Breathe. Just Breathe. A Prayer for the Week Ahead.

“Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life.” --Gregory Maguire, “A Lion Among Men”

Breathe.  Air in. Air out. Repeat.

On the days in this life when I am feeling anxious, or feeling like the world is out control, or when I am wondering just where the heck God is and when is God showing up; those are the days I most need to remember to just breathe. And this is certainly a week I know that I MUST remember to breathe.

Just breathe.  Air in. Air out. Repeat.

Breathe and connect myself to this present moment, the only moment that is real.  Past is past, long gone, out of my hands and the future isn’t here yet, and though I far too often assume the worst of outcomes is coming, that story isn’t written yet.

Yes, absolutely in these fraught times, I need to do all I can as a person of faith, to work for God and hope and peace and justice and mercy, in my life, in our shared life as citizens and neighbors. Jesus calls me to push back against bullies who would hurt and hate. In a way my activism and my vote are akin to civic breathing. Community dies when we forget how to breathe with and for one another.  Community thrives when we remember we all share a common body, a commonwealth, common breath.   

So, I am reminding myself to just breathe today and then tomorrow too, and then on and on and on. Day by day. Minute by minute. Even second by second.

Breathe and listen for God’s spirit in my inhalation and exhalation.  Sometimes when I pray, I can be a bit verbose with God, get all wordy, ask all kinds of questions, even demanding, all kinds of answers. Then I can treat God as some kind of divine “room service” of sorts.   

But other times my best prayers are simply like breaths, offered straight up to heaven, and then in the quiet, I listen for the breath of God in response, I suppose, to return to me on earth. Trusting not so much in God’s absolute answers but more so trusting in God’s absolute presence. Having faith that God is right here in this world, right within me, and within you, and within our communities, and as close as, well...

A breath.

Breathe. 

A confession. At times in my adult life, I’ve struggled with actually forgetting how to breathe. Some call these episodes “panic” attacks. Then I can get anxious. Then I breathe faster. Then that makes me more worried. Then that makes me breathe even faster. Then that can lead to panic, feeling as if life is just closing in on me. Or that I am responsible for everything, everyone, forgetting God’s got this.

Then I have breathing amnesia somehow and so I have to learn again, be guided by someone, recall and practice how to breathe well. Calmly. Slowly.  Clearly. That’s a lesson I’ve had to learn, and remember, especially when things seem bleak, or when I am convinced that God has left the house and that I am all alone.

I can’t breathe because I am afraid. Or I can breathe and be courageous. 

“Be still and know that I am God…”  the psalmist wrote.  Could also be “Breathe and know that I am God.” I like that too. To see breathing itself as an act of faith and resistance, a declaration that no matter what, God is here, God is with and in us, and God will give us the spiritual tools, energy, and wisdom to do what we must do.  To fight the bad. To embody God’s common good.

But first, we have to breathe.

This is a big week for our nation and our world.  I am praying and hoping and working for an outcome in this election that reflects the goodness of God and the goodness of humanity.  It is not clear that this will be the reality.  It may not be clear the next day or even the next week.

So, God, just help me to breathe. This day. To just breathe.

Air in. Air out.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

    

Dare We Ask Our Leaders to Act With Decency and Honor? YES!

“Have you no sense of decency sir?” --Attorney Joseph Welch, 1954

You have to be of a certain age (old, like me) or a history geek (yup, that’s also me) to understand the momentousness of the question and accusation that Joseph Welch put to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, on June 9^th, 1954. 

“Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

The Oxford Languages Dictionary defines decency as, “behavior that conforms to standards of morality or respectability.” To treat others with decency means we show respect for people, strangers, and neighbors alike, and that we strive to be honest in all of our dealings. At our best, we try to treat others as we wish to be treated.

With decency. 

But in June 1954, decency was in short supply, when it came to the tirades, bluster, lies and cruelty of McCarthy. For four long years, beginning in 1950, McCarthy was a crusading, self-aggrandizing and oftentimes bullying leader in the drive to identify and remove communists from the United States government.  A climate of fear ruled our country then as the Cold War with the Soviet Union heated up. McCarthy claimed to have lists of hundreds of names of so-called subversives that he would soon unveil. The problem was that much of the time he had no names and instead used innuendo and half-truths to intimidate and attack his opponents.

By 1954 the country was beginning to tire of McCarthy’s narcissistic showmanship. That June, McCarthy led nationally televised hearings about his charge that there were communists in the United States Army. Boston lawyer Joseph Welch represented the Army. McCarthy decided to name on TV a colleague of Welch’s and accuse that young lawyer of subversion. Such a charge would doom the young man’s career and ruin his reputation. It was a despicable thing to do. But McCarthy pushed ahead. That’s when Welch asked his famous question.

From the United States Senate website, “As an amazed television audience looked on, Welch responded with the immortal lines that ultimately ended McCarthy's career: ‘Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.’ When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, ‘Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?’"

Welch’s confrontation with the bully McCarthy brings to mind the indecent, mean, and callous ways that one national political candidate speaks about anyone who opposes him or his policies in any way. Yes, it our former President who wants to reoccupy the Oval Office.

A note: this isn’t about partisanship. I’m not a big fan of 45’s ideology. But neither was I a fan of, say, either George Bush senior or Ronald Reagan, and their policies. But I do have respect and even admiration for the decent, honorable, and often kind ways, in how they performed as commanders in chief. They carried themselves well as presidents and human beings. They spoke about their opponents not as the enemy or as subversives to be jailed or a threat to be despised, no. They worked across the aisle to find common ground. They made no veiled or direct threats of violence against anyone who dared to confront them. They actually laughed at themselves and their humanity.

