Our bear loves sunflower seeds. Around our bird feeders she dances like a 100-pound goldfinch. She has smashed beyond use several of our hospitality locations for God’s birds. Dick Rustay has spent hours designing, rebuilding and praying for a “No Bears Allowed” bird feeder. So have I. There’s no way we can keep the bear from eating birdseed. (Might makes right).

Late one afternoon as the western sky, goldenrod toward blush, crawled behind the mountains toward the Lakota lands, I sat in the living room reading the important newspaper from Viva House, the Baltimore Catholic Worker House. I had just read our standard confession: “The only solution is love, and love comes with community.”  

Suddenly, out of the fading sky, a boom-crash streaked through the old farmhouse. I jumped, my lap disappearing, running to the side porch to see what I had heard. There, bent over, was our bear munching the sunflower seeds. My heart beat tight. I stood at the screen door and watched.

Billy Bob raced from the far side of the house, barking. The bear arose, hissed, and with stentorian blast blew Billy Bob away. Our sweet old dog, tail tucked between his legs, cried and cowered to the far side. He did not return until hours after my friend had departed.

I stood for 30 minutes and watched as the bear crunched the seeds in grinding teeth, occasionally hammering my Murphy-gifted bird feeder to paw at more supper. Braving with clock-clicks I opened the screen door and moved outside, my flashlight burning away the appearing dark as black sky overhead began to twinkle. She raised her head, sniffed the air fox-like, moved away and returned to the repast. My she, coming round the mountain, headlights leading, car clacking on gravel, drove. Bear bone fear, our she clambered up creekside into the woods: black light night. I have not seen her since our shared meal.

                                *   *   *

 Old Floyd is a friend of mine. He lives in the shadowy uplands fromEllijay,Georgia, near our beloved Dayspringfarm. Floyd has worked for years at Ellijay Hardware. We have shopped there for 25 years now. Floyd showed me how to configure spigots for my rain barrels and how to let the earthward pull of water in a hose slake the thirst of our “Lauren Cogswell Blueberry Bushes,” all of whom journeyed to us in the back of a car from our sister community Jubilee Partners.

Old Floyd is also a friend of Murphy’s. He has helped Murphy with her seed purchases and taught her about the soil, shade and sun needed for her various flowers, herbs and her scraggly bushes.

We all need a little help from our friends, with the possible exception of the Libertarians. So I went to Old Floyd at the hardware store after my encounter with our bear. He took me to the bird feeders. He demonstrated the “squirrel proof” feeders, in which he did not believe. He told me about concrete footings, higher steel posts and cage-like wire covers to keep paws from pawing. “Maybe,” said he, “this will keep the bears from eating your seeds.” He did not seem to be a believer.

“Floyd, what do you do?”

“Well, I feed them all.”

“What?!?,” I exclaimed, raising the head of the woman mixing paint nearby.

“I feed them all.”

“You mean the squirrels, the bears and the birds, even crows?”

“Yep, I feed them all.”

“Thank you, Floyd.”

I departed the hardware store, but I did not leave. Old Floyd gave me a new vision and insight: new wine in new wineskins, for the old wineskin would burst apart with such a vision.

Back to Dayspring I drove “Little Girl Blue,” our pickup truck. Home again, I sped to the ruined bird feeder. I built a flat board plate and fastened it to the existing post. No bird feeder at all. I put a gracious plenty of sunflower seeds on the plate. I then and now put seeds around the feet and in the arms of our St. Francis statue, who stands 15 feet from the feeder. Sometimes a squirrel and sometimes a cardinal in regal robes sits on St. Francis’ head, chewing or pecking away. I now feed them all.

We have had an open table (feed them all) at the Open Door Community since our founding, which was 2,000 years ago when Jesus called Levi the rich tax collector. We have a Eucharistic theology which links all our Works of Mercy to the Welcome Table.

