Docs and musings

“I was in prison, and you visited me.” – Matt. 25:36
 
Twice a year, in the gym of Phillips State Prison in Buford, Ga., the love of Christ pours out on more than 50 inmates selected to be in a long weekend retreat called the Kairos Prison Ministry.
 
Kairos is an international ministry in nearly 500 prisons in nine countries – but mostly in the United States, which holds the record for per capita prison populations. The lay Outsiders who have come to Phillips State Prison are from scores of churches of various denominations in the Atlanta area, including three men from Holy Trinity Parish, my home church here in Decatur.
 
Ron Stein, until the Covid pandemic, was involved in the follow-up program that brings monthly visits to maintain the Kairos community of prayer and fellowship after the inmates’ three-and-a-half day weekend. Pete Pfeiffer has been involved in Kairos for 25 years, starting at Lee State Prison when he was at First United Methodist Church in Cordele, Ga. Since coming to HTP, he has continued to be involved and he talks about it in adult Sunday school. The third HTP member, Tim Ball, who was inspired to join by hearing from Pete in Sunday School, has been involved in the long weekends at Phillips State Prison.
 
It’s an exhausting experience that Tim, at 77, is taking a break from now. He says the prayers, singing and small table discussions “about life” and its choices are a powerful release for incarcerated people. “Working in a prison where men had not been able to speak their minds and talk to anybody else, it’s just a wonderful experience,” Ball said.
 
The ministry is designed to maximize the experience of Christian forgiveness, community and release. It grew out of an older movement called Cursillo, or “short course” in the faith, which began with Catholics in Spain in 1948. In 1979, men of the “Fourth Day” (living into the commitments of their three-day Cursillo weekend) created a prison-appropriate version of a Cursillo weekend, which became the Kairos ministry. (“Kairos” means God’s moment, or “the fullness of time,” in the Greek New Testament.)
 
Kairos has various forms, for women and youth as well as men, and for one-on-one as well as the long weekends. One former inmate named Richard Jones, a friend in our previous church, Grace Episcopal in Lexington, Va., said his Kairos weekend was the best experience of his life. He remembers especially the Saturday evening when he received bags of encouraging letters and cards from people “who didn’t know me from a bucket of paint.”
 
“There’s so much love, you could cut it with a butter knife,” he said.
 
Ron Stein had always been curious about how prisoners survived. But curiosity changed to real relationships once he got involved, even though it remains “in the moment” without reference to the past or future. “I don’t just go for myself,” he said. “Some of these guys, their families have given up on them. They have no one else. . . I realized, we’re the only people who care about them.”

We flew for four and a half hours across the land, stuffed into a full Delta airliner four rows apart, no view of the land. No earbuds, no room to reach them in my shoulder bag under the seat, I watched “2001: A Space Odyssey” without sound. I could pay more attention to the camera angles (mostly no angle, straight-on symmetry) and “special effects” without the goofy music and dull dialogue. Check. The movie is just as pretentious, sluggish and enigmatic isolated as pure visual.

   Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about a Theory of Man (as the science of homo sapiens would’ve been called in former times, before we cleaned up our language of gender and race). It’s remarkable to me that the most singular thing about the human creature, our web of connections through symbols of words, laws, rituals, faith, etc., is so little remarked on or understood. In “2001,” the idea that these things evolved is assumed in “The Dawn of Man” scenes, but these “things” of language are misplaced as “tools and weapons” (In a sense, symbols are our “tools and weapons,” but that is only a metaphor for a mystery.) The apes in these scenes discover using bones to kill prey for food, then to kill one another. A bone-as-tool becomes the spaceship a million years later, in 2001 Anno Domini. What caused the earlier evolutionary leap, and what will help us to the next stage? It’s a mystery, represented by the featureless black monolith. (The next stage, of course, is in Christ, the New Man, as we say unconsciously with “the Year of Our Lord” 2001.)