But the one who names towers and hotels after himself? In the past eight years how we as Americans talk about one another and treat each other: its devolved and been cheapened. On the campaign trail but also in many public settings. School Committee meetings. Legislative bodies. Main Street even. That’s his legacy. This is not a red state or blue state issue, or Dems versus the GOP. It is about simple human decency and asking a legitimate question: does the ex-reality TV star ever show any decency in his politics? Or compassion? Mercy? Humility? Restraint of pen and tongue?

He has sullied and changed how we as citizens talk about and to each other, and how our candidates and office holders carry themselves. He has dragged our political and civic discourse down into the mud. We are all now splattered with the stain of his hyperbolic and mean-spirited rhetoric.

So…our ex-President retweets a tweet on X that used pornographic descriptions of sexual acts to defame Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton. Did he really just share that with his followers? He mocked a disabled reporter in a speech as the crowd laughed and cheered. How can someone be that heartless, that cruel? He claims Kamala Harris wasn’t Black until she decided she was Black.  I’m speechless. He’s decided that God saved him from assassination so he could save America. Must be great to know the mind of God. 

I write as a Christian pastor who has worked my whole career to build community in my small corner of Creation, and I am heartbroken at how divided the community called America has become since 2016.  I write because I love our country. I want to see it lifted up again, not torn apart more, nor torn down with negativity and the politics of grievance and menace.  

It is past time for all of us as citizens to call out the indecent and yes, despicable ways he’s tarnished and tarred, our public discourse. It’s time to just say, “No more. Please.” And to remember again Welch’s indictment from seventy years ago. It still rings true.

“Have you no decency sir?”

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

As Summer Fades...Gratitude and Melancholy.

“The summer night is like a perfection of thought.”    --Wallace Stevens, “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm”

Yes, I know it is still three weeks away and yes, I know some folks get really peeved when I name this time of year as the unofficial end of summer, but…. every late August the feelings for me are always the same. Maybe for you too. 

We experience and want to offer gratitude to God for summer and all of the gifts it offers. We experience melancholy, at the passing of one season into another and all the gifts going away.

Summer thanksgiving?

For me that list is so, so long. Sleeping late and no alarm clock. Hot dogs that snap with one bite at the ballpark and cheering on a homerun as a pale-yellow moon rises over center field. Eating supper under the stars with good, good friends. Something off the grill and fresh tomatoes and corn from the garden. Riding my bike on a balmy evening well past 7:30 as the sun seems so reluctant to finally set. That first day of vacation and how the time that lies ahead seems to stretch on for so long. Finding postcards on a road trip to send back home to mom. “Having a great time. Miss you!”

What’s on your summer ‘thank you God!’ list? Have you started to write it out yet, pray it up to God yet?  It may be time.  Labor Day will be here before we know it. And a return to school.  And increasing energy at work for many of us. And shorts and dock shoes that go back into the closet as fall jackets are retrieved.  And the cabin is locked up until next year, after one final BBQ blowout.

Summer melancholy?

Looking at the assembled loved ones in the photo from the July family reunion and knowing that the next time we gather there will more than likely be a few old souls that have passed on to heaven and a few new baby souls to take their place in our clan and the world.  By this time, the Red Sox baseball team that teased us all season has begun their September swoon and fall fade. Wait until next summer! Right?

Nothing and no one lasts forever, not even a summer that always seems to feel so endless to me in May, as the flowers blossom in full and the trees bloom beautifully and the sun rises hot in the sky, and it all begins again.  And then before we know it, September knocks on the door and we remember again that summer is finite. 

But by my calendar we’ve still got about a week left until summer starts to depart.  So, have one final soft serve ice cream and risk a brain freeze. Take a plunge into the pool or the ocean then lean into the warmth of the sun on your back as you huddle under a soft fluffy towel.  Sit out on the back deck and read that book you’ve been hoping to read all summer and read it far into the night, as the crickets chirp away in a summer symphony.  Get the last of the sweet corn and the ruby red tomatoes at the farm stand and dig right in.  Don’t spare the butter or the salt. Take a long walk with a friend at dusk and talk about everything and talk about nothing and just be with each other.

Then lift your eyes up and look to the Creator of summer, the one who paints pink sunsets and gives voice to the robins at the feeder, the power that raises a blue moon in an August sky. The spirit that invites us all to enjoy summer and the other seasons too.

It’s almost goodbye. Thanks again God for a great summer. We’ll miss it. Please make sure and bring it back again next year.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

 

    

      

 

To Make a Difference, Find Hope, and Fight Cancer. RIDE ON!

“I have found that it is the small everyday deed of ordinary folks that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.”     --J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

It’s just a bicycle after all.

Just a two wheeled conveyance, to get me from point A to point B and under my own power too.  It’s got two pedals, twenty-four gears, two jet black tires and sleek levers on the handlebars for shifting up or down. There’s a granny gear for a big hill and a speedy gear for when you get to fly like the wind down a long winding road. Throw in a water bottle or two and a spare tube, maybe a banana in the back pocket of your bike shirt, and that is about it.  Oh, almost forgot. A helmet to keep the rider safe.

You’d think that such a humble contraption couldn’t do much good, not in a world changing way, not in this oh so complicated and huge and often broken place called earth that we all call home. 

