Communing PLACES: This Holy Thursday marks exactly 70 years since I had my first holy communion. It was around the simple wooden altar of Zion Lutheran Church, Walburg Texas. In the years that followed I repeated the experience thousands of times at hundreds of other holy places. From cathedrals in New York and Helsinki to store front chapels in Hong Kong. From quiet secluded sanctuaries to the floors of bustling hotel meeting rooms. From among the olive trees of the Garden of Gethsemane to a rustic chapel at Yosemite National Park. From places of somber meditation to arenas filled with the jubilant sound of a thousand hymn singers. From places with names like Zion, St. Paul, Good Shepherd, and St. Thomas to Calvary. Always the PLACE in that moment was holy ground.
Communing PEOPLE : I recall those 12 nervous teenagers with whom I first communed and wonder where they now are, here or in heaven. I recall the multitudes of others who shared with me those precious elements: my sainted parents, my children now scattered around the world, the black saints who welcomed me as the only white in the assembly, those with whom we now share full communion in denominations with names like Methodist, Presbyterian, United Church of Christ, Moravian. I recall people next to me at the rail who exuded the scent of exquisite and expensive perfume and those who came in their sweat-filled work clothes. I recall an ancient Chinese grandmother and the tense bodies of GI’s on R&R from Viet Nam. Always with those PEOPLE we heard the words “For You.”
Communing PRESENCE : Today I recall that every place with whatever people there was always bread and wine. There were always words. But there was more. There was the PRESENCE. Yes, it was the PRESENCE of mystery, of prayer, confession, reflection and resolve. But beyond it all was a greater Presence. For in with and under the forms of bread and wine was the very REAL PRESENCE of the One who said “This is My body; This is My blood.”
Prayer:Dear Lord, as I commune in this holy season make the place holy, the people blessed and your presence experienced. Amen
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
A Quiet Little Boy from a Quiet Little Texas Town
I may have reached my 83rd birthday, but in my heart I still see myself as a quiet little boy from a quiet little Texas town. The town, in fact, is Walburg,
Texas. The sign near it reads “87 Friendly People and 1 Old Grouch”. I actually was born and lived in a simple house about a mile from the general store and where the saloon used to be. In the nineteenth century the community was populated by immigrants from the Czech/German border. Half of us spoke German and were Lutherans. The other half spoke Czech and went to the Catholic Church. We seldom interacted and intermarriage was a major challenge to our long held traditions. The tradition served us well. Church on Sunday, chicken salad sandwiches and homemade ice cream for birthdays, shivarees at weddings, and bar-b-que and beer for every important occasion. Quiet enough - and I was just another quiet boy in the community, at least that was my remembrance of it all until I did a bit more reflecting on my morning walk today.
I remember the excitement back in the 40’s. It was in the days of the famous outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. I shiver in remembering the story of how some one close to me was walking along the country road. A car with two strangers in it (a man with a distinctive hat and a girl) had stopped and asked for directions. Upon reflection we all knew it was Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker and we waited in dread for the day they would come rob the Walburg State Bank!
They didn’t survive a shoot-out with the law shortly after this. But some years later there was a tragic disruption to the still quietness of Walburg and its sleepy bank. A couple of armed robbers did indeed rob the Walburg State bank one quiet Saturday morning. They were serious. My uncle Reinhold who ran the bank did all the robbers asked for. Yet they shot at him with the bullet just grazing his head. Closer to home - my sister Mimi had entered the bank for a simple Saturday morning transaction. When ordered to lie face down on the floor she complied. Yet as one of the robbers was leaving the bank he stood over her and fired directly into the back of her head. By the grace of God she survived. The cops said that the ammunition seems to have been old. Today almost 40 years later she has occasional seizures and the doctors tell her that they are the result of that terrible incident in that quiet little town. And when a highway patrolman stopped the robbers’ car down the road a ways they fatally murdered him.
