble Earth is a swirl of clouds and water and patches of green-brown-white continents. I zoom in for a closer look and try to locate all the paths on land, all the trails and roads. The American part of my continent is a scattering of asphalt and concrete tangles connected by furiously busy interstate highways that connect our cities. In this richest of nations, one would expect to see railroad lines everywhere; but there are actually fewer passenger rail connections between towns and cities now than there were in the middle of the last century. When I was a boy growing up in California, my friends and I often took the train on Saturday afternoons from Live Oak, population 2700, to Gridley, six miles up the road with no more people than my town but which did have a movie theater. The little iconic train depot in Live Oak is now a real estate office. I don’t know if the pretty little Gridley station is still there. In those days we took the train to Gridley to the movies rather than to Yuba City or Marysville because the movie theater in Gridley was close to the station. We could have gone on up to Biggs and to Chico. Once upon a time the railroads that transported vegetables, rice, fruit, and nuts outward from America’s primary breadbasket also transported people. OUR BRIGHT NATION of moon walkers and cyber geniuses got many thing right in the Twentieth Century. What it didn’t get right was transportation. We didn’t get transportation right because we didn’t know it mattered... to the environment and to the economy. We were too much in love with our colorful cars and sprawling surburbs. We were smug enough to assume our ways would always be better than the ways of old fashioned, stodgy European and Asian nations.. While we drove with our tops and our minds down, countries that had been brought to their knees in two great wars and a couple of smaller ones were slowly but surely replacing battle scarred infrastructure. While we celebrated the present, other countries built for the future. We thought we were being clever to let Japan and Germany make our cars and our television sets. We preferred to produce the shows for T.V. Sitcoms were more fun to make than automobiles. Blockbuster movies were more our style. We were content to entertain the world. We were amused at little Singapore’s feistiness. With our help South Korea turned from backward nation to prosperous country,. While our backs were turned, the great sleeping giants, China and India, woke up.

On a train journey from San Diego to Vancouver I was reminded that people who need to get somewhere don’t take the train. It takes twice as long to go from San Diego to San Francisco by train as it does by car. We take the train in Western America for sightseeing. The journey from San Diego to Vancouver on Amtrak, a distance of about two thousand miles, takes forty-two hours... if the trains are running. It took forty-four hours for me to make the journey. None of the conductors and service people on the train seemed to know why we were late. It was routine. It didn’t seem to matter. Only in Russia and a few places in Africa and South America are the trains as slow as ours. As long ago as the late 1960s I rode “Bullet Trains in Japan between Tokyo and Kyoto, and you could then and can now set your watch by them. China recently inaugurated a fast train from Beijing to Lhasa in Tibet. Don’t be surprised if Russian has a fast train between Moscow and Vladivostok before we get one between Washington and New York.

It’s not that I personally want to get somewhere fast. After all, I’m the old guy on the bicycle slowly making his way down the West Coast from Canada to Mexico. It’s my country that needs to get itself into gear... and to do it responsibly.

My BLOG for the next month will be an anthem to our Mother Earth, this mostly beautiful, occasionally ugly, sometimes cruel organic ball of mystery on which we live out our lives. In the months of May and June as I ride my bicycle down the West Coast from Vancouver to San Diego, I will try to enjoy and respect and love every curve and stretch of the two-thousand-mile coastline, every hill and valley, every sheltering grove, every quiet village and every bustling city. Robert Frost wrote his own epitaph: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world,” and the words are carved onto the slab of New England granite that covers his grave in Vermont. I’m not ready yet for an epitaph, but it is time to acknowledge that my life has been and will continue to be a lover’s dance with the earth. I love to go. Anywhere. I once overheard my Mother talking with a neighbor about me. She said, “If someone came along dragging a sack, Jerral would get on it.” I was ten or eleven years old. She had me pegged.

