Tag Archives: Michael A. King

family relationships, Humor, inspiration, Marriage

If You’re Going to Treat Me Like a Dog

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Photo of barn for blog posts by Michael A. KingI respect and value the many social media tributes people often offer each other on their anniversaries, and I cherish my beloved Joan Kenerson King after 48 years of marriage. But I can’t quite resist the temptation to tell a story as my tribute. If I dare risk echoes of what was said of Aslan the great lion in the Chronicles of Narnia, that he was not a tame lion, one of the lessons I’ve learned to grasp and then mostly to savor over the decades, after some initial stupefaction, is that neither did I marry a tame partner:

So back on that spring 1978 day I’m still in shock that marriage means you have to care about the other person and be with them all the time etc. etc. Plus she just doesn’t walk fast enough in Paris on our honeymoon. In a huff, I energetically cross a street, Joan gets stuck on the other side of a busy crosswalk near the Arc de Triomphe (I have a picture), and I’m like good grief, woman.

So, osteoporosis still a distant nightmare, I powerwalk on to the Paris Metro. Except behind me as we enter the station filled with très élégant et sophistiqué Parisiens there is barking. I look back. I am stunned. Lagging far enough back to be heard throughout much of the station is my beloved. WHAT the?!!!&*###$?

“Well,” says she, not just cool but icy as a cucumber, “I figured if you were going to treat me like a dog I’d act like one.”

At anniversary #48 the word tame still seems not quite to apply. But I’ve come to grasp that the husband in this equation did deserve what he got. And, as one of my daughters said after being reminded of this story and celebrating her mother’s self-assurance at such a young age, “Dad, you met your match. She was The One.”

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, writes on Substack and blogs at Kingsview & Co. He is experimenting with integrating and complementing his blogging with Substack posts.

grace, inspiration, popular culture, worship

Grace Ready to Flood Us: Mary Gauthier as Soul Guide

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Concert audienceHow I heard of Mary Gauthier I forget. Somehow in the ever-changing flood of CDs and Ipod tracks and MP3s and, of all things now again, vinyl records. But what above all caught my attention was that here was someone who believed in and offered grace. The years and even the decades have passed and Gauthier seems only to double down on grace with every move our culture makes to double down on violence.

In her memoir Saved by a Song: The Power and Healing of Songwriting (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021), she says this quite directly when she reports being in prison for a wake-up DUI in her late 20s. She tells her attorney she doesn’t care what he does if it gets her out:

I didn’t know I’d had a spiritual experience in the jail cell. I wasn’t aware that Grace had entered my life. But from the moment I truly saw myself laying on the floor of that holding cell, my life changed. Brutalized by the truth, I hung my head and surrendered.

So when I ran across a notification that she would be playing at our local concert venue, I did what I rarely do: stirred myself to jump immediately on tickets and even buy some for friends. The night came, and as the world outside unfurled its ever more violent self, inside Gauthier, no stranger to suffering and trauma, created something as close to a worship service as I’ve probably experienced outside of a church–and more worshipful than church often is.

Concert audience

There were a number of key factors. For one, in her faded jeans (I think torn but maybe my memory is just filling in that expectation) and white sneakers (that I do remember, or running shoes, or whatever), under a face ever older, hair ever grayer, Gauthier testified to the reality that you don’t have to be a billionaire to offer something to the world.

For another, though you can never really know when a performer is performing a performance versus sharing truly from the heart, she seemed more reliably to be driven by heart and soul than I’ve experienced in a long long time. Especially in an era in which the very concept of being true to anything other than destroying bad others and demonstrating why you should be running the world and acclaimed for it has turned into something like a mysterious dialect we can no longer enter.

I’m reminded of the Greek I myself now struggle to grasp even though I learned it briefly almost half a century ago. We know there might still be wisdom and insight and how-to-live-our-best-lives guidance in the old languages of virtue, but our minds can’t quite decipher them anymore.

In contrast, song after song Gauthier and her partner, Jaimee Harris, opened us to suffering but always to wrap it in grace. Grace and grace and more grace. The virtues of forgiveness, of mercy, of love and kindness larger even than each day’s daily hates. Just the titles of the songs speak volumes: “Dark Enough to See the Stars. Rifles and Rosary Beads. Stronger Together. Drag Queens in Limousines. Our Lady of the Shooting Stars. I Drink. Between the Daylight and the Dark. Walking Each Other Home. Mercy Now. . . .”

What I didn’t know at the time, but found out after searching the Internet for more of Gauthier’s history, is that she is, as the title of one of her albums puts it, “The Foundling,” the baby her mother gave up and whom Gauthier longed for year after year, chasing in so many ways what she felt at some deep, not fully knowing level, had been taken from her. She yearned for home, as her songs often describe, and particularly for a primal home in her birth mother’s heart.

