Somewhere in my family’s archive is an old picture of my grandfather in his early 60’s, swinging shirtless from the rafters of a picnic pavilion with one hand, holding a beer with the other, knees pulled up to his chest, mocking a chimpanzee. Grandma, a devout Catholic woman, is standing next to him, arms crossed, donning her characteristic look of disapproval.

I’ve searched high and low for the picture but can’t find it.

I loved grandpa (we called him PaPaw because that’s all my sister – firstborn grandkid – could come up with when she was learning to talk), though I never got to know him very well. He was a self-made successful businessman who grew up in the depression era and vowed to be nothing like his father. I was intimidated by his strength and usually didn’t know what to say when I was around him.

Regardless, when he walked into a room, or setup his Waterpik on the kitchen counter to spray his grandchildren while they watched TV, or yelled “Where’s the beef!” at a fancy restaurant (well within earshot of MaMaw), or cut his oldest grandson’s cherished two-dollar bill in half, saying “I’ll double your money!” he was always more than a mere family member.

Just before he died, his grandchildren gathered in his hospital room, most of us for the last time. He was tired but managed. Near the end of our visit, he sat up, swung his bare, atrophied legs over the edge of his bed, locked eyes with me (something I’d never experienced) and said, “Mark, you’ve always had this facade of being… well… sort of a dumbass. These days I’m convinced otherwise.”

I had recently set out to start my own church, and I guess his inner entrepreneur felt some connection with me.

Either way, it was one of the most memorable compliments I’ve ever received.

To all of us, PaPaw carried weight, importance. He had a presence that you could feel when you were around him, one so profound that I can still feel it when I see a picture of him. One of my cousins recorded a conversation with him just before cancer became part of his life. His voice is broken and tired, but entirely possessing of its power.

What Papaw imparted to us is something that defies natural law; a thing that exists and seems to have a life of its own, though we can’t see it or quantify it in a laboratory.

I can’t think of a better word to describe it than “magic.”

There would’ve been none of it if he had played the victim like his father did, gambling the family into oblivion. I’ll wager that few have magical memories of my great grandfather beyond the way he ruined everything.

Papaw, on the other hand, stayed in the game, not perfectly by any stretch – he was a deeply flawed human being. But he worked, stayed invested in his marriage, and lived with the best commitment to his family that he could manage. At the same time, he found a way to be who he wanted to be, letting his rowdy parts off the chain from time to time, and we loved him for it.

Because of the way he positioned himself, his grandkids experienced a power that has rippled far beyond his grave.

I’ll argue that we all possess something similar; a wizardry of sorts that does something really special to the people closest to us. As long we’re willing to play the game, they get to feel it, for the rest of their lives.

It doesn’t require any special skill or effort beyond us being the best version of ourselves that we can manage.

Here’s another example, just because it’s funny.

I have an old friend (“Reggie,” to protect the innocent). My favorite memory of him is the time when we were in a church staff meeting and the weekly prayer bulletin was making its way around the table. These meetings were always a little too serious, so I was surprised to see Reggie with his head down, convulsing, trying desperately to keep it together.

He slid the notes my way and pointed to the first item on the list of prayer requests.

One of the congregants, Richard, had suffered a stroke. That’s not funny, I know, and thankfully he was OK, but the memo read “Richard had a massive stroke.” Because an older person penned the note, it didn’t say “Richard,” it used instead the once common shorthand that is also a common term for the male cha cha. It was impossible to read that phrase, sitting next to a guy 10 years my senior, and a true badass when it came to getting things done, still convulsing in the middle of a serious meeting.

The pastor of our church, a much more serious fellow, kept asking, “what’s so funny?”

I had to leave.

In the years that I’ve known Reggie, he can’t seem to manage to be anything other than himself.

People who persevere through life while also mining the truest version of themselves, bring something into our world that’s much needed. Sure, they’re entertaining to be around, and typically don’t have a problem with you being yourself, but they also, unwittingly, unleash something that travels far beyond them.

Magic.

On the other hand, folks who quit, play the victim, blame others for their problems, or on the other extreme get so serious about everything that they can’t let themselves out, keep their magic in the closet.

It’s there, but you can’t have any.

The cosmos seems to want that: people who are too scared, discouraged, angry, insecure, apathetic, etc., to fully express who they are. In their defense, and from personal experience, it’s too often difficult to slog through the day’s challenges with a good, hopeful perspective, believing that being yourself won’t get you in trouble.

