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by Ken Sehested

        If specific moments can serve as memory triggers for a larger historical period, I would nominate seven current headlines to characterize this COVID-19 season in US history.

        1. The death by suicide of Dr. Lorna M. Breen, a renowned emergency room doctor in New York City, who, with her colleagues, bore the brunt of treating massive numbers of COVID-19 admittances.

        She eventually fell victim to the virus, took off 10 days to recover, returned to the emergency room, collapsed on the floor, then went to live with her sister in Virginia to recover. She had no history of mental illness; was active in sports and an avid salsa dancer; was a deeply religious person who volunteered weekly at a nursing home.

        The sheer tragedy of what she was witnessing was too much to bear. Her dying should knock our socks off.

        2. Among the radical right-wing groups protesting in several state capitols (whose rallies are coordinated and funded by wealthy donors with white nationalist sympathies) demanding the reopening of the economy, one young woman in Nashville carried a sign saying, “Sacrifice the Weak.”

        The sentiment is not new in US or in global history, of course. The 5th century BCE Greek historian Thuycydides wrote: “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

        This sentiment is precisely behind the Nazis’ infamous “Final Solution” to exterminate not only Jews but also homosexuals, gypsies, and those with physical or mental disabilities.

        Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was himself a fan of Ayn Rand, the novelist-philosopher who wrote that the Great Commandment to love your neighbor is tantamount to “moral cannibalism,” and that those who live for others are “parasites.”

        The gunslinging hecklers’ chants for “freedom” in our state capitols demonstrate how decadent and licentious that honorable word has become.

        3. We now know that the pandemic spreads fastest in crowded quarters, e.g., prisons, nursing homes, and meat packing plants. So President Trump’s use of the Defense Production Act to order those plants to reopen is effectively an order condemning countless low-income workers, many of them people of color, to painful sickness and even death.

        It appears the only reason the president did not similarly act to mandate industries to gear up the production of testing kits—which every medical professional knows is essential to prevent higher levels of infection—is to disguise the actual spread of the disease and further damage his reelection campaign. Of all the cruelties and crimes he has committed, none may be more blatantly, singularly hideous.

        (As of 1 May 2020, 37 other countries had tested a higher percentage of their population than the US. Congress’ own physician, Dr. Brian Monahan, says he does not have enough COVID-19 test kits to test the 100 senators Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is calling back into session in the coming days.)

        4. “That's the story of healthcare in America today,” said former insurance executive Wendell Potter after the largest private health insurance provider in the US announced that it saw a significant increase in profits over the last three months while the Covid-19 pandemic killed tens of thousands and forced millions more off their employer-sponsored coverage.

        5. Maryland’s Republican Governor Larry Hogan managed to purchase thousands of COVID-19 test kits from South Korea. He now has them stored in a secret location protected by members of the Maryland National Guard and State Patrol officers.

        Why? To protect the shipment from being confiscated by the federal government, which has expropriated supplies ordered from private companies by other states in recent weeks.

        6. Who can forget President Trump’s suggestion that injecting disinfectant might be a cure for the virus. Was he was being sarcastic? Watch this 1:11 video and judge for yourself.

        7. No statement I’ve heard or read in recent weeks is more telling that this one from Minnesota nurse Emily Pierskalla:

        “If I die, I don’t want to be remembered as a hero.

        “I want my death to make you angry too.

        “I want you to politicize my death. I want you to use it as fuel to demand change in this industry, to demand protection, living wages, and safe working conditions for nurses and ALL workers.

        “Use my death to mobilize others.

        “Use my name at the bargaining table.

        “Use my name to shame those who have profited or failed to act, leaving us to clean up the mess.

        “Don’t say ‘heaven has gained an angel.’ Tell them negligence and greed has murdered a person for choosing a career dedicated to compassion and service.”

        I understand our desire to encourage front-line workers—like medical professionals—with expressions of gratitude. And I sincerely hope each and every one finds a measure of comfort in the words and acts of appreciation popping up not just here but around the world.

        But the "hero" tag should trouble us as well. It is too easy to do the charitable work of assigning personal gratitude while ignoring the structural fractures that recklessly put our medical professionals (among others) in harm's way.

