Roger O Green

Open up houses of worship?

some church music

open the church doors Catbird asked me a question:

I just saw da prez say he’d overrule governors if they didn’t open up houses of worship this weekend. A legal analyst in the same BBC broadcast said he had no constitutional or legal authority to do this.

I suppose said houses of worship will decide for themselves.

I know you’re actively involved in your church, so I’m interested in your opinion on whether God cares WHERE people pray.

My understanding is that even in the strictest of interpretations it doesn’t matter more THAT one prays than where one does it.

What do you think?

My first response, I’m afraid, was lacking in Christian charity.

I will say that whoever has been advising “da prez” on these things has picked the confluence of several religious traditions. Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost in the Jewish tradition, is May 28-30. The Christian iteration of Pentecost is May 31. Ramadan ended the evening of May 23 for Muslims. And of course, Memorial Day begins the secular religion of the barbecue.

But, of course, it is false piety on his part. He can’t mandate it, but that’s not the point. He’s stirred up the base. “These are places that hold our society together and keep our people united. “The people are demanding to go to church and synagogue, go to their mosque,” he said.

Sure you can theoretically bring churches/synagogues/mosques back, with 10 people, socially distant, masks. Maybe more people in cathedrals and larger structures. No way you safely have a traditional choir. At my church, online services even offer the opportunity for communion.

Connecting remotely

I found this posted by a choir director of mine from a quarter-century ago. He quoted Tom Trenney, Minister of Music at First-Plymouth Congregational Church in Lincoln, NE. “Our church is open. Open to patience and wisdom. Open to science and common sense. Open to discovering new ways to connect when it is unsafe to ‘do it the way we’ve always done it.’

“Open to saving lives by giving up some of the traditions and sacraments we hold dear. Open to wearing masks to show we love our neighbor. Open to keeping the sanctuary closed so more of us can come back together safely when it is time. Our church is open to following Jesus who, himself, spent time in the wilderness. We will remain open, and someday, by the grace of God, we will be able to worship together again.”

Or, as someone else noted recently, “If the only place you can worship your god is in a building specially built for it, you have a very small god.”

Obviously, we need some church music:

Date to Church – the Replacements
I Met Her In Church – the Box Tops
Church – Lyle Lovett

And some more religion tunes:

Have a Talk with God – Stevie Wonder
Down to the River to Pray – Alison Krauss
Wayfaring Stranger – Rhiannon Giddens
Personal Jesus – Depeche Mode
(What If God Was) One of Us? – Joan Osborne

Maybe a service:
Zoom Church – Saturday Night Live

“My cardinal song is a call to you”

Speak their names

cardinal male After my father-in-law, Richard Powell died on April 22, I received over 125 comments on Facebook. That was very nice. My wife isn’t on Facebook, and I don’t blame her, frankly.

She received about 30 sympathy cards. You know, the ones you buy in a store, sent via the United States Postal Service. Many were from members of our church, and the rest from friends and present or former colleagues. Quite a few included lengthy hand-written notes of condolences. It was very clear that the messages were based on their own experiences of grief.

One, in particular, included an extended note recommending the book Healing After Grief by Martha Whitmore Hickman, which I was able to download for free from here.

Hickman writes about the time after the services are over – and for my FIL, the services haven’t even taken place. “Now there are spaces in the mind, spaces in the days and nights. Often, when we least expect it, the pain and the preoccupation come back, and back—sometimes like the rolling crash of an ocean wave, sometimes like the slow ooze after a piece of driftwood is lifted and water and sand rise to claim their own once more.”

I didn’t leave; love never dies

Another enclosure in a sympathy card was two poems, Speak their names and Red Feathered Soul. The latter was written by Elle Bee.

You might think cynically about Red Feathered Soul, considering it mawkishly sentimental, and I understand that.
“My cardinal song is a call to you
To tell you that I miss you too.”

But the day after my FIL died, my wife and one of her brothers saw a cardinal. At least a half dozen times in the two weeks after he died, my wife and I saw a cardinal in our backyard when usually we see one or two per year. And neither my wife or I had actually heard a cardinal sing in our yard until this month. Make of it what you will.