I often wonder how PaPaw managed it. His life, especially the early years, was difficult. If anyone had cause to play the victim, it was him. After his middle-age, odyssic search for meaning and significance, and not finding much, he decided instead to put his nose to the grindstone when it was time for work, and swing from the rafters when it wasn’t.

I’m thankful that he did.

For me – up at 5 AM, hiding in the basement to finish this post, having just spilled coffee on my laptop, convinced while I’m wiping it up with my bathrobe that today is going to be yet another fascinating journey through the depths of mundanity – it’s good to consider that I’m having the same impact on the people in my life.

It might be that my presence, appropriately applied, even when I’m not doing big things, has power.

By now you’ve seen a few different video perspectives on last week’s mid-air collision at a Dallas air show. I’ve seen a few now and will watch as many as I can get my hands on because I really want to know what happened. Long ago, I spent hours studying aviation accidents as that’s the best way to avoid the mistakes of others. Today, long past my flying days, it’s still an area of interest.

The most recent video showed up on my social media timeline this morning, and is a clear, relatively close perspective on the accident. My heart goes out to the victims of this tragic loss, and to their friends and families.

I wrestled with whether or not to post this. You’ll find the video below, but it’s very graphic. I don’t recommend watching it, but I’ll leave it to you. If you’d prefer a recap: two WWII era planes collided at low level – a Bell King Cobra (small, single engine) and a B-17 Flying Fortress. All 6 aviators were killed.

I didn’t post this for the morbidity factor. At the end of the video, you can hear a child asking, “Wait… was that supposed to happen? Was that supposed to happen?!!” Her tone and volume suggest that she desperately hoped that the incident was staged.

Kids especially will have a difficult time integrating what they saw last Sunday with their understanding of reality. The idea that 6 people fell from the sky and died in a fireball is a bit hard to reconcile with the average 8-year-old’s ontology. But this poor little girl wasn’t just watching a bunch of pilots meet their fate, she came face to face, probably for the first time in her life, with the reality of her own death.

She’s not simply hoping that a bunch of people didn’t just die, she’s hoping that she’ll never die.

For all of us, regardless of when this happens, it’s a terrible realization, so we try our best to talk ourselves out of it or find a distraction; whatever system we can get our hands on that might take our focus off of the turnstile we all have to walk through.

Anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote about this in the 70’s and was posthumously awarded the Nobel Prize for his work. Until then, he wasn’t very popular. His work was too raw for that era, far too focused on the reality of death for the modern mind that, at the time, was preoccupied with distracting itself.

His book, The Denial of Death, confronted readers with the tension between two realities that are difficult to reconcile:

“This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression – and with all this yet to die.”

To Becker, the truest expression of humanity is to live in this tension, to ultimately accept the fact that our existence here will end. Facing death, not denying it, is the best way to live.

But, according to Becker, that’s anathema in our culture.

We don’t like to talk about death, especially with our children. We’ll talk about drugs, money, behavior, family, future, responsibility, etc., but not the part about us closing our eyes and never coming back. In our defense, that’s scary as hell – a fear we haven’t dealt with ourselves – and we haven’t found any good reason to face it, so we avoid it like the plague.

A good example is the media coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s passing. We celebrated her life, took tours of her many years of service, journeyed through the photo album of her life, but saw absolutely 0 pictures of her deceased body. Why would we? What would be the point of that level of morbidity?

Or a blogger posting a video of an air show crash. Isn’t that taking things a bit too far?

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, author of the acclaimed, On Death and Dying, suggested that affluent, educated, socially distracted people (read, Americans) have a special struggle here, much more than in those parts of the world where suffering and difficulty are part and parcel to everyday life:

“Simple people with less education, sophistication, social ties, and professional obligations seem in general to have somewhat less difficulty in facing this final crisis than people of affluence who lose a great deal more in terms of material luxuries, comfort, and number of interpersonal relationships. It appears that people who have gone through a life of suffering, hard work, and labor, who have raised their children and been gratified in their work, have shown greater ease in accepting death with peace and dignity compared to those who have been ambitiously controlling their environment, accumulating material goods, and a great number of social relationships but few meaningful interpersonal relationships which would have been available at the end of life.”

Sheldon Solomon, Ross Professor for Interdisciplinary Studies at Skidmore College, took this a bit further:

“Americans are arguably the best in the world at burying existential anxieties under a mound of French fries and a trip to Walmart to save a nickel on a lemon and a flamethrower”

Anthropologists, psychologists and others have long suggested that the energy, time, and resources that we expend in our repression of death is affecting our lives.

