A Prayer for Our Country

A Prayer for Our Country: from the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church

Spirit of the living God, guide us in the way of peace, keep us on the path of justice and the way of love for the whole of the human family.

We pray for those who weep today as our elections reveal winners and losers.

Our hope for a more inclusive and unified country remains our prayer, and that the Gospel and the church bring healing and help to those most in need.

– GBCS Board President, Rev. Allison Mark and Bishop Julius C. Trimble, GBCS General Secretary

A reason to love and respect the United Methodist Church.

It’s a Beautiful Morning

In the back of my mind I hear a song about that. An old one no doubt. I would tee it up so you could listen, too, if I were a little more adept at this blog thing and sitting in front of my desktop.

Why such a beautiful morning on such a gray day?

I’m going home today.

Sometimes

There is a little poem by Sheenagh Pugh called Sometimes. I first encountered it in the book Good Poems collected by Garrison Keillor. I have called it up as a Thanksgiving prayer of gratitude a couple of times in this blog and over our Thanksgiving celebrations with family and friends. I leave it to you to find it with the search tools you undoubtedly have at your disposal. It is difficult to give you the kind of post I would like to if I were working from my desktop at home so I leave it to you to do some digging.

Yesterday was one of those days — for me. The Astros won a game in Seattle after losing three in a row and Justice won out over the bullying threats of an ex-president. Set aside the Astros. There is always next year. But for the brave citizens that prosecuted, judged and read the facts of this case, I shall always be grateful. Their courage and understanding of duty is a model for us all.

The bullying ex-president was held accountable for the first time since appearing on our national political stage and maybe for the first time in his life. After hearing the verdict he faced the cameras for the first time in his business and political career with eyes that betrayed his fear of Justice. He showed the clear countenance of a loser.

Except for that, there was no reason for this to be major news. White collar crime in Manhattan is probably not so unusual as to deserve headline coverage in the New York Times. Sentences are usually light for white men gone astray. They can remain heroes in the world of finance and pass on fortunes to the kiddoes like Jared Kushner.

The ex-president’s misbehaving has probably only begun. A light sentence, say probation, provides a stage for him to challenge the judge lock him up. He would love the theater of it.

But there must be a way to let him stew over questions like guilt and innocence, crime and punishment. Maybe he could be assigned reading in the classics of American governance and jurisprudence and required to turn in short essays on what he has learned from the reading. His essays would undoubtedly repeat his tired chants about witch-hunts and how unfairly he is treated by the same Elites that administer death penalties on the streets to people of color.

Judge Merchan would give him a very public and embarrassing “F” and require him to re-read the assigned prompt until he starts to deal with fact and logic and maybe even admit that his own treatment and that of George Floyd is a false equivalence of the worst kind. Another “F”. Maybe even a zero on the assignment. Require him to strain his eyes and read again, and again. Maybe from his seat in that cold Manhattan court room.

I have very little concern for the ex-president and his feelings about the day. To me it was one of those days when things went right. Celebrate a win for Justice and the people.

But remember his followers. There are so many ways we have failed them.

We have reduced public education in most places to shallow measures of the transmission of “content” at a time when the world begs for thinkers who have explored ideas like justice, truth, fairness, and personal responsibility as starting points for better understanding of a structure of government that promotes these ideals.

We have given them hundreds of cable television channels that offer up drivel for tired and lazy minds twenty-four hours a day. Mixed into that stew of nonsense there are a few that offer journalism from the old school where there is no room for “true facts” versus facts. Just facts. Observable and undeniable facts.

We have given them gun-rights when they needed moral leadership. We have given them video games when the same technology might have been used to teach more deeply the meaning of religious traditions rooted in love, empathy and the revolutionary value of stepping back and listening to each other.

We might have given them the ability to read — to read deeply and critically. We might have given them good nutrition instead of the empty calories of fast food.

For now, they are our charges (or we, theirs?) and we need to co-exist without destroying a system of government that has held dictators at bay for over two centuries while other systems have produced authoritarian leaders that goaded us into wars and sacrifices that were necessary for the survival of the idea of freedom.