        It's as if we are saying, "Thank you for being willing to die, so we don't have to change our ways."

        This is gross. This is imbecilic. This is cowardice. This is manifestly immoral. We have no shame. God have mercy on our souls, for no other authority will suffice.

        Offer your heartfelt applause as vigorously and personally as you can for those now carrying a heavy load of the public’s welfare. But don’t let such expressions become a kind of penance which absolves us from the hard work of recasting public policies that preference the common good over private greed.

        Like the virus, the market has no conscience, no purpose, no aspiration, other than to reproduce itself.

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©ken sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

by Ken Sehested

“Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you.
Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you
that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest.
That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together,
to hold its own, and to advance, regardless.”
—Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I once did dawn patrol in the high desert mesa country of northern New Mexico, with the only theologically trained cowgirl I know. It was during winter’s ragged end. Several inches of snow fell overnight. This being calving season, we had to check the pastures and spot signs of distress in the newborns. We did find one, lying still in the snow, steam still lifting from its small body, mama still licking clean the mucus. I carried it to the pickup hoping the heat would revive.

It didn’t. It lay there at my feet until we finished our rounds. Not since my two bedside vigils with my wife in labor have I ever felt so useless. None more than women know that birth is dangerous and threat is camped nearby. Hope is attested in such encampments.

In fact, when you descend into the deep mines of Holy Week’s labor—where its augurs bore away at human illusions and presumptions—one of its targets is the delusion that human value is calculated on usefulness and productivity. Having that fantasy stripped away is especially painful for those of us raised in a ethical universe shaped by capitalism. The makers find it impossible to believe we don’t get extra cookies; and that we don’t get to disparage the takers. What kind of moral mismanagement is this!?!

It’s enough to drive the monetizers mad.

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There is an uncanny, discomforting coincidence at work this week, Holy Week for Western Christians. This is also the week leading scientists say may be, here in the U.S., the worst week of the COVID-19 pandemic, with infections, hospitalizations, and deaths mounting exponentially.

Surgeon General Jerome Adams said Sunday that the US should brace for levels of tragedy never so widespread as the emotional impact to the nation from the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key member of the president’s Coronavirus Task Force, said “things are gonna get bad” this week and the public needs to “buckle down.”

Both Heaven and hell are on full display during Holy Week, and we are not allowed to ignore the latter while siding with the former. Our duty is to sit with the onslaught of grief and prepare for the upsurge of hope. To refuse the first is to reduce hope to pleasantry; to refuse the second is complicity with despair.

Holy Week was hell week for Jesus’ small band of followers. They knew being in Jerusalem was dangerous, both for Jesus and for them—particularly during Passover season, when Jewish affront at Rome’s occupation was at its peak.

The disciples could not understand why Jesus had made this strategically disastrous move to confront the religious authorities on their own turf.  Hopes for a more muscular liberation and Jerusalem’s return to royal sovereignty were fading among Jesus' close associates.

Their worst fears were soon confirmed. It was as if the world were ending: Certainly their own dreams and visions, possibly their lives as well. Distress is no less contagious than a virus.

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As it happens, hope’s fertile soil lies in that spit of land between helpless despair and sentimental optimism. Our cultivating work, as the Welsh novelist and academic Raymond Williams wrote, “is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.”

Hope is wider than optimism, believing everything will be fine; and deeper than pessimism, sensing all is doom. The latter, in fact, is a form of arrogant self-obsession, as if the world will unravel without our attention.

Both optimism and pessimism are haphazard, often fickle. When one or the other knocks at your door, give welcome; but say, you’ll get neither bed nor board in this house.

How are the faithful to hold up in the face of mounting tragedy? This is the focal question as we practice our special disciplines—as means of attentive listening—in this liminal season.

The counsel of scriptures and saints for the living of these days is this: In the panic, be still; in the ordeal, take heart; in the night of sorrow, remember the promise of joy’s release, for more is at work than we imagine.

Hope is not hope absent the context of threat. Otherwise, what you have is distracting amusement.

“For the world has grown full of peril,” Galadriel said to Celeborn in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. “And in all lands, love is now mingled with grief.”

Celeborn asks, “What now becomes of this Fellowship? Without Gandalf, hope is lost.”