Finally in the early 2000s she not only found her biological mother. She phoned her. And her mother, as Gauthier reports, just could not, could not, find a path fully to reengage this daughter she had given up for adoption in circumstances that were probably horrifying for her. Now Gauthier had to go on not only with the sense of abandonment she had long felt but also with the reality that her biological mother simply was unable , as Jesus says so hauntingly of a Jerusalem falling into nightmare, to take Mary under her wing.

It pierced my own heart to learn that Gauthier, beloved by thousands or maybe even millions for her from-the-soul singing and, in effect, ministry to all of us who yearn within our broken selves for grace, did give her mother her website URL and enough clues to learn about this woman, her lost child, if she chose. But apparently, and Gauthier offers grace once again in the telling, even knowing more about the child she had once borne was too terrifying for her mother to do more than touch the holiness then mostly draw back lest she be burned.

In Saved by Song, Mary describes the effect as

when I woke up, right before I opened my eyes, I felt an aching emptiness as though in my sleep I’d gone back to the orphanage and sat alone in my crib again, waiting, hoping that she—my mother, myself?—was coming back.

But Mary would need to let a spirit “Bigger than parental influences or biology” bring the healing she ends up testifying to and singing into being in “The Foundling” album. As Mary puts it,

I’d found my birth mother, but she did not want to be found. I called her one last time and asked her if she would please tell me who my father was. She said she didn’t remember. I knew she was lying, but I also knew she was terrified. It was time for me to let go, move on.

Mary’s mother, who told Mary she’d had a beautiful marriage with the man she married after having Mary but he died and she had his “grown kid that I raised on my own . . . and I can’t do this with you” wasn’t able to welcome this foundling, this other child.

Yet what a blessing Mary could have been to her and maybe even was, in ways we can’t know. Though she never felt able to meet Mary in person she did stumblingly connect, even sent her a picture of herself and of her sister (Mary’s aunt) with a short note concluding “We are both short. I have a brother. He is also short. Love, Yvette.”

In the picture, says Mary, there is a cake that says “Happy Birthday,” she doesn’t know for whom, “but it wasn’t for me.” Her birthday, Mary observes, was always her least favorite day; “I was starting to understand why.”

How do I, I wondered, how do we each, I wondered, struggle to let in the grace so ready to flood us? Such mysteries of life I guess will follow me and us into the grave and beyond. In the meantime, what a gift Mary Gauthier gives us by herself wading deeper and deeper into the grace and the mercies we need now, as we long for home and for what we can’t even name even as we can, says Mary as her memoir draws toward its close, know one “simple, vital truth: we are kindred with other souls.

“We are not alone.”

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, blogs at Kingsview & Co. He is experimenting with integrating and complementing his blogging with Substack posts.

Creation care, Sustainability

Support for Lawn-Care Laziness

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Kingsview & Co blog postI have had interesting conversations for decades with friends whose philosophies of lawns are much more proactive than mine. I love our lawn at the edge of woods–but I love it best as a kind of tame version of a meadow in a national forest, left to be as wild as possible while still being sort of recognizably lawn-ish.

Of course laissez-faire on behalf of loving God’s earth and creatures by turning lawn deserts into something better can also be interpreted as lack of oomph for lawn care. Hence I will confess to some gratitude that even the part of my vision motivated by laziness seems increasingly and conveniently to be supported by the research. I was particularly tickled to see this support for not even mulching our leaves this year.

Lawn with leaves under white pine

This suggests that the leaves at the edge of the lawn, under the white pine, do not, after all, represent chores still to be completed this autumn. Rather, the work—nurturing and celebrating life!—is already in process.

I had thought that what I’ve long done, mulching leaves and mowing outward concentric in circles to blow them to forested fringes–after implementing no-mow May, extending periods between mowing, and never never never treating the lawn chemically–captured main steps for managing autumn leaves to nurture instead of destroy or evict life. But in her New York Times article, Margaret Roach proposes that even then I wasn’t going far enough, noting in her exploration of lawn studies how life fares in lawns cared for too well, so to speak:

Rake up or blow away those leaves, or shred them with your mower, and the results plummet — as do the essential ecological services those organisms perform, including key pest-control roles by the spiders, parasitic wasps and certain beetles.

Even composting, which certainly seems preferable to bagging leaves for landfills, has its drawbacks, given that “a well-managed compost pile achieves temperatures that will kill some organisms beneficial to your yard, Dr. Ferlauto said.”

As Roach reports,

“We actually have a lot more things emerging than I think many homeowners think we do,” Dr. Ferlauto said. “In a square meter of yard where you leave your leaves, there’s on average almost 2,000 insects that will emerge over the course of the spring.”