    Arriving in Portland, then brought to Salem in a car with windows hot to the touch (registered as a record-breaking 110 F outside on I-5), we eventually re-fueled on Chinese takeout and settled on couches to watch CNN and MSNBC for big news on a big thin-screen TV. The big news came right from my hometown, the familiar Fulton County courthouse where I went to settle Mother’s estate in 2017. The news was, in a sense, about us – as citizens of Georgia, we are the aggrieved party in The State of Georgia v. Donald Trump et al. 

    The grand jury indicted the former President and 18 others on racketeering charges. This is clever, to call what Trump tried to do openly and with the apparent agreement of his millions of supporters, a criminal conspiracy. All he did was to claim voter fraud, and use that claim to perform a kind of theater of pseudo victory. So? He’s an entertainer, a brand. But the purpose was to overturn the election of Joe Biden. To call this a “criminal conspiracy” is clever, and unique. What mobster was ever a former President, or ever acted so brazenly and publicly? (Well, maybe in a sense the populi always have a kind of amused moral laxity about knowing that famous gangsters were supplying them with bootleg gin, or like in Providence, that Raymond Patriarca was keeping Federal Hill safe using killer henchmen. Trump voters know he is “bad,” but they are amused and hope he might bring a more convenient order to their lives.) What is truly unique about this alleged criminal enterprise is that its purpose was to overthrow the outcome of a Presidential election. It’s not an exaggeration to call this an attempted coup, or the overthrow of American democracy.

    Back to that most human thing, our web of connections through language (the meaning of evidence, of logic, of facts and laws), the DA, Fani Willis, began by reminding us that all of the accused are presumed innocent. A grand jury looks only at “probable cause,” and needs only a majority of 23 (the equivalent of a unanimous jury of 12) and looks at only the prosecutor’s side of the story. A trial will be closer to “truth” as a contest, with rules and rights favoring the defendants. Proof must be “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Trump doesn’t have to take the stand. But can he stand that silently, missing his campaign rallies?

   The breakdown in language, in meaning, is a sign, like the 110-degree F on the car windows. Something is terribly amiss. Was this an attempted “coup,” an attempt against American democracy? Was this a “criminal conspiracy” and is Trump the Godfather of thugs? I don’t think we all agree on the meaning of these words. I don’t think we all agree, even, that the Fulton County Courthouse, with all its rules of evidence and procedure, is the proper place to resolve our differences on this. Within families, our solution is “Let’s not talk about politics.” Or religion. Or the news. We certainly won’t talk about politics when we visit relatives nearby, with a brother’s ex joining us. And here, with my Democratic in-laws, all the talk is in agreement that the Republican Party is sick and doomed.

[from my profile of Frank Hamilton in Salvation South]

I guess you could say I became part of the Frank Hamilton community before I met him.

I realized this one Sunday afternoon as I sat listening to the Showcase, a recital of all the Frank Hamilton School’s classes at the end of each eight-week term. Our daughter, Sarah, would sing “Summertime” with her harmonica class. My wife, Libby, would play stand-up bass with her string-bass class and sing with my sister, Anne Preston, in their “Sing Your Heart Out” class.

And though I had taken no classes, the harmonica class was letting me play my tenor saxophone on “Watermelon Man.”

Each class performed on a tiny stage, in between school director Maura Nicholson’s cheerful groan-worthy jokes. This was in the administration building of what had been a sprawling Methodist orphanage across the street from Columbia Theological Seminary. Many in the audience were also performers, but some were not. The local physical therapist of my wife and daughter was in the audience (sitting beside Frank Hamilton, by chance) because they invited him. I recognized some old family friends near the front—local actress Carolyn Cook and her husband Matt Cook, a retired radio newsman my father had taught in college. I have no idea why they were there.

Sitting at ease in this audience, I had an epiphany. I turned to my sister, and whispered, “Do you realize that none of the women here are wearing makeup and none of the men have tucked in their shirts?” Most of them wore T-shirts. These are our kind of people, I said.

No, that sounds too exclusive. At the Frank Hamilton School, the cultural identity is loose, open, accepting, and honestly joyful. The variety of musical styles and musical skill levels signifies that openness. Music is a unifier. The humanity of the whole world is here.