"The Quest stands upon the edge of a knife,” said Galadriel. “Stray but a little, and it will fail, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while the Company is true."

Trying days are here. Death’s pandemic is more palpable than usual; but it does not have the last word. Find your company and devote yourself to its sustenance.

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©ken sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

by Ken Sehested

The root meaning of “apocalyptic” is not “catastrophe” but “unveiling.” That which was hidden is now revealed. It is not the brutal, final flourish of history, but the opportunity for renewal, the chance to begin anew.

Simply typing the word—apocalypse—makes my fingers feel awkward, clumsy, hesitant, requiring uncommon coordination. “Apocalypse” is a tricky word. It evokes memory of the surreal 1979 film (“Apocalypse Now”) by Francis Ford Coppola and the mind-bending roles of Brando and Sheen and Duvall. Not to mention the glut of more recent dystopian movies and television shows featuring zombies and the trail of gore they dramatize.

“Apocalypse” is one of those “don’t-go-there” words for me and mine. Its associations are best left to the Left-Behind crowd, quarantined behind their cruel glee at the prospect of getting to cut in line among the lucky few refugees escaping the final sadistic revenge of a ghoulish god.

But we cede too much to that crowd—among other crowds, of various sorts, who plunder our narrative treasures, stealing our vocabulary for mischievous purpose.

In the wake of every new disaster, some within the community of faith—some who speak the name of Jesus with our same accent—describe this present and frightful moment of history in apocalyptic terms. And they are right. It is. But not, I think, in the way they propose.

Apocalyptic moments are often catastrophic ones. As the Levitical author put it, “If you defile the land, it will vomit you out” (18:28). But, for biblical people, the accent is not on catastrophe but on the unveiling and uncovering of truth, the dispelling of delusion, of evaporating fantasy, and forsaking presumed innocence. From Genesis to Revelation, the evil one is often dubbed as the deceiver.

Most importantly, this disclosure, disquieting and upending as may be, opens the portal to repentance and ushers us to the occasion for conversion, the movement from despair to hope. Apocalyptic moments bare the heart to “Godly grief” that “brings no regret” (2 Cor. 7:10), guiding the hands to repair and redeem.

For us, now, is offered the moment to grasp the truth about what the fires have unleashed abroad, what the floods have uncovered at home, what the pandemic has disclosed about what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. named as our “inescapable network of mutuality” and “single garment of destiny.” These realities are intimately connected.

Reality, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. Conflicting claims are made. You may remember the character played by that fabulous actor, Maggie Smith, in her role as Countess Violet Crawley, matriarch of the clan featured in the popular TV series, “Downton Abbey.”

The countess displayed the sharpest of tongues and got more than her share of the best lines, including this one: “Hope is a tease designed to keep us from accepting reality.”

Conflict over the direction of the human legacy is most fantastically portrayed (at times frustratingly obscure) in the book of Revelation. Listen to this adaptation of the drama in chapter 12.

“A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pangs.

“Then another portent appeared: a great dragon, with seven heads and ten horns. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman to devour her child as soon as it was born.

“And she gave birth to a child who is to rule all the nations. But her child was snatched away and taken to God; and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God.

“War broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels defeated the dragon and his minions. That ancient serpent, who is called the deceiver of the whole world—was thrown down to the earth along with his flock.

“Then the dragon pursued the woman who had given birth. But the woman was given the wings of the great eagle, to fly from the serpent into the wilderness, where she is nourished.

“Then from its mouth the serpent poured water like a river after the woman, to sweep her away with the flood. But the earth came to the help of the woman; it opened its mouth and swallowed the river.

“Then the dragon went off to make war on the rest of the woman’s children, those who keep the commandments of God and hold the testimony of Jesus.”

Brothers and sisters, the self-serving sovereigns who now rule have been issued an eviction notice. The realm of earth is destined to be sheltered under the wings of the Beloved. (cf. Revelation 11:15) “Look,” the Revelator proclaimed, “God’s dwelling place is among the people” (21:3).

“Thy kingdom come,” Jesus implored, “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).

Apocalypse is not earth gone to hell in a handbasket by means of a bloody conflagration. It is the confidence in the promise, provision and possibility of a new beginning.