I mean what’s a bike up against poverty or war, or violent political rhetoric or all the ‘isms that so hurt God’s children, hurt you, hurt me, hurt everyone? What can one bike do, or perhaps a group of bikes, a team of bikes, maybe even several thousand bikes…what can all those cyclists and bicycles do?

A lot of good, it turns out. A bike can actually carry much hope, and love too, and compassion. 

You see, every year since 1980, tens of thousands of cyclists from around the country and world have ridden in the Pan Mass Challenge (PMC). The PMC is a two-day charity bike ride that for more than forty years, has raised funds for Boston’s world class cancer care institute and hospital, the Dana Farber.  This year the PMC will surpass $1 billion raised to help find a cure, so that one day we might actually make cancer history.

I am blessed to be a PMC’er, have been for fifteen years, and am on a church team of seven amazing fellow riders.  In total more than 5,000 of us will be riding this weekend, through eastern Massachusetts, with many of us biking all the way to P’town on the tip of the Cape.

So, if you find yourself on the roads and byways of the Bay State this coming Saturday and Sunday, you may just see some of these do-gooders, these world changers, these cyclists who just want to work and share some kindness, and work for the dream that we will one day beat cancer once and for all. Beat the disease that takes the lives of more than 600,000 Americans each year. Those folks are our loved ones. Our neighbors. Our friends. The amazing scientists and doctors and helping staff at Dana Farber have come so far in their work. But there is still much to do and many miles to go.

Why do I ride?

I ride for the people I love who are either sick with or have been taken by cancer. I ride for uncles and aunts and mentors and church members young and old and friends and cousins. I ride because I need to be amongst big-hearted people who actually sacrifice and work for a cause greater than self alone, and for the common good. When people work together like this, anything is possible. When people don’t or can’t work thus, well, nothing is possible. Not really.

So, here’s a suggestion. Put down your device that is trying to preach to you a litany of bad news and instead look out on the road for the bearers of some good news. Very good news.  For me and my fellow PMC riders: we can use something as simple as a bike to save lives. We can pedal and reassure a cancer patient that they are not forgotten, that they are in fact, loved. We can ride and remind the world that each of us can do good, lots of good, in our corner of the world.

All we have to do is decide to make a difference. For nothing, nothing is more powerful than a community that commits to come together and then build a new world, just one act of goodness at a time.

God knows we could all use some goodness and good news. 

RIDE ON!    

(Donations can be made at pmc.org)

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

America's Political Leaders: How Old Will We Go? Stay Tuned.

“It is a paradox of democratic politics that only those willing to walk away from power deserve to be entrusted with it in the first place.” –Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe

Should I stay or should I go?

That is the question all of us face as we age.  We’ve worked for many years in a career or calling and then the day comes when we just know it our is time to go. To retire. To find new work. To pursue new passions and pastimes. We realize that where once our body was young enough, agile enough, limber enough to do this or that, well…one day we just can’t do it anymore.  So, we adapt. We find a new sport to embrace.  Think pickle ball instead of tennis.   

The point is simple and clear: we all “age out” in this life. Age out of pursuits, careers, sports, day to day activities. That’s ok. That’s normal. Then if we are wise, humble, and realistic, we let go and go on to whatever is our next chapter.

We know. “Yes—it is time for me to go.”

That is, I guess, unless you are Joe Biden (81) or Donald Trump (78) or Senators Mitch McConnell (82), or Chuck Grassley (91) or Bernie Sanders (82), or Representatives Nancy Pelosi (84) or Grace Napolitano (87). I hope when I am 78 or 81 that I’ll have the stamina and intellectual acuity needed for high office, though I’d never want those jobs. But even if I could do it, should I do it? Or maybe when you get to be that old you step aside and make room for the next generation to serve. Welcome and support those amazing and very ready younger folks to lead our land and bring their new ideas and visions to governance.  

President John F. Kennedy said, “The torch has been passed to a new generation!” But my generation and older—we just can’t seem to let go. If you watched Biden’s “deer in the headlights” debate performance or have ever watched Trump get on the crazy train at one of his rallies or watched as he fell asleep during his recent trial, it’s easy to see that each man is diminished by age. They are “less than,” physically and mentally.

Yet still, they stay.   

Reminds me of a personal sports hero who stuck around the game too long. Carl Yastrzemski played left field for the Boston Red Sox from 1961 to 1983. He was fast in the field and on the bases. He could dive for a ball and elegantly scoop it up for an out. He could smash the ball over the green monster with ease. And then he aged and lost a step and had to give up playing left field for first base and then designated hitter.

I remember watching him play his last year. Like a lion in winter, he gave it his all, but Yaz just did not have it anymore. Reflexes. Strength. Agility. Stamina. These had waned, which is natural for a professional athlete in their forties.

Just as it is natural for a politician in their late seventies or early eighties or beyond to lose a step or two or three. To have trouble retrieving information. To struggle with your energy, and the ability to stay awake, focused, sharp. Yet right now an entire generation of political leaders can’t or won’t see how much they’ve faded.

So, they stay.  To wreak vengeance on those whom they think wronged them. To make sure that their legacy is secure. To hang on to power. To enjoy the elixir of influence. To be a king or queen maker. It’s sad that Trump and Biden and so many other elected leaders don’t know when to exit the stage. Yet, the real risk is that their obstinacy hurts our democracy and blocks the next generation from taking their rightful place in leadership.   