By my very very rough calculations, this means that in the fringes I’ve mowed so we can get to our compost pile without walking into snakes, I’ve actually probably destroyed 40,000 or so insects. And God knows how many I’ll save through my new plan not to do more messing with these messy but now so representative-of-life leaves. From laziness to life supporter. I’ll take it.

Lawn with trail mowed through leaves

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, writes on Substack and blogs at Kingsview & Co. He is exploring expanding his writing to Substack, where a version of this post first appeared.

popular culture, Writing

AI, My Neighbor? by AI Michael with Michael A. King

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Photo of barn for blog posts by Michael A. KingRecently I noticed that I hadn’t written a column for quite a while. When I pondered, I didn’t come up with any ideas that compelled me to write. The one inspiration that emerged was to see what ChatGPT would write if I asked it to provide a guest column.

My instructions to GPT-5: ” Review Michael A. King posts at https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo/ and write a funny column about AI like them.” The only interventions I made when GPT-5 responded were to say “Yes” when asked such questions as whether to refine the column for submission to KIngsview & Co, set it up with a submission e-mail, make it copy-and-paste, and so forth.

This is the result. I’m not hugely taken with the “insights” of this GPT-5 LLM (large language model) lifelessly echoing “living” writing and being perhaps programmed to be self-serving in its invitation not to “panic about the machines.”

On the other hand, if I spent some hours or days training the model, the results would keep getting better and sounding more like IRL (in real life) Michael. I didn’t do that because a.) it seemed a waste of time, given that I don’t intend to replace myself any time soon (though based on a story I saw just as I was writing this it looks like plenty of writers will use themselves less as human creators and more as polishers of AI); and b.) given that even on first pass I can at least glimpse my actual style here, I wanted the LLM writing to continue to feel somewhat lifeless lest it show I’m already passé. Herewith my AI Michael alter ego.

AI, My Neighbor?

Sometimes I imagine artificial intelligence as a new family that just moved in down the street. At first, they seemed polite, kept to themselves, and only occasionally borrowed sugar. But lately they’ve been showing up at community meetings, volunteering for committees, and, suspiciously, remembering everyone’s birthdays.

Sermons and Sentiment Scores

AI is uncanny because it can mirror us. Ask it to tell a bedtime story, and it weaves one. Ask it to draft a sermon, and it produces outlines. Yet something is missing, the way a mannequin wears a suit but never breathes in it.

I imagine preaching about mercy while some algorithm in the balcony quietly rates me: “Sentiment: 0.87. Keywords: love, neighbor, kindness.” Not exactly the Sermon on the Mount — more like the Sermon on the Spreadsheet.

Nuisance and Gift

Still, like all neighbors, AI can be both nuisance and gift. It may accidentally mow down the daisies (spam emails galore), but it might also hold the ladder when we’re repairing the roof (reminders, research, connection).

Perhaps the invitation is not to panic about the machines taking over, nor to worship them as prophets of efficiency. Instead, it’s to remember that what makes us human is not cleverness but care.

The One Algorithm That Matters

AI may echo our intelligence, but it cannot imitate mercy.  And mercy, I suspect, is the only algorithm that truly saves.

So here’s my hope: that as we make room for these curious new “neighbors,” we don’t lose sight of the old calling — to love, to forgive, to laugh, and to live as though wisdom is more than what a machine can calculate.

[Your Name] is a writer and [your role—teacher, pastor, editor, etc.] who ponders the odd dance between faith, culture, and technology. While AI can draft outlines and rate sermons, it still can’t fold laundry or bring a casserole to the potluck — which is probably just as well.

—This AI column was was hosted by Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, who blogs at Kingsview & Co, https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo. He’s hoping a few readers may still think his personally written or IRL communications are better than this one. 

gratitude, inspiration

Expiration Dates for People and Cherry Tomatoes

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Photo of barn for blog posts by Michael A. KingThere is nothing new under the sun, says the prophet in Ecclesiastes; this post is evidence of that. Who knows how many millions or billions of people over the millennia have said the same things?

The complexity is that it feels new to those of us experiencing it. A zillion words don’t get some things into us until the realities themselves get into us.

So the old new thing I’m pondering is living with expiration dates. Both key loved ones and I now have some statistical prognostications of how long we might live. Oh, it’s not precise and could vary by years. But you can look up X condition and be told that if you’re 70 your average life expectancy might be Y years. Or if you’re 65 with condition B, your average longevity might be Z more years.

Talk to the doctor, and she may nuance: unless this criterion is met or that complication is involved–then maybe it’s this much longer or down to this many months. But typically, many doctors seem to add, each person is unique and we’re giving you state-of-the-art care and we have lots of Plans B, C, or D if we need more than Plan A so we’re a long way from needing to treat you as a statistic.