For instance, a couple of Sunday mornings past,Jason Ebingerand I sat with JP in the visiting room at Central State Prison. We shared vendor food and soft drinks. The unsaid words of institution echoed in our hearts from our worship the Sunday before and the anticipated Eucharist in a few hours. No one who comes through the Open Door is unhouseled, though many are unhoused.

The Holy Spirit in Old Floyd revealed to me the relationship between the Eucharist and squirrels, bears and birds. Feeding God’s creatures at Dayspringfarm is now an extension of our Eucharist and the Works of Mercy. Floyd also taught me about the mercy that is at the center of the heart of our God, whom we know as Creator and Redeemer.

“Yep, I feed them all.”

We believe and practice “The only solution is love, and love comes with community.” And love feeds them all.

Thank you, Old Floyd.

This reflection was also inspired by the article “Freedom” in the November-December Hospitality, by Anonymous, and I thank its author.  W

Eduard Loring is a Partner at the Open Door Community.

Hello, I am TroyDavis.

You killed me on September 21, 2011. You wanted to kill me at 7 p.m., but it was 11:08 before your Georgia venom took me down. Now I walk your streets with the poor and homeless and haunt your gated “communities” while you drink too much wine and gorge yourselves on dead meat. I am the resurrection and the way.

I am alive in every Occupy Movement from Atlanta to Yemen. We are coming to you. We are now moving toward you. Your little needles, poisoned tipped, ain’t gonna work for you much longer. Your houses will be turned into houses of hospitality and gladness, and joy shall fill your now empty rooms. We will have peace and solidarity, shalom and equality. But beware: The gospel is as bad news for non-repentant killers as it is hard news for faithful practitioners.

Come out, come out, my people.

 I. The Ancestors of State Killing

Charles A.L. Lamar was a 1 percenter, serving King Cotton to amass his wealth. His heart grew rotten selling cotton down near the swamps and rice lands around Savannah. He was one of too many who wanted his way to make money with plenty of honey that oozed from the brows of slaves.

We must destroy the Union so we can buy and sell those African bodies and their labor. We need them for slavery. Slaves are the base of our Southern civilization, our way of life. If a plantation system, like a political empire and capitalist markets, does not grow and expand, it dies. It must not die.

 Lamar will kill and die to have things his way. He will defy the law and send his death ship, the Wanderer, from Savannah to Africa to bring back human beings to sell into slavery.

 But Lamar ultimately did not get his way, thanks be to the God of Abraham Lincoln. Lamar crumpled to the earth leading an assault on Union soldiers, whose victory became the basis of the 13th Amendment, adopted December 6, 1865: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” (Emphasis added.)

Still, we must listen to the rivers of woe.

620,000 dead soldiers and millions more from the auction block.

 II. The Wanderer

By 1857, those who wanted to destroy the Union and build a Southern slave nation — the “secessionists” — realized that reopening the slave trade with Africa would rend our common fabric. Thus arose a double strategy. First, to purchase more slaves would expand slavery westward in the United States and southward into Cuba and Nicaragua. Second, to defy the federal law against the international slave trade would encourage the white masses to boldness and rejection of the Union. Fire-eaters and poor whites would kill our nation and citizens in order to own slaves, to pursue the international slave trade, and to conquer new lands under Southern sovereignty.

620,000 dead soldiers and millions more from the auction block.

This is the sordid tale of the last American ship to sail in the U.S. slave trade, from Savannah to the mouth of the Congo River and back. The international slave trade had been outlawed by the U.S. Congress in 1807, taking effect on January 1, 1808. In 1857, the Wanderer set out in brazen disregard for the law of the land.

Like our 21st-century drones, the Wanderer was a bitter fruit of human imagination and technological know-how. Built in 1856, she was a luxurious yacht with all the finery for sumptuous meals and lavish entertainment. A toy for the rich white elite, she became a death machine for Africans. Sold and transmogrified from heaven to hell, she became a slaver. Outfitted for human cargo, the Wanderer sailed into bondage and death.

