My career has obligated me to hear a lot of commencement addresses. None, I will say, quite like this one. As a tennis fan, I’ve always found it easy to like Roger Federer and it would not have been hard to imagine that if he were called on to give a commencement speech, that it would be something like this.
You will not be surprised to learn that his speech had three points. Here they are:
“Effortless is a myth.” “It’s only a point.” “Life is bigger than the court.”
If you take the trouble to transplant those simple remarks to a tennis career, you will see immediately how he used them. It is how he used them that most interested me. Here are some illustrations.
First: I’m happy to be here! Happy to be with you, here on the Green. As you might have heard… grass is my favorite surface.
Second: Today, I want to share a few lessons I’ve relied on through this transition. Let’s call them… tennis lessons.
Third: But talent has a broad definition. Most of the time, it’s not about having a gift. It’s about having grit.
Fourth In tennis, perfection is impossible… In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches… Now, I have a question for all of you… what percentage of the POINTS do you think I won in those matches? Only 54%.
In other words, even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play. When you lose every second point, on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot. You teach yourself to think: OK, I double-faulted. It’s only a point. OK, I came to the net and I got passed again. It’s only a point.
And finally: Tennis… like life… is a team sport. Yes, you stand alone on your side of the net. But your success depends on your team.
Pretty good, I thought. I would have loved to have heard it live.
Every now and then someone makes a remark that crystalizes a lot of information that was just sitting there unpatterned and unnoticed. A remark like that happened to me recently. I was describing a nagging difficulty I was having with the ABC channel in Portland. Their by-line, the characterization they add to nearly anything about the station is, “KATU is on your side.”
I was complaining about this to my son Doug one morning and I said that the part of that designation that bothered me was the “sides” part. The way I hear it, it presupposes a stable opposition of interests. That is why there are “sides.” It stops a little short of saying that there is THEM and then there is US. It stops well short of saying who THEM is, so just who they have in mind by US is unclear.
What I was musing on in my conversation with Doug was that my mind seems to slide so quickly from the claim “We are on your side” to the presupposition, “There are sides and whatever side you are one, we are on that one too.” It was the “sidedness” of the claim that caught my attention.
“Oh yeah,” he said, “You always do that.”
I scarcely noticed at the time. We went on talking about whatever it was we were talking about. But it kept coming up in my mind and I began to catch myself treating other topics that way. Since then, I have been thinking, “Was he right? Do I always do that?”
Let me try to put the question in a way I will understand it better. A claim is made. The claim has presuppositions. I understand what the claim is but my attention is drawn to the presuppositions, or—to be fair—to one of the many possible presuppositions.
My daughter, Dawne, was recently in a conversation where she identified herself as “pro-choice.” A woman in the group “corrected” her. [1] The woman informed her that she should say “pro-abortion” rather than “pro-choice.” This part of me—the part Doug identified as characteristic of my thinking and processing of information—went immediately to “Really? This woman thinks that the right to choose and the decision to abort a fetus are the same question? Really?”
It seemed to me that you could make a decision about what decision was the right one or you could make a decision about whose decision it was to make. You could focus on the choice or on the chooser. Not both.
So now I am interested. I’d like to poke around in this question a little. If you are a regular reader of this blog, consider this an alert. There may be lots of these coming up.
It is at this point that, in fairness to the regular readers, I should say just what topics are going to be coming up. But, of course, I can’t do that. The sequence of events that would produce these blogs would be: a) a claim is made, b) I am drawn to the presupposition of the claim, and c) judge it to be an appropriate claim or not. That’s really it. In coming to some judgment about it, I am not going to be concerned whether the claim is valid. That’s a whole other matter. I want to look at the presuppositions and to the extent I consider the claim I want to see how the claim is derived from the presuppositions.
I got a real lift, some years ago, from Gordon Kaufman who was, at the time, a systematic theologian at Harvard. He was writing a chapter on “the divinity of Jesus” and his point was that the standard approach is to postulate what “the marks of divinity” are and to show that Jesus bears those marks. His question—the one that produced the lift for me—was this: How do we know what the marks of divinity are?” Or, more exactly, “Is there some other source of information we trust more and that we can apply to the matter of adjudicating the claims Jesus made?”