In my morning walk reverie today I also recalled a little encounter that I would never have expected, growing up in Walburg. In the mid 1950’s I found myself being an educator in Hong Kong. I had been there only a few weeks when on a Wednesday night I was walking home from teaching a class. Even though I was a newcomer it seemed to me that there was extra excitement in the air. The streets were crowded, the tension palpable. When a gentleman made a threatening move toward me with a brown bottle he held in his hand I wondered if he had been drinking. I soon learned that that bottle was filled with explosives and he was threatening me. The building I had just exited had been in the middle of a street riot. Some in my class never left the building. Bullets streamed through the window. Tragically the wife of the Swiss Council General who just happened to be driving through the area was shot and killed. When the police rounded up the rioters they marched them to the police compound a block from our apartment. When they were just below our windows the police forced rioters to run quickly because in the process they all lost their wooden clogs, one less weapon to take with them. Within a day things had settled back down and Hong Kong had rest until the Red Guard movement in the 60’s - but that is another story.
Another story far from quiet Walburg found me in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 4,1989. My two sons and I left the square just as the army moved in and the tanks were still a few blocks away. Hours later we stood with weeping students on the Beijing University Campus as they returned from the morgue with the names of their slain friends. A hastily painted sign over the university proclaimed “Tiananmen Bathed in Blood. The Whole World Weeps.”
And so the memories wash over me. It has been and continues to be a blessed and full life, especially in the context of a quiet little boy who grew up in a quiet little Texas town.
Texas. The sign near it reads “87 Friendly People and 1 Old Grouch”. I actually was born and lived in a simple house about a mile from the general store and where the saloon used to be. In the nineteenth century the community was populated by immigrants from the Czech/German border. Half of us spoke German and were Lutherans. The other half spoke Czech and went to the Catholic Church. We seldom interacted and intermarriage was a major challenge to our long held traditions. The tradition served us well. Church on Sunday, chicken salad sandwiches and homemade ice cream for birthdays, shivarees at weddings, and bar-b-que and beer for every important occasion. Quiet enough - and I was just another quiet boy in the community, at least that was my remembrance of it all until I did a bit more reflecting on my morning walk today.
I remember the excitement back in the 40’s. It was in the days of the famous outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. I shiver in remembering the story of how some one close to me was walking along the country road. A car with two strangers in it (a man with a distinctive hat and a girl) had stopped and asked for directions. Upon reflection we all knew it was Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker and we waited in dread for the day they would come rob the Walburg State Bank!
They didn’t survive a shoot-out with the law shortly after this. But some years later there was a tragic disruption to the still quietness of Walburg and its sleepy bank. A couple of armed robbers did indeed rob the Walburg State bank one quiet Saturday morning. They were serious. My uncle Reinhold who ran the bank did all the robbers asked for. Yet they shot at him with the bullet just grazing his head. Closer to home - my sister Mimi had entered the bank for a simple Saturday morning transaction. When ordered to lie face down on the floor she complied. Yet as one of the robbers was leaving the bank he stood over her and fired directly into the back of her head. By the grace of God she survived. The cops said that the ammunition seems to have been old. Today almost 40 years later she has occasional seizures and the doctors tell her that they are the result of that terrible incident in that quiet little town. And when a highway patrolman stopped the robbers’ car down the road a ways they fatally murdered him.
In my morning walk reverie today I also recalled a little encounter that I would never have expected, growing up in Walburg. In the mid 1950’s I found myself being an educator in Hong Kong. I had been there only a few weeks when on a Wednesday night I was walking home from teaching a class. Even though I was a newcomer it seemed to me that there was extra excitement in the air. The streets were crowded, the tension palpable. When a gentleman made a threatening move toward me with a brown bottle he held in his hand I wondered if he had been drinking. I soon learned that that bottle was filled with explosives and he was threatening me. The building I had just exited had been in the middle of a street riot. Some in my class never left the building. Bullets streamed through the window. Tragically the wife of the Swiss Council General who just happened to be driving through the area was shot and killed. When the police rounded up the rioters they marched them to the police compound a block from our apartment. When they were just below our windows the police forced rioters to run quickly because in the process they all lost their wooden clogs, one less weapon to take with them. Within a day things had settled back down and Hong Kong had rest until the Red Guard movement in the 60’s - but that is another story.