The shared space for the captives had no toilets, and they resembled torture boxes, 12 inches wide, 18 inches high and six feet long.

On a gurney about the same size, Troy Davis was chained down and murdered, not by salt water filling his lungs but by toxins filling his blood.

This size offered less space than most slave ships, but the reduction is not surprising. Charles Lamar and his fellow slave dealers’ inner demons studied ways to minimize costs and maximize profits. Their bottom line was making money — cutting costs in buying and raising prices in selling — through the most awful of human corruption, the selling of human bodies.

The Wanderer arrived at the mouth of the Congo River in the autumn of 1858. Slave hunters and purchasers, along with security guards, picked up Africans as young as 13 years old. In the former place of lavish entertainment, the luxury yacht turned slave ship became the scene of a battle to survive  Of the 409 slaves bought and chained, 80 died crossing the violent sea, murdered by the slave powers just like Troy Davis on September 21, 2011.

Was an ancestor of Troy Davis aboard that ship? It feels like it. Troy Davis and Charles Lamar were both from Savannah.

Charles Lamar was arrested and charged with slave trading. He awaited Georgia justice in a state where his father-in-law was the local federal district judge.

Lamar walked away freely to the battlefield. He now wanted to kill Yankees, so off to war he marched with his own cadre of Confederates. He gave what he took, a life for lives. On April 16, 1865, near Columbus, Georgia, a week after Lee had surrendered at Appomattox, Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar sank earthward, dead.

More than 120 years later, in Savannah, Troy Davis was arrested and charged with murdering a white police officer. He awaited Georgia justice. On September 21, 2011, inJackson, Georgia, mere weeks before his 42nd birthday, Troy Anthony Davis sank into the execution gurney, dead.

 III. The Emancipator

On March 4, 1865, Inauguration Day, Pennsylvania Avenue was “a sea of mud,” with water splashing everyone who gathered to hear the president’s immortal interpretation of the meaning of the Civil War and of American slavery. As John Wilkes Booth hovered hatefully in the crowd,Lincolnspoke:

 Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came….

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.

The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” (Emphasis added.)

 If the family of the victim murdered allegedly at the hands of Troy Davis had heard the voice of God’s offer of reconciliation through Abraham Lincoln’s words, perhaps they would not have screamed and pleaded for this man’s murder.

Who does speak and act for the pro-death penalty lobby? Are they deformed children of the pro-slavery argument? Is there one God with many contradictory voices, or are there many Gods who contradict one another? In whom do we trust? A god who kills? Or a God who gives life, mercy and justice? A God of the slaves way down in Egyptland? Or the god of the slaveholders?

 IV. The Survivors

What if Charles Lamar and his minions do not receive the death penalty?

The New York Times editorialized a threat and a promise that came true in 1865: “The entire population of the North will wage upon [the South] a relentless war of extermination.”

620,000 dead soldiers and millions more from the auction block.

Oh, say, can you hear, the hoofbeats of John Brown’s horses rattling into Harpers Ferry at midnight on the cloudy, misty night of October 16, 1859? Can you feel the song of Langston Hughes to all the Blacks of theUSA?

 SinceHarpers Ferry

Is alive with ghosts today,

Immortal raiders

Come again to town —

Perhaps,

You will recall

John Brown.

 — From “October 16” by Langston Hughes

 What has changed since Charles Lamar and his cronies designed a slave ship that minimized space and humanity to maximize profits? American corporations, prisons and state governments today are squeezing human beings into poverty that maximizes profits and cuts costs. Have you heard of the suicides among Chinese workers employed by American corporations to make our toys? These wage slaves are squeezed by time, space and meaningless work, another device in the tool box of death for the oppressed.

Of course many of you, dear readers, got a bucket of cold water thrown into your faces as you awakened to the modern South when, through passion and scapegoat lust, the body of Troy Davis was finally stilled, like John Brown’s at the end of the gallows rope or Baptist John’s head brought in on a platter to flatter the thin one dancing.

