Be Still!: Departure from Collective Madness

By Gordon C. Stewart, Eric Ringham and Wayne G. Boulton

Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness echoes the call of the Navajo sage and the psalmist who invited their hearers to stop--"If we keep going this way, we're going to get where we're going"--and be still--"Be still, and know. . . ." Like pictures in a photo album taken from a unique lens, these essays zoom in on singular moments of time where the world is making headlines, drawing attention to the sin of exceptionalism in its national, racial, religious, cultural, and species manifestations. Informed by Japanese Christian theologian Kosuke Koyama, Elie Wiesel, Wendell Berry, and others, the author invites the reader to slow down, be still, and depart from "collective madness" before the Navajo sage is right. Told in the voice familiar to listeners of All Things Considered and Minnesota Public Radio, these poetic essays sometimes feel as familiar as an old family photo album, but the pictures themselves are taken from a thought-provoking angle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Jan 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532600661

Gordon C. Stewart

Gordon C. Stewart's guest commentaries on faith and culture have aired on All Things Considered and in print on MPR, Minnpost.com, and the StarTribune. An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), he has led ecumenical campus ministries and churches in Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, New York, and Minnesota. He was the first non-lawyer Executive Director of the Legal Rights Center, a nonprofit public defense corporation in Minneapolis.

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Be Still!

Departure from Collective Madness

Gordon C. Stewart

Foreword by Eric Ringham

Introduction by Wayne G. Boulton

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Be Still!

Departure from Collective Madness

Copyright © 2017 Gordon C. Stewart. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Wipf & Stock

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

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paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-8292-5

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-8294-9

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-8293-2

Manufactured in the USA. 01/16/17

Thanks to MinnPost.com for copyright permission for use of previously published commentaries:

Reframing the gun conversation, October 22, 2015.

Homeland militarization—tanks in Ferguson, Blackhawks in Minneapolis — must be stopped, August 22, 2014.

They may squirm in hearings, but Wall Street oligarchs know who has the power, April 29, 2010.

Gulf oil-spill crisis raises basic questions about how we think of ourselves, June 4, 2010.

For faith and for politics, there is one over-riding question: Am I my brother’s keeper? January 6, 2010.

How appeals to fear—and misuse of Scripture—dampened a chilidog celebration, October 9, 2009.

Blackwater/Xe: How did it happen that the US came to rely on mercenaries? July 3, 2009.

‘Sorrow floats’: The healthy-deregulated-capitalism myth just keeps resurfacing, September 10, 2009.

In this era of incivility, messianic nationalism strides to the fore, September 21, 2010.

Dealing with the prison of deregulated capitalism, February 12, 2010.

Thanks to Steven Shoemaker for copyright permission for use of all poems appearing in this collection.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Tide Pools and the Ocean

Stillness at Blue Spring

A Joyful Resting Place in Time

Memorial Day and the Soldier’s Helmet

The Man Who Loved Graves

Mysterium Tremendum

Our Anxious Time

The Common Ground Beneath the Gun Debate

Say the Word ‘Freedom’

Reframing the Gun Debate

The Execution of Troy Davis

Religion and Politics

Idealism and Terror

Being Human

Creating Hell in the Name of Heaven

Losing Our Heads

Two Kinds of Religion

A Visit to South Paris

Meeting the Boogie Man

The Waiting Room

Jesus in the Hospital

When the Breath Flies Away

The Forlorn Children of the Mayflower

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

The Man Who Knew

The Church on the Bridge

Martin Luther King Day in St. Augustine

The Neighbors in St. Augustine

Hands Up! Don’t Carve!

Homeland Militarization

Jacob Miller’s Amish Rocking Chair

The World in an Oyster

My Soul Waits in Silence

Two Universities

Willful Ignorance

The Anguished Heart of God

Only One Sin

The Economy

Climate Change and the Nations

The Wall Street Tattler

Sorrow Floats

The American Oligarchy—4/29/10

Mary of Occupy

A Visit with the Deeper Memory

Get Off My Corner!

The Return to South Paris

God as Policeman or Lover?

The Bristlecone Pines

Bibliography

In memory of Kosuke (Ko) Koyama

(1929–2009)

Gentle and strong, as trees

Bend gracefully in wind,

You stand—and I bow.

—Peggy Shriver, 2009

If we keep going the way we’re going, we’re going to get where we’re going.