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a President and Congressional leaders who came of age not during World War II and the years after but instead, who grew up in the sixties, seventies, or eighties? So, so much has changed in this world in the past half century. Yet, our choices for president are two men who grew up using dial landline phones, listening to eight track tapes and watching Lawrence Welk on network TV!  Seriously, can’t we please just elect someone who is not yet eligible for Social Security?  

One of my favorite American presidency stories is the amazing tale of the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Both men died just five hours apart on the same providential day: July 4^th, 1826.  Adams was 90 and Jefferson, 83. When those former presidents began their terms of office Adams was 61 and Jefferson 54. Spring chickens in comparison to our current geriatric presidential choices.

Trump, Biden, McConnell, Pelosi, et al: it’s time to take well-earned retirements. Go back home. Play with your grandkids and watch them grow up. Golf. Take afternoon naps. Try painting or cross stitch, or pickle ball! Write a memoir. Return to reality TV.

To stay or to go? Go. Please.  Just go.  It’s time.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

  

Lighten Up! The World Needs Illumination. And Light. And Love.

Life is a lot more interesting if you are interested in the people and the places around you. So, illuminate your little patch of ground, the people that you know, the things that you want to commemorate. Light them up with your art, with your music, with your writing, with whatever it is that you do.”              --Alan Moore, author “V for Vendetta” et al

Lighten up.

That was the wise advice my spiritual director gave me on one of my more downhearted, deadly serious, “chicken little the sky is falling” kind of days.  Can’t remember what I was worrying about, or griping about; what person I was anxious to please or what part of my work I was kvetching about. What in this world, with all its brokenness and beauty, I was complaining about.

The point is—I was living without light. Living unilluminated. Being shady in a way, shadow filled. Pigpen from Charlie Brown comics walks around with perpetual dirt clouds surrounding him.  If I am not careful, I can walk around with perpetual dark clouds surrounding me, huge gray puffy clouds threatening to rain on my parade, on your parade too, if I am not careful.

Thus, my need for light and illumination and to just lighten up. And to remember this sage wisdom every day.  I need the light. We all need the light just to see better, to see more, to see clearly now that the rain is gone, and it just might be a bright sunny day, in the words of a beautiful song.

Thank goodness this week contains the exact day when our supply of natural light is at its peak for the year. On our summer solstice, the sun came up at 5:10 am and didn’t go back down until 8:26 pm.  So much sunlight for so long, longer than any other day of the year. Yes, on June 21^st we will start “losing” sunlight in these parts of the world but let’s not talk about that yet, ok?

Let’s talk about summer light.

The light that allows us to watch a Little League baseball game on a balmy June evening, cheering for all those young players as they round the bases so earnestly. Summer light allows us to enjoy an after-dinner ice cream cone at Dairy Queen or some other local creamery. To stand in line with our fellow frozen treat aficionados as the sun hangs around and nothing tastes better than a cone on a still bright night, right? Summer light gifts us with a long bike ride after work, or nine holes post the office, or maybe a quick sail, or just a walk with the dog.

We need that light. Need to be the light too. God’s light. A love light.

Lately I’ve been paying attention to the people in my life and world who bring light into the lives of other people for no other reason that to just do good and be God’s good in a world that always threatens to go all dim.  Like the person in the drive-thru line at DD’s who paid for the coffee of the person behind them. It’s true. It happened. Someone actually did that for me once. That lightened me up! Or how about folks who treat a brow beaten clerk behind the counter with kindness and care, saying a sincere and kind “Thank you!” and maybe even leaving an unexpectedly generous tip.

That’s sure to brighten someone’s day.

Or think of the rare politician, the civic leader who brings out the light and the goodness in the people she serves. That’s what great leaders always do: they bring out the light in others.  Bad leaders always evoke the worst, appeal to the darkest of human impulses, and are only interested in light if it shines on them. What an illuminated world it could be if folks threw out all those shadowy leaders and instead lifted up those who embody light.

Light. Love. Peace. Joy. Hope.

Funny thing about light is that the more you share with others, the lighter our own lives become.  We lighten up and laugh and don’t take ourselves too seriously and it gives permission for other folks to lighten up too. Jesus was right when he said to his students, “You are the light of the world!”

We all have the light within. The question is….do we see it? See and give thanks to the creator of all illumination for our own light, then share it with others? Everybody needs the light.  Needs illumination. Needs to remember that each human life matters, that if one light, just one life is threatened, all the lights are threatened.

Lighten up.

I’m trying. And you? Will you be the light today? 

Happy summer solstice!

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

 

 

      

D-Day Eighty Years Later: Could We Make Such a Sacrifice?

The American citizen soldiers…didn’t want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed. So, they fought, and won, and all of us, living and yet to be born, must be profoundly grateful.” --Stephen Ambrose, "D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of WWII"

“I see the bodies, John, when I fall asleep and dream. It makes me afraid to close my eyes.”

That’s what Jack told me when I visited him in the hospital several years ago, after he suffered a fall. He was in his late eighties then, with wisps of white hair atop his head, and sharp and clear blue eyes, which looked at me so intently, as I took his hand and listened.

“I was the pilot of a landing craft on D-Day,” he said. “Omaha Beach. I was in charge of a boat that brought troops from the ships to the shores of the beach.”

