Atonement

 

 

Autumn, last year

God struggles with God’s self

I sit in the eye of this God storm

The flood waters rise to baptize by drowning

and God’s super hurricane force breath blows everything down

Electrical fire from the sky, thundering bombs, an avalanche of fire down the holy mountain that is the sky

just a day in the life of a planet that slowly becomes uninhabitable for humans

I sit in God’s eye with my eyes closed, in the darkness of my ignorance, as the wind bangs on the windows, as if the macrocosmos is trying to crash into my microcosmos. 

You hide my soul in the cleft of a rock and cover me there with your hand.

My hands reach up toward the ceiling and the heavens, toward everything that is out of reach, reaching out to the out of reach

This is the posture used in religious icons, the iconic posture of prayer or of an infant who wants to be lifted up and held by the protector provider

Grasping the ungraspable spirit, as if you could hold your breath in your hands, but your breath escapes to the unlimited and leaves you gasping, not grasping

You can’t help it. Your brain stem demands that you breathe and perform the rituals of staying alive.

How ultimate can one be, 

if the Absolute is absolutely out of reach by definition, and ungraspable?

Evening of the same day.

I had just clocked out when you called

You are in a truck going up and down hills in Alabama

and the signal was off and on but I hear the gist of it —

lesions, biopsy, mri, pet scan, waiting to hear from the doctor again 

I think you said you don’t want the treatment 

It’s in the Lord’s hands 

Heaven looks beautiful in Alabama

You’re beside me, you say

Fading in and out

I’m beside you

What should I do?

I get on the boat

The harbor is full of fog

I email this prayer/thought to myself, to you, God, and everyone

It’s raining when I get off the boat at the Battery

I try to keep my phone dry as I take a picture of the Statue, a gray vertical in the gray fog and message it to you

To you, God, everyone, and myself.

Liberty to the captives.

Talk to you later.

Past family gatherings were spoiled by political arguments, so now when they get together for a wedding or a funeral, they try not to talk about politics.

I post my opinions on my blog — newcleanblog.blogspot.com — and on social media. They already know what I think.

After Betty was diagnosed with cancer she and I stopped arguing about Trump.

September 15, this year

Betty is dying in Alabama and I need to decide whether to go there this week or next week.

She called and sounded like her breathing was more labored than before. She had a scary dream about being abducted by an intruder who took her to “an undisclosed location” in Sheri’s words. She had my second niece tell me about the dream. The abductor poured a liquid on her and was going to light a match.

They interpreted this as the work of an evil medicine man they know. Some of her Seminole friends seek to protect her from the evil medicine. I did not say what my first thought was. If she is under the influence of a bad medicine man, it’s the Alabama “prophet and preacher” she now follows.

Who will protect her from being conned by a fake prophet who supports Trump and who says that I am doing Satan’s work by being involved in a church that is woke and pro-choice and welcomes queer folk.

I had a fantasy, briefly, of flying down to Warrior and confronting the fake prophet and casting out his demons, or something.

But I think the dream is about death and fear of death and the fire of cremation.

 I send a link to the second chapter of Jonah, the prayer, to Betty and my nieces. I read it as a prayer for deliverance from fear of death.

 I tell them that it is good medicine and I suggest they read Jonah’s prayer out loud:

“I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.”

I thought of this passage because it would soon be the Day of Atonement and the book of Jonah is traditionally read on that day.

Jonah is the reluctant prophet who was called to reach out to a nation that had lost its way. The story is about the possibility of such a nation undergoing a collective change of heart and mind and the power and promise of divine grace. Jonah doesn’t want to deliver this prophetic message of liberation and flees in the opposite direction in a boat, but God sends a storm. Jonah is blamed because of his disobedience to God and is tossed overboard and swallowed by a fish.

Maybe Jonah came to mind because of my own reluctance to go to Alabama where I might meet their preacher and cause trouble. My youngest niece had created a scene in their church, disrupting the service when they claimed public schools were trying to change the gender of children and so forth. She is a public school teacher and her two kids are students. She spoke out, gave the preacher the finger, and walked out. I applaud her. Betty told me she was proud of her daughter’s independence.

If I went to see my sister, I would also want to confront the preacher and tell the congregation what I think. Is this really the time for that? Betty is on her death bed and I think she’s scared and I wanted to send her Jonah’s prayer about overcoming fear of death.