As I was thinking about this, a young woman with beautiful dark Middle Eastern eyebrows above her black N95 mask played a hurdy-gurdy, one of her hands cranking it as her other hand played something fast with nimble fingers. The musical mode was one I had never heard before, and it made me smile. The teacher on the hurdy-gurdy was Melissa Kacalanos of New York. Her four adult students were all pounding out the same hypnotic rhythm on hand-held Goblet drums, the Egyptian doumbek. They were all beginners.

It transported us at no cost to another part of the world, to another age, and felt all the more that we belonged to the present in our home community.

A “mushroom hike” is a slow-moving thing. The two organizers of our hike last Saturday were debating which trails to follow, thinking the 14 of us would cover a mile or two. But one of our two guides, Sam Landes, treasurer of the Mushroom Club of Georgia, stopped them. We’re only going to cover a few hundred feet every 15 minutes, he said.

The 2 ½ hour hike would cover about a half mile up the abandoned Drunken Spring Road and Corn Hill Knob trail, since that was the wetter choice, three days after the last rain. He and his wife, a pediatrician and researcher in economic botany named Cornelia Cho, were leading. They had come to this North Georgia mountain in a car with the license plate of “FUNGI” and Sam wearing a pro-mushroom t-shirt and bearing a basket with a plastic container for about two dozen specimens and two magnifying loops. 

Our fungi hike also included four rambunctious dogs who got up to their dew claws in mud. After the hike, we gathered for a sweet picnic in a maple’s shade, piling goodies on bagel slices downed with bubbly. Sam didn’t give the summing up lecture I was hoping for, but he had spread five beautiful books on the old golf links bench – The Lives of Fungi: A Natural History of Our Planet’s Decomposers, Bunyard; A Field Guide to Mushrooms of the Carolinas, Bessette, et al; Mushrooms of the Southeast, Todd Elliott et al; Spalted Wood, on the lovely blue-green wood of the fruited Emerald elf cup (chlorociboria aerugiosa), and catalogues to the Campbell Folk School. And he did answer questions while I took notes.

Too many kinds of fungi fill the woods for our decomposing brains. But there was something exciting about the knowledge Sam and Cornelia were wasting on us. They spoke Latin names of genus and species of Russula, morels and Amanita, naming parts too small to see without a loop: gills, spores, and the tiny pin holes on the underside of the polypores. They told hopeful stories of natural medicinal values, like the extract from the true Turkey Tail (pictured above) that can boost the immune system against certain cancers, and the spit poultice from the common plantain weed that once stanched swelling when Cornelia was stung in her hand by a few yellow-jackets, she told us. Sam would vanish into dark bracken grottoes to find the tiny red pimples called Wolf’s Milk or a slime mold (not a fungi but a mycoparasite, not to be confused with mold in your house). He would explain the morphology of what you see on the ground or on rotting logs, and what you don’t see, the vast networks of mycelia that communicate and transact energy with “mother trees” in ways that make the science of it sound mystical. Or at least Lamarkian. 

Sam and Cho brought us more than the names we couldn’t remember, let alone spell. They opened our eyes to a glittering reality deep in the dank cycles of life at our feet, a magic we previously only suspected in our savage love of these familiar trails.This is what Sam and Cornelia actually left in our brains, the experience of the naming that science does, but in this case narrowly focused on the life of our wild woods. In a dazzling documentary I watched later on Netflix, “Fantastic Fungi,” Michael Pollan describes fungi enthusiasts like Sam and Cho as being in the tradition of 19^th century amateur botanists and naturalists, the scientists of their day. Whether we remember the names or the parts, we know that these have names and categories that have been discovered by “amateur” scientists like Sam and Cornelia.

We are now a part of that, the shared world of human language at the delectable tip of human curiosity (like the tip of cat briar we were invited to chew like deer). Language is the human mycelial mat, concepts mysteriously networked in our neural pathways and shared everywhere in our books, picnic conversations and iPhones. We feel sanctified by a collective curiosity, stalking fungi that emerged even before the flowers, the angiosperms of our 100-million-year period (represented by what remained of the pink lady slippers at our feet, flowers that bloomed briefly in April). They emerged even before lichen, which Sam described as “fungi that has taken up agriculture,” usually two merged fungi with a bit of algae to share its photosynthesis.The fantastic fungi were here even before the photosynthesis of plants, which let animal life flourish, We are learning how the trees cooperate in a beautiful communication and trade policy with fungi, which sequester 70% of the carbon that trees breath in from the air, thank you very much.