I am fortunate to have known all four of my grandparents. My maternal grandfather died when I was a child, but I knew him well. The other three lived into my own adulthood. I didn’t know any of their parents, my great-grandparents. My great-great grandmother on my Mother’s side was a Cherokee maiden who survived the forced move along the infamous Trail of Tears from somewhere on the Mid-Atlantic Coast to an Indian reservation in what would become the state of Oklahoma. I know almost nothing else about her besides her having lived most of her life as a refugee. Her grand-daughter, my Grannie Lucy, with her long, dark hair and her almond eyes, was as much Native American as she was European. Only a couple of her children and grandchildren still had some of the look of the Cherokee, but I am not one of them. Most of us look like the Western Europeans that we mostly are. Grannie told us stories about her Mother’s experience growing up a half-breed in Oklahoma Territory; but she didn’t know much about her grandmother, the Indian lady; so that history has been lost. What has not been lost is my native ancestors’ respect for the earth. The older I get, the more I feel it. That’s what the next month’s BLOG writings will be about.Until recently, I had an English teacher’s love for a speech that was widely thought to have been spoken by the great Chief Seattle of the Suquamish and Duwamish tribes in response to an offer in 1854 by President Franklin Pierce to “buy” a large area of Indian land in return for establishing a “reservation” for the Indian People. The speech has been circulated throughout the world to promote projects designed to protect the environment. I learned recently that the speech as I know it was actually written in 1971 by a screenwriter named Ted Perry for the movie “Home.” Apparently Perry pieced together and expanded remarks actually made by Chief Seattle when he received President Pierce’s offer. Perry said later that he assumed the Hollywood editors would give him credit for the speech, but they thought the movie would be more successful if people believed the speech in the movie was actually what Chief Seattle said. It was often reported during Chief Seattle’s lifetime that he was indeed a fine orator (in the Lushootseed language, not English), but the only evidence we have of what he actually said indicates that it was something like “Thank you very much.” Of course, that doesn’t serve my purpose for the BLOG, so I’m falling shamelessly back on Ted Perry’s version of Chief Seattle’s Speech:
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“How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?Every part of the Earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clear and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memory and the experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.

The white man’s dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful Earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the Earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters, the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and the man, all belong to the same family.

So, when the Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land, he asks much of us. The Great White Chief sends word he will reserve us a place so that we can lie comfortably to ourselves. He will be our father and we will be his children. So we will consider your offer to buy land. But it will not be easy. For this land is sacred to us. This shining water that moves in streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events in the life of my people. The waters murmur is the voice of my father’s father.

The rivers of our brothers they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes and feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember to teach your children that the rivers are our brothers, and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness that you would give my brother. We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The Earth is not his brother, but his enemy and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father’s graves behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the Earth from his children, and he does not care.”
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A POET WHOSE WORK I AM LEARNING TO LIKE VERY MUCH is Ilya Kaminsky. In his book, “Dancing in Odessa,” he begins my favorite of his poems with the line, “What ties me to this earth?” The poem hints strongly at a great love (with some fear) of the earth.

ENVOI
by Ilya Kaminsky

What ties me to this earth? In Massachusetts,
the birds force themselves into my lines--
the sea repeats itself, repeats, repeats.

I bless the boat from Yalta to Odessa
and bless each passenger, his bones, his genitals,
bless the sky inside his body,
the sky my medicine, the sky my country.

I bless the continent of gulls, the argument of their order.
The wind, my master
insists on the joy of poplars, swallows,--

bless one woman’s brows, her lips
and their salt, bless the roundness
of her shoulder. Her face, a lantern
by which I live my life.

You can find us, Lord, she is a woman dancing with her eyes closed
and I am a man arguing with this woman
among nightstands and tables and chairs.

Lord, give us what you have already given.

LOOKING THE GIFT HORSE IN THE MOUTH...

With every passing week there are more scruffy people with crudely scribbled begging placards taking their places at intersections to ask for money from motorists. Listening to news commentators and to President Bush’s people describing Americans eagerly waiting with outstretched hands for the $300 or $600 gift from the government, one might conclude that America is fast becoming a nation of beggars. Where is the proud nation that was challenged almost fifty years ago by President John F. Kennedy declaring, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”? President George W. Bush has a very different remedy for our country’s problems. He apparently wants individual citizens to ask not how they may help the country pay its growing national debt, but whether they will receive a “gift” of $300 or $600 from his administration to secure their good will and their votes for his party in the next general elections. Instead of demanding to know how we are going to get out from under the burden of a national debt that would cost each of us nearly $37,000 to pay, we stand with our hands out to receive his bribe.

Where is the money for the bribe coming from? Will it be taken from programs that address educational needs of the nation’s children? Might it be generated by reducing services for our men and women serving in the military? Will the Department of Transportation have its budget reduced? What about the Department of Health and Safety? What about Social Security? How about Medicare? The Environment? With no clear statement about where he will get the money, the President is giving me and people like me $600.

It is reported that veterans must wait weeks to see a mental health provider even though it is known by the President and leaders in his administration that in the past year 121 soldiers committed suicide and another 2100 attempted suicide. Soldiers in combat zones are among Americans losing their homes to foreclosure. Lenders can seek a court order to foreclose on a house even if it is the home of a soldier in combat. When the soldier comes home from war he or she must struggle with high gas and food prices. Returning soldiers find that student loans for college are more difficult to get and more expensive than they were before George W. Bush became president. And his solution to the problem is to give me and others like me $600.