This topic has gone long enough and I have been clear enough that you know the question I am dealing with is not whether Jesus is “divine” or not. The question is how we would know. The minute Kaufman pointed out that the conventional method of establishing the divinity of Jesus requires another, a purportedly superior, source of knowledge, I heaved a great sigh of relief. My first reaction was, “He’s right.” My second one was, “Now I can let that question go.”
So we go, in ending this blog, from the question of whether he was or not to the question of how we would know if he was or not. That is the same shift I see in moving from “pro-abortion” to “pro-choice.” It changes the question. And it is the same shift I see in going from “on your side” to “why are there sides?”
We’ll see.
[1] Had the woman asked me, I could have told her that Dawne would not respond well to that.
The state of Louisiana intends to be at the forefront of a “growing national movement to create and interpret laws according to a particular conservative Christian worldview” according to journalists Rick Rojas, David Chen, and Elizabeth Dias. In a New York Times article published on June 21, they review a collection of laws the current governor, Jeff Landry, has signed but that were vetoed by the previous governor, Democrat John Bell Edwards.
I was taken, as I often am, by the language used to support and criticize these bills. According to the Times writers:
“Dodie Horton, the state representative who sponsored the Louisiana bill, said that having the commandments posted would allow students to ‘look up and see what God says is right and what he says is wrong’.””
Currently, the laws forbid discrimination on the basis of “religion.” I suspect that would not bother Rep. Horton, who sees these commandments as “truth,” rather than “religion.” When you start off with “God says…” you speak for citizens who have other gods, who have no god at all, and who are sure that no reasonable decision can be made on such questions. You also preempt Christians who are quite sure that when God said [whatever was said], God did not mean what you think was meant. I am drawn particularly to the commandment that says you shall not covet any of your neighbor’s property, including his wife.
Several civil rights organizations with a particular interest in church and state questions have issued a statement saying “Politicians have no business imposing their preferred religious doctrine on students and families in public schools.” Note that what was “God says…” in Rep. Horton’s argument, has become “the preferred religious doctrine of some politicians” in the civil rights response. I liked especially the insertion of “preferred” in their critique. It adds another step away from the position they are opposing. “God says” has become “a religious doctrine” and even worse, “the religious doctrine they prefer,” as if other citizens “preferred” other religious doctrines.
Rep. Horton wants a war between God and sin to be waged in the public schools. The civil rights groups are pointing out that the “war” is between the doctrines I like best and the doctrines you like best and they are arguing that it is not the business of the schools to judge between my favorite doctrines and yours.
The Christian nationalists of Louisiana do have an advantage, however, that the ACLU and their allies do not have. They have an enemy. This year, that is more important than it has been in any year since I began paying attention to politics in 1960.
Here is Jason Rupert, formerly a state senator in Arkansas and founder of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers. “This is all born of the leftist culture war tearing down the fabric of the country, and we are saying, ‘Enough’.”
This argument strikes me as ingenious. In the first place, it identifies an enemy so familiar it needs only to be referred to to sound ominous. It is “the leftist culture war.” This is not a charge that would withstand persistent inquiry. The idea that a Christian sect has the right to force its theology onto public school children and that trying to protect the children is a “leftist culture war” is not an idea that is obvious to a neutral observer. Of course, it was not designed for neutral observers.
Second, it is the United States that is the victim of the leftist culture war. We know that because the effect of the war or, even better, the goal of the war is to “tear down the fabric of the country.” The “fabric,” just in case you were wondering, is not made up scrupulous secularity in the public schools. The fabric is God’s plan for America, which, I strongly suspect, it to make America Great Again. Just guessing.
Finally, this tearing down has been going on for a long time. We have tried being patient. We have tried being reasonable. Now it is time to say “Enough.” In this way, all these new legislative devices are really just defensive. They have been warring against America and we have been patient. Finally, our patience has run out and it is time to do something.
Those three emphases, tucked neatly in to Jason Rupert’s remarks, are rhetorically powerful to anyone who begins where he begins. He is arguing for the rightness of his movement. He is not trying to persuade leftists.
When I got up this morning, I learned that Neil Goldschmidt had died. There will be stories now attempting to weigh his abuse of a young girl in the same scale as his imaginative and thrilling leadership in Oregon politics.
They will take two forms. Neil was a gifted and powerful politician BUT. And Neil was an egregious child-abuser BUT. The story I want to tell is neither of those and it has very little public significance. Still, it has mattered a good deal to me since the day it happened.
