OUT OF CONTROL AND INTO TRUST

A couple days ago, I got home from having total hip replacement surgery.  I was in the hospital for 3 ½ days, during which time I was working toward a series of small steps that would effect my release, a series that has some parameters, and has quite a bit of objective data from others who have undergone this surgery.  Once at home, I begin working toward a series of steps that are larger, not as well defined, and which can vary widely from person to person.  The data that surgeons and other healers have about this second phase is mostly self-reported by the patient and thus subjective rather than objective. 

I’ve only been home a couple days, but it’s looking like this stage of my healing could be much harder than the first one.

It’s interesting, because here at home, I have much more control about where I can go, what tools I have at my disposal, just how much physical space I can operate in, and how many physical activities it is possible to do, and yet in some ways, being in the hospital was easier.  There are many reasons, but it seems to me that at the core of them all was the issue of control.

When I went under anesthesia, I lost—or rather ceded—control of some key physical functions, among them breathing, urinating and finally, consciousness.  Agreeing to the surgery was essentially an act of faith.  I chose to trust people and a process over which I had no control. I chose to put my body and my life in others’ hands.

Even after waking from surgery, in many ways my life was still in others’ hands.  They decided when I could be moved from the recovery room, when I could eat solid food, when the catheter would come out. I had some control over that, in that there were certain steps I could pass.  I could drink a clear liquid diet and report no problems; I could report that I didn’t feel dizzy or nauseous.  (That reporting required a trust on the part of the staff—that I was telling the truth—but also they had a lot of machines to gather my data).

In fact, as the recovery in the hospital continued, I was asked to trust in a different way: that my body, with help, could do certain things.  Get up, walk to the hall, do physical therapy exercises, go to the bathroom, practice climbing stairs.  The more active I became, the more I was asked to both trust my pain (stop an exercise when it became intolerable) and trust that the pain would diminish as I got stronger.  The staff kept asking me to trust them with information: how I was feeling, if I could do more activity, if I could reduce the pain medication.  They also asked me if I had passed gas, and showed disappointment when I answered no (tell me another social situation where that happens!)

At home, it’s a different level of trust. I have to trust my family to adapt their lives and activities to my condition. And I have to trust my mind and spirit to make choices that aren’t necessarily black and white.  For example, how much should I push myself, and bear the pain, trusting that becoming active will reduce the pain versus how much I should take it easy, trusting that my body needs time to heal, and will do so at its own pace.

Anyone who has undergone major surgery will know that dilemma.  Doctors and nurses aren’t really helpful on this, because the best advice they will give you is “well, if it hurts too much don’t do it”, which basically leads you back to your subjective evaluation of what your body is telling you.

But coming home after surgery also challenges me to trust the trust I put in my family.  The people I trust the most are also the people I need to choose to trust the most.

The nurses and physical therapists never did anything that would test my trust in them. I was only in the hospital for 3 ½ days after all. But all of us in our family have done things that have damaged and even broken the trust between us for a time.  There has been more practice of forgiveness and reconciliation here, which has deepened the bonds of trust.  But even though I trust that I can trust loved ones with whom I have shared pain, I have to make that choice daily.  In the hospital, I didn’t have much of a choice whether to trust the staff: I depended on them.  At home, as I gain a little more independence physically, my dependence on my family is slowly diminished. But it takes time, time in which I must depend on people who are not being paid to help me (like in the hospital) but choosing to help me.  That dependence is a difficult spiritual discipline for me

I’ve been through a couple of workshops this year that sought to help us uncover—or discover—what is at the core of our being as leaders.  In both, my need to be in control surfaced strong and sure. I don’t like not being in control.  I want to know how things are going to turn out, and I feel that I need to make sure that they do.  Logically, of course, that doesn’t make any sense. No one can control the outcome of what we do.  But there is this power in me that demands that I keep my hands tightly on the reins, and shout directions to everyone travelling with me.  It is the opposite of trust, and the only way I can diminish that power is allowing myself to feel vulnerable and trust, even when I don’t feel it.  It’s not telling myself that “everything is going to be all right”, because not everything will be.  It’s more encouraging myself to trust that I will be all right, that those I love will be all right, that no matter what, life is precious and good.