I will not let a check in the mail, a $600 bribe, move me to ignore all that this administration has done to bring our country to the brink of bankruptcy. I will not be bribed to forget the damage to the environment, the increased numbers of hungry people in lines at food banks, and the growing national debt.

SECOND THOUGHTS: If spending the $600 "gift" doesn't save the American economy, perhaps the next "gift" from the President will be an American Flag stick pin for us to wear on our collars. That should solve all our problems. If that doesn't work, he can always give each of us a t-shirt with an elephant on it...maybe two elephants.Sri Lanka, March 19, 2005

Julian is an amazing little boy. He is a good case study in human growth and development. Emotional and social maturation is happening right on schedule. If you ask him, he is quick to say that he is three... and going to be four. Today at the Nature Center in Chula Vista he fell right in with a couple of other little boys whom he didn't know. They became great friends immediately... calling each other to "come see this." Later he and I were out looking at two golden eagles and one bald eagle in side-by-side enclosures (all three having been rescued after suffering injuries in the wild that made it impossible for them to live outside the protection of a cage); and when one of the golden eagles expanded his wings, we could see that one wing was little more than a stub. Julian said, "Jerral, that is so sad (big adult emphasis on "so"). It's the beginning of empathy. Julian is only three years old, and he's no longer just pulling the cat's tail and poking little dogs with a stick. He's growing up.

Flat Stephanie has gone on several bike rides with Uncle Jerral.She enjoyed climbing a tree in Chula Vista with Julian.FLAT STEPHANIE

A creative elementary school teacher in North-Central California came up with a strategy to help her children extend their vision of their state. She had each child make a page-size image of herself/himself, a paper doll that could be folded and slipped into an envelope for mailing. My niece Connie’s granddaughter Stephanie reinvented herself as Flat Stephanie. Flat Stephanie went first to the Damacion home in Rocklin. She had a good time there with Jim and Erica and their two daughters.

Flat Stephanie writes each day in her diary, so when she arrived at my house in San Diego on Friday, I was allowed to read what she had written about her visit to Rocklin. She’s definitely learning a lot about California, especially about what adults do with their time and with their lives.

In San Diego on Saturday morning, Flat Stephanie went with me to a piano recital at Wagner’s School of Music (no relation to Richard Wagner, the composer). My God Daughter, Nina, played “Lefty Medley,” which was written by her teacher, Larry Wagner. She played beautifully without a single mistake. Flat Stephanie met some of Nina’s friends. She had her picture taken with them.On Sunday Flat Stephanie went to church. Twice. She attended morning worship and then went back again in the evening for the Spring Concert. San Diego Symphony players and a hundred-sixty-voice choir presented a Mozart and Schubert program. So her classmates can see what she’s doing in San Diego, I’ll be adding photographs to this posting every few days as long as Flat Stephanie is visiting with us.Flat Stephanie went with me today to my volunteer job at Mama's Kitchen. She is shown here with my fellow volunteers. Mama's Kitchen is an organization that helps provide meals for people who are too ill to go to the market to buy food for themselves or to prepare it. In almost every city there are programs that give help to people who are unable to help themselves. It is my hope that Flat Stephanie and her classmates will grow up to be people who are interested in helping others. Mama's Kitchen was founded several years ago to help AIDS patients who had become too sick to care for themselves.

The following photographs of Flat Stephanie were taken in Balboa Park.
Japanese Tea GardenOrgan PavillionSpanish VillageBotanic HouseStatue of El CidAt the San Diego Zoo we met a young man from Taiwan who asked to have his picture taken with Flat Stephanie and his two special key-chain dolls. One doll represents him and the other represents his girlfriend. He was taking picures of the dolls at places like the world famous San Diego Zoo.
Sculpture by Niki de St. Phalle at the Mingei Museum

Cathedrale Notre Dame de ParisNorth Rose Window which dates from 1250-60

WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?

I’ve been wondering lately what would happen to church attendance if all allusions and direct references to heaven as a physical place after death were to be removed from Christian texts and thought?

Christianity emerged in human history when most people in the Greek and Roman worlds except epicureans and stoics believed in a place where gods live apart from mortals. It is no surprise that a concept of Heaven, of Paradise, figured so definitely in the early development of the Christian religion, especially in the institutions, the churches, that formed around it.