When Goldschmidt took office, I was working for an education planning agency that the legislature had created many years before and then slowly lost interest in. Goldschmidt made Paul Bragdon, former president of Reed College in Portland, his “education adviser” and placed him as head of the agency. The agency was, therefore, on its way to becoming Goldschmidt’s “office of educational advisers.”
In political terms, it was to be answerable to the executive branch, not to the legislative branch.
But just how the agency and the governor’s office ought to relate to each other was something we had to work out on the fly. Goldschmidt didn’t know; Bragdon didn’t know. So our first meeting with the governor was fraught.
Bragdon had a “presentation” format in mind. He spread out various elements of some issue we should deal with and gave everyone responsibility for a piece of it. Each of us was to write up “our part,” which would become part of the “agency report” to the governor. Then we would troop into the Governor’s working office—just behind the ceremonial office—and we would “walk him through” the report.
Bragdon led off, covering the first topic and giving Goldschmidt an early view of what was to come. Lots of careful language, lots of formal deference, and little else.
The Governor let us get about three speakers into the drama when he interrupted. This interruption is one of the best experiences I ever had in state government. He said, “I’ve READ the report. Could we talk about what it means and what we should do?”
I’ve phrased his interruption as a question, but everyone in the room knew it was not. It was a rebuke, first Then it was a primer on how he would like to treat the “advice” that would be coming to him. Then it was an invitation to propose something audacious and eye-catching.
That was my very small window into what “advising” Governor Goldschmidt was going to be like and it set the bar, frankly, for my hopes of every succeeding governor until I left state government under Gov. Kitzhaber many years later.
“This is how,” I said to myself, “a Governor who wants to do things will use the specialized advice available to him.” It was a wonderful moment.
[I had to go through a lot of pictures to get this one. Most of them picture him as a young and idealistic mayor of Portland or as a publicly exposed demon hiding from reporters or as a high-flying governor newly in office. I didn’t know him in any of those ways. This picture is the closest I could come. That is the face he had on when he said, “I’ve READ the report.”
The paragraph below is the final paragraph of Phil Klay’s Memorial Day column in the New York Times, The version I read had the headline”What Do I Owe the Dead of My Generation’s Mismanaged Wars?”
“In the past when I’ve thought about the recent dead, I’ve told myself that service to country, service unto the point of death, is a momentous enough sacrifice to overshadow all other questions. The cause doesn’t matter so much if the fallen I knew served courageously, looked after their fellow Marines and kept their honor clean. But I’ve come to feel that airbrushing out the complexities of their wars is, ultimately, disrespectful to the dead. We owe it to the dead to remember what mattered to them, the ideals they held, as well as how those ideals were betrayed or failed to match reality.”
The headline and the paragraph nicely pose the question of just what it is about Americans who died in wars that we should honor. In the paragraph I have chosen, Klay’s first option is “service to country…to the point of death.” These, says Klay, who have “served courageously,” have “looked after their fellow Marines,” and have “kept their honor clean.” [1]
Those are all personal attributes and all worthy of praise. But he has introduced another element by asking which of the wars in which these Americans served were “mismanaged.” If you look at the first paragraph above, you will see that the personal adulation is confined to first part, then there is the turning point—“but I’ve come to feel”—after which we get to the wars themselves and how we treat those wars.
One way we treat the wars, Klay says, is to “airbrush” them. Normally, airbrushing takes out unattractive features; features we would not want in a “picture” celebrating individual sacrifices. Airbrushing would be about the war, not about the soldiers. Then he goes on to say that it is disrespectful to the dead to do this airbrushing; that we need also to pay attention to “what mattered to them, the ideals they held, as well as how those ideals were betrayed or failed to match reality.”
I appreciate Klay’s raising a problem I had not considered. How to you honor the soldiers without honoring what they thought they were doing? But then, if the war itself betrayed them, how do you condemn the war while honoring the soldiers?
I really don’t know. It seems to me that we divide naturally into teams. The one team is a glorifier of soldiers as individuals. We honor them for the sacrifice they offered. The other team is a vilifier of the particular war in which the soldiers died. It was waged in error and terribly mismanaged and so on. As long as we do the work that our team, each team, has to do, there is not much stress and not much effort.