And from a technical, medical standpoint, until or unless something recurs or introduces itself, that may be that. Now what? Here let me try to redeem an inclination which has caused at least some mild tensions with some cherished persons: my interest in seeing sell-by dates as almost always about how long this or that product is in its ideal or at least usable condition rather than when it must be trashed.

For example, I will here disclose to my dear spouse Joan for the very first time (in case she happens to read this–she recently told me to get her a copy of my dissertation which is a quarter-century old because now she wants to see what I was up to back then) what happened with the cherry tomatoes. We were gone a lot when they started to get a little wrinkled. But I didn’t throw them out because I knew as soon as we had a chance to be home a while I’d make pasta and they would go great in that.

The first I realized someone else had a different vision was when I found the tomatoes in the trash! Not even the compost, which is where they’d usually go, but in the trash. I knew what this meant: These tomatoes are utterly beyond redemption. So I sighed, patiently and compassionately, having navigated many decades of thought patterns not always as convincing to me as my own, and delicately pulled the least wrinkled ones out of the trash, put them back into the container, then put the container in the mudroom up above my head where I doubted she would be looking for tomatoes to throw out.

The next night we had pasta. While her back was turned I washed and cut up the tomatoes nicely with a sharp paring knife. I threw a few that might be even-post-wrinkled into the compost, then had a delicious delicious meal while dear Joan experienced a sadly under-tomatoed version. (When I let her preview this she said, “I should have done what I usually do, put it way under the other trash so you don’t find it.”)

What else is there to add? I’m not sure. Certainly I resonate with the gazillions who have testified to what happens when you’re convincingly exposed to the reality that your life will some day end.

I say convincingly, because it takes a lot to move us from pity for those who somehow didn’t outwit death to really really believe that we’re not exempt. This barely days-long horizon is why despite the data underscoring that spring is coming earlier and earlier as most of the planet keeps warming and warming, I sure had trouble still believing that when those polar winds blasted so fiercely I could literally feel them blowing in around my head on the pillow.

Still, sometimes what happens is sobering enough, inescapable enough, that against your own lifetime of believing otherwise you do become convinced that even you yourself have an expiration date. Then each remaining day does seem to be somehow fuller of fizz.

This might be something for the billionaires who are convinced they’ll live to 150 to think about before someday they learn that the biblical three-score-years-and-10 lifespan could affect even them.  Now what about the lives they could have lived with such different gifts of grace than the mere conviction of never having to give up their lives to find them?

I also do want to take seriously that the cherry tomatoes that had mold did require a dignified and loving good-bye. But also that the tomatoes that were just wrinkled really did still have a lot of zest and sheer joy to offer.

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, blogs at Kingsview & Co, https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo

 

beauty in blemishes, grace, inspiration

The Tulips that Became Roses

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Roses photo in blog post "The Tulips That Became Roses"As a mostly failed provider of flowers for my patient spouse Joan, I was impressed with myself one Mother’s Day when I happened to be in the grocery store and saw a display of flowers. For some reason this particular bunch of lovely red roses was cheaper than another bunch which I figured was just a different variety. But the cheaper ones looked great, what was not to like, why not be a good steward of precious resources? Or as some might less charitably put it, a cheapskate?

So I proudly took home the bouquet of a dozen roses and offered them up. Joan was indeed touched that I had thought to provide them but with slightly furrowed brow also offered something along the lines of “I would never have thought of that–tulips for Mother’s Day. But they’re beautiful!”

I was taken aback. How could these lovely red flowers be other than roses? But Joan patiently and compassionately explained that tulips is what they were. This was why they were cheaper than the other red flowers which were actually roses.

I told the story in church that morning as part of launching a sermon. Congregants who owned a garden center risked falling off their chairs at this revelation of just how lacking in common sense and basic knowledge their pastor was.

But then came the following Sunday. They had brought a lovely little potted plant to the sanctuary. They explained that this was a rose bush from their nursery. They were giving it to me. If I planted it and managed to keep it alive it would teach me what roses look like.

Amid the general hilarity I was actually quite taken with their gift. I carefully planted it and for some years was tickled when a few roses would appear to remind me how to tell a rose from a tulip. But the plant always struggled and once was so hard to see I mowed over part of it.

Eventually it was gone from where I’d planted it. I forgot it.  Then yesterday Joan and I went for a walk. She pointed out this tall bush with multiple red flowers on it. “Do you remember what those are?” Indeed! “Yes, those are not tulips; they’re roses.”

“Did you remember,” she asked, “that when it just kept struggling and struggling I transplanted it to that flower garden in case it did better there?” If I’d ever known this, I’d lost track of it.

What a memento, these decades later. A memento of life as a mixture of stumbles and mistakes, of good intentions and failed implementations, from the tangles of which–nurtured with patience, generosity, grace, and nudges of encouragement–red-rose beauty can spring.