June 6, 1944: eighty years ago, this week. D-Day was the spearhead of Operation Overlord, the largest amphibious assault ever assembled. Men like Jack piloted 5,000 LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank) to drop 132,000 American, British, and Canadian troops on beaches along the French coast, in Normandy.  Allied planes flew 14,000 sorties to support the landings and 7,000 naval vessels waited offshore. That day the goal was clear and simple: to take back Europe from Hitler and fascism, and to rescue millions of people held under the rule of a murderous despot.

Yet even with the unfathomably huge scale of the battle, that day and that war, as always, was finally personal, up close, unforgettable to those who fought.  People like Jack who in his late teens signed up for the Navy right after Pearl Harbor in 1941. Like so many people then, Jack just knew it was his duty as a citizen to do his part and to help win the war.

On the second day of the invasion after the beach had been largely secured, Jack was still bringing troops and supplies ashore. As he steered his ship through the waters, hundreds of bodies floated on the surface all around his vessel, bobbing up and down, banging against the sides of landing craft. They were soldiers who had been killed in the first wave of landings.

Jack could not escape this awful memory. He told me he had not thought about it for many years, until his nights in the hospital, when, for some reason, it all came back to him. The dead. His feeling of helplessness, that he could not bring any of them back to life. Survivor’s guilt that he was still alive while they were gone forever.

I’m remembering Jack this week, as our world marks the 80^th anniversary of D-Day. It symbolizes and sums up in a way, the personal and collective sacrifice of millions of Americans, who overseas and at home, sacrificed time, and comfort, and loved ones and limbs and lives, for a cause so much greater than self alone.

Of course, there are no morally “clean” wars or wartimes. Millions of innocents died on both sides. In 1944 racism was the norm in our country, so Blacks served in segregated outfits and were denied certain roles in the military. Japanese Americans were held in detention camps, even though they had lived here for generations. Women worked in the factories until wars’ end when most were summarily laid off to make room for returning men.   

Yet for all the ways America struggled to live up to its professed ideals, even still, it is amazing to consider just what so many in Jack’s generation did. Gave up. Fought for. Lost in that war. The haunting memories that would not go away, even after so many decades. 

I’ve come to know many veterans like Jack. Ken, who scaled the bluffs on Normandy beach. Ann, who served as a nurse in the WAVES, the women’s reserve force of the Navy.  Murray, who met his wife Jessie, in London, when he was just 19; he survived Normandy as an infantry man. I’ve never heard any of them say that they regretted what they did, the service they offered to a nation and world in need.

We are living in strange times, eight decades later, with such weird and troubling contrasts between then and now. An ex-president again vying for the highest office in the land has unashamedly called soldiers and prisoners of war, “losers” and “suckers.” We lack any collective understanding about the necessity for communal sacrifice. It makes me wonder…could we do what Jack did? Do we have that civic strength?

I’d like to believe that we still do, that Jack’s example of serving a greater good, and the common good…it still is in our American DNA. I have to believe that, as a citizen and a neighbor, someone who still loves this place we call home, even for all its sins and excesses and mistakes.  

So, thank you, Jack, for your service. We must never forget it. May God help us all, to do our part, if and when the call goes out.  

To serve. To give. To sacrifice.        

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

   

Making Peace With Our Bodies

 

“The body never lies.”            --Martha Graham, dancer, and choreographer

I used to be able to leapfrog over parking meters in a single bound.

I’m not kidding. Hope it doesn’t sound like I’m boasting. It’s just a weird physical ability I once had when I was young, and my body was too. When I was sixteen and playing high school football the coach had us do something called the “six-inch ab exercise.” Lie flat on your back. Arms at your side. Keep your legs together, then raise them up six inches off the ground and hold. HOLD! I could do that for a full minute then, even longer! When I was forty, I rode my bike 545 miles in seven days, from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

Now?

I just found out last week from my orthopedic doctor that I need a second hip replacement. I already had one hip “done” in June of 2020. So, if I tried to repeat that youthful leapfrog trick these days, I could do some serious damage and certainly embarrass myself. “Who’s the old guy lying on the ground writhing in pain next to the parking meter?” And six inches? Maybe one inch and I could hold that for about six seconds.

I think at 63 I’m just trying to make peace with my body. That’s something all humans go through as we age.  Because the truth is that Martha Graham is spot on--a body does not lie. A body always tells us the truth whether we like it or not. We wake up one morning to a new twinge or ache and think…Well, I’ve never felt that pain before!

Even so a body is a such a grace filled and generous gift from God, from the moment we were conceived. The author of Psalm 139 tells us that God knit us together in our mother’s womb and the author of Genesis tells us that each of us is created in God’s image.  You, me, everyone: when we look at one another we see the face of God. Which means that God’s face is seen in all human colors and all human shapes and God lives in the wrinkle and blemish free skin of a child and the spotted and wrinkled and mottled skin of a senior like me.     

I could try to hide or camouflage the fact that this body of mine is very much now a well-used model, no longer brand new and shiny, right off the lot! I guess I could dye my hair or beard. Maybe purchase stretch pants that hide those extra pounds or wear contacts, so folks think I’m still 20/20 in my vision.  Botox perhaps, to smooth out the bags under my eyes or tighten the loose skin on my neck and arms.

I don’t know….

I’ve got a lot of miles on my body, this container made up of chemicals and water and flesh and bone. By this point in life, I’ve taken in something like 530 million breaths. Walked about 170 million steps. Eaten 35 tons of food. (YIKES!) The miracle of the body is that at least for now, mine keeps going. Keeps breathing and walking and living and laughing and moving and riding.