“The waters closed in over me;

the deep surrounded me;

weeds were wrapped around my head

at the roots of the mountains.

I went down to the land

whose bars closed upon me forever;

yet you brought up my life from the Pit.”

Meanwhile, a powerful storm was approaching Florida and the night before hurricane Milton hit I had my own terrifying dream. I fall into infinite space, infinite nothing, and I’m fall into this pit for eternity until I panic and pull myself out and wake myself up, terrified. 

I lay in bed and think about think about my dream for a while. 

Isn’t infinity a mental construction? Isn’t limitation also a mental construction?

Anyway, I’m not ready to surrender to the void. I have to continue to live for a while longer. I go back to sleep.

The phone wakes me up. 

My sister’s name is on the screen. 

Betty Luckey. 

It’s my niece Libby calling from Alabama. She says Betty is in an emergency room for stomach pains.

Mom isn’t expected to live through the night, Libby says. 

I’m not surprised because I just dreamed about this. 

Libby asks me if I have anything to say to Betty, because she can hear me on the speaker phone. 

I think I hear Betty breathing. 

I tell my sister that I love her and I know she loves me. I tell Libby I love her too. I tell them I love all of them and that is all I have to say because love is infinite.

My nephew was in Florida sitting out the hurricane that had now reached the Eastern coast. I call him in the morning after the storm has passed. I’m relieved I get through. He hasn’t heard any updates about Betty. They got through the storm OK. Their power went out and came back on. We don’t sleep, he says. Two tornadoes touched down within a hundred yards of his son’s house and killed some people. 

We talked while I walked to work. I said it would be strange to be in a hurricane while waiting to hear how his mother was doing. We didn’t talk about the election.

Betty made it through the night and through the next night. My nieces kept me informed by text messages. There is a tear in Betty’s GI tract and they are waiting to see if she’ll have surgery and also waiting for the doctor to OK pain medication. I don’t really know what’s going on. I know she’s in terrible pain.  

Saturday afternoon while I’m at the store I get a text message. I go outside to be on a group call with my sister. The whole family is listening in. Betty is heavily sedated, but they think she can hear me. I’m talking to her and her children and I repeat what I said two nights ago about love being infinite.

“We will not die, we will be changed,” I add. 

I’m quoting ancient wisdom literature. I know this is vague and probably doesn’t assure us of what we want to know, which is that some things don’t change. 

But life is change and love is infinite, as if I know what I’m talking about. And as if infinite anything never scared me.

This last call with my sister happens to be the Day of Atonement.

That night a final phone call awakens me from the deepest pit of deep sleep.  

My sister has gone to heaven and is with the ancestors.

Jesus

Betty is gone

Deliver us from evil.

 

Election Day, November 5, 2024

There must be wildfires somewhere. The air quality here is bad. The smoke is oppressive.

I’m depressed because of the smokey air outside, the election, and losing my sister.

Despite all the reporting and commentary on what to expect if Trump wins, and despite what he says he’ll do, I don’t know what to expect.

I voted for Kamala this morning. I am not watching the returns tonight or even checking the news after the polls close. I’ll wait until after morning meditation, even though the vote count might not be over for days, if it is ever over.

I’m not confident. They keep saying its a toss up in all the battleground states.

Do fifty percent of voters have no idea what authoritarianism is?

Yes.

Do fifty percent really want what is, in effect, authoritarianism?

I don’t know. Apparently?

I pray — right now I pray — for a defeat of evil, deliverance from evil.

I pray and I post, “Deliver us from evil.”

Forgive me for praying in public, like the hypocrites

Wednesday 4:11AM 

Quiet, cloudy. The trees outside the kitchen window are agitated. I make coffee and pour a cup and meditate, or try to.The quiet is disturbing. When Obama won, we knew because of the cheering outside, and people were cheering again in 2020 when Biden defeated Trump.

There has been no cheering tonight. I didn’t think we would know who won on election night.

I finally look at the New York Times:

“Trump on verge of victory with swing state wins” He won Pennsylvania and Georgia and only needs one more state to win.

Both Houses appear to be Republican, maybe? We won’t know for sure until God knows when.