Doing both things, which is what Klay is after, seems hard to me and very much worthy of respect, whatever conclusion his work produces.
[1]”Clean” is not the most obvious choice of virtues to match with “honor”, but the first eight lines of the Marine hymn use a rhyme every other line that goes: Tripoli, sea, clean, and Marine. So the choice of virtue names is limited.
It is so easy to exaggerate the current antipathy between (some) men and (some) women in the U.S. today. Here is a political overview:
For a growing percentage of young men, Cox [1] wrote:
Feminism has less to do with promoting gender equality and more to do with simply attacking men. A 2022 survey by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that 46 percent of Democratic men under 50 agreed that feminism has done more harm than good and even more Republican men agreed.
More young men, he added, “are adopting a zero-sum view of gender equality — if women gain, men will inevitably lose.”
This attitude varies quite a bit from one generation to another, from one region of the country to another, and from one social class to another. That’s why it is important to put “some” in at the right places. Still, it is commonly understood that economies vary from a “positive sum” view at one end of the scale to “zero-sum” at the other end. It strikes me as a little odd that what I am referring to casually as “the gender wars,” should make use of a scale that was invented to describe macroeconomic distributions of values.
Surely they ought to be more different than that.
In order to uphold the zero-sum model, the men who feel this way—nearly half of Democratic men—need to understand the relative success of women in education and in the professions as taking away something that they could otherwise have. That takes something of a stretch.
Picture a diesel mechanic saying, “I could have had that professorship myself if they had not decided to give it to a woman.” Just sit with that for a minute. You can’t get there by the route I have described above: women are succeeding more than men, therefore I myself, am being cheated. There is a way to get to it, however. Richard Reeves [2] puts it more dramatically than I would, but his meaning is clear.
The left see a war on girls and women; the right see a war on boys and men. The left pathologizes masculinity; the right pathologizes feminism. [3]
Back to the diesel mechanic. If he starts by pathologizing “feminism”—meaning by that the greater success of women in sought after schools and firms—then he can take nearly anything as “evidence” that the life he wants is under attack and that women are the reason.
Let me put that another way. If you start with the cause—women are displacing people like me—you can use almost anything as “evidence” for it. A competitive job search chooses the most qualified candidate. “I don’t care.” Is the candidate a woman? “Ha! It’s just as I said!”
This could be a very long haul and I don’t have the patience for it this morning. Let me point in the direction of the two things that would help. the first is a belief in merit. The second is compensation for the losers—the “less meritorious.”
The justification for “the meritocracy” [4] is that it is fair. Whoever has most of what the position requires is chosen for the position. Giving priority to anyone from any group on other grounds—sex, race, age, body size—erodes a belief in the fairness of the system. It undercuts meritocracy. It enables the diesel mechanic to say what he says.
The second component is compensation for the losers. There have always been higher statuses and lower statuses. The lord of the manor has a higher status than the merchants in town and than the serfs on the land. But it has taken capitalism to turn the occupants of lower statuses into “losers.” If the system is fair and if everyone aspires to the higher statuses, then those who do not attain them are losers. That’s not much of a stretch.
So if life for the losers—in this formal sense of the term—is really bad, then the protest against the unfair system that fastened these conditions on them will be vigorous. Eventually, it will be violent. There is no way to make these people not “losers” given the presuppositions of capitalism, but social policy could make their lives considerably more satisfying than they are.
I’m going to stay with that simple declaration. Social policy could do that. Having taken that leap, I am free to return to the diesel mechanic and note that he is now free, if he wants to do it, to acknowledge that women are getting the best gigs because they are the best prepared and in many cases the most motivated. With a better life himself, he could let go of the zero-sum explanations of gender equity and move toward “fair is fair.”
I think that would be helpful and it is easier to change economic conditions than it is to change gender attitudes. Surely we know that by now.
[1] Daniel A. Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute, [2] Reeves is the author of Of Boys and Men. [3] Again we see that English is stuck with unbalanced terms. We could force the issue and oppose “masculinity” to “femininity” but those terms don’t work any more. Also, there is no commonly used word “masculinism” to oppose to “feminism.” It leaves us with the clumsy, inadequate opposition Reeves uses. [4] Words ending in -cracy all ought to mean “rule by __” The root of the word tells the reader just who is being identified as the ruler. Democracy is understood—these days—to mean rule by the people; kleptocracy would mean rule by thieves. Meritocracy would mean “rule by the most meritorious,” but it leaves unexamined just who is to decide what traits and abilities have merit. Oh well.