Like many folks, I’ve put my body through the ringer, in some ways. Not taken very good care of this temple God gave to me. I don’t drink or smoke anymore, but I certainly did my fair share of consuming copious amounts of alcohol and puffing away on butts for decades. That was not good for the body. The spirit either. I’ve been able to stay away from both habits now for a while, and I’m praying that this abstinence will help me live longer. I can’t ride 500 miles, but I will try and cycle 100 hundred miles next August in the Pan Mass Challenge Bike Ride, a charity ride across Massachusetts.

Perhaps that will help me live past my life expectancy of 78 years as an American male.  In 1950 that number was just 68 and so we should celebrate that this trajectory is upward, but if you really want to age well and age long, move. To Japan. They live to 85 on average. I’d like an extra seven years.

Finally, the body is what the body is. We can be in denial about aging and getting older, but nothing can stem the passage of time and its slow but sure effect on the bodies we inhabit, these soul containers if you will. What we can do is take loving care of our bodies.  Try and eat well and get enough sleep. Stress less. Pray more. Absolutely laugh more and play more. Spend time with people whom you love and love you right back. Give hugs and get hugs. Helping others helps too. Being a part of some cause or community or belief system bigger than self alone. And move every day.  Off the couch. Into life.

A new hip? Alright. It’s time to schedule the surgery.  And thank you, God, for this “under construction” body of mine. It isn’t perfect. And that’s ok. 

The body doesn’t lie.      

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

 

Finding Hope In The Robin's Nest Right Outside My Door

 "Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life."              --Rachel Carson, author, “Silent Spring”

It’s called the Turdus migratorius.

We know it better as the American Robin, a ubiquitous bird in this part of Creation, and oh so recognizable too, with its deep brick red chest, and its dark gray plumage, and its propensity for pulling up chubby worms out of the soil as we watch in fascination.  Many of us mark the return of spring when we see our first robin, though the truth is that some robins actually winter here, and not just down south. But still, when we spy that new robin, on a chilly spring day, there is something so hopeful about that sighting.

Spring can’t be far behind. Hope. Natural hope. Nature’s hope.

I’ve been feeling a desperate need for hope these past days and weeks.  It feels as if the temperature has been turned up to “HIGH” in our world, that in so many places, everything and everyone is red hot. Tempers are hot and anger is hot, and politics are hot, and violence is hot, and conflict is hot, and war is hot. Folks stand on opposing sides of metal barricades and scream at one another, attack with cutting words or worse, raised fists.  Folks stand in the halls of Congress and with fiery rhetoric tear to pieces those they deem as “the enemy,” leaving no room for compromise or bi-partisanship or simple governance. Soldiers trample over civilians, the innocent, children, widows, bystanders, and wage war with seemingly no thought of collateral damage. The ones injured and maimed and killed. Tens of thousands. Parents. Children. The elderly.  The ill. 

Using terror to fight terrorism. Terrible.

Back to my robin. Yesterday I discovered that this familiar winged creature had built a nest just inside a green and bushy shrub right by my front door. For days I could not understand why every time I came home and walked up the front steps, a red and black blur of a bird flew by me, and landed on a branch not far away, seeming to eye me with suspicion.  My research tells me it is mom tending to the egg. These bright blue eggs should hatch within two weeks, and then within another 14 days, the young will leave that nest.

But I hope they will stay awhile. I hope my presence does not disturb them.

I watch it all with fascination, and a bit of awe too. To see up close such a wondrous process, such a natural gift from the Creator of all things. Robins carrying on, as they have for thousands of years, being born and basking in summer sun and finding a mate and making more robins. Robins who are the first birds to sing at dawn, their sing-songy warble, pretty and light.  

Robins who do not know of human stupidity or human bloodlust or human hubris or human sin.  That’s a good thing.  Robins who survive in spite of us. More than 370 million robins live in North America alone, making this species one of the most common birds on the earth.

But not so common. Not to me.  Not to those of us who need to be reminded the world is a big and resilient and ancient place, and that perhaps, with God’s grace, the world will carry on too, in spite of its more brutish inhabitants, especially the species that goes by the title homo sapien.  “Homo” meaning human and “sapien” that comes from the Latin word meaning “wise.”   Not so sure about that second designation. Not when it comes to the unwise and yes cruel ways we home sapiens have been acting lately. Towards Creation. Towards each other.

Yet this grace-full family of robins, gives me and my anxious spirit, something else to witness and enjoy, even while some days it can feel like the world is ablaze in a conflagration of so much pain and suffering. For now I think I’ll just wait for new life to show up and yes, right by my front door.

Thank you, robins. Thank you, nature. Thank you, God.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

  

   

     

 

Welcome Back Spring. Finally Here! God Knows We Missed You!

"Blossom by blossom the spring begins."       --Algernon Charles Swinburne

It has to come. It must come. It will come. It has come. Finally.

Spring. At least for me. How about for you?

Yes, I know that technically, meteorologically, spring began in these parts March 1^st; or if you really want to split hares (!) spring began March 19^th, more than a month ago when the earth’s equator aligned with the sun.  

Others marked spring’s initiation on April 9^th, the day of the Red Sox home opener, played in the friendly confines of Fenway Park. Bright blue skies and sixty degrees. It was a mixed day, with excitement at a brand-new year but sadness too. For Sox pitcher Tim Wakefield, the team’s longtime knuckleballer, as good a soul and teammate as you’d ever meet, he was remembered. You see he died much too young at 57 of cancer last October. Tears were shed by fans and teammates. 