Today the spirit of slavery and murder continues in nearby Columbus at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly the School of the Americas, where torture and the fine art of slaughter are taught to our helpers — death squads — who will kill to keep markets stable.

Spoke Lincoln at Gettysburg:

 It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. (Emphasis added.)

Epilogue

Hello, I am TroyDavis.

I live in your work to abolish the death penalty. I live in you. You, the living legacy of the Abolitionist movement, must reach into the present, despite how you got here through the spirit of domination and slavery.

How can we redeem the past? That is the question. Let us sit together at the Welcome Table of life and love. Sit with us, Charles Lamar, with the children of the Wanderer who died on the way toSavannah.

Let us sit together and the death penalty will sink earthward, dead.  W

Eduard Loring is a Partner at the Open Door Community. “The War Over Slavery” is a series of occasional columns.

Through the center of the city, the old Confederate capital of slaveholding Georgia, marched a band of deformed white people. They were celebrating the birthday of one of their gods, General Robert E. Lee. Young and old were attired in Confederate uniforms, carrying rifles or flags, smirking at those of us who raised our voices in protest.

Yet this display of twisted logic and hateful history is my heritage. I carry the blood of slaveholding families and Confederate military officers. By the grace of God, I heard the cry of the oppressed 50 years ago. I prayed, “There must be some way outta’ here.” And a door was opened for me and my deformed life.

Thirty years ago, Dr. Ndugu T’Ofori-Atta blossomed into my life. Grace abounds. He came to a soil already being plowed, and still being plowed today, by Martin Luther King Jr., the Concerned Black Clergy, Vincent Harding, Rev. Timothy McDonald III, my pastor, and First Iconium Baptist Church, among many, several of whom are in this holy gathering today.

Today I remember in thanksgiving and testify in this congregation of thanksgiving and mourning to Dr. T’Ofori-Atta’s life-giving gift from the waters of Africa to the rivers of America. This “Just Another Brother” said quietly and profoundly to me and Murphy Davis and the Open Door Community, “Yes, yes. You can come to a new life in Jesus Christ.” We brought his Christ Kwanza into our Advent lives.

Dr. T’Ofori-Atta instructed me in gentle loving ways and profound teachings that empowered me to climb up the rough side of the mountain beyond myself. Me, Jim Crow born and bred, white privilege oozing from my pores, racist by political policies, prejudiced by cultural formation. He, “Just Another Brother,” said, “Yes, yes, climb up, you can, you are better than your white deformation.” Through him I was given new life, new vision, and a mouthful of the Beloved Community.

He lives in my life, our lives. He lives in the welcome to the stranger and outcast, Black and white, at the Open Door Community’s front door. He lives when we sit down visiting on death row waiting with a brother for the lynching tree to kill another child of God. Through him, with him, for him, this brother of mine, I say — and do we not all say? — “Yes, yes, God almighty, yes!” African, African-American, Jesus Christ, Black and white together, Yes we say to the everlasting vision of the Beloved Community, which lives in you and me in the everlasting life of our beloved Ndugu T’Ofori-Atta.

Yes, yes.

Thank you.

We have heard disappointing squeaking from the beds in the White House. We have learned, in “all the news that’s fit to print” and in salacious presentations, about beds bouncing and moans moaning in hotels and motels along the political campaign trail. A recent film, “The Ides of March,” chronicles the ride to power of a liberal idealistic Democratic presidential candidate. Sex with a 20-year-old brings him down. If you want to save dollars but spend some time, get a copy of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” which makes a similar point in a different medium. (It’s a book.)

As a young man, I was saddened when I learned about FDR’s loves, in part because I have felt the deep suffering of Eleanor Roosevelt. She was one of our great anti-racist leaders. It took me several years to believe that Dwight D. Eisenhower turned amorous toward his driver during World War II. According to the British Broadcasting Corporation, many others slept on both sides of the bed, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding, whose story includes “compulsive adultery.” Bill Clinton romped around and lied about it under oath.