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, blogs at Kingsview & Co, https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo

Humor

Some Airplane Fun

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Even if we were having to fly into Newark during a late-season winter storm, we were fortunate to have been able to experience the sunny tropics in the first place. Our plane did run late due to thousands of storm-related delays and cancellations including snow, ice, rain, howling winds. Nevertheless, we were boarded, not that much more than an hour late, pushed back from the gate, raring to go.

Then that dread intercom crackle. Pilot: “Sorry folks. There is a problem with a seal on a life raft access panel. It has no bearing on flight safety, but we need to research if policy will let us fly or we have to go back to the gate. If we go back, we’ll time out and this crew won’t be able to take you to Newark. We do apologize and will update you soon.”

All 150 or so of us are trying not to cry. I’m reminded of my youngest granddaughter: I need a time out so I can go back into my bed and use my pacifier.

Pilot: “I’m very sorry folks but policy doesn’t let us fly. We’ll need to go back to the gate.  Someone there will help you make arrangements.”

Back to gate. But we sit and sit. Maintenance people with orange and green vests roam around the panel. All seems resolved. But that pesky time out. Wait wait wait.

We think about how much of our lifespan is about to go down the drain. I really do need to get in my bed with a pacifier. But then: Wild idea from pilot. Maybe we can fly you to Dulles and then another crew will fly you to Newark and you won’t even have to get off the plane!

Joan and I like this idea. Lots and lots of people do. But some people don’t.

I wish I’d have dared video some of the action to get my minutes of viral fame. In lieu of that, I did text family members contemporaneously, so I’ve stitched together a narrative based on often-verbatim texting of what came next.

After the pilot reported the potential solution,  maybe one-fourth of the passengers went into a complete tizzy (some in we-have-feelings English, some in eloquent and energetic Spanish, bilinguality only adding to the fun). They threw fits. Let us off this plane! We’re done! This airline is toast! We have our rights!

They were reminded they were only going to Dulles to get a new crew. They wouldn’t even leave the plane, and it was the fastest they could get to Newark. They were warned if they got off they might make it to Newark amid cancellations maybe by the end of their lives. So most of them huffily paraded back on. But enough got off that all the luggage had to be pulled and reviewed on the tarmac.

After oh, two or three hours of new mutinies leading to more efforts to get off leading to more reminders that you might be in your grave before you get to Newark if you persist in this self-defeating behavior, a few people did give nice speeches. They pointed out (I didn’t speechify but courageously nodded support) that this would be a good time to work together as a community to help each other get to Newark instead of generating constant door openings and closures and luggage delays and threats from crew to cancel this flight right now. But the collaboration contingent struggled to achieve full buy in.

Then came word that–

a.) we might get to Dulles if the flight path around wind and storm and oh, a rocket launch at Canaveral could be achieved . . .

b.) fast enough the crew didn’t time out (our seatmate noted that if they timed out they might land us in the ocean), but–

c.) only if you dear people settle down right now.

Except that as the hours passed the crew had said you can go out to terminal for food if you send only one rep per family and return soon. Of course all kinds of exciting new hell broke loose as the push-pull of will we obey so we can actually fly or will we do what we want because we deserve it after all the fuss you’ve put us through continued including as some insisted give us airline vouchers right now to buy our food.

Somehow, even as we were constantly warned we had to get going any minute, the chaos persisted yet another hour or more. Then another update: Nearly within reach of a flight plan if you all settle down.

This was greeted as wow, just an ideal moment for more going to the bathroom, roaming the cabin, arguing with the crew. At this point our seatmate, admirable representative of his locale, a polite young gentleman by and large, observed that “these people are f-ing stupid.”

Joan and I have been on multiple canceled flights. There were many junctures at which we knew that in prior cancellations this would signal flight ended.  But unbelievably, the crew started coming back to re-check boarding passes. Okay folks, we should have the flight plan in minutes.

So one woman starts playing local party music really loud. Attendant goes back says stop. She argues. Attendant says everyone can’t play music really loud on this plane it’s not legal stop right now. Argue argue.

Attendant, who seems to be a boss and a grizzled competent veteran of passenger wars, goes back up front to pick up microphone as amid the music kerfluffle a contingent that apparently has bought duty-free liquor celebrates the blessings of the spirits. The music fan and the spirits-lovers both have their celebrations rudely interrupted as the attendant goes on loudspeaker to observe as follows in several layers of Spanish and English:

“You need to know you can’t all play your music loud so none of you can. Imagine if you all did that! And it’s the rules that you can’t. Furthermore. Furthermore! If any of you even try to drink your own alcohol you need to know that could involve the federal government. Which is to say la policia. Which is to say you could be taken off this flight. Which is to say this flight would be canceled and no one would get to Newark. Not even to Dulles. Which is to say you could end up arrested and in jail instead of in Newark.