They were here before us, and as the documentary says, they’ll be here long after, if we don’t learn how to live in harmony with these efficient underworld decomposers and resurrectionists.

The two of us once hiked far into an enchanted forest in Italy called the Sybillini Mountains. From a deep ravine with dancing waters we climbed a path up and up through a stand of pristine trees, mostly some kind of birch I think. The path got steeper, the trees more uniform and a wind in the trees stronger, as if to send us a message through the living leaves. (I wish I could tell you what kind of tree.) At the remote-seeming peak, a vision: a classical stone chapel, open to us. Inside the small sanctuary, apparently maintained by monks but deserted when we entered, an altar had these Italian words engraved, “LA VIA, LA VERA, LA VITA.”

This is what Jesus said he was — “I am” — when Thomas asked him at the Last Supper (John 17), “How can we know the way?” How interesting that the three words have similar spellings in Italian (and Latin). The way, VIA, has the same first and last letters as the truth and the life. And the “Way” becomes the “Life,” in Italian, if you insert a “T,” which is sometimes taken as the Cross.

George Herbert, the 17th century poet and Anglican pastor, played with these three little English words in a poem that is set to the 20th century music of Ralph Vaughan Williams as Hymn 487 in the Episcopal Hymnal.

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
Such a way as gives us breath;
Such a truth as ends all strife;
Such a life as killeth death.

Singing this, as we did last Sunday in church, you might miss the tight verbal patterns, let alone the packed meanings. The stanza is rhymed A-B-A-B. The second, third and fourth lines all start the same way, “Such a,” like three silver clasps of those jewels, Way, Truth and Life. But after the first line, the upper-case words that represent Christ Himself, become the lower-case generic words, as the divine became incarnate in the human. So, “Such a” connects the singular with the universal, the temporal with the eternal.

Look closer at the interior rhyme scheme. The last word of the second line, “breath,” is an off rhyme with the third word of the next line, “truth.” Similarly, the last word of the third line, “strife,” is rhymed with the third word of the next line, “life.” So the whole verse is woven together in an intricate almost mathematical design, exhibiting the idea that the sound and structure of language itself can reveal beauty that is nested within its meaning. When the meaning is metaphysical, the effect in language is what made George Herbert one of the Metaphysical Poets, as John Donne and some other contemporaries are called.

This tight pattern of English word-sounds is also maintained, remarkably, in the second and third stanzas of this three-verse hymn. Herbert invokes two new trinities to echo Christ’s self-naming triplet of the Way, Truth and Life, making an overall design of three. The second verse:

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:
Such a light as shows a feast;
Such a feast as mends in length;
Such a strength as makes his guest.

And the third and final verse:

Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart:
Such a joy as none can move;
Such a love as none can part;
Such a heart as joys in love.

The ingenious design weaves like a braid, but it may be too much. It strains the meaning. Although “mend” can be an intransitive verb, meaning to increase in value, a feast that “mends in length” makes little sense, unless you take “in length” to mean lifelong, or eternal. What kind of joy can none “move”? What kind of love can none “part”? It is biblical language, of course, and the idiom may be partly lost to 21st century English. Also, to hold the design, Herbert needs “move” to rhyme with, or at least look like, “love.” And he needs “length” to rhyme with “strength,” which means he needs a one-syllable intransitive verb to connect with length. Since the feast is Christ’s eucharistic Body, maybe “mends” is the perfect and porous verb. But much of this poem doesn’t make sense.

How does such a strength “[make] his guest”? I think it means the Lord (“Strength”) makes (me) his guest.

This may be explained by a feast in another poem, “Love (III).” This most well-known of Herbert’s poems is from the point of view of a wayfarer who arrives, let’s say at a tavern on the road, and is welcomed by Love, the ultimate allegorical figure.