—Navajo Wisdom

America is living stormy Monday, but the pulpit is preaching happy Sunday.The world is experiencing the Blues, and pulpiteers are dispensing excessive doses of non-prescription prosaic sermons with several ecclesiastical and theological side-effects.The church is becoming a place where Christianity is nothing more than Capitalism in drag.

—Otis Moss III, Blue Note Preaching in a Post-Soul World

He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;    he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear;    he burns the shields with fire.

Be still, and know that I am God!    I am exalted among the nations,    I am exalted in the earth.

—Psalm 46:9–10

Foreword

by Eric Ringham News Editor, Minnesota Public Radio

In any newsroom, there’s a predictable pattern to the unfolding of a major story. First comes the initial, fragmentary report: a tsunami has struck, or there’s been a school shooting.

Then there’s a ghastly little pause, when it’s clear that this story is indeed one of those awful ones, but there’s a frustrating lack of material to publish. It can be a special problem for commentary and op-ed editors. That essay on France’s burkini ban that we were planning to publish will seem aggressively off-point in the days after a terrorist attack.

Fortunately for me, there’s been another dependable element of the pattern: the phone call from Gordon Stewart.

I couldn’t begin to guess how many times I’ve heard his calm, deliberative voice on the line: Hello, Eric? Gordon Stewart calling. I’ve sent something to your inbox.

That something would be an essay on exactly the topic of the hour—a nice, short (to an editor, nice and short are redundant) exploration of the moral aspect of the story. Sometimes he reaches into his personal history; sometimes he pointedly unpacks the fallacies that surround a public current event. The consistent characteristic of these essays is that he always addresses the moral or ethical element of an issue. If there is an angel in the room, he wrestles it.

I don’t think I’ve ever told him how comforting his calls have been to me. Yes, he’s a writer calling to pitch a commentary, but by the time the call has ended, I feel like a hospital patient who’s just received a visit from the chaplain. In a word, I feel better.

Gordon knows something about writing commentaries that many people of faith do not: that is, how to be inclusive in addressing an audience that may hold some other faith, or no faith at all. He writes from a Christian perspective, but not to a Christian perspective. He writes to everybody.

I’m a different kind of editor now, and it’s been a few years since I’ve been directly involved in publishing Gordon’s work. I miss reading his commentaries, which is why this collection is such a pleasure.

In Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness, Gordon demonstrates his ability to be both topical and versatile, both insightful and unconventional. He ponders the manatee’s knowledge of Disney World, the barbarity of beheadings (whether committed in the name of Allah or the Old Testament God), and the fate of a man just hours from his scheduled execution. He claims an affinity for John Lennon and admits his sympathy with Lennon’s song Imagine.

And there is much more, besides: the evils of Hitler, the remorse of a World War II Marine, gun control, the deaths of black men at the hands of police, hearing loss, the pleasures of solitude, and the demands made by cell phones.

He revisits his childhood and reflects on his own death. Whatever lies on the other side of my years is beyond my mortal knowing, he confesses. I imagine that on the day he reaches the other side, he’ll find a way to write about that, too.

This gentle, thoughtful writer deserves a wider audience, and I’m glad you’ve found him.

Eric Ringham

September 5, 2016

Preface

I invite you to look at this collection as a kind of photo album. Each snapshot focuses on a singular moment in real time.

Like the times on which these essays focus, the author’s lens is set in time. It developed from the experiences of faith and doubt, hope and despair, sanity and madness, solitude and loneliness, stillness and frenzy, companionship and forlornness. I alternate between the quiet calm of the psalmist—Be still, and know that I am God (Ps ⁴⁶)—and deep disquiet over the madness that fills the news, and me.

Throughout it all, my camera lens looks as much for what is left unsaid as for what’s said. Willem Zuurdeeg’s and Esther Swenson’s work in analytical philosophy of religion taught me to look and listen for the governing convictions a speaker takes for granted, the bedrock underpinnings upon which a speaker depends. To be human is to die. And to die is to live with what Rudolf Otto called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the larger mystery that both causes us to tremble and that draws us irresistibly, the whence and whither of existence itself.

Elie Wiesel and Walter Brueggemann challenge the collective madness that often passes for sanity. But their insights into the depths of collective madness are anchored in the deep stillness of Psalm 46. Kosuke Koyama, to whom this book is dedicated, knew collective madness as a youth in Japan and again in his adopted home in the United States. Over lunch one day, he made a statement that added to how I look at the world. There’s only one sin, he said. Exceptionalism. I’ve been thinking about that ever since in relation to the manifold ways in which this one sin manifests itself: religion, race, nation, gender, culture, and, finally, species exceptionalism.