“So you need to listen. You need to obey the law. Please. Tienen que escuchar y obedecer la ley. Por favor! This flight will be problematic indeed without your cooperation. Este vuelto sera problematico sin su cooperacion.”

Cockpit door keeps opening and closing. Cabin door keeps opening and closing. People in reflective vests keep showing up after all seems resolved. Doors close. Doors open again. Thunk thunk sounds below the plane. Baton dude who guides the plane out gets to work then sits down again on a concrete barrier to watch the fun.

Chief attendant scrolls up and down his cell phone screen for the 3,423rd time in four hours. He and pilot confer for the 50th time. The pilot is not looking like he’s on a happy date. We keep waiting for sorry folks, your dreams are dashed. People keep getting up. Some go to the bathroom 242 times. Bathroom has become an overflowing outhouse and we haven’t even gone anywhere.

But then. Then. Flight plan has been approved “BUT ONLY IF WE GET TO RUNWAY IN 10 MINUTES.”

Lots of fussing and muttering. But crew firm, mostly on loudspeaker now, reiterate: “If we run out those 10 minutes Dulles canceled SIT DOWN people.” Somehow 10 minutes becomes like 25 but flight still hanging by its thread.

Loudspeaker: “Captain says NO ONE Stand Up for ANYthing or That’s IT we’re COOKED.”

The plane actually starts to move. Attendant comes back to check we’re all behaving. Gentleman behind continues a phone call. Attendant tells him, politely but sternly, phone off. Guy yells in several languages, “F— you [that part for sure is in English] we’ve been patient long enough.” It feels like blows come next.

The attendant says one more time “Stop the call or we cancel.” Then backs off and keeps moving up the cabin. Passenger huffs. Gets off the phone.

The plane keeps taxiing. The cockpit door stays closed.  It looks gray and inscrutable and strong and a bulwark against the breakdown of civilization. You can almost feel the pilot concluding that so long as no shots ring out this plane is getting up in the air. And this plane is going to Dulles. And in a few hours this story is going to be shared with airline colleagues, maybe even putting some of that duty-free libation to legal use.

Our seatmate says this is the first time he’s been so scared. He says, “It feels like there’s too much going on in this plane.” Joan and I agree.

We get to the runway. I tell our seatmate there’s no wrong answer but ask if he believes in God. He says yes. So we all breathe prayers.

The plane gathers speed. We see the ground drop away.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean.

inspiration, loving enemies, Reconciliation

Skimming in Harmony

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As usual the news was filled with reporting on national divorcing of red and blue and infinite variations, enough said, as much of the world’s energy went into taking things apart.

But in one part of the world, itself no perfect place as wealthier and poorer live their sadly stratified lives and the privileged play while the struggling work, there was a moment of sheer loveliness. All the struggle was right there, the endless plastic bottles and trash caught in the grass and dunes and trees just behind the waves, those with too little money selling what they could on the beach while the kites soared.

I wonder what we do about this. But I doubt simply ignoring the soaring fixes the struggling.

So I did love watching as the kite surfers fluttered across the waves like butterflies used to before so many went extinct along with their habitats.

And I particularly felt my breath catch when three surfers, perhaps part of a team though maybe they were just committed to sheer joy, started skimming in unison. Back and forth they raced across the ocean, slowing down to turn at the ends of coves then somehow knowing who would take the lead and how quickly until they were lined up in near-perfect formation.

Kiters one

Mostly there was no need to do anything but cherish the sight. I also, however, thought about the sheer delight stirred by humans who must have spent endless hours practicing their soaring collaboration rather than feeding endless versions of that national divorcing.

Kiters two

I thought I’d better learn from their example how to invest more of my own energy in skimming and less in splitting.

And I imagined all the healing that could be released if resources for kiteboarding, both literal and metaphorical, were so equitably shared across the weathier and poorer of us that we could all skim together on the Planet Earth team.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean.

inspiration

Thankful for for Little Cow

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Ella, three years old, has been fascinated by the scar on her grandfather’s chest, where the surgeon literally took out my heart and fixed it before putting it back in. She particularly keeps trying to understand the role of the bovine aortic valve Dr. Desai put in.

I explained that it came from a cow. That really caught her fancy. As we’ve kept talking about this, I’ve started suspecting Ella’s cow image is quite literal.

So I asked her: “Do you think there is a tiny little cow in my heart helping to keep me alive?”

“Yes, PawPaw. Your cow is always in there taking care of you.”

She paused. “But it makes me sad. Because a big cow had to be killed so your little cow could live in your heart.”

