Religion – South of Town: Notes and Scenes from Texas' Upper Gulf Coast

An Unrelenting Gnawing at My Soul

The Listeners by Walter De La Mare

Public Domain, link copied from

http://www.poetryfoundation.org

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

–\\\\\–

Well, here I am again. I tried to give up this bad habit of paying good money to people so I could write things for other people to read. I managed to successfully stop it a few years ago with respect to what I had come to think of as the loathsome Facebook . In this comeback posting, I begin by quoting someone else’s poetry, maybe as a way of trying to explain myself.

Last year I committed myself to discontinuing this WordPress chronicle. I had written about the things I thought about and worried about; I wrote about my church and its internal debates over social principles; I wrote about my community’s fine arts council and its theater programs, and, in general, many things that are not of interest to most readers. Besides, what do I really have to say about political issues that has not already either been born or batted around online? I read the opinion pages in national papers and I know that there are many better educated and informed people saying the things that needed to be said regarding our civic lives. Saying it all here seemed to benefit no one but myself and an irrepressible egotistical desire to attract attention. I let my subscription to the service run out. But then I wavered again.

WordPress gave me another chance to re-up, as online services almost always do. And I did. I renewed the service and will be here at least through April of 2027. So why did I decide to continue?

Most importantly WordPress emphasizes content rather than user relationships. As I remember it, people typically used Facebook posts to craft a story of their lives as they wanted friends to see them: wealthier than they really are, cooler than they really are and more well read than they really are. And, of course, kinder than they really are to their precious pets which are presented as cuter than they really are. And they undoubtedly wanted you to see it and ‘friend’ them or give them a ‘like’.

It would be disingenuous to say that I am not interested in presenting my life as one of distinction. People who know me know that I try to post things I have spent some time thinking about not just what I had for breakfast, or the cute thing my cat, kid or dog did nor my immediate reaction to what I saw on the evening news or picked up online. I do my very best (most of the time) to say something I really need to say because of its informational or moral relevance for readers and all the people in this world we share.

I don’t fish for readers. What I think about and write is here for anyone who reads it. In fact, I heard a little poem today on the podcast Poetry Unbound. The title is “The Listeners.” It is in the public domain and I led this discussion with it.

When I read the Walter De La Mare poem, I see myself as the Traveller as I send these chronicles out to phantom listeners (readers). And you would be one of them. Not just to you, but to that phantom being we call a soul. Whatever it is that I need to say, it is of ultimate concern to me and it is my responsibility to let anyone within reach of my voice know that I came and that I kept my word. These are things I must say because it is a duty of citizens to speak and, especially, of things that constitute one’s ultimate concerns.

If no one answers my knock, still, I am keeping my word. It is important to me to come calling on you because I have been feeling lately a gnawing at my soul: the world is rotting all around me and people who see something must say something.

Is anybody there? May my soul speak with yours?

Reflections on Democracy: Lessons from the White House, 1964 and 2025

I had decided to let this thing go, this WordPress subscription. I stopped it but I was informed by the WordPress powers (that’s their spelling with the capital P in the miDDle) that I had recently paid for a year and I could post until my renewal date but no longer if I didn’t renew. So I left it to fallow and let the old posts rot in the field thinking that I would never post again.

I’m not sure what pushed me over the edge and led me to reach out again last night but maybe it was the criminal destruction of the East Wing of the White House. I have always felt myself to be a part owner of the White House with a bit of personal interest in its preservation as a public historical asset.

I went there once in 1964 as a college student invited by President Lyndon Johnson who, working from a mailing list, asked Dr. Phillip Hoffman of the University of Houston to identify and sponsor a student leader to come to a special White House student leaders meeting.

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Fear: the Political Weapon that Calls Us to Sacrifice

I confess to being something of a pacifist at heart.

I served in the military when my country required it of me because my country said it was needed. I never answered for myself the question of what I would do in a kill or be killed situation on a battlefield. I would make that decision when confronted with it. That was pretty chicken, I know now.

I disagreed with the justification relied upon by the authorities when they said my service was required. Yet the call to serve came from my country out of a process of debate, deliberation, and choice by popular election.

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Goodbye Facebook

I began this journal on April 12, 2018. I bring it to the top here because we will soon be doing a short study of the Social Principles of the United Methodist Church and I thought it might be useful as a way to collect some of my own thoughts as we go along during the month of October. Besides, the United Methodist Church and those principles are at my core and they instruct much of my thinking about all of the social and political issues of the day.

Leaving Facebook seven years ago was an act that represented my rejection of all things “social media.” This is, of course, just another social medium – less noticed, less read and less quoted, retweeted, or generally batted around in our anonymous and unregulated 21st Century “free speech zone.”

When I started this, I did not intend to discuss politics at all. But it did not take me long to fall off the wagon. In 2018 that was impossible, no matter which party you honor with your precious vote. And I felt an urgent need to put myself on the record – for history and for my family. As you hear so often these days, silence is complicity.

I have made only a little noise here over the last seven years and have offered only the most ineffectual resistance. But it is open to you if your curiosity compels you to read more. Please, be my guest.

Originally posted April 12, 2018. Moved to the top and reposted with the comments offered above on September 13, 2025.

I made this journal entry just after I deleted my Facebook account. I had been a dedicated Facebook user. There was no better communication tool available to fill that niche between mass media and face-to-face interactions. I shared a lot of photographs, mainly from our community theater, Brazosport Center Stages, and from our church youth group. I also did my share of celebrating our beautiful, talented grandchildren with occasional Facebook posts. They were, by my design, nameless and homeless in the eyes of strangers, although I was always careful to limit the distribution to “friends”.