So, enjoy the day when a few things went the way they should. But do not forget the needs of all the folks who show up for the ex-president’s rallies.

Listen to them. Help them. They need the moral leadership of thinking people. Who really knows how that can best be provided? But it is a conundrum worthy of our own best thinking and effort.

Sometimes things don’t go, after all, / from bad to worse.

One Year, Nine Months and Two Days of Silence

Twenty-one months of silence in this age is, for me, an unnatural state. I cannot continue to voluntarily stand aside without some guilt of complicity with social and political trends that represent heartbreaking losses in the small gains in democracy and civility we made in our country since World War II.

I have never meant to use this space to make a lot of noise or to become an “influencer”. Few people even know that it is here. For me, sotlj.com is simply a place to say my piece without calling attention to myself or those who share this life-space with me. That is, I know, a contradiction but it has always been my way. And I had nothing much to add to the national conversation. Professional journalists and commentators were doing a much better job of it.

So why did I start writing again?

Nineteen days of illness and hospitalization have provided me time to think about things and people so dear to me that I could no longer hide my solitary inner self from them. But the thoughts expressed here are mine alone. The people I love most dearly speak for themselves much more powerfully in the work they do every day. Things I write here are my responsibility alone. I simply hope not to embarrass them.

Readers of this journal will notice some changes in my voice since my flirtation with mortality began almost three weeks ago on May 9, 2024. I have come to be more openly accepting of the religious tradition of my United Methodist Church. This was a gift from my mother that I have often thought of as being somewhere between a simple nuisance and the promotion of unscientific nonsense.

Before this experience I could not hear anything but mumbo-jumbo in a phrase like this: the healing power of the love of Christ.

I have spent many hours discussing things like this in Sunday school classes and I have nit-picked until I felt I had demolished the idea because of its clear disconnect from the reality I could see in science and, more specifically, in the science of modern medicine. There is another way to read it, though.

Ideas and expressions like that are rooted in traditions passed down by pre-scientific people who were able to see in any recovery a miracle. And the healing tools of the man they followed were simple acts of loving, touching and offering of something we call grace.

He was a revolutionary figure in our history for demonstrating the healing power of love for individuals and whole human societies. As the generations progressed, people have been motivated by the love he expressed to enter healing professions that rely on science and not prayer alone. It is what Jesus would have done. He might have been a doctor or nurse on the medical staff of a life-saving institution — maybe even a social worker, physical therapist, hospital administrator, dietitian or housekeeper. There would be teams of people working with him toward the goal of healing, all of them educated in a solid science and motivated by his unremitting love.

I have seen it clearly expressed by everyone who provided care for me during my long hospitalization. The single exception, I believe, was a result of the hardness of her own life and, perhaps, an unawareness of the presence and meaning of grace in her life. I had to speak up about her performance but I hope she is being treated with the same kind of love that has benefited me here.

All of that is to say that you will hear more religiosity in my voice although I will respect the church’s guardrail. Although I may tend to be preachy, I am not ordained and have no license to preach. But I will let you know what this Methodist thinks. That is a totally John Wesley approach and one of the reasons I so admire his interpretation of the traditions of Christ.

You may also hear more personal reflections, but not just about politics. I may even lapse into the thought and format of poetry. I may reminisce about coming of age in the awful and glorious Mid-Twentieth Century America. I feel compelled to share my experience with anyone who has time and willingness to read.

This is not the Tom Fowler you have known. I come now touched by grace and with, I hope, more than a little love. There is in that stuff the power to heal a broken world, Don’t overthink it. Just learn to live more completely with love as your companion, guide and driving force in everything you do.

No, this is not the course correction of an octogenarian suddenly afraid of death. It is simply a clearer perception of the love that drives this Catholic hospital and the love extended to me through the prayers of my friends. Let’s not strain it all through the divisive filter of theology. Just love every person you encounter. That’s not such hard work. In fact it’s fun to share your heart more fully every day with everyone you meet.