Today would have been Richard Powell’s 84th birthday.

Being a good black person with a gun

the perception of arms and race

art of the shot — Photo courtesy of the Department of Defense

Annoyingly frequently, a story will catch my attention in the “while black” section of the news. In this case, “sleeping while black.”

A black woman was shot and killed after Kentucky police entered her home as she slept, her family says. “Louisville Metro Police Department officers were looking for a suspect at the wrong home when they shot and killed Breonna Taylor, according to a lawsuit.” Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who had a licensed firearm, fired his gun when he thought someone was breaking in. He was arrested and charged with assault and attempted murder on a police officer.

People have asked me if I would feel safer being a good black person with a gun. Hell, no.

Back in 2018, a black man killed by police in Alabama mall was shot from behind. “Emantic ‘EJ’ Fitzgerald Bradford Jr., 21, was shot when police officers responding to reports of gunfire at the mall mistook him for the gunman. According to witnesses, Bradford was helping other shoppers to safety.”

That same year, there was an interesting article in The New York Times. ‘I Am the “Good Guy With a Gun’: Black Gun Owners Reject Stereotypes, Demand Respect. “After recent incidents in which police officers shot black men who tried to stop a shooting, African-American gun owners told us how they navigate being wrongly perceived as a threat.”

In the second half of 2018 alone, at least three black men in the United States had been shot by police in separate incidents while trying, according to witnesses, to stop an active shooting. Jordan Klepper, in his short-lived series, produced a piece, Open Carrying While White vs. Open Carrying While Black.

Philando Castile, RIP

I’m still pained, and slackjawed by the death of Philando Castile in 2017, a black man with a legally-owned gun, who announces in a traffic stop that he has a weapon in the vehicle and ends up dead.

This story is interesting: Racism and the black hole of gun control in the US. “Would tighter gun laws help protect African Americans or make them more vulnerable to racism and police brutality? Charles E Cobb Jr notes of the civil rights movement that “if not for the threat of gunfire, many more peaceful protests – and possibly the movement itself – would have been silenced by violence.”

Still, the perception of arms and race are quite different. And historical. Check out The Racist Origins of US Gun Control Laws Designed To Disarm Slaves, Freedmen, And African-Americans by Steve Ekwall.

In 2016, Agent Orange encouraged supporters to “watch” polls on election day. And similar noise is being made this year. Yet the tiny New Black Panther Party doing it in previous years was seen as terrorism, not Second Amendment freedom. What’s the difference here? It’s as simple as black and white.

My favorite day in quarantine

lead the two of clubs

hearts game may 7 2020 Thursday, May 7 has been my favorite day in quarantine. Seriously.

6:30 a.m. Awake.

7:00 a.m. Meeting of the Thursday Bible guys on Skype. I had been going to the Tuesday BGs, and still am. But the Thursday guys use the lectionary, so it’s different from reading the Bible as published. And I had a muffin that one of the guys named Bob had dropped off at my house the day before.

8:15 a.m. Breakfast.

9:00 a.m. I make my two daily phone calls. One’s to a guy at choir and is fairly brief. But I end up speaking for more than an hour to a woman from my church I’ve known longer than almost anyone there. We shared stories of technology challenges, among other topics.

11:00 a.m. I had arranged a Zoom meeting with one of my choir buddies, but it was unsuccessful on her side.

11:30 a.m. Empty the dishwasher and tend to miscellaneous tasks.

12:30 p.m. Eat lunch with my wife.

1 p.m. Finally work on a blog post that, annoyingly, was no writing itself.

3 p.m. HEARTS! Back in the late 1980s, a coterie of us would go over to Broome’s house and play cards. There would be a game three or four nights a week with a rotating cast of players. Sometimes Broome wasn’t even there.

When he moved to the country, the games ceased. For my 60th birthday, I decided to have a card game at my house, and that became a nearly annual tradition. But as coronavirus began its spread, there were only a handful at the game the weekend before everything got shut down in New York State.