A wonderful picture came into my mind this morning. I’m going to share it in the hope that you will enjoy it as much as I did. It will take a little setting up.
I am listening to Jennifer Paxton’s lectures on medieval England, thanks to some CD I bought when the Teaching Company was still selling CDs. She was talking about that time in the history of England when the Viking raids had been so common and so successful that fairly large numbers of them just stayed in England all year instead of going “home” and then coming back to raid again. [1]
It was the men who were doing the viking, of course and when they began to farm, it was the men who did the farming. But when it appeared that they were going to stay, they send word home to bring to them the things that they would need.
I am going to pause at that point to tell you about an experiment I conducted at Starbucks ten minutes after I heard Professor Paxton. I asked each barista what the word “retainer” meant to them. One of them is currently involved with a court proceeding of some kind, and he said his mind went to an attorney, who was on retainer. One mentioned a wall that was put up to hold back the soil of a hillside. I get that one, but I have never heard it used that way. The rest of them said it reminded them of something you put in your mouth at night of keep you from grinding all the enamel off your teeth.
I have recently begun using what my dentist calls a “Nightguard,” I suppose because it is easier to get men to use them if you call them that. But I am a tooth grinder myself and I have recently been fitted for a Nightguard.
What Professor Paxton actually said in her lecture is that the men who had been viking and who were now farming, sent home for their wives, their children, and their retainers.
Is that a great picture or what? Who knew that those fierce Vikings were so careful about their teeth?
[1] I learned from Professor Paxton that “vike” is a verb. The people that the British called “the Northmen” came to do a variety of things. When they were farming, they were farmers. When they were viking, they were Viking. Apparently, “to vike’ means to raid for plunder and slaves. These people were only Vikings while they were viking.
I think I’ve passed a milestone of some kind. You’re never sure at the time, I suppose. I am basing this opinion on the fact that I find myself looking back at something that I have routinely looked ahead to see. And that is being old.
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post that I called IOYK. Properly speaking, there should have been a comma between the O and the Y, but my mind’s eye saw it as a bumpersticker kind of sentiment and your really don’t punctuate bumperstickers.
It stands for “I’m Old, You Know,” and I treated it as an all too readily available excuse for not doing something you really could do if you needed to.
I began noticing the use of that excuse—phrased, of course in a variety of ways—when I moved to a senior center seven years ago. I mentally filed it under “How People Talk Here.” But now I have found that the expression has morphed into something I did not have in mind when it first occurred to me. It has become a source of success and encouragement. It has come to define how I feel about the way I am living.
Maybe some examples. When I am waking up in the morning, I practice breathing until I get the breath I was hoping for: large, deep, effortless. Then I stop and celebrate it a little. Then I get up. Then, when I am making the coffee, I have to reach the filters in an upper cupboard. The cupboard is much more “upper” than it was several years ago, but if I reach it smoothly and if I pull just one paper filter away from the pack of filters, I stop briefly to enjoy those two successes.
That may sound pathetic, but I wanted to start small enough to engage your interest. There is, in these examples, a willingness to focus on very small discrete acts. That is probably what you noticed first. But there is also a willingness to celebrate “achievements.” And how did getting a coffee filter from an upper cupboard get to be an “achievement?” That happened when I lowered the criterion for success down to the place where there would be a lot of successes.
That’s my superpower. It isn’t as dumb as I have made it sound so far, really it isn’t, but before I tell you just how it has an inner rationale that is worth exploring, let me make brief mention of a “superpower” that my brother, Mark, says I have. We are out riding out bikes in Portland and come up to a light that is just about to change from red to green. Just about. I slow down; I shift into a lower gear. I can time this light if I am careful. But, it turns out that I can’t, so I get off my bike, at which point the light changes. According to Mark, that’s my superpower. I can change the light from red to green by the simple act of getting off my bike. Some superpower, right?
That’s a faux superpower and Mark and I both know it. But my ability to lower the criterion for success down to the place where I can experience a success when I need it actually is an ability I am proud of. And it is—can be—included in IOYK if “old” is seen as the context that makes celebrating these “successes” plausible.