First Century residents of the Mediterranean region would not have known about Siddhartha, Gautama Buddha, who had lived six centuries earlier, nor would they have known about the philosophy-religion that was seeded by his teachings, a way of right living that didn’t rely on a promise of Paradise as a reward. It’s interesting that the teachings of the Buddha, like those of the Hebrew sect called the Sadducees, didn’t depend on the existence of an afterlife. The Pharisees were the Hebrew religious group who believed in a doctrine of resurrection of the dead. Jesus was a Jew. He nor his followers had especially good things to say about either group; but he surely knew all about both of them. Could it be that those who reported Jesus’ life, the short life of a Jewish rabbi, tried to find some middle ground between the Sadducees and the Pharisees but ended up leaning more in the direction of Pharisaic Judaism and their Talmud, the core literature of Rabbinic Judaism, hence we get their concept of afterlife. The Sadducees were more aloof than the Pharisees, especially distant from the poor and suffering people. It would not have been consistent with his teachings for Jesus to actually have preferred the Sadducees world view, but it would be a gross oversimplification and misunderstanding to suggest that he didn’t take their point of view into his consideration. Could it be that the Gospel writers interjected more talk of heaven and the afterlife into the Jesus story than Jesus himself actually intended.

Jesus emphasis is remarkably like that of the Buddha. The reward for right living is temporal, earthly. Heaven...Paradise seems at times to be a kind of afterthought. It seems as if it might have been added to stories for effect..to make a point. Take, for example the stories of the crucifixion. John mentions one thief, Barrabas. Matthew and Mark don’t report an actual conversation between Jesus and the thieves who were crucified with him. They say the bandits taunted him the way spectators and soldiers around the crosses were taunting him. Luke (Luke 23: 39-43)reports a conversation between Jesus and the two thieves. “One of the criminals who hung there with him taunted him: ‘Are not you the Messiah? Save yourself, and us.’ But the other answered sharply, ‘Have you no fear of God? You are under the same sentence as he. For us it is plain justice; we are paying the price for our misdeeds; but this man has done nothing wrong.’ And he said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you come to your throne.’” He answered, ‘I tell you this: today you shall be with me in paradise.’ The differing accounts of the crucifixion are not blatant contradictions. They do, however, point to confusion even among those closest to Jesus about what he actually said on the occasions that are reported in the Bible.

The Jesus that I find most appealing is the one who tells us that we find in ourselves the reward for doing right. We find the Kingdom of God in ourselves. It seems to me that much of the heaven talk in the Gospels might have been sprinkled on later. Perhaps it might have been added to get the attention of First Century people for the same reasons that it may appeal to people now two thousand years later. Perhaps I am being cynical to suggest that it’s an easy answer to the glib, unspoken question that people then and now often ask: “What’s in it for me?”

Holding out Paradise as the reward for right living seems inconsistent with the central theme of the Gospel. It bothers me not as much as the alleged promise in Islam of seventy-two virgins waiting in Paradise to please the man who has sacrificed himself to kill infidels. I don’t know much about Islamic theology, but I doubt that it is actually so unsophisticated and juvenile. On the other hand, the Koran came along six hundred years after the time of Jesus. Christianity was the religion that invented the idea of paradise as reward in the first place. Perhaps Muhammed was just making sure his picture of Paradise trumped the Christian picture of streets of gold and angels hanging around playing harps. Does throwing seventy-two virgins into the arrangement make it so much more outrageous. "Pie in the sky by and by" obviously wasn't what Jesus had in mind when he laid out a design for living in relationship on this earth.Mission San Diego de Alcala

Revolutionaries come in many flavors. Some of them, like Lenin and Che Guevara urged people to fight, to take up arms and overthrow a corrupt system of government. They are pictured on propaganda posters as leading a charge with rifles raised. Others, like Mathama Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mother Theresa, declared that violence would not bring the desired result but could only exacerbate pain and suffering. They are pictured in attitudes of contemplation or prayer or service.

Whatever it was that Jesus actually did or said during his short life, it is clear that he was a revolutionary. Although accounts of his life are often muddled, few people in the Western World doubt that a man called Yeshua, or Jesus, lived two thousand years ago in a remote, insignificant province of the Roman Empire. He changed the world.

In sermons preached every Sunday in churches around the world, congregations are urged to follow Jesus. Which Jesus are we to follow, the one with raised fist or the one being led meekly to crucifixion? Or is there another Jesus?

It isn’t clear from the sometimes conflicting stories in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that Jesus’ teachings are the thoughts and words of a revolutionary determined to turn his world upside down or the expressed philosophy of someone who urged people to take it easy, let it go, chill, relax, and to take no offense even when insulted or injured. Some people prefer to think Frank Sinatra got it right when he sang about being slapped down by life: “I pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again” Others prefer Onward Christian Soldiers as anthem.