Power is an aphrodisiac. Sexual temptations come with power, for men and women. The equation is often that of a powerful man who attracts women who feel his power. Power and sex travel along the campaign trail. Candidate Herman “9-9-9” Cain left the political coliseum tattered and torn. Newt Gingrich, up to this writing, seemingly has nothing to hide – his indulgences have received proper reporting and analysis from peers and seers. He is a free man wrangling the campaign trail with the yips.

None of us are clean, pure or innocent. So this had better not be about judgment. This is a political, and shortly biblical, analysis of what is going on.

My favorite writer is Robert Penn Warren. He says it well in “All the King’s Men”: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.”

So, if that is what is going on, what should we do?

When faced with ethical, moral or political issues, I turn first to the Bible. Wow – God’s Word is really cool.

First, the God of no gender (though we know her as Father/Mother) makes a distinction between fornication and adultery that is essential to the common good and the Beloved Community/Kindom of God. Fornication is sex between consenting partners neither of whom is married or betrothed. Adultery is sex between consenting partners when one or both are married or betrothed to someone else.

It is sometimes difficult to know what “consenting” means for a woman. In biblical days, she was, as in our own day in places (like our front yard), a slice of property, an object to produce male children and to obey husbands. These girls/women had few resources to give them the power to say “no.” We are thankful for one of the great feminists/womanists in the Bible: Vashti, the hero of the Book of Esther. Vashti said “no.”

Though fornication presented tremendous problems for girls/women, whose value for their fathers was tied to their virginity (whose loss sometimes brought execution by the family and religious leaders), it was adultery that made the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments. But the intensification of adultery, which brought the death penalty, was not primarily about sexual activity. The prohibition is more closely related to “the knowledge of good and evil” – “for God knows that when you eat of it [the forbidden fruit] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3.5b).

Do not eat of the forbidden fruit, says Yahweh-Elohim. We did and do, but it is not sex or eating that constitutes the fall from innocence and essential goodness. It is the response to the powers and principalities (snakes) that tempt us to know no boundaries. To do our own thing. To not say “no” to personal desire and empire. This may give us the knowledge of good and evil, but always from the social location of “east of Eden.”

An important question that emerges from Genesis 3 to

the end of Revelation 21 and 22, posed by William Stringfellow,

is this: how shall we live together in light of our knowledge

of good and evil?

God gave and gives us a journey to travel toward the Beloved Community/Kindom of God, with means to geton the road, stay on the road and tear down the systems of war and injustice. First, we are called to “go” from our place in the status quo to a new community and vision. Second, God gives us covenant, Torah, teachings, parables, poems, songs and psalms, regrettable threats and wars, and frightening images of hell and banishment, which these days we are excising from the Bible, God be praised. (See Wes Howard- Brook’s book “Come Out My People!”) The end of this journey, experienced while traveling (we look in a glass darkly), is shalom, the Beloved Community/Kindom of God, peace, freedom and equality.

Adultery is important less as a sexual experience in and of itself than as a threat to, a disregard for, the life of the community. Adultery threatens the common good of the community, church, political parties, hospitality houses and the struggle for justice. Adultery can and does elongate the struggle against poverty (John Edwards), toward housing the homeless, and toward the coming of God’s Kindom on earth as it is in heaven.

Thus, in the days of old, those convicted of adultery could be stoned to death, to protect family, community, love of God and neighbor. Though we still practice ancient blood lust in the state of Georgia, the death penalty is not related to adultery. If it were, it might clear out the state Legislature.

When public officials tilt the golden goblet for the aphrodisiacal elixir, using their power and their knowledge of good and evil to pet, pant and purr, the nation is threatened by the abuse of power, by lies and corruption.

So what’s new? The biblical analysis above is not enough. That leads us to consider: what shall we do?