I had a physical therapist in the hospital who epitomized the kind of coach or teacher I admire and aspire to be.  She was in her last year of school at the University of Minnesota, and combined in just the right proportions support and challenge.  She pushed me to do new things, and helped me to do them.  She was not going to make me get better, she was going to help me get better.  Her two most common phrases were “how do you feel?” and “do you want to try something else?”  No doubt, she had a written plan to guide her treatment of me, but it was her trust in me as a patient—that I would tell her what I was feeling, and that I would trust her as she guided me on—that made the healing relationship work.

Maybe we could apply that to other human relationships—at work, in our families, in community.  If we truly asked each other how we felt—and listened to the honest answer—and truly asked each other if we ‘d like to try something new, how much richer would our lives be?

I wonder.

Be beauty.  Be justice.  Be trust.

Patrick

WHAT HATE LIES WHERE?

The news of the last several weeks has been hard to take: the plight of the Yazidis and Christians and others in Iraq, the punishment of Gaza, the ongoing carnage in Syria, the Ebola outbreak and the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.  And then last night, the news of the beheading of James Foley by ISIS or ISIL or IS, whatever grandiose name this determined group of killers has chosen for the moment.

Today, on the way to the studio to write, I caught part of an interview on The Take Away about a white sheriff’s deputy in California, who is raising his adopted African-American son with his husband. (http://www.thetakeaway.org/story/white-sheriff-talks-race-police-his-black-son/#commentlist). He shared how his own views on race changed as he watched his son grow—how people looked at the child suspiciously in stores for example. You could hear the emotion in his voice when he told the story of his son crying at the kitchen table when a Latino youth (holding a toy gun) was killed by police in California, and his son asking him if that could happen to him.  Killed for being black.  Stopped for being black.  Arrested for being black or Latino or anything considered “other”.

My two girls are adopted.  My oldest is Latina (as is my wife), my youngest is African-American.  And though I have lived and worked in diverse inner-city communities for over 30 years, I cannot say that I know or can comprehend fully how they navigate the American landscape that still bases so much on race, on perception of “otherness”.  I know that I live my life with privilege that the rest of my family doesn’t have, because I am white.  I also know that race in America is complicated, entangled as it is with class and gender and neighborhood and region, with perceptions and resentments that are generation-deep.

We moved from Philadelphia to Minneapolis almost exactly nine years ago, when our girls were 5 and 14.  I will never forget something that happened in a drug store, somewhere in Pennsylvania or Ohio.  My wife confronted the manager because he was following our then five-year-old daughter around the store (and not following other children who were white).  He denied that he was doing it, period.  My wife said something like “oh, yes you were, you know that you were.”

Thinking back, I wonder how much the manager knew he was doing it, and how much was an automatic response, given his background and status.  Which makes it harder to see, and harder to root out.  I wonder how deep that automatic response is in me, is in us, and how we can help each other see that and root that out.  It was so easy for me to see the manager as uneducated racist jerk, and leave feeling righteous.

The deputy sheriff talked about how important conversations around the kitchen table is for his family, to have meaningful dialogue about race; and how important real dialogue—that does not paper over injustice—is for Ferguson, and the whole country.  And the world, of course.  Of course, the bigger the entity gets, the harder it is.  It’s hard to see an Israeli or Palestinian as a dialogue partner when you’re trying to kill each other. And a “let’s all be friends” pseudo-dialogue won’t work.  There is any real peace without justice, but there may be no real peace without forgiveness as well.

One of my favorite writers is Thomas Merton, who though being a Trappist monk in a monastery guided by silence, was one of the most astute witnesses to our world. Henri Nouwen (another favorite) put Merton’s ideas this way:  “If you see evil as something ‘out there,’ something outside yourself, sharply defined and irreversible," explained Nouwen, "then the only way to deal with it is in the same way you would deal with a malignant tumor: You cut it out, take it out, eradicate it, burn it away, kill it—which means you immediately become violent.”

But if you see evil as something inside of all of us, something we are caught up in, then there is a chance for dialogue and transformation.  I hope that this happens in Ferguson, but I’m realistic enough to know that it often takes “deepening the pain” (my term) that makes people want to risk it.  At the root of all hate and violence is fear, and I know that sometimes the thing that gets me past my fear is feeling so bad, I have no choice but to change.