I did the total wipe on Facebook. I don’t doubt the files are still out there as backups or as research data for some “university professor” serving as a front for a marketing firm or for Vladimir Putin. A blog offers only a bit more privacy. At some point, it will be open to the public and most of what I post will be there for all the honest world to see.

So there are some things you may as well know from the start. There is no need to go to all the trouble of developing a psychographic profile based on assumptions about my friends, likes, and ad clicking. So allow me to save you (and perhaps Mr. Putin) the trouble. I am a United Methodist Christian, born once and only once into the faith at the age of six kneeling at the altar with my parents in Jacinto City Methodist Church. I am a Democrat, have always been a Democrat and your suasions on behalf of some other party will probably be wasted on me. I do not hate or even mildly dislike Republicans. I live among them in Lake Jackson, possibly the most conservative 1,609 square miles in the country, and although they caused me lots of discomfort with barbs about Democratic presidents, I don’t hold that against them because I deliver a few aimed at their Republican heroes from time to time. Not feeling the safety in numbers that they feel, I deliver most of my barbs in the privacy of my home.

To My Fellow Methodists

My most direct connection to Jesus is through my mother, Lovie Westbrook Fowler, who was a member of Hornbeck Methodist Church as a child and the Hornbeck United Methodist Church when she left her old hometown to come to our area where she lived her life out in a nursing home in Angleton.

My father grew up closer to fundamentalist evangelical churches in his childhood. But my mother and he had me kneeling at the altar of our small Methodist church in Jacinto City to be baptized before I was six.

Like many of the young people in the 20^th century, I drifted away from the church, but God and my mother kept calling me back, forgiving me, welcoming me, and allowing me to feel needed.

The United Methodist Church was always with me. Even when I tried to ignore it. Even when I advised others that it was out of touch with the 20^th Century, that it was anti-science, that the people who went there were mostly hypocrites.

Now in my 79^th year, I see more clearly the need to make disciples of all the world.

In the 20^th Century our parents fought wars, they suffered economic depression, but they helped each other when neighbors were victims of weather events, crimes, or hatred armed with weapons of war. United Methodists were always teaching the stories of Jesus: stories of love, generosity, and kindness.

We need the church more today even than in the days of my youth.

We need the stories of Jesus.

When I consider the issue that confronts us and challenges our unity in the UMC today, I think about my mother, and I try to think how she would have decided.

I think she would tell me that God, through Jesus, has told us to love one another. To be fair in our dealings. To make the circle of love as big as we can, never to cast out people we do not understand – people like tax collectors and sinners. Our job is to help make the circle bigger. To love mercy, to do justice, and to walk humbly with our God.

She would tell me that we do fairly well with mercy.

But she would tell me that we have a lot to do yet to meet the requirements of justice and humility.

She would say that we have a responsibility to love one another and to inform everyone of their right to full participation in God’s community through our church. And that we must remain United Methodists. Not just Methodists. Not Global Methodists. But United Methodists.

We must honor love wherever it exists in a world affected too much by hate. We must eliminate those parts of our discipline that make us the judges of the relationships people enter into to express love and commitment in their shared lifelong journey toward sanctification and perfection. Not one of us is there yet. We cannot judge others. Thankfully, it is not our job.

We should not ask how people express their love just so we can judge them. We should not require that people be classified as L, G, B, T, Q. or cis. We should welcome all God’s people into our membership, FULL membership. Let all who qualify for ministry become ministers of the word. Let all who qualify become leaders in our congregations.

While we must always require love, we should never appoint ourselves to make judgments about the expression of love between people who commit to living their lives together in peaceful, loving relationship. We should celebrate when we find those places where love exists. And we should offer the sacred services of the church to all who require them for the fullness of their lives in Christian community.

I have remained a member of the United Methodist Church even though our Book of Discipline includes prideful, exclusionary passages aimed at the people we now refer to as LGBTQ, etc. I stay because I know that the Discipline clearly is not always inspired by God. It only gives us some agreed upon rules about how we will work together to achieve God’s purposes on Earth. We make mistakes in foundational documents. They can and must be corrected.

If some would choose to leave our church family because we make those corrections, I feel certain that God will lead them back some day and that the United Methodist Church will thrive and continue to provide leadership in a world that hungers for the word of God. That is our job. And I hope to be able to continue doing that work with you as members of a vibrant and open United Methodist Church.

2020 – A SILENT GENERATION LAMENT

The cohort of Americans born between 1928 and 1945 has been called the Silent Generation. I didn’t know that I was a member of the Silent Generation until I wrote the piece below and I looked up “generation” in Wikipedia to see if I was indeed a boomer myself or, maybe, even an undeserving member of what they were calling the Greatest Generation. I found out that I am stuck in between the two. We are hardly noticed by the folks who try to generalize about the behavioral characteristics of people born in certain age cohorts.

I was late coming to the Silent Generation so my adult years were spent with talk everywhere about “boomers.” Marketing and media primarily addressed their needs and preferences. I heard so much about boomers that I subconsciously identified and, in any case, I was very nearly one myself since you could say that I was born on the cusp. But as I read more about those years between 1928 and 1945, I could see how completely my life was in the grip of that history.

What follows is very long. If you decide to read it, you will see that it is laid out like a poem. If it reads like prose to you, at least stop for a beat to think before going to the next line. Each bit of our history is loaded with plenty to think about. Yes, Truman and Eisenhower may not excite you. Ozzie and Harriet may bore you. But the kids who first learned about the world from floor model radios and small black and white screens had much to think about. And we have much to regret.

The piece is a personal project. It was completed during the 2020 election campaign and before the Biden-Harris election results were known. Although it is a hopeful sign, it doesn’t really change much. Having lived through alternating and descending stair steps down into Trump hell, I know that it will take more than a single presidential election to get us heading onward and upward again. But we must continue the struggle.