“Love bade me welcome,” the poem begins, “yet my soul drew back.” The poem is a dialogue, a tender disagreement, between Love and a guilt-ridden traveler. Love,“sweetly questioning” the dusty traveler, finally leaves him cornered. So he offers to serve. She (for “quick-eyed” Love seems very feminine here) abruptly cuts off the dialogue. “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit, and eat.” No more argument. He is made Love’s guest.

Those last two lines give me the shivers. This is the poem that the writer Walker Percy mentions as giving him a final push into his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church. Simone Weil, the French philosopher whose conversion to the Roman Church was never completed, describes reciting the poem to herself when she was suffering from intolerable headaches, and then having Christ descend and take possession of her. For me, studying the poem in a college class called “The Metaphysical Poets” was not that intense. But it may have been the start of something important in my life, on the way.

Post script to the post “Three Little Words”: Jesus’s answer to Thomas in the Gospel of John, that he is “The Way, the Truth and the Life,” makes a claim that is particularly hard to defend, much less understand, in today’s pluralistic and reasonably offended world. Rowan Williams, the intellectual Archbishop of Canterbury (2002-12) with the wonderfully upswept eyebrows and wizard’s beard, unpacked this challenge in a lecture he gave in 2010.

The problem: The claim that Jesus is THE Way, Truth and Life is aggressively exclusive, asserting what Williams calls an absolute and unique “finality.” It’s a position that can embarrass sensitive Christians in the face of Jewish continuity, other beliefs, and non-belief (even of dear friends and family).

Here is the former archbishop’s lecture. It’s carefully set out, so I can’t adequately simplify it. But to try to keep it straight in my head, or if you don’t read the whole thing, here’s my outline of what Williams calls the three “great objections” and his answers:

I. Modern Objections

1. Moral – For God to base salvation on one chancy, historically embedded “way.”
2. Political – That it’s a recipe for contempt of, or crusades against, outsiders.
3. Philosophical – How can the final “truth” be born in a single place and culture, and apply to everyone always?

II. Problems with these Objections

1. Gospel is not saying “or else!” to outsiders, but speaking only about a vital relationship with Jesus as the “final” form of everyone’s full humanity – what each person was always meant to be.
2. To say this truth isn’t for everybody is to divide humans and humanity into various pieces, condescending to some, making Christian faith relativistic.
3. “The Way” is not an abstract principle, but is more like a walk, a personal discovery, an individual’s transformation.

III. Modest Answers to these Objections

1. Moral – It would be more unfair to deny that all have access to an ultimate Father-Son relationship as the stamp of full humanity, the eternal in our nature.
2. Political – This is God’s work, not ours in any particular cultural form. Understanding that, we become humble about what we know and claim, and more critical of human systems, racism, bigotry, arrogance, etc.
3. Philosophical – There is “something about human nature which is beyond change and negotiation; something about the way we are as humans.”

So how should Christians, believing this, relate to other faiths and nonbelievers? Williams says: With open minds and hearts, on the principle that there’s much to learn from others if you are free to live in the true fullness of your human nature and in expectation of its coming to all (including yourself).

Heval Kelli, a Kurdish Syrian Muslim refugee living in Clarkston, just outside the Perimeter from here, exudes the kind of human empathy you can see in his very being. He listens quietly and attentively, and in responding to what even the most troubled or inarticulate person says, he seems to have just the right words. We saw this in the documentary “Refuge,” which five of us watched in a nearly empty Plaza theater Wednesday afternoon, the matinee (after we were turned away from the sold-out premiere on Sunday).

The man’s empathy, half saint-like, half bemused with irony, has three layers, I think. One is his experience as a refugee. His father was tortured. He spent his youth in a refugee camp. By the sheerest random luck, he got to America a few days after 9/11, and was sent to Clarkston, now called the most ethnically diverse square mile in America because of its welcoming structures for refugees from places like Syria and Somalia. A second layer is his quiet religious practice as a Muslim. He prays in the traditional way five times a day, and performs the duties of compassion and peace from the Koran. And finally, there’s the overlay of being an Emory cardiologist. He is trained well by the institution and Hippocratic oath to pay close attention to illness of body and soul in others, both meanings of the word “heart.”