Here’s another way to look at it. Rolling friction is less than starting friction. If your car is stuck on the ice or in the mud, anything you can do to get that very first start toward rotating the wheel is really important. Why? Because every other rotation will benefit from the momentum. That first little success—that breath or that coffee filter—establishes rolling friction as the standard that must be met and it is a lower standard.
Or, just another metaphor really but I remember this one from my basketball playing days, a really solid defensive effort can set up some amazing offensive achievements immediately following. And it isn’t just me. As the NCAA basketball season winds down and as March Madness prepares to crank up, I see it all the time on TV. I see a really spectacular defensive action by one of Connecticut’s guards, say, and I start to look at what that guard is going to do at the offensive end on the next play. Will he take the shot he has been passing up? Will it go in? You’d be surprised.
This particular twist on IOYK isn’t quite as easy as I have made it sound so far. You have to be able to take pleasure in the success for it to have the effect you want it to have. I fail at getting that breath, that particular breath, several times before I get the one I have been trying for. That helps me really enjoy it when I get it. If my life were not full of things I care about and that IOYK helps me to enjoy, then “successes” of the kind I have been describing wouldn’t really matter. I know that because I have had some experiences of pervasive depression when nothing at all mattered. Failures were insignificant (in the most literal sense of that term) and successes meaningless. And since they didn’t mean anything, they didn’t help. All the frictions continued to be starting frictions as if some otherwise pervasive law of physics had been repealed the minute I turned by back.
In my current use of IOYK, it is “old” that serves as the justification for the new lowered criteria. I don’t mean “old” in the purely chronological sense, which, as it pertains to life in a senior center, is clearly meaningless. I have, in fact, experienced a noticeable erosion in the abilities, both physical and mental, that I used to count on. I have become “old” in the experiential sense.
That could lead, obviously, to a lot of failures if I were dumb enough to continue to expect my mind and my body to operate in the same ways and at the same levels that they once did. Of course they don’t. But they do operate in a way that provides considerable pleasure in the “successes” I experience. The successes are provided by meeting and exceeding the criteria for success. And I set the criteria. Not whimsically; not casually. The new criteria are, in fact, achievements of their own kind.
And the root of it all is the ability to take real pleasure in the things I can still do. I can, for instance, get up and go to Starbucks and write a blog post that I have been wanting to write for some time now.
I would like for you to stand with me on the sidelines of this conflict and try to determine what it is about. Let’s pursue the implicit football metaphor a little.
As is true in many contested rulings, it is hard to say just what happened first. Here is the order that seems sensible to me. Darryl George, pictured here, is suspended by the Barbers Hill Independent School District for violating the dress code. Darryl George and his mother, Darresha George sued the district, saying that they had violated the CROWN act. [1] At that point the Georges threw the famous red challenge flag.
The Georges say that the school district has, in fact, violated the law which says it may not “discriminate against a hair texture or protective hairstyle commonly or historically associated with race.”
There is no question is our minds, those of us gathered on the sideline waiting for the review to be concluded, that Darryl George’s hair style is “commonly…associated with race.” For our purposes, I am going to call that a fact.
The school district begins at another place, which should not surprise. What the school district is against, says Dr. Greg Poole, the superintendent, is “unlimited self-expression.” Darryl George’s hairstyle does, as the district sees it, violate the ban on “unlimited self-expression.” That is the other claim that the officials under the hood are taking into account and debating among themselves. If you put the two rules together, you come up with a kind of hybrid standard in which self-expression may be limited by the district dress code unless it is a violation “historically associated with race.” That hybrid form really does not seem stable to me.
You could argue as the move for Affirmative Action did, that the historical and structural disadvantages that go with the black experience in America, justify a temporary race-related benefit to the current black generation. That was always opposed as unfair to the whole set of present generations. The Supreme Court eventually came around to that view. It has also been rejected by many black intellectuals as an automatic discounting of their abilities and achievements.
This problem as it is shaping up in Texas has both of those problems unless there are other extravagant ways of presenting oneself that are “historically associated” with other races. No one I have read is arguing that.
There is, however, an interesting parallel in the U. S. Army. The Army has recently accepted a stunning variety of “new looks” for American warriors and that variety includes turbans, beards, hijabs, and “under-turbans.”
“Our goal is to balance soldier readiness and safety with the accommodation of our soldiers’ faith practices, and this latest directive allows us to do that,” Lieutenant Colonel Randy Taylor said in a statement.