In recent years I’ve read about research suggesting that in their own ways bees think creatively; spiders dream; trees communicate. And maybe, metaphor though this may be, little cows live caringly in our broken hearts.

Ella is no longer a baby but she lives closer than I do to what William James once memorably described:  “The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion. . . .”

Through Ella’s insights my bovine aortic valve links me to all of that–and reminds me that there is in nature so much glory and so much sacrifice. Ella reminds me to be grateful for great blooming of life. And for the suffering and new possibilities, so often both mixed together, we create for each other as we strive and yearn for life amid all the buzzing confusions of our thoughts and dreams and sacrifices.

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean.

Anabaptist-Mennonite theology, God, Holy Spirit

A Pentecostal Theater Large Enough for This Marriage

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Kingsview & Co blog post barn imageFor a year I’ve been the Anabaptist-Mennonite contributor to a conversation on “Following Jesus” among writers from 12 different Christian traditions. Each month a writer made a main presentation on her or his tradition and the remaining writers offeredresponses. Here at Kingsview & Co I’ve been posting my contributions along with links to the larger conversation. As touched on below, this post completes my participation.

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If I dare put it this way, I’m grateful to J. Terry Todd for offering, in “Following Jesus to the Altar: One Pentecostal’s Reflection,” a Pentecostalism large enough for my marriage. This marriage, of a former atheist and semi-former charismatic, has called for a large room–even, in Todd’s language, a theater. And in relation to the Pentecost-related matters Todd addresses, as much my marriage as my Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition has set the stage for my experiences and perspectives. The story:

As a teen, I attended a church camp. I had by then decided that adopting atheism was the most ambitious, dramatic way I could declare independence from traumatizing aspects of my Mennonite church community.

Intertwining with classic Anabaptist themes in my church experience were already evangelical and fundamentalist influences. Then yet another stream was added: the charismatic renewal movement. Abruptly all manner of settled ways of praying and worshiping and thinking were unraveled. It could be said that, to echo Todd’s memorable wording, a form of Pentecostalism was making its transgressive appearance.

It had taken over this church camp. So there I was, theoretically atheist. Yet underneath the atheism I was also, as Todd introduces his experience, “bearing the weight of a grief I couldn’t name.”

What happened next could be described almost word for word as Todd does:

Bearing the weight of a grief I couldn’t name, one Sunday I tarried at the altar, a classical Pentecostal phrase that involves praying mightily for a divine encounter with the Holy Spirit.  I stood, along with others, near the front of the worship space, my body enveloped by the band’s percussive rhythms and the praise team’s soaring vocals.  I, I’ve seen God do it, and I know / it’s working out for me. / It’s getting ready to happen. The entire assembly chanted the song’s refrain, again and again: It’s getting ready to happen, it’s getting ready to happen.  I wasn’t kneeling at a structure but standing, walking, rocking on my heels at the “altar,” a space that in most Pentecostal settings encompasses the center front of the church, stage left and stage right as well.

My moments of tarrying, or waiting expectantly, involved both the fervent hope for a divine encounter with the Holy Ghost, and a struggle with my willingness to surrender to the experience. And then it happened . . .

But precisely there our experiences sharply diverge. For me it most definitely did not happen. I felt crushed under the dreams of those praying over me, laying hands on me, issuing ecstatic utterances through which I grasped, though without understanding the words themselves, that they were entreating the Spirit to enter recalcitrant me.

“Just let go,” they pled. “Let your tongue go even if it makes no sense. Say nonsense words and then the Holy Spirit will come to fill them with meaning.”

So I did. And a sort of half feeling of sort of half being filled with something arrived but deep down I knew: I was doing my best to be filled with the Spirit but not managing actually to be filled by other than my own quest to be “good” for those who wanted me to be filled. Still I yielded. Eventually I eked out some nonsense words. Joy erupted. For several days I convinced myself It had happened: I had spoken in tongues; I had been baptized in the Spirit.

Only for a few days. Then as I noted no underlying transformation of my troubled self, I admitted the truth to myself: I had tried but failed to open myself. Whatever had happened had been my effort to go along with the expectations of the crowd.

Years later I was to find paths toward following Jesus and experiencing the Spirit. Part of what it took was concluding that what had befallen me back then was external coercion blending with my inner need. I had experienced true hunger but not necessarily for what I was being offered at that camp.

In mid-pilgrimage I met a woman. She was Joan, still a teenager, in her first year at Eastern Mennonite University, where we met when I was a senior. She had been raised American Baptist. She had found much to treasure in her tradition. But there were hungers not yet met in her teenage self. In her world too the charismatic movement made its transgressive appearance, undoing patterns and spiritualities that had long seemed settled. She was blessed. She still connects with friends from the days she sang in a traveling choir with her charismatic mentors and friends.