Another story far from quiet Walburg found me in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 4,1989. My two sons and I left the square just as the army moved in and the tanks were still a few blocks away. Hours later we stood with weeping students on the Beijing University Campus as they returned from the morgue with the names of their slain friends. A hastily painted sign over the university proclaimed “Tiananmen Bathed in Blood. The Whole World Weeps.”
And so the memories wash over me. It has been and continues to be a blessed and full life, especially in the context of a quiet little boy who grew up in a quiet little Texas town.
Friday, April 1, 2011
Diversity, Rigidity, Opportunity
Attending a national conference of colleagues is not necessarily highly inspiring. However, the one I attended last week was stimulating, affirming and thought provoking. More than 2,300 teachers and administrators in Lutheran schools from around the world were in attendance. It began with a day-long consultation of global leaders. It was great to hear reports from schools in Canada, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Hanoi, New Guinea, India, Australia, So. Africa and Palestine. That is where the variety came in. Hong Kong International School has nearly 3,000 students with another thousand on the waiting list even with an annual tuition of some $25,000. At the other end of financial spectrum are the Lutheran schools of India which serve the still discriminated against lower caste families (even though the caste system is supposed to be a thing of the past.). These students often do not even have a desk for each student. Then there was the report of emerging Lutheran colleges from the highland of New Guinea to the concrete wall-enclosed containment of Bethlehem, Palestine where the Lutheran university there is the largest building project in Bethlehem since the days of Herod the King. An added bonus was to listen to the various dialects in which the reports were given, from Australian English to the heavily German-accented English of South Africa. Even a sometimes jaded old teacher like me could not help but feel admiration, gratitude and enthusiasm for the many ways in which the Lutheran church’s traditional commitment to education and schools at all levels is manifested in wondrous new venues and contexts.
It was not all good news. Lutheran schools in the major cities of America are becoming an extinct species. While there used to be hundreds of them from the Atlantic to the Pacific now they are missing from the city limits of even major cities like Los Angles and Detroit. One reason for their demise is the inability of some of those urban folks and other leaders to image new models for emerging contexts. When Marlene Lund of the Center for Urban Education Ministries gave a detailed list of options for faith-based American urban schools there was almost no-one there to listen. Some stayed away because they simply did not want to consider any option not based on a 19th century model. Rigidity is leading to rigor mortis.
It was then that I saw an opportunity. Many Lutheran jurisdictions are selling off Lutheran schools properties in the city, often generating millions in revenue. I challenge the leaders involved in these transactions to invest the money from the sale of any urban church properties back into a Lutheran neighborhood school operated on any one the models presented by Lund. Hope could be be made available for many city kids and their families for whom a good education today is a denied reality.
What is required is a movement from rigidity to a grasping of the opportunity to an inspired new vision, a vision which is now being brought from outside the borders of the USA to the very heart of the cities of our land.
It was not all good news. Lutheran schools in the major cities of America are becoming an extinct species. While there used to be hundreds of them from the Atlantic to the Pacific now they are missing from the city limits of even major cities like Los Angles and Detroit. One reason for their demise is the inability of some of those urban folks and other leaders to image new models for emerging contexts. When Marlene Lund of the Center for Urban Education Ministries gave a detailed list of options for faith-based American urban schools there was almost no-one there to listen. Some stayed away because they simply did not want to consider any option not based on a 19th century model. Rigidity is leading to rigor mortis.
It was then that I saw an opportunity. Many Lutheran jurisdictions are selling off Lutheran schools properties in the city, often generating millions in revenue. I challenge the leaders involved in these transactions to invest the money from the sale of any urban church properties back into a Lutheran neighborhood school operated on any one the models presented by Lund. Hope could be be made available for many city kids and their families for whom a good education today is a denied reality.
What is required is a movement from rigidity to a grasping of the opportunity to an inspired new vision, a vision which is now being brought from outside the borders of the USA to the very heart of the cities of our land.
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