I’m risking a new direction with some of my poetry.  I’ve been writing a series of connected short stories about a fictional village named Two Rivers that is near a packinghouse town, and becomes the repository for “otherness” for the townspeople.  (It is fiction, fellow Austinites by birth or choice!) One of my protagonists is Graciela, who at age twelve flees with her family when the townspeople burn Two Rivers down in 1918 because they believe the village is the origin of the Spanish flu epidemic.  Graciela comes back to the town in 1933, after suffering—and causing—various traumas, ostensibly for some kind of revenge, but then discovers a deeper purpose.  (I hope you’ll be able to read it some year soon).  I’ve written a number of poems in her voice—this is her speaking, after her return in 1933:

SIN

What is it, exactly?

Why do people have a need

To point it out when it

Flows from another person?

The priests seemed to think

We were born with it,

And that somehow during

Our first long journey

Down our mother

We catch if from her.

Like a disease.

Or a curse.  I confess

I have clung to my sin

As a trophy, as if to say

You can’t make me

Any worse than I am.

I have stolen.

I have lied.

I have killed one man

And thought about many others.

If rape were a crime

That a woman could commit,

I would gladly do that.

But when I am alone

At night, with no body

Or word to console me,

I know a deeper hurting

Than I can explain. It’s as

If there is a war inside

Of me, and both sides

Brook no prisoners.

I cannot say that I pray

At such times as these,

Because prayer demands

A willingness to listen.

I see how Jesus sits down

With sinners and eats,

I’ve heard a thousand times

How he died to save all sinners,

And will come back to punish

Those who will not obey.

But I have two questions

Simmering in me:

If Jesus’ death did not do it,

What death will? And

If God fights with the same

Weapons as the devil,

Then who would you have win?

Be justice. Be beauty. Be dialogue.

Patrick

SHUT UP ALREADY!

My memory has been sparked all over the place this past week, and there’s nothing like a photograph to set one’s memory going.  I’ll get to this week’s photo—taken by one of our youth photographers—but first a couple of memories.

Twenty nine years ago, I was privileged to return to the Soviet Union. I had been there in 1982, as part of a group of seminarians, visiting Lutherans in the Baltics, and Orthodox in Moscow and Leningrad.  I had brought out my college Russian text book, bought some flash cards and tried to beef up my dormant Russian, which enabled me to order tea on the train, introduce myself and greet people, tell them where I was from and so on (and then listen to a Kalashnikov-speed reply from a Russian, of which I got about every sixth word).  I was frustrated and wanted to speak better. Curiously, when I was trying to speak Russian and got stuck, the English word did not come to my mouth, but Spanish. I was not fluent in Spanish at the time, but conversant enough.  (I went to Amsterdam after being in the USSR for three weeks and spent part of an afternoon with a person from Barcelona.  When I got stuck on a Spanish word, Russian, not English came out!)

By 1985, I was fluent in Spanish, and not much advanced in Russian, but I got out the flash cards.  I told a fellow traveler (pun intended) that I hoped I met someone in the Soviet Union who spoke Spanish.  I did. The first night. In Red Square, I met a couple of Cubans who were studying in Moscow, and we had a nice conversation.  I remember the last thing I said to them: “I hope relations between our countries are normalized soon.”

I’m still hoping, but not holding my breath.

Of all the stupid things we’ve done as a nation, the Cuban embargo has to be one of the stupidest (among other things, opening up their economy to Disney and Apple and McDonalds would be the surest way to subvert any socialism).  It has been in place for 55 years, más o menos.  Has Cuba “changed”?  Have “we” gotten anything good out of it?  (The shame of Guantanamo only adds to the stupidity of it).

Yes, I know the human rights record of Cuba is bad.  But we’ve endorsed and funded and supplied with arms worse countries and dictators, from Rios Montt in Guatemala to the Somozas in Nicaragua to a series of military governments all over South America.  Yes, Cuba’s form of government is not democratic, but they have universal health care that is marvelous and a literacy rate that is the envy of many developing countries. And please don’t tell me it’s because they’re communist. We have huge trade with Viet Nam and China who are communist (besides being great capitalists, which is another story!).

Which brings me back to the photo one of our youth took.

I want my country to shut up talking about democracy and human rights.  I want it to stop sending guns to Israel and guns to Iraq and guns to Colombia and guns to Mexico.  I want it to shut up talking about climate change, and do something about it. I want it to just shut up about how being exceptional, and start being compassionate.  I wouldn’t mind if the whole collective nation just took a month-long reprieve from talking and just listened.