We have been taken over by a cult. We will be governed by a corporate state headed by a man whose history we know all too well. I don’t want to list all the reasons he should never have been considered as a candidate. You already know and you voted for him, or some of you did.

We now know that the majority has selected the most despicable man to ever run for the office of President. He is old and unhealthy but he has a young sidekick who can carry out the agenda of Project 2025, and he has the Supreme Court and maybe both Houses of Congress.

People were so sick of a status quo that wouldn’t deliver the American Dream to their front door fast enough they decided to burn the house down while we are all still inside it.

I don’t know if I have the strength to carry a heart this heavy and I don’t know how long my brain can maintain sanity or even aspire to peace of mind in a country that is in the grip of a collective psychosis. 

My sister believed in Trump, maybe because her husband, my beloved brother in law, believed Trump — until Covid killed him. Maybe she believed in Trump because the TV preachers she liked said Trump is anointed by God to be our new King David. 

I can’t explain it and I can’t explain her and I wouldn’t try. Not to you. Not tonight. Betty wasn’t typical in any way, so she wasn’t a typical Trump supporter — if there is such a thing — but that doesn’t matter. She and my brother in law went to one of his rallies in Fort Myers and they laughed, and clapped, and shouted, and had fun joining in with what she called “patriotic chanting.” She wasn’t strange. As a member of the Trump cult she was in the majority. The new normal.

A couple of years ago I went to a small town North Carolina for my nephew’s wedding. It was my first visit at my sister’s house there. A big Confederate flag and a TRUMP billboard stood on the highway. Nice neighborhood.

My sister and I started to argue about Trump, but one of my nieces made us stop and go to bed. Another one reminded me that after the 2016 election I had posted that anyone who voted for Trump can unfriend me and go to Hell. She said it made her afraid I wouldn’t want to talk to her any more. I felt terrible and I regretted what I had written in anger.

I don’t know how the Trump Corporation administration is going to affect me personally. It might not have much of an effect, or I could get arrested for an act of conscience, if it comes to that and I have the courage. I don’t know what to expect and my imagination is only serving overcooked paranoia tonight. Lead us not into trials.

The poor will suffer the most, as always — the poor, the refugees, the undocumented immigrant, single women with children, children, Black women in general, those who cannot afford healthcare, those considered extremists. 

He said he’ll be a  dictator on Day One. We are headed into a waking nightmare. I try to find hope in the knowledge that his record on keeping promises is not very good.

My heart is heavy and sick and my brain is a mountain of burning tires, but I will continue to make art and pray like a monk in my urban cave, in our decaying empire, in the midst of a global moral plague, in a free range psych ward run by psychotics, on the floating island of garbage that America seems doomed to become.

Lead us not into trial. 

Deliver us from evil.

The Eleven

In 1973 God called my sister to liberate some Haitians from the West Palm Beach police department.

Betty died this month. I am studying the texts my sister left behind, her two books, and this is how our relationship continues for now. I wish could talk to her now.

Her memoirs unearth my own memories.

I am reading her first book, Operation: Devil’s Garden. She published it in 2005 and when I first read it I found it was full of stories she has told me and in the voice that is her voice. I hear her voice when I read them and I think the stories are true, if embellished, and she might get that from Dad, who was a Baptist preacher who followed the standard practice of evangelical preachers like Dad and Aunt Betty and Papa — our Grandfather Weakland — to embellish true stories to better deliver the message of the sermon.

My sister’s two books carry a mystical/mythical approach to meaning but an essentially compassionate, courageous approach to her kind of activism, or ministry.

The first story in my sister’s first book is called “I’ve come for the Haitians.”

Betty tells the story from memory that isn’t always accurate, but we also have a newspaper clipping with the story that provides some details:

“Housewife Aids Refugees”

“Betty Luckey Helps Haitians in PB Gardens”

Betty’s husband, Gary Luckey, was a cowboy and also a technician at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, a defense contractor that also built rocket engines. My mother also worked there. Lots of people in Palm Beach County worked there.

Betty had been praying all day, she said, and her praying grew in intensity until she was face down on the floor.

She asked God if He was trying to tell her something.

Her words:

“I was hardly prepared for what happened next. He spoke to me in a clear, audible voice (at least in my spirit, it was audible). He said to me, Go to the West Palm Beach jail and say, ‘My name is Betty Luckey, I’ve come for the Haitians.’ I asked Him to repeat the message and He did, and then I heard myself agree to do it!”