Again, going to the Word, we have a wonderful solution in the first chapter of Esther. In the marginal notes of my study Bible there is a radical statement. I am surprised it made it through the editorial board. If incarnated, it would change the world. “Human action,” Sidnie White Crawford writes, “is the key to achieving God’s purpose in the world.”

Now remember that we are asking questions about how to be helpful to the American Empire and its deformed leaders. Therefore we turn to perhaps the most powerful and extensive world empire in the fifth century B.C., the Persian Empire (ancient Persia being what is now Iran).

The Emperor Xerxes ruled the Persian Empire from 486 to 465 B.C. He had a lot of women, and he had a beautiful queen who acted to achieve God’s purpose in the world. Xerxes, known biblically as Ahasuerus, needed helpers he could trust to be his close advisers and to keep the women in line. He smelled in the courtyard and palace rooms what Erica Jong named in 1973: hard to trust a testosterone-laden man. Only one direction on the compass. Xerxes, as others before and after, chose eunuchs to help him run the empire. Less threat to the common good of all and the emperor’s women-domain, or harem.

This system did not work completely. Once, when Xerxes was in a drunken state, he beckoned his close-at-hand eunuchs together and ordered them to go to the women’s room and get Queen Vashti. According to several rabbis’ interpretation of the text, he wanted to show her off with only her crown on her head. They attempted to fetch Vashti, but she sent a message back to Emperor Xerxes: “no.” This set the Persian Empire into a swirling whirl, and new laws were proclaimed that all women must obey their husbands. Vashti was banished.

But notwithstanding women’s power, Xerxes does offer a solution that might work in a democratic empire. What if a new qualification for electoral office in the usa required that all men running for office had to be eunuchs? Would that not strengthen the common good? The anti-war movement? The justice movement? Would we still have to occupy Wall Street? What do you think?

Eduard Loring is a Partner at the Open Door Community.

A Cry From Prison

Thony Lee Green, 102340, is our adopted son in prison.

Below are two cries from prison:

June 17, 2011

     My “M” [Murphy Davis] and I have more than just mom and son in common; we are both struggling for a few more years of life on God’s earth and with our loved ones….
     … it’s been so hot! Here, these days are so hot, and the people in society think that we have it good inside of prison, only if they knew the half, only if they knew that this is a living hell, something I wouldn’t wish on a dog.

 June 26

     This thing that I am struggling against is very strong.…
     … it brings me all the way down….
     … a very hard life….
     … will I get old, sick and die alone in prison….
     … I am tired of just being a number. Dad, I’m trying to get you to see and understand what I live with daily, for you to understand how I feel you would have to be locked up for 30 years with no end in sight. I live with the constant threat of danger, which doesn’t bother me too much because there are times that I feel like making it happen, maybe death is more peaceful than going through this life of prison day in and day out.

     … when are you going to buy me a pair of tennis shoes?
     … please pray for me that I can hang on….

     This question comes to me as I dream of Thony’s release:
     “How can the bird that is born for joy / Sit in a cage and sing?” asks poet William Blake in “The Schoolboy.”
     I say, “Not all jailbirds can.”

Speaking What Is Right

     Another voice from behind bars from a protagonist of mine:

June 22, 2011
     Melvin E. Jones, #401754

     Ed, in the end … in the final scheme of things, right always beats might. These folks (the powers that be) cannot dangle carrots in front of me and say “hush up, boy, and I’ll give you a bite.” All wrongs are worth fighting. Throughout this prison experience, I have always practiced — among all odds — looking these people in the eyes and speaking what is right. Any other mannerisms express accepted slavery and puppetry; neither description fits me.

     P.S. When the reckoning comes, the chicken will come home to roost!