Enough of that rant.  A friend this morning reminded me that it was August 1, and seven years since the I-35 bridge collapse, which took place two days before our dear Talia’s 7^th birthday.  Which means now that Talia has lived half of her life since that terrible day.  I hadn’t thought about it for awhile, which shows, I guess, that it doesn’t have the same power over me that it did. (And as a friend noted last year, August 1 last year was the day Marriage Equality came to happen in Minnesota, a much better anniversary to celebrate).  Of course, I will never forget that day seven years ago, and it will come to my present memory when it will. 

We are often told as a people that we should never forget: never forget 9-11-2001, never forget Pearl Harbor and so on.  I don’t think it would be possible to do so, even if we chose to. I still hope we will start to remember: what we did on 9-11-1973 in Chile, what we’ve done for decades all over the world, what we are doing right now in Gaza, with bombs paid for by us, and sent with our best wishes.

Be justice.  Be beauty.  Be remembering.

Patrick 

WHAT DO WE SEE?

This photo could be a scene over Palestine as bomb after bomb lands on thin houses.  This photo could be the view from an Israeli farm, wondering when the next rocket will fly. It could be the sky over Ukraine, the sky over Iraq, the sky over Afghanistan, where red and orange and yellow do not harbor joy, but usher in another night of terror. 

But it isn’t. It’s the sky seen from our front yard, in a photo taken by my daughter, earlier in the summer, when the sun was reaching the farthest north, just before the solstice. Just after the sunset.

We’ve had beautiful sunsets in Minnesota lately, caused in part, I’ve heard, by the wildfires out west—acre after acre burning as the drought deepens and the planet gets hotter and hotter.  You can’t see the molecules that may be making the sky shimmer, and discern which comes from which source. Is it cloud, is it smoke, is it hope or is it fear?

My wife and I watched the 10 pm news last night, hoping, I suppose, to catch word of some miraculous peace, some unknowable justice that had rained down on a “conflict zone” and that now reigned instead of death.  It didn’t come.  There was a 15 second piece about Secretary Kerry demanding unfettered access to the site of the downed airliner.  There might have been a 15 second “shout out” to Gaza when I slipped into the kitchen to fill my water glass—I’m not sure.  We were told three times that today would be “steamy” with a chance for severe weather overnight.  We got something about cute animals or nice people helping neighbors, just before the requisite five minutes of sports.    

I’m not looking for an overabundance of gore, or story after story of homicides and assaults and wars.  But despite the access to “24 hour news”, it seems to me that we are shown so much that is not news that we are unable to see what is in front of us.  And so we hop from crisis to crisis: the schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria, the riots in Brazil, the fighting in Ukraine, ISIS in Iraq, the invasion of Gaza pop up into our consciousness like summer thunderstorms, rattle the windows for awhile and then pass on. 

I don’t have a ready-made solution.  I can’t tell the future.  Even though I am praying, at least some of the time I think that praying for peace may be a copout, because if it doesn’t inspire us to the kind of actions that make for peace, it is as empty as the news broadcast (No, parishioners, I’m not saying we should stop praying or that prayer is not efficacious. Just that uttering words by themselves without our spirit on the line doesn’t make a lot of difference.) 

I like to end these blog posts somehow tying it into the “Be justice. Be beauty” thing.   But I am not being either of those right now.  I am being frustrated, I am feeling broken, and I am hoping that what I can’t see I can truly hope for.

Patrick

TAKE NOTICE

I haven’t kept up with writing a piece a week about one of the photos our youth photography program produced.  I’ve been busy, I’ve been down, I’ve been sick.  Ok, got that out of the way.

I picked this photo because it troubles me the most.  The only color is the two notices on the door, both of which are pulling away.  As if the framers of these theses didn’t really care if they stood the test of time.  The tape is pulling away; the staple was not driven in all the way. Their message is clear: time to get out.  You don’t belong here anymore.

And yet, artistically, the photograph is beautiful: the lines, the angle of the shot, the sense that maybe a little breeze is trying to lift the papers away.  The young photographer had an eye for shape and framing.  Also a lot of courage to take a photo of a heartbreak rendered in legalese.

I don’t know who lived here, and what ghosts might inhabit a building found to be condemned.  When children at church ask me if I believe in ghosts, I tell them no. When writing poetry, that’s another question.  I do think that when we inhabit spaces fully, the space begins to inhabit us.  That’s why in the best stories, the place itself becomes a character.  And the characters leave a trace of their spirit in whatever place they pass through.