We grow cynical about doctors, who seem to pursue specialties that separate them from the whole person, specialties that pay a lot more than general practice. But when I see Dr. Kelli, “call me Heval,” in the film, I think of Libby’s visit to a Hispanic cardiologist at Emory’s hospital on North Decatur Road, and my visit to a native Indian periodontist yesterday, Dr. Ash. They both exuded the same feeling of compassion as Dr. Kelli, which I now associate with a special gratitude and patriotism I sense in American immigrants who have achieved the height of success in the healing arts. Dr. Ash put his hand on my shoulder as he came from behind while I sat pitched back the dentist’s chair, and touched me the same way when he left. When I complained about my recent experience trying to get some reimbursement or explanation for the $1,042 I paid for getting a crown at this same big dentistry office, he agreed with me wholeheardedly about the shame of the U.S. not having universal healthcare. Even his native India, he said, has a more humane healthcare system. There are several doctors in his extended family, and all are for universal healthcare, he said. And he is horrified at the prevalence of guns here . .  He seemed to say without words, about guns: “Don’t get me started.”

Heval was an obvious protagonist for the two University of Virginia alumnae who decided to make this documentary, “Refuge,” after they were shocked by the Unite the Right rally in their beloved Charlottesville in 2017. There’s a scene in the movie where Heval welcomes a Republican Primary candidate for governor who arrives in Clarkston, by some miscalculation, on his “Deportation Bus” tour of Georgia. Heval offers him some good baklava, which Williams samples with the forced courtesy of the campaign trail. (Williams ended up with less than 5% of the primary vote, while Kemp, running ads of him hunting illegals with a shotgun, went on to barely beat Stacey Abrams that year.)

The heart of the documentary is about Heval’s relationship with another man, the extreme version of the type who would vote for a Williams or a Kemp. Chris Buckley is an Army veteran living in Lafayette, in the northwest corner of Georgia near the Tennessee and Alabama state lines. The relationship makes a powerful case for an answer to “hate groups” like those at the Charlottesville rally. The film shows the effectiveness of getting those who resent the Other to know one of them well. Chris, a heavily tattooed son of an abusive father, came back from traumatic experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan with an addiction to pain meds that evolved into a crystal meth habit that was tearing him away from a wife and son. He found his way clear of drugs with a 12-step program. But it goes further. A counselor with “Parents for Peace” introduces him to Heval, on the notion that a 12-step program to overcome a ritualized hatred of Muslims (Chris had joined the local Klan) required a relationship with a Muslim. It worked, creating a road show out of Heval and Chris with their message, and this powerful documentary under the Katie Couric brand. (Couric, who briefly replaced Dan Rather as anchor of CBS Evening News, also went to UVa.)

One scene that struck me powerfully was Heval first driving through Lafayette, Ga., in his late-model black Mercedes-Benz. He is shocked by the poverty, the hovels and trailers, the despair that makes such communities the ruined gardens of opioid addiction or make Trump’s gilt-edge delusions so appealing. I feel the heartbreak of this landscape. I have seen it in Rockbridge County, Va., and in Pickens County, Ga., so close to the bountiful nature and communities I have loved. From a purely compassionate vantage, without the politics or sociology, this glimpse of rural poverty, where mostly white Appalachian folks dwell in a forgotten or stereotyped America, floods me with love and sympathy. Yes, these folks are resentful. Why wouldn’t they be? I also understand a very different resentfulness – the bitter resentment of a young Black Lives Matters activist or some white allies who empathize with that Black experience. But to the forgotten or demeaned Appalachian folks, it must be appalling that the “resentment” of young BLM protestors is presented sympathetically by the “liberal media” while the culture calls their resentment “hate” and “racist.”

I shouldn’t judge like this. Heval doesn’t seem to judge. He merely utters the sounds of sorrow and shock, a compassionate refugee driving through a land like his own war-ravaged homeland, astonished that Americans could forget these children of their land and history.