And then it was an underwhelming effort by the men in red and white. Baltimore Orioles 7, the Sox 1.

Maybe the onset of spring for you is about enjoying foods that come back after chilling out for winter. Ice cream cones. Anything grilled. On a seaside boulevard south of Boston, not far from my childhood home, is a venerated restaurant called the Clam Box. For 55 years folks have stood in line there in flip flops and dripping bathing suits awaiting the deep-fried delicacy of fresh clams, or fish and chips right out of the fryer, or a juicy cheeseburger, or in my case, onion rings. The Clam Box on Wollaston Beach makes the best rings in all of western civilization. Light and flaky, just a bit sweet, crunchy batter all brown and golden, salt sparkling on the rings’ surface.  Many springs my mom and I have ventured forth on the first warm spring Sunday, walked down to the beach and returned to the Clam Box. YUM!

How about the Boston Marathon? That’s a good signal for spring, the streets of MetroWest and Boston teeming with thousands of runners and cheering throngs.  Or taking the lawn furniture out of the basement and setting it up in the backyard. Putting up storms windows and pulling down the screens. Carrying heavy sweaters and flannel shirts back to the cedar closet, for winter hibernation and then pulling out short sleeve shirts and docksider boat shoes and maybe even a baseball glove and ball too.   

This year my spring opening came late, in part because it has felt so Seattle-esque around here, all rainy and chilly and gray. But yesterday I returned home from a weekend away to an explosion of colors that mother nature offered up, seemingly overnight. One day all is cold mud and blustery winds and cold temperatures and then one morning, spring just explodes!  

Announces itself with gaudy and gorgeous colors. Yellow daffodils dance forth. Red tulips twist and tango in the breeze. Green buds emerge on the end of tree branches, their tendrils stretching up towards heaven.  The purple azaleas in my front yard are blooming forth in all their violet vivaciousness, almost spilling over into the driveway.  The bright yellow forsythias that border the neighbor’s yard look like an explosion of sunshine, one huge bush spilling out onto the lawn in a symphony of golden hues.

WOW!  Weren’t those bushes bare, barely a day or so ago?

Welcome back spring! And yes, however we humans choose to meet it, to mark it, to revel in it, to calendar it, to just say hello to this new season.  God knows we need spring. I know I absolutely do, every year. Maybe this year even more with so much ugly, messy stuff going on in our country and world. Spring never gets old or boring. Never fails to amaze with its resurrection power, its invitation to start all over again, to begin anew, to believe in renewal, both natural and spiritual.  

In April and May God wakes us and the earth up from slumber and lethargy, shakes our shoulders and dares us to revel in the warmth again. To be witness to these months when the earth embodies hope as it awakens too. Nothing can hold back spring. It has been with us forever in a way and it is stronger and more faithful and dependable than any human power. Thank you, God, for spring.  May we enjoy it and invite it back into our hearts and homes.

Me? I’m ready for my very first order of onion rings. It is finally time for spring!

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

 

NO INTERNET?!?! Confessions From Living A Life Offline.

“Technology is a useful servant, but a dangerous master.” --Christian Lou Lange, Nobel Peace prize recipient, 1921

It’s 1994 again.

To clarify: in my house, it’s 1994. Technologically speaking, I’m living thirty years ago. My Verizon FIOS internet service just stopped working this week. “No Internet” my laptop informed me. Well that’s just great! When I tried to reach google, my browser’s cheeky message didn’t take this tragedy seriously enough. “Hmmmm. We’re having trouble finding that site.” Ya think! Until a tech person repairs the wires that a little critter munched on, I am without the internet.    

WITHOUT THE INTERNET!

That’s right. I am being forced to live in the real world, with real people, non-stop, 24/7!  No surfing the web, no reading news online, no checking the weather or reading email, or perusing Facebook or falling into the Reddit rabbit hole. No more Amazon or crossword puzzles. No YouTube to review songs my choir is singing this season and no Google to quickly look up some random fact or idea.

My cyber umbilical cord has been cut, and I’ll admit…it really hurts.

I’m using my phone to connect but it’s just not the same. Not even close. Screen is way too small. No internet also means I’m without streaming services, so no TV either.  No CSI New York or Star Trek Next Generation or The Good Place to soothe me when I get home from a long day at work. No Netflix. Max is missing. Hulu hidden. I got so desperate on my first screenless night, I hooked up an old DVD player and watched my favorite PBS detective show and yes, I know that makes me sound as old as dirt.      

How old? The last time I lived untethered from the information superhighway, Bill Clinton was President, Tom Hanks was Forrest Gump on the big screen (Life is a box of chocolates!) and Ace of Base had the #1 song, “The Sign”. I was a kid, 33 and the most I did with my used Macintosh, was write sermons and play tic tac toe.  

In 1994 millions of us were introduced to something called the “world wide web.” I still remember the day I installed America Online on my desktop computer and signed up for an email account. (Yup—I still have and use it, if only for the looks I get from the young, as in What’s AOL?). The web then was all so quaint, simple, new. I’d dial into AOL, knowing I was on my way by that weird series of beeps, buzzes, clicks and chhhhhhhhhh.

“You’ve got mail!” my computer would cheerfully chirp. Then the internet was exotic, wild, kind of clunky. Sites loaded up so slowly. It was mostly nerds and computer geeks who actually understood how to use it and how it worked. 