For many years, the red letter edition of the Bible had the effect of putting a straight jacket on my mind. We are urged to believe that all those passages in red are words and phrases and sentences spoken literally from the mouth of Jesus. The scholars who marked the passages to be printed in red didn’t take into account, because it probably didn’t occur to them, that some of what was reported as having been said by Jesus was actually ad libed by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, words the Gospel writers thought it was fair to believe he might have said. What is consistent in all of the stories, however, is that Jesus was a revolutionary thinker for his time in history. Madison Avenue would say he could think outside the box. But how does one choose among the several pictures of Jesus painted by the Gospel writers? Which is the one to follow, the one to emulate in day-to-day living? Is it the Jesus of Matthew 10: 34-38 (“Think not that I came to send peace on the earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law: and a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he that loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that does not take his cross and follow after me, is not worthy of me.”)? Or is it the Jesus who gave his disciple Peter a direct, absolutely clear answer when he asked, “Lord, how often am I to forgive my brother if he goes on wronging me? As many as seven times?” Jesus answered, “I do not say seven times; I say seventy times seven.”


Some of the confusion for me comes later, especially after the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus’ outbursts suggest violence as remedy. For his written account of the life of Jesus Matthew obviously gathered saying of Jesus, especially from Mark, and set them in the context of one long teaching session that he pictured as having taken place on a hillside. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is full of reassurances and admonitions, the rewards and responsibilities of “The Blessed.” Matthew carefully presents the teacher’s central message as a series of contrasts between the old ways of doing things and the new ways suggested by Jesus. “ You have learned that our forefathers were told, ‘Do not commit murder; anyone who commits murder must be brought to judgement.’ But what I tell you is this: Anyone who nurses anger against his brother must be brought to judgement.” (Matthew 5: 21,22) ...and “How blest you are, when you suffer insults and persecutions and every kind of calumny for my sake. Accept it with gladness and exultation, for you have a rich reward in heaven; in the same way they persecuted the prophets before you” (Matthew 5: 11,12). Later on the tone changes. What in the world was Jesus talking about in Matthew 10:21 when he said , “And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death”? That entire passage is a jumble of images and ideas that don’t make sense to me. In the narrative Jesus has been talking about teaching and healing: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out devils. You received without cost; give without charge.” Then he goes off into a rant: “When you come to any town...(and they don’t receive you well and won’t listen to what you say)..., then as you leave that house or that town shake the dust of it off your feet I tell you this: on the day of judgement it will be more bearable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.”

And then he says something even stranger, like something from the playbook of a cunning politician. “Look, I send you out like sheep among wolves; be wary as serpents, innocent as doves.” Maybe that is the part that guides George W. Bush. But for me, the only reasonable conclusion is that Jesus was a pacifist. One of the images that is clearest to me is the one of him rebuking Peter for grabbing a sword during Jesus’ arrest. Throughout his lifetime he suffered unjustly, yet he managed not to hate his tormenters. His actions, not just his words, point to pacifism as the way he would ask me to live if we could have a conversation today. When confronted with the confusion and contradictions of the Gospel record, I must say that I believe much of what Jesus is reported to have said is presented metaphorically, that sometimes the writers got carried away with their own agendas.

It is clear that Jesus’ teachings were reasonable and wise concerning the uselessness of hatred and revenge. I believe George W. Bush and his followers (or his handlers) got it wrong. The best response to the horrific terrorist attack on the World Trade Center was not to invade Iraq with a spirit of vengeance. Imagine what the situation would be like in Iraq today if we had gone in peace instead of war with the hundreds of billions of dollars we are spending to inflict terrible suffering on that nation. Imagine what it would be like today in the rest of the world. Imagine what it would be like for the thousands of American families that have lost or have had irreparably damaged their sons and daughters and brothers and sisters. Imagine what it would be like in our hearts without the images of Abu Graib.

Jesus was obviously right. I want to be like him. I prefer to live in an atmosphere of forgiveness, not in a climate of vengeance.

THE WAY IT IS

The moon can be personal even intimate
for lovers lying softly beneath silver light
while telling each other the vast universe
worked to make the magic moment come
just to them unique and special and right
to prove a god of order sense and system
preordained this and every small moment
in the universe of quintessential goodness.


Unfathomable universal clockwork whirrs
spinning rotating circling looping planets
suns being born and dying exploding into
space dust flung wide and maybe like all
of us and everything heading finally for a
sucking black hole located in the middle
of whatever wherever galaxy it belongs to
taking everything and giving nothing back.

WE HIT EACH OTHER

We hit each other
with words mostly
being too civilized
to draw blood
or leave bruises

unless of course
the people damaged, destroyed,
decimated and left destitute
are of some other place
or color or faith.