The Stoics argued that, in facing death, one can find thankfulness and appreciation that there is, at least, one more day to be alive. If I knew that I’d die tomorrow (so long as I was guaranteed a quick, painless death) I’d live today in a completely different way than I’m planning to live it. I’d probably be a better parent and husband, willing to let little things go, focusing on what truly matters, uncharacteristically present.

If you received a terminal diagnosis with 3 months to live. Your next 90 days would certainly be affected, but if you had no choice but to face it, would you be freer? Kübler-Ross’ “Five Stages of Grief” suggests that you might find a freedom you’ve never experienced before, so long as you make it to the final “acceptance” stage.

My own encounters with death/terror/loss have me convinced that there’s something to all of this.

I once saw a friend gunned down a few feet away from where I was standing. On two occasions, I landed an airplane that had lost power. Years ago, my wife and I were caught in the middle of a Napa wildfire. Just before COVID, on a trip to San Juan del Cabo, I pulled a man out of the ocean (with the help of a lifesaving ring and a bunch of guys with a rope), so close to drowning that he could no longer move – alive, but slowly sinking.

When my sister was in her early 30’s, in a moment of anger and desperation, she took the buckle-end of a belt, wedged it between the jamb and the door of her bedroom, climbed onto a footstool that she had painted blue with white flowers, tied the other end of the belt around her neck, and ended her life.

My family and I drove to her home in Houston to care for her things, then to the mortuary where her body lay in state. The first thing I noticed were the bruise marks around her neck.

In all of those moments I felt a tangible presence that I’ll call “death.” It’s the most ugly, repulsive thing I’ve ever encountered. All I could feel was “get me the hell out of here.”

Now, when I think of death and loss, I can’t help but think about control. I’ve seen enough to believe that my life (and yours) hangs by a thin thread at the whim of something we simply can’t understand, much less control.

That stands in stark contrast to the way I live my American life. There is a mountain of pressure to control everything when we believe that we’re supposed to control everything. My death will be the cosmos’ last attempt, the final purging of the idea that I’m the one in the driver’s seat.

Maybe, when we accept death, at whatever point, we let go like we’ve never let go before.

It might also be that we transition into something else when we die, and our illusion of control can’t come with.

Either way, my heart goes out to the little girl at the air show, not just because of what she witnessed, but by the way our culture will step in to soothe and distract, compelling her to place great distance between herself and the reality of death, leaving her more convinced that her life is to be spent trying to control everything.

“It might be helpful if more people would talk about death and dying as an intrinsic part of life just as they do not hesitate to mention when someone is expecting a new baby.” ~ Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

 

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

There’s an episode in the Old Testament, a very clear one, where God dresses his people down for losing sight of what’s most important, offering a simple list of what he wants more than anything else:

He has shown you, human, what is good. And what does God require of you? Do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. ~ Micah 6:8

If you’ve spent any time in church, you’ve heard this one a few times. It’s benign, maybe a little boring. But when we rephrase with a bit more contemporary parlance (while considering the larger context), it reads something like this:

He has already shown you, over and over again, puny human — ye who could never understand the mind of God — what is good. And what does he require? Religious observance? Here’s a simple list: Don’t lie, cheat, steal, or take more than you should. Fall in love with mercy. Live your life with a deep sense of humility, like God is constantly walking behind you.

In the book of Micah, God is angry and deeply unimpressed with Israel’s legion of religious observances — not because they’re meaningless, but because Israel had lost sight of something more important.

It’s as if God is saying, “If you’re not doing these three things, your religion is meaningless.”

For us religious folks, following is part one of three reflections on these three things:

#1 – Act “Justly”

I had a difficult time writing this. The more I think about what God wants here, the more I realize that I’m doing my daily life within a corporate/financial/political system that’s driven by profit before anything else. Because $$ is the endgame, just about anything goes. This system travels far from “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” living much closer to “do whatever the market will bear.”

Because this is so baked into our everyday lives, I hardly notice it.

For example, a friend of mine bought a house that had a massive problem with the land that it sat on, but the seller wasn’t legally required to disclose anything. Though my friend paid thousands of dollars and a mountain of time and energy, the problem was never rectified. It ended up being one of those things you just have to live with.

When it came time to sell the house, he had to make a difficult decision: break the Golden Rule, or take a huge financial hit. What would you do? The situation is unfair. My friend did nothing to deserve this. It’s totally OK to sell the house “as is” because that’s what the previous owner did.

That’s what anyone would do.

We don’t operate this way because we’re dishonest people. We simply don’t see the point in losing money, especially in circumstances like this. If you disclose everything, you lose, right?