Betty got in her pickup truck and headed to West Palm Beach. She didn’t know any Haitians. All she knew about Haitians were that they were from Haiti, she said. She wasn’t even sure where the West Palm Beach jail was located but she found it. She went straight to the dispatcher’s window and said, “My name is Betty Luckey. I’ve come for the Haitians.” The dispatcher asked her to repeat that and she did. She had Betty sit down and eventually a cop with a clipboard appeared and asked her how he could help her and Betty said, “My name is Betty Luckey and I’ve come for the Haitians.” He gave her an intense look and then left to get a higher ranking cop.

This higher ranking law enforcement officer appeared in the doorway and called, “almost as if he knew me, ‘Ms Luckey, what can I do for you?’”

You know what she said.

“I’ve come for the Haitians.”

I am pretty sure this higher ranking officer was familiar with the name Betty Luckey. The year before her name was often in the news for various actions. She and our cousin Eraca Cleary organized what I think was the first major antiwar demonstration in the county, The Unarmed Forces Day Parade  (I drew an eagle clutching broken arrows for the flyer). It was the first peace march I participated in.

The plainclothes policeman told her to wait and then left and another cop came and took her somewhere else in the building. They led her to a counter where a different officer had her sign a paper she didn’t read, or read it and forgot what it said.

Eleven Black men, the Haitian prisoners, were brought in, and she led them to her pickup truck. They couldn’t speak English and she couldn’t speak French. They were excited and she was in shock and everybody was talking.

“I knew what they were wondering, who was I, how had they been released, where were we going now, etc. Actually, I was wondering the same thing, but all I could do was shrug my shoulders and finally I said, “Jesus!” 

This reassured them.

One of those Florida rainstorms hit and then a Community Action bus pulled up they all got in and Betty led them to our church in Palm Beach Gardens, and showed them the pews they could sleep on and the eleven cans of soup and eleven blankets that had coincidentally or miraculously been donated a couple of weeks before.

The press immediately got wind of the story. TV cameras and reporters were in the church parking lot. Betty Luckey was up to something again. Involves Haitian refugees.

The newspaper story says the eleven sailed into Jupiter Inlet New Year’s Eve in a 35 foot open boat from the Bahamas. The Haitian dictator Baby Doc Duvalier threw them out of the country because they had been preaching a subversive message. 

“They were all preachers”, Betty said. 

They were tired, scared, hungry, strangers in our strange homeland.

“We all be killed if we go back to Haiti. We said words against the government. We want to stay in America. Get jobs. Become Americans,” one of them, Joseph De Graff said.

“These people placed a great deal of hope in America,” Mrs. Luckey said, “It just didn’t seem right they should be put in jail as soon as they reached free soil.”

The US government considered Haitian refugees to be mere economic refugees, as I recall, while Cuban refugees were political refugees. Also, the Haitians are generally much darker than the Cubans, and that distinction was important in Florida when I lived there, important to both the native crackers and the nouveau crackers transplanted from the North. I transplanted myself to the North. I had assumed that things were slowly getting better down South, but now I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure about our country, now on the brink of full blown fascism, with a man every bit as petty and dictatorial as Baby Doc Duvalier favored by about half of the country. 

Each of her stories begins with a scripture reading. Her account of this story is introduced with Luke 4:18 and 19:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has appointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

I wish I could talk to Betty about the prophetic call to provide for the strangers, the refugees, and to seek justice and the state of things now, as well as Isaiah’s call, cited by Jesus, to deliver good news of liberation to the oppressed, and to claim that the time of liberation is NOW.

The Community Action Council and some church members helped the eleven strangers to purchase bus tickets to Miami where one of them had a friend. They spent the night at the church, sleeping on the pews, and the next morning they had breakfast with Mom and Dad and Aunt Betty at our house. I remember meeting them before I hid in my bedroom, freaked out about the whole thing.

 

What is Endarkenment?

 

Break free from the bonds of what you’ve been taught to believe and think for your self. Think anything you want to think. Free your mind! Follow your own rules. 

With some constraints, of course. 