Card party

I had started playing a free online game at PlayOK with random strangers. Sometimes, there was no one to play with at all. Why not invite my old hearts buddies? So I did. Then someone suggested we should set up a Zoom meeting simultaneously so that we could actually see each other. I made it so.

As one of us noted, “I think we enjoyed it so much because in so many ways it felt NORMAL! A hearts game with the old crew.” There were some technical glitches – if you wait too long the game ends – but it was an inspired event.

4 p.m. Watch some TV with my wife, notably a segment CBS This Morning Saturday about Kent State. My bride was too young to remember it clearly.

5 p.m. Mow the lawn for the first time. It’s a nice day. I have to do this when the sun is low in the sky so that I don’t burn too easily – the vitiligo, y’know. And before the forecasted rain/snow. It DOES snow in March. Wait, it’s May! I did the back lawn but the smoking man who lives next door was standing and puffing at his usual post, so I passed on doing the front.

6 p.m. Take a shower.

6:30 p.m. Eat a lovely dinner of zoodles, plant-based sausage, and tomato sauce.

7:15 p.m. Google Hangout with my wife and her family – her mother, her two brothers and their wives, and two of the nieces.

8:30 p.m. Watch the evening news, much to the chagrin of my daughter, who had settled into watching one of her programs.

Then the evening routine, and bed. A splendid day in quarantine.

Comic actors Jerry Stiller, Fred Willard

mockumentaries

Jerry Stiller.Thom Wade — Art by Thom Wade c 2020. Used by permission.

When I read that Jerry Stiller, died at 92 recently, I didn’t first think of the 1990s. I went right away to Stiller and Meara. They were on The Ed Sullivan Show over 30 times between 1963 and 1971. I probably saw most of them.

Their schtick was that Jerry Stiller’s character was Jewish and the late Anne Meara’s character was Irish Catholic. You can see them from June 14th, 1964. Except that their characters mirrored their real-life status, though Anne converted to Judaism. In fact, they broke up the act in the early 1970s because they couldn’t always tell where their act ended and their lives began.

Yet their example was a very light-hearted way to talk about breaking down ethnic barriers. In a Theater Talk interview around 2010, Part 1 and Part 2, Jerry mentioned their biggest controversy in those days. They did a joke their son marrying one of the Supremes, a bit that didn’t go over well in certain parts of the country. Jerry told Sullivan that the couple was taking a bit of flak over the joke. Sullivan said not to worry about it, that he’d take care of it.

A couple more bits: The Carol Burnett Show and an ad for the National Safety Council.

Of course, a younger generation knew him better as George Costanza’s dad Frank in 26 episodes of Seinfeld. The character famously created A FESTIVUS for the rest of US!. I never watched The King of Queens, but here is The Best of Arthur Spooner. Stiller’s character eventually was matched up with a character played by Anne Meara.

Jerry Stiller had over 100 other credits, in comedy, dramas, game shows, and talk shows. He was 92 when he died, the father of an up-and-coming actor named Ben Stiller.

He was the Best in Show

Art by Thom Wade c 2020. Used by permission.
Fred Willard has over 300 credits in the IMBD, from guest appearances going back to 1966, to his breakthrough as Jerry Hubbard on over 100 episodes of Fernwood Tonight/America 2-Night. He’s had recurring roles on Roseanne, Mad About You, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Modern Family, as Phil Dunphy’s dad, Frank.

I best know him from that series of Christopher Guest mockumentaries, Waiting for Guffman (1996), Best in Show (2000) and A Mighty Wind (2003). Here’s a clip from the latter.

The New York Times called him, “The king of the deadpan cameo, the guy who makes a one-shot appearance as an office manager or furniture salesman and ends up stealing the scene.” Hollywood Reporter called him the Master of Comic Cluelessness. Watch The New WKRP in Cincinnati: Nancy’s Old Man episode.

Here’s the Fred Willard Collection on Letterman, 1982-2007. I saw this bit years ago, and I’m still going to post it: The Worst Video Will. His proudest achievement and biggest regret. He was 86.