It is easier to see the value in the Army setting. You need combat-ready soldiers and this accommodation provides for that. There is nothing is the school setting in Texas, however, that can justify such an accommodation. Schools ordinarily reach for some abstraction like “maintaining at atmosphere conducive to study.” The anti-Vietnam black bands students (Tinker v. Des Moines) were said to disrupt the study atmosphere. That isn’t going to work in the Texas case, and I can think what will.
[1] An acronym with very high aspirations. It refers a law in which CROWN stands for Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair.”
I have a thought about being possessed by demons. The thought I want to pursue isn’t all that scary, but it wouldn’t hurt to start with the only joke I know about demon possession.
Question: What happens when you fall behind in your payments to the exorcist? Answer: You get repossessed.
The scripture that came up in church last Sunday was Mark 1;21—28. We are a lectionary church so the pastor who is preaching that day has the obligation to preach on one of the texts or to give some reason why she is not. The preacher last Sunday took it on and treated in seriously. That’s two separate achievements in my mind.
Here is the passage as it appears in the New Jerusalem Bible.
21They went as far as Capernaum, and at once on the Sabbath he went into the synagogue and began to teach. 22And his teaching made a deep impression on them because, unlike the scribes, he taught them with authority. 23And at once in their synagogue there was a man with an unclean spirit, and he shouted, 24’What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are: the Holy One of God.’ 25 But Jesus rebuked it saying, ‘Be quiet! Come out of him!’ 26And the unclean spirit threw the man into convulsions and with a loud cry went out of him. 27The people were so astonished that they started asking one another what it all meant, saying, ‘Here is a teaching that is new, and with authority behind it: he gives orders even to unclean spirits and they obey him.’ 28And his reputation at once spread everywhere, through all the surrounding Galilean countryside.
I don’t have any trouble seeing how Mark fits this into the early ministry of Jesus, but the notion of demon possession—even when an episode is as dramatically portrayed as it is in v. 26, really doesn’t move me. I remember having the same familiar “I don’t really care” reaction to the story Jesus told about the man who sold everything he had to buy a field because he knew there was a treasure in the field. “Treasure in the field” is not something I knew how to care about. But in the movie The Butcher’s Wife, one of the principal characters is a psychiatrist (a very bad psychiatrist) and is required to choose between the love of his life and continuing to cherish his status as a psychiatrist. That makes sense to me. It was so very hard for him to give it up.
So what would make me care about the phenomenon Mark calls “demon possession? In the same service, we sang a hymn called “Silence! Frenzied, Unclean Spirit.” Here are the first two stanzas.
“Silence! Frenzied unclean spirit,” Cried God’s healing Holy One “Cease your ranting, flesh can’t bear it” Flee as night before the sun.”
Lord, the demons still are thriving In the grey cells of the mind Tyrant voices, shrill and driving Thoughts that grip and bind.
That sounded pretty contemporary to me. Probably “the grey cells of the mind” [1] got me started down that path but once you start there are a lot of other reasons to keep going. “Tyrant voices, shrill and driving” sounds like any number of twisted experiences, with or without the benefit of street drugs.
It sounds, in other words, like the world I live in, just as the status-loving psychiatrist sounds like the world I live in more than the treasure hunter does.
And that would have been a very good thing to have happen to me in a worship service, but the choir also sang an anthem, “Lord, Grant Thou Me a Quiet Mind,” which was as close to the other end of the continuum as can be imagined from “tyrant voices, shrill and driving.” We sang:
Lord, grant Thou me a quiet mind in depths of Three and thought inclined O gaze upon this wounded heart and with Thy sweet and piercing Dart Prick this soul with Love’s embrace and heal these wounds with saving grace.
We had sung that in practice, of course, and I didn’t react to it much one way or the other in practice. In the context of the service, with the sermon prying up the power in Mark’s account and with the hymn delivering the “tyrant voices, shrill and driving,” I had trouble singing to the end of the anthem.
Each of those elements of the service, the sermon, the scripture text, the hymn, and the anthem fit like hand in glove and I am very glad I was there.
[1] It’s hard not to be sympathetic. “Mind” rhymes so nicely with “bind.” But it’s way too physical. The mind doesn’t have any “grey cells,” which are notably important in the brain.
The Dilettante's Dilemma 