I imagine there is some heartache behind these notices on the door, heartaches that may be hard to notice because they are hidden from us.  Perhaps a family of immigrants—documented children, undocumented adults—who had to flee quickly.  Maybe a family that lost a job or had a health problem and couldn’t afford the rent or mortgage.  Maybe an unjust landlord.  The meaning is not posted with these officials signs.  Only that the building has been declared “unfit for human occupation.”  We don’t know why the people who lived here left, or where they have gone.  It makes me cry out for justice, for renewal, for grace.

I have been writing a series of linked stories that first started being placed in my hometown of Austin, Minnesota.  But as the stories grew, it began to be more about a small city’s relationship with what became a ghost town.  In “real life” there was a ghost town named Two Rivers, just south of Austin.  In the stories I’m writing, Two Rivers has become the settlement that the townspeople blame for their misfortune, a place that houses the “other” in a way that makes the respectable citizens uneasy. Eventually they burn the people of Two Rivers out, blaming them for the Spanish Flu epidemic.  But the woundedness and the beauty of Two Rivers does not disappear, but rather becomes part of the landscape.

I wrote this poem as a companion piece to those stories. It was originally published in the Austin Daily Herald around Halloween last year:

WHAT IF A GHOST TOWN HAS NO GHOSTS?

What if its river carries no cries down its long

and twisted fingers?  What if the cemetery has                    

no hinges between heaven and hell?  What if

the stories you were told were told to the first hearers

not to  lift their wings or give them hope, but to

shut them up for every hour?  What if the shovels

and the pitchforks and the lanterns and the shouts

all marshaled to bring the old town down, still hover

in the copse of pin oak and maple that looks

over the long, slow bend in the river?  What if                                 

the houses, built log by log, peg by peg,

first the frame, than the roof, then the longing

in the roof, the longing for sky and protection          

from storms, the child’s dreams wafted into prayer,

the moon beheld and the sun obeyed; what if

the chair set by the sick bed and the stool pulled

next to the stove in deep winter were the first

to go up in flames; and what if those bodies,

the dammed and the saved, did not weep as they

were driven from their homes, but held their hands

as wings in front of their bodies,

two to cover the face, two to cover the flesh,

two to hover and to rise as if all sacrifice                  

were but the backlash of praise, and what if             

those angels, those devoured by our fear,

hold not to hatred, nor sorrow, nor the lust

to kill, but incense, candlelight, the taste

of warm bread and sweet wine, and what if

as you and I walk through fields of poppies and oxeyes,

our eyes brightened by the late summer sun,             

we discover that what we thought was curse

was blessing, and that these enemies

driven from among us, have returned

in our children, in our song, and will stand

for us in the last night, in the last breath,

in the sound of the trumpet?

What will we say then?

* * *

What are the ghosts in our communities, our houses, our nation that cry out to be noticed? What do you say?

Be justice. Be beauty.  Take Notice

Patrick

COFFEE BREAK

This is the second in a series of reflections about photographs taken by children in our photography project at St. Paul’s Lutheran in Minneapolis during the summer of 2013.

This photo was taken by one of our Young Leaders as part of the summer show “Under Construction”.  You can see that the building is more under destruction than construction.  Two glass blocks have been broken out. Knowing how sturdy these blocks are, I can assume that it wasn’t wind or another force of nature that took them out, but human action.  It makes me wonder who did it, and why.

I have to confess that I broke a lot of things on purpose when I was a teenager. Petty vandalism, which wasn’t petty to the person who had their property damaged.  I know that part of the reason I did it was to fit in with a group of youth doing it, or even to shine as the leader of that group.  Part of it also was the sound that breaking something made, a sound that was paralleled by a kind of controlled fury in my heart.  It felt good to break something. I could have tried to justify it at the time by saying others were breaking me, others were damaging me, and I was just trying to “get back”.  That didn’t exactly ring true to me, even in my wilder days. No, I think the truth is that I liked breaking things for the sake of breaking them. I liked being the destroyer.

I think we probably all like being the destroyer.  Is it innate in us, or something that we have built into our life together so that it effects every one of us?

There have been quite a few programs on the radio lately about the passing of Maya Angelou.  On at least two of them, I heard her quote from the Roman playwright Terence.  Terence was a slave from North Africa; purchased by a Roman Senator, who later gave him his freedom (that last phrase deserves a whole essay).  The quote Maya Angelou cited was "I am a human being, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.”