How far should we take the Golden Rule? I don’t want people to keep important information from me when I’m buying a house. I don’t mind little picadilloes here and there, but the big stuff? Can you do that and still believe in “do unto others”?

The Almighty Market

Here’s another tricky one…

If I buy a house for, say, $600,000 and in 10 years it doubles, I’d be a complete idiot to sell it for anything less than market price. But if I sell my house for twice the original cost, I drive prices up along with everyone else that’s selling their house at 100% profit. Soon, the cost of living goes up for everyone in that area, including the people who are struggling to get by. Ultimately, some will have to move to a place they can afford. This happens all the time in booming neighborhoods; the poor people move out, the rich people move in, and somehow that sounds totally fair to us.

Not sure God likes that, nor would anyone who’s on the business end of it.

Even if my house does double in value, the bank will keep me close to the break-even point. My bank loves me. I come first, they say, and were happy to loan me the money to buy our house. All I had to do was sign a contract that committed me to pay the agreed upon price, plus the same amount in interest.

When I’m done paying for my house, I will have forked out twice what it was worth when I bought it.

You have to wonder what would happen to our economic system if we based our prices on 1) the real value of things, 2) what’s best for buyer and seller, and 3) a deep commitment to honesty, maybe even overkill, in our business dealings.

Would we have inflation, the kind that kills people who are scraping to get by? Would there be systems that keep the poor in their place and whatever bootstraps just out of reach?

I have to believe that “acting justly” would have a deep impact, even if it was just the Christians who committed to it. I’ll guarantee you that Christianity would have a better reputation than it does now.

Sadly, despite the many fairness codes in our legal system, our economy is geared the person making the money. In most cases, you and I can charge whatever we can get away with, withholding whatever information that might lie within our stunningly spacious legal boundaries, disregarding any impact on the buyer and beyond.

That’s what everybody else is doing, why shouldn’t we?

That’s our system, one that ripples far beyond the extra $500 we made selling the family minivan, failing to disclose how the tailpipe smokes a little when you start it up in the morning.

What’s funny to me is that few are complaining or critiquing, especially the Christian folk who whine incessantly about how America’s moral code is disintegrating in so many ways.

Not a whisper about the sins so closely tied to our pocketbooks.

If things like the queer/transgender developments in our culture outrage us, we should be even more outraged by a system that honors the market at the expense of so many other things. God seemed to want something else: a system that made the market its servant, not its God, one that put fairness and honesty first, compelling people to take better care of one another.

That’s the system we tend to live under when we do business with family members. Why is it so different when we do business with everyone else?

Either way, when it’s time to move, am I going to sell my house for what I paid for it? That’s where this passage gets my goat. My family has benefitted from unwittingly moving to a popular city just before it got popular, while the people who’ve lived here most of their lives – now just getting by – are forced to make some difficult decisions.

What Now?

Am I taking this too far?

It’s silly to believe that, in attempting to follow God, our pocketbooks aren’t going to be deeply assaulted.

And is contemporary Christian America less guilty in this particular arena than the Israelites were so long ago? Their system revolved around a theocracy, for crying out loud, there’s no way we’re doing it better than they did; no way that we’re not caught up in the same current, just as blind to it.

If God was angry with them, how does he feel about us?

Is this such a huge leap?

I doubt that God’s looking down on America, thinking, “Oh yeah, let’s keep that shit going.”

To the Christian nationalist and/or MAGA believer, this passage suggests that your patriotism is misguided and does not impress God any more than the Israelites of Jesus’ day who put far more on the line for their nation. He seems to be much more interested in you, fighting with everything you’ve got to make yourself great.

And when folks try to ease the burdens of our system by, for example, paying off student debt, providing affordable healthcare, pursuing a deeper level of racial justice, equity, equality, etc., maybe reconsider getting so angry about it.

To the average, everyday Christian, bored with church and wanting to find an expression of faith that’s more “dynamic” and “exciting,” this is a reminder that God’s world, upon invitation, invades everything, especially the things we worship that we shouldn’t be worshipping. Instead of searching the world for something new, we’d do better to take a brutally honest look at the places where we simply don’t trust God.

For me, money’s a great place to start.

While I’m not sure how to integrate any of this into my life, or how deep I want God’s hands in my purse, I do believe that adherence to this “live justly” commandment requires two things that are fundamental to faith: a deep commitment to the welfare of the strangest stranger, and the belief that God, not the market, is the one who controls everything.

It’s on His whim that paupers and princesses are made.