But now? We do everything online. EVERYTHING. Nothing escapes that virtual world. We connect. Date. Fall in love. Read test results from the doctor. Book plane tickets. Order everything from flowers to pharmaceuticals to a pizza. We watch our home camera that shows the dog tearing apart the couch pillows and who just rang the doorbell. We zoom. Imagine COVID without zoom? We’d have been completely cut off from one another.    

The web is also about some not so good stuff. Vulnerable people (especially kids) get bullied by anonymous folks on social media. Teens fall prey to unrealistic notions about looks, weight, life. I don’t look like that person. I’m ugly. Less than. Foreign governments like Russia and China spread disinformation and try to influence elections. Demagogues lie about everything and whip up their followers to carry out violence. Folks consume pornography in huge amounts. (Fourteen percent of web searches and 4 percent of websites are porn-related, according to a recent BBC report.)

What amazes me is how far and how fast the world has come because of the net. So much information created, disseminated, and democratized. Trillions of dollars’ worth of business transactions. And all these technologies come about because humans use the minds that God gives to each and everyone of us.

We think. We create. We progress. We change the world.

Is technology a blessing? Yes. Is it a curse? Yes. Are many of us addicted to it? Yes. Has it made life better? Yes. Could we live without it? I suppose. Do we want to live without it?

Not me.

Maybe when my internet finally comes back, I’ll ask God to help me be more thoughtful and intentional about my endless appetite for life in cyberspace. Look up from my screen into actual life. Look away from online “life” more often. Let me enjoy the thousands of movies and TV shows and documentaries I have access to, and then let me close the laptop, switch off the big screen TV. Take a walk outside. Go old school. Read a real book.  Or get together in the real world with a friend for coffee. More conversation. Less text.

Verizon: I’d like to get back to 2024. Now please. I lived in 1994 once and though I miss “Ace of Base”, it’s time to come back to my wired home. 

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

 

Spring and Hope and the First Ride of the Season...Ready?

"Where flowers bloom so does hope." – Lady Bird Johnson

I open up the blinds on my bedroom window and look out at the world. I was hoping for a better forecast when I went to bed last night, one more promising than the cloudy and cool conditions predicted for today. 

It’s grey, overcast, not very spring like, not what I hoped, for my first ride of the new cycling season.

That’s what I tell myself, chilly first day of April, a Monday, Easter Monday. Twelve days into spring. One day since Jesus rose up from the dead, but me? I’d like to stay down all day, thank you very much. Recline on my soft couch. Sip smoky dark coffee. Read the news on my laptop and rest. 

He may be risen but this pastor is bone tired and weary from a week of non-stop services. So many sermons preached, and lots of prayers pronounced, and hundreds of hands shaken, and several Easter hymns sung and one 6:15 am sunrise seen and a schedule like no other time of year. Hence my prevarication about getting back on the bike again, after six months off.     

It’s too cold to ride. Maybe later in the week. Just a few days more to wait.   

This is New England spring after all, a most fickle and unpredictable season.  In 1997, in a meteorological April Fool’s Day joke, mother nature sent 25 inches of snow to these parts. Last week ice cold needles of rain fell almost every day, chilling me, drenching me, soaking everything and everyone. Today is not as dramatic weather wise but rushing out to the car late this morning to retrieve my favorite “Baseball Hall of Fame” thermal coffee container from the car, I was barefoot as I skipped across the driveway.  My toes curled in at the coolness of the pavement. 

I can always ride in another day or two. Yeah, that’s it.  Who’s going to know?

Then I open an email and it’s from the young man I’ve hired to help me train this year for the summer charity bike ride I’ve done for the past fourteen summers. Almost 100 miles in just one day.  “Enjoy your first ride of the season!” he enthusiastically instructs me. I’d forgotten I told Owen about my sometime yearly tradition of riding on Easter Monday.

Damn it! Now I have to ride. No excuses.

I go out to the garage and examine my just tuned up bicycle. It’s a deep blue color, all sleek and straight lines, thin black tires built for speed in the front and back, handlebars just waiting for someone to grip them again, to take this twenty-three-pound cycle out for a spin. 

Can I still do it? Ride ten or twenty or forty or eighty miles? I don’t know.

This bout of insecurity hits me every year, just before I take up my bike again. I worry about being able to make it up the first big hill of the season, to spin the pedals eighty revolutions per minute, thighs burning, lungs huffing, butt stinging, hands numbing.  If I’m not careful I might psych myself out but then I remember. Most springs, most Aprils, since 1995, almost thirty years, I’ve mounted up on my two-wheeled conveyance, and ridden, ridden again. Still, it feels like the first time ever.

Relax. Just do circles on the pedals. Just spin. No rush. It’s not a race.  Enjoy it.

That’s my inner voice of calm, or perhaps God, reminding me that the ride is not about going the fastest or proving something to someone, no. It’s not a race or competition to win or lose. It’s about the joy of watching the world go by at twelve or thirteen miles per hour, and hearing the quiet thrum of the wheels beneath you as they glide across the blacktop, and listening to the “clack, clack” of the gears as they shift, and watching as a hawk lands on a tree just into the woods on your right and feeling the sun as it warms the skin on your arm. 

Feeling more alive somehow.   

I can do this.

First ride. Saddle up.  Spring calls forth, to me, to you, to all of us. God declares, “Begin again.” 

Ready?

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.