As a theologian and follower of Jesus, that is a great summation of the Incarnation.  As a poet, that is a blessing to write about, for and with anything human.  And as a human, that exempts me from judging.

Maya—may I call you Maya, or would you prefer Ms. Angelou?—riffed off  Terence in a talk in Minneapolis in 1984 that was replayed this spring on Minnesota Public Radio.  She talked about how all of human experience is open to us, and we are open to it.  The thing that struck me the most was when she talked about the “most heinous acts that humans commit.”  She said that, being human, we cannot say “I could never do that”.  We can say: “I will try to never do that” or “I will work with my community to get the support to never do that” and so on. I’m approximating her quotes, except the one that says “I could never do that”.  That one I know I got right.

I cannot say that I could never kill anyone. Or torture. Or betray a loved one.  I’m not planning to do any of these things, but more importantly, I am trying to build a life that will keep me and others from doing those things: prayer, meditation, my support group, being honest with my family and friends, working for justice, confessing my sins honestly and accepting forgiveness graciously, trying to build a community of love where I live and I work.  I hope that I keep doing that. But I cannot say “I could never do that”, and strangely, that has given me a great deal of freedom.  When I trust that nothing human is alien to me, my fear diminishes.  I don’t need to fear myself or others, and that also relieves me of the burden to judge myself or others.

I could knock out the glass blocks in this photo.  I could also put the coffee there.  Whether it’s an offering, a sophisticated piece of littering, or something staged by the youth photographer, I don’t know.  I just finished my morning coffee from a coffee shop, and I’m going to take it home and recycle it.  Or plant something in it.  Or fill it up with more coffee.

Be justice. Be beauty. Be human.

Patrick

WHAT WORDS WE SEE

I got this idea to write a blog post a week this summer, riffing off a photograph from a show that the youth in our summer program did last summer.  The show was called “Under Construction” (and can be seen at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, 2742 15^th Ave S. in Minneapolis, by appointment. I’ll let you know when it appears elsewhere!) because there were no less than five construction projects going on in our neighborhood last summer.  This summer’s projects have started up already.

The youth also were able to look at the idea of construction in two other ways: nature, and human community.  How are we under construction?  How is the world?  There really are some beautiful photos, which I hope to share with you over the summer.

I started writing this post thinking about the words that were captured in some of the photographs, and how many of them were negative: “Sidewalk Closed” “Bridge Closed” “Stop” “Condemned” “Danger Construction Area Keep Out” “No Trespassing”.

It made me think how many times our young people hear and see those words directed at them: stay out, stay in your place, don’t come in, this is NOT FOR YOU.  Many of our youth are undocumented, or the children of undocumented parents.  That status comes with a kind of roving sign: “You are welcome to work here” (in fact we need your labor) but “You are not welcome to feel welcomed here” (we fear your culture, your language, the way you look, what you may represent about us).

I’ve been teaching poetry to some of these youth, and one theme rises from them over and over: you don’t really see me.  You don’t see me as I am, you don’t want to get to know me, you assume my life is “just like yours” or “totally different than yours” without ever really asking me what my life is like. 

You would think that would lead them to bitterness, but I don’t see that in them.  I see hope, a willingness to explore, and a determination to change things.  They all have incredible stories, and I have been honored to hear them.

Their photo that I chose for this writing is one of a worker holding a hard hat. At least that’s what I thought it was, until I really LOOKED at it.  I think it’s two workers holding a hard hat—the one on the left a woman (I assume, from the nail polish), the one on the left a man (assuming again).  The worker who has worn the hat has seen some work, it seems to me: look at how the “l” and the “a” are scraped off the words “laborers” on the cross.  “Laborers” has become “borers”: boring down into the heart of things, as construction does.  Boring at times, as all labor is.

It’s interesting to me that Local 563 is proclaimed in both church and state: the cross and the flag.  It just begs me to write something about the connection and disconnection between the two this Memorial Day weekend.  But I’m not going to do it.  I am going to ask you to pay attention to how many places of worship will have memorial day messages or celebrations, and how often we’ll be asked to remember and thank veterans.  Then compare that to Labor Day weekend, and see how well the labor movement fares.

But I digress, as is my wont.  What else do you see in the photo?  Why is the orange scraped?  What IS that drawing above “Maverick”.  What are those hands doing today? Why did the youth ask them to hold the hat the way they did?

I hope that we all see some very interesting things this summer, and it leads us to ask some very interesting questions.

Be justice.  Be beauty.

Patrick