How Colonel Sanders Lost a Customer

     The other day before the calendar popped up midway through the diseased month of July, and flies still buzzed at Gettysburg though vultures like Pickett’s men, shot dead in swoop-fall, someone said (oh weak and deflating memory — though my heart holds fast — what was her name? What is a name?): “I never eat chicken.”
     “Oh, not vegetarian when time stood still for two minutes and the sun halted overhead,” she said with a sprout of broccoli lodged fast between cocaine teeth. But “once upon a highway blazing hot and hair askew” (and top of blouse flipping in the exhaust and therein lies a possibility — one in eight women in the usa — of a secret growth hungry for lymph cells to make desolate with chaos one or two breasts).  “Upon the silver shaking concrete I beheld an 18-wheeler come furious roun’ the bend at 170 miles per two hours.  The ferocious manic truck carried monstrous misery like a motherless child as chickens, squeezed like dough, lay suffocating in small wooden crates, torture chambers really. They could not cluck nor moan their death watch on their way to the beheading chamber, feathers flying like ice stones in hail madness.
     “Never, never again will I eat chicken,” she told her courageous God. “I vow it; I won’t. I will not be part of this cruel apathy. I take the Eucharist, but nothing fowl must be decapitated for my next meal. Ever again.”

The Cry of the Poor

This is how things are in America today.

 Sitting on the Dock of the Bay

      August bends us toward the brutal bomb and the foul birth of “The Modern Period.”
     Where: Bay C.
     Diversity: Indian, Latino, Black, white, young, old and dying with little hope and lots of pain. The alive ones, a blessing, bread, miracle, trump card, destiny, bomb not yet detonated. All suffer. Even the accompaniers — the Blessed ones — can feel a bit of marrow leak.
     When: Hospital Standard Time. The ill wait. The lifegivers rush.
     What: I listen to a Latina woman, 65, from Boston taking a life trip. She speaks with an odd combination of Bostonian Spanish accent (odd to myDeep Southears).
     I listen to her conversation partner, pink pendant, autumnal blonde, hidden wrinkles popping, skin like a crocus at final frost. She is the Blessed One; she speaks. Her husband is angry on the edge of rudeness when nurses turn the other cheek every day, every hour. Doctors are the elite. Even the almost dead take it out on the nurses: misplaced (what place is there?) class, power. His jawbones rigid like Samson’s nonnuclear weapon. Yet he is us and we are him. I love him as we rage against diminishment and death. Together in mystery we peer over the edge of our maps into a glass darkly. Killing is killing. He is as we are. We are sitting on the dock of the bay, praying, hoping, getting stuck with needles, vomiting,  hair falling out, tremors in our hands, dullness in our feet, no feeling in our fingers. The Blessed One listens and sees, but we do not know. We stand in solidarity, but the abyss beckons like Scylla and Charybdis. We stumble under a cloud of unknowing.
     Says she, Latina, “My husband [who is not here] teases me. Says my real family is on the Internet — people I don’t even know. Of course, we are all family here.”
     Responds the white woman: “Yes, I tell my children to know who their friends are. No one writes postcards any more. I believe …” Nurse interrupts. Needle time. Drip to live. Slowly she falls to sleep mimicking when from our labors we shall rest. White one moves to a nurse. “My husband is very anxious. Can you help me? Please?”
    The one “who is not busy being born is busy dying,” Bob Dylan sang in 1965, on “Bringing It All Back Home.”

“Mortimer: A Lament”

By Presbyterian Social Action
Like Jesus was a carpenter for the poor,
He did not so much build
as repair the edifices of others’ labor.
He with wood, tar and shingle,
hammer and nail, climbed high the ladder
of the rust-bruised house trailer
banging the ersatz walls with used
work boots, laces leather, store-bought new.
He slides of a sudden, foot twisted.
Slipped headlong. Crashed. Neck ajar.
Another empty space left.
Unfilled hole toward rooftree.
Heart stopping. Ankle swelling.

Eduard Loring is a Partner at the Open Door Community.

“Looking Through a Glass Darkly” is a series of occasional

columns.