Perhaps a picture of a moment in time with Kosuke will whet your appetite.

The day I’m remembering, Koyama was scheduled to deliver the inaugural address for a new speaker series in Chaska, a forty-minute drive from his home in downtown Minneapolis. Shortly after we left his apartment, the car broke down on the entrance ramp to the interstate. It just quit! Neither one of us had a phone. While I ran back to get help, frantic because we were going to be late, Ko stayed with the car. I had forgotten what Ko had written in Three Mile an Hour God:

We lead today an efficient and speedy life. . . . There is great value in efficiency and speed. But let me make one observation. I find that God goes slowly in [God’s] educational process. . . . Forty Years in the Wilderness points to [God’s] basic educational philosophy. . . . God walks slowly because [God] is love.¹

When the mechanic and I returned to the car, Ko was sitting in the passenger seat like the Buddha himself—calm, cool, and collected. I asked whether he was OK. He smiled and said, Good meditation.

I hope in some way the still shots of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness offer you an opportunity or two for a good meditation.

1. Koyama, Three Mile an Hour God,

6–7

.

Acknowledgments

Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) and MinnPost (minnpost.com) aired a number of these essays on All Things Considered or published them online. This collection would not exist without the All Things Considered former Producer Jeff Jones, who first welcomed a submission following the Nickel Mines school house massacre. Former assistant MPR News Editor Eric Ringham, whose gracious foreword appears here, encouraged continuing submissions for the commentary page. MinnPost Managing Editor Susan Albright rarely declined a request and, like Eric, offered a wise editor’s pen that improved each essay.

Wipf & Stock has been a joy to work with, thanks to Administrative Assistant Brian Palmer and my editor, Assistant Managing Editor Matthew Wimer, who were a quick email or phone call away during the publishing process.

Professors Esther Cornelius Swenson’s and Willem Zuurdeeg’s collaborative work in the field of analytic philosophy of religion is the indelible ink in which Be Still! is written. Likewise, Kosuke Koyama’s metaphorical theological method and observation that exceptionalism is humanity’s one sin altered the lens through which I have come to see the world. Koyama’s provocative statement is applied here to racial, cultural, religious, national, gender, and species forms of exceptionalism. Thanks to Mark Koyama for permission to include his late father’s faithful testimonies to the reign of God in this collection.

Life is nothing without good friends. Carolyn Kidder and Mona Gustafson Affinito pored over every word, improving the text with valuable comments and the eyes of a copyeditor, although it was the final copyediting of Gillian Littlehale (Gilly Wright’s Red Pen) who whipped the manuscript into final shape. Emily Hedges, Courtenay Martin, Austin Wu, and Dennis Aubrey encouraged me to believe writing and publishing were more than exercises in vanity. Steve Adams, Faith Ralston, Chuck Lieber, and old friends and seminary colleagues Wayne Boulton, Don Dempsey, Dale Hartwig, Harry Strong, Bob Young, and Steve Shoemaker have sustained me through thick and thin. After ten years of sharing our blog, Views from the Edge, Steve Shoemaker’s verse and poetry appear in Be Still! Wayne Boulton, my seminary roommate—fellow Presbyterian teaching elder, scholar, author, faithful friend, and cheerleader—graciously consented to write the introduction for the book.

My deepest thanks goes to my spouse, Kay Stewart, who spent as many hours working on this project as her sometimes cranky, absentminded husband. This collection would not have made it to the publisher were it not for Kay’s daily encouragement, patience, mercy, guidance, and extraordinary wisdom. Kay’s good cheer over morning coffee and interruptions of obsession rescued the text and the author from solitary confinement. Every page has Kay’s fingerprints all over it.

Last, but by no means least, is a group of men who would be shocked to find themselves mentioned anywhere but in a courtroom. The Brothers of Opal Street, as they called themselves—eight black homeless former inmates of Eastern State Penitentiary in North Philadelphia—had a farewell conversation in late August 1962, with me, a naive nineteen-year-old church street outreach worker. As we sat on the stoop of a boarded up tenement on Opal Street, they said good-bye with the startling instruction not to return to the ghetto. "Go back to ‘your people’ and change things there. Only when things change there will there be hope for the people