Eventually, of course, the former-but-sometimes-still-atheist and the charismatic decided that one thing amid their confusions was clear: They should marry. When they announced this oil-and-water merger to their respective friends, there was no joy in either camp. There was gnashing of teeth, rending of clothes, smearing of ashes on brows. This was a variant of Thelma and Louise rollicking their way off a cliff.

So here we are, forty-some years later. We have survived partly by becoming more like each other. What our friends couldn’t always see–nor actually could we ourselves, who realized we might have lost our minds–was that we would also, hoary though the concept is, complement each other. So I am often enough the skeptic but experience Joan as offering guard rails that keep me from, ultimately, plunging into the ditch of cynical disbelief.

And I think she would testify to the ways we mutually nurtured each other when at moments of severe distress in her circle of loved ones the charismatic word was sometimes a toxic pray harder, trust God more, get out of the Spirit’s way even if that forces you to lie to yourself about what is actually happening here. During one potentially fatal crisis, it was also not her charismatic mentors but that boring old-fashioned leader, an American Baptist pastor, who knew precisely the words of divinely inspired grace and wisdom to offer.

Within that journey we find ongoing blessings as we nurture children and grandchildren in a world turned wilder than many of us might have anticipated even a few years ago. We go to church. We engage Scripture. We do things good Christians and Mennonites do. We take seriously the Mennonite Church USA understandings of the Holy Spirit offered in the 1995 Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective article 3, which concludes that–

The Holy Spirit enables our life in Christian community, comforts us in suffering, is present with us in time of persecution, intercedes for us in our weakness, guarantees the redemption of our bodies, and assures the future redemption of creation.

But buffeted by traditions we have long experienced as sources of both strength and shadows, we have not majored in jots and tittles of Holy Spirit doctrine. Nor have we found that the somewhat middle-of-the-road MC USA take on the Spirit exhausts the wildness of the wind and the tongues of fire that blow and alight where they will.

This means I take in Todd’s report more as testimony and inspiration than as theological tome–although I appreciate and affirm the theological nuances he offers us and the many ways they resonate with Joan’s and my lived experience. I particularly am moved by Todd’s ability to show us three things:

First “is the experience of worship as a theater of divine encounter, a space of intense emotion and intimacy where God meets us at the altar.”

Second is “transgressive space”:

As a theater of divine encounter, the Pentecostal (or renewalist) altar can be a “transgressive space,” a term Gastón Espinoza has used to describe the altars at Azusa Street, the 1906 Los Angeles revivals that helped put the Pentecostal movement on the Christian map.

Third is the “freakiness” that this can catalyze and empower. Todd documents an amazing array of Christians and peoples and experiences that can all, in their frequently contradictory ways, fit in the theater. As he describes matters, “The altar where I first experienced the baptism of the Holy Ghost is a transgressive space, which is why I use the provocative language of ‘flying the freak flag’ to unabashedly embrace Pentecostal ideas and (especially?) actions that might puzzle or even repel others.”

That grips my heart. That shows me what it can look like when Christians today behave as those first book-of-Acts Christians did, seemingly drunk but with Spirit not spirit. That fills me with appreciation for ways in our half-blind and fumbling ways Joan and I, one burned by one form of Pentecostalism, one healed by another form of it, then both of us discovering mutual inspiration and healing at the nexus of salvation and shadows, have found each other. And have been found by the Holy Spirit who turned even our marriage into a wing of that theater of divine encounter.

Yes, J. Terry Todd:

That prophecy makes me dance with joy at the altar, as I await this Third Pentecost, grateful for the radically relational pneumatology that undergirds it.

Somebody shout Hallelujah, please.

* * *

This post completes my contributions to the “Following Jesus” conversation. It has been a rewarding journey. Meanwhile “Following Jesus Is a Liquid Dance,” J. Terry Todd’s engagement with his respondents (which includes comments on my post above), provides an eloquent and heartfelt wrap-up to a valuable year of mutual learning for the twelve of us involved. Let Todd have the last word:

As embodied souls we are here for a time such as this. Some of the roadblocks to the flourishing of all God’s people are novel – a climate emergency on a global scale, the possibility of nuclear destruction, along with the usual human litany of greed, war, murder, inequality, and exploitation.

How do we sing the Lord’s song in such a strange land?  Well, it’s not all dependent on our singing, thank God since I can’t carry a tune in a bucket. Maybe it’s the Spirit that plays and sings through us. Glory! In a prophetic phrase attributed to Montanus, “Behold, the human being is like a lyre, and I [the Spirit] fly over them as a pick.”

—Michael A. King is blogger and editor, Kingsview & Co; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. He has been a pastor and seminary dean and participated in Harold Heie’s Respectful Conversation project within which a version of this post was first published.