Just love and let’s listen to each other. Use the comment section at the end of each post and I promise to respond unless you are simply selling your own blog or the long-awaited perfect air fryer. Your anonymity will always be respected.

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 20th 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 20th Century, that it was anti-science, that the people who went there were mostly hypocrites.

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

In the 20th 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.

The Sanctity of Life as It Applies to the Common Street Urchin, School Shooter, Gang Member, and Teen Suicide Victim.

The Republican Party has marketed a view of a particular medical procedure as the murder of a precious child. The sanctity of life, they say, should be respected in law by making that procedure illegal and, in some places, by making the mother an accomplice in the commission of a crime. And often it is her life that is most at risk and, therefore, two lives.

If you are an American woman, you have watched as your right to have that procedure has become the principal question put to every judicial nominee since 1973. As a result, it has been made difficult, if not impossible, for women in many states to obtain the procedure.

Republicans have mobilized millions of votes through one of the most brutally invasive yet successful political marketing campaigns in history. They have pulled at the heartstrings of voters by romanticizing and dramatizing a beautiful life of the fetus and the the right of that fetus to expect the chance to have a full life with air to breathe, to be cuddled by adoring parents, to become educated and prepare for great achievements and contributions for the betterment of all mankind.

Democrats have responded with the argument that it is about the right of a woman to make decisions about her own health care; that it is about the broader and more generally applicable right to privacy. Democrats have tried to appeal with reasonable arguments.

But is anyone really thinking about those children? When the debate juxtaposes the rights of a cute and cuddly fetus against the rights of a self-interested and probably promiscuous woman, the argument is already lost.

“Sanctity of life” is an interesting catchphrase and marketing ploy. But, it is to mothers that nature has given the responsibility for the delivery, care and nurturing of new life — not Congress and not the Texas Legislature. Those institutions have been corrupted by the Republican Party and have been allowed to become, let’s call them what they are, agents of an evil interference with the God-given right and responsibility of mothers to make decisions about whether her current situation and conditions are right for a child that she may love most fully by not bringing it into a life of almost certain loneliness, poverty and despair. And perhaps most important of all is the right of mothers and the medical profession to privacy.

Your Texas legislature, so assembled, would be a poor choice for a cardiologist. It makes even less sense in the choice of an OB/GYN doctor since, in many cases, there are two lives at stake.

When we look at the lives of the children born into circumstances that any mother can see as wrong for proper nurturing, the Texas Legislature is nowhere to be found. It is a corrupt and shameless institution for which “sanctity of life” often means many thousands of births into lives of violence and despair.

You may thank your gerrymandering Republican political lifers for packing the courts and legislative branch with dull-witted, power-seeking politicians too short-sighted to see the connection between their meddling in medicine and the unhappy lives of youth who become perpetrators and/or victims of violence, sometimes dying by their own hand.

Many of my friends who vote for Republican candidates do so for other reasons and don’t really support these inhumane laws. Some have sound policy reasons for voting the way they do. But I suspect many have just come to accept a view that is popular among their social and economic peers: that Democrats will take their money and give it to the poor. There may be a bit of truth in that view but, really, only if they have more than a fair share of control over God’s gift of a decent livelihood.

Apologies, Republican friends, but now you have introduced a fundamentally Christian notion into the discussion: sharing.

Republicans in the legislature go on celebrating the sanctity of life by pretending that more guns bring more peace to the streets, by underfunding public education, food and nutrition programs, and and by meddling more and more in the practice of medicine. They do all that they can to stay in office for as long as they can by selling the snake oil of a simple-minded gutter morality to a voting population that begs for leadership, not exploitation.

They may become a bit rattled when another teenager acquires an automatic weapon and shoots up a school. Or if he turns the weapon on himself and takes his own life. Then, and only then, they start talking about our dreadfully underfunded community and school mental health services. Or maybe they will call for arming teachers, or adding one more counselor in each of the schools. Yet they never stop to ponder the decision they yanked from a mother’s heart that might have spared these children such tragic lives.

They may do brilliant root cause analyses for problems on the job yet they hardly ever apply that trusted technique in executing their civic responsibilities.