I mean, when you’re driving I’d appreciate it if you are in the correct lane, stop when the light is red, go when it is green, and when it is yellow proceed with caution and not close your eyes and floor it. There is a social contract in effect, after all.

We’d been living in an age of enlightenment for the past few centuries, although not in an enlightened age. We sought enlightenment. We looked for lights to light our paths. Light of all colors, but mainly lights that will help us find our way and not lights that only project movies that show us things that are not there, and situations that never occur, and behavior that is unlikely.

We cast off many traditions that misled us or harmed us, beliefs and belief systems, entire meaning systems collapsed around us, and even some cognitive categories are no longer relevant.  

We’re dizzy and disoriented and grab onto the first hand that is offered and steadies us. A strong hand that is attached to a powerful arm which hangs from broad shoulders on which a thick neck stands like a mighty oak that lifts a beautiful head with an open mouth from which a confident voice speaks sentences that sound plausible enough.

He — yes, he is a he — claims God has told him what is going to happen. He has an explanation for the weird things going on. You no longer trusted the fake news and your parents meant well but they didn’t understand everything you are going through and how the situations in life are different today, the old authorities lost their authority, so you were susceptible to a charismatic prophet.

So you follow your new guardian, safe at last on a path as you stride confidently together, hand in hand, over the cliff, falling into a deep deep deep pit of ignorance and grief where you are robbed of everything you value and love, whether you know it or not, and you still may not be aware and may never be aware of how lost you were when you pulled us all down with you into this pit of stupid suffering.

You are absolutely free. Your mind is free, to some extent, and free enough to choose to do the right thing.

What is the right thing?

Let’s say you are faced with an ethical decision.

Immanuel Kant offered this useful rule of thumb:

Act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will to be universal law.

What in the world does that mean?

You know, treat each person as an end, not as a means to an end, but as an end in themselves.

That is rather abstract.

Well, here, let me recite the entire Torah while I stand on one foot:

“That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow.” ( a famous rabbi said that).

Oh, you mean like the Golden Rule. Like: 

“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” (another famous rabbi said that).

What about, “Mind your own damn business,” or “We’re all in this together?”

Don’t those contradict each other?

I don’t know.

What about you are faced with a decision you are forced to make, a decision only you can make because only you understand what your existential situation is, what you think your life’s purpose is, or what your, let us say, moral position is, which you can’t really articulate, but which positions you nonetheless so that you say, No, I can’t go there. This is where I draw the line. I can’t cross that line and you can’t make me. But your state legislature has determined it is really their decision, or that of their base, and THEY know what you need to do, because your body belongs to them, to the fine, honest, wise men who managed to get elected to office once, because they had the financial backing to dominate the media that you depend on for your information.

No, it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there, as the poet said. We don’t yet live in the Dark Ages, but we do live in an age of endarkenment. I am not the first to use that term, and, yes, it is a joke about Kant’s essay, “What is enlightenment?” 

Kant argued that enlightenment is humanity emergence from self=-imposed immaturity, meaning a childish inability to use one’s understanding, to think for oneself, without submitting to the opinions of others, without questioning those who claim to be authorities.

We don’t question these authorities when we lack resolve or courage to use the ability to reason that we are born with. Laziness and cowardice, in the Kantian view, keeps us intellectually immature.

I’m not sure that Kant’s view is still adequate. Facts are still facts, and the public use of reason still requires that one distinguish what is true from what is false. But we have become dependent on a powerful information technology that is also used to misinform and to shape public opinion. You check a notification on your phone and release a Niagara of false data from an unknown source, often passed along by someone you trust, who received it from someone they trust, but that ultimately came from some manufacturer of a Big Lie.

We live in a new age of endarkenment because the new technology of disinformation is all pervasive. Not everybody is fooled, but enough people are fooled, and in our current non-democracy it doesn’t take a majority of votes to win an election, just a majority of electors to win the electoral college.

When you finish reading this, I want you to read that essay, or watch a YouTube video about it.

“What is Enlightenment?” by Immanuel Kant. 

I want you to write a short essay on what you think about it or if you prefer, you may write a short satirical piece, similar to this one I am reading to you now, that demonstrates your own confused musing on the issue of truth and moral authority in the post-postmodern condition.

You will not be graded and you will receive no credit.

Learn to educate yourself.