This is indeed a frightening time. But if we persevere in the promise implanted in us by our baptismal vows, we may live to see that the floods, the scorching, and the pandemic do not have the last word.

“Things are not getting worse,” the poet adrienne maree brown wrote. “They are getting uncovered. We must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil.”

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Postscript: I can think of no better way to observe Lent than to watch this short (3:42) video, “An Imagined Letter from Covid-19 to Humans,” from Films for Action.

©ken sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

by Ken Sehested
Circle of Mercy Congregation, first Sunday of Lent 2020
Text: Matthew 4:1-11

(The first draft was written late night of 25 February 2020, Shrove Tuesday, following the death of my Mom early that morning.)

“Isn’t there anything you understand?
It’s from the ash heap God is seen.
Always! Always from the ashes.”
—Archibald MacLeish in “J.B.,” a play based on the Book of Job

My Mama died today, in the wee hours before dawn. Nancy and I went and sat by her beside for a season of mourning and thanksgiving—in silence, though Mom’s favorite hymns were playing.

         Some months ago Dale Roberts figured out how to implement what I wanted—which turned out to be a bluetooth device, with a built-in speaker, on whose memory chip he downloaded 10 hours of instrumental renditions of old hymns, the ones Mama knew well, playing in a repeating loop on a table near her weak ears.

         The medical staff in the nursing facility where she lived—the past year in palliative care, mostly morphine—said the music had a calming effect, just as I had hoped.

Right: Linocut art by Julie Lonneman.

         When I hear traditional hymn music, it’s Mama’s voice I hear. My Dad couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket; and he knew it. Sometimes we would quietly hum—always off key. And sometimes he would mouth the words. So it’s Mama’s voice I hear in my head.

         Without planning, Nancy and I ended our vigil as the closing bars of “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” played, followed by a prayer from Missy who joined us. Then I kissed Mama’s cold forehead and said my last goodbye.

         Needless to say, my heart and mind and bones have roiled throughout the day, much of which was spent attending the multitude of details all surviving beloveds must do. By this evening, some clarity emerged.

         There is a liturgical significance to the fact that Mama died on Shrove (from the root word for “absolve”) Tuesday, “Fat Tuesday,” Mardi Gras in southern US coastal towns, Carnival in countries like Brazil. You may have wondered why, in some Christian traditions, pancake suppers are held on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, inaugurating the Christian season of Lent.

         By the Middle Ages, many in Christendom cooked pancakes to use up butter, eggs, and fat, before doing without those items during Lent. In Mardi Gras towns, the day is for extravagant partying, on the eve of the ashen season beginning the following day.

         Mama would have enjoyed the fact that she died on Mardi Gras, which she knew about, since the second half of her life was lived down the bayous, southwest of New Orleans.

         But Mama didn’t know what “liturgical” meant. She spent her life in deep-water, Southern-flavored, Baptist congregations, which didn’t acknowledge things like Lent and Advent. (And we downplayed Pentecost Sunday, since the Pentecostals made such a racket.)

         Shrove Tuesday—“fat Tuesday” in Carnival’s lingo—is a day for fat-saturation and festivity. Followed by Ash Wednesday, when many in the believing community submit to ash smeared foreheads and penitential posture, for all the world to see.

         For-all-the-world—or a good bit of the Western world, even some in the believing community—interpret the day as an act of self-imposed suffering. Which is why a good many view the day, and the season of Lent, with much skepticism, if not disgust.

         Why would modern, civilized people—having been freed from the bonds of poor self-image—submit again to the servitude of crippling dependency? Does it not end in glorifying the obscenely brutal act of Jesus’ lynching? Of a cancellation of human liberty and freedom from medieval autocracy and serfdom? Some even argue the cross was divine child abuse.

         You want to revoke the Enlightenment with Lent?

         That’s where for-all-the-world is blind to the drama of Ash Wednesday and Lent’s invitation to penitence.

         The promise of absolution for the penitent is what makes starting over possible. Think of the ghostly voice on your GPS announcing “recalculating” when you make a wrong turn.

         The act of penitence is powered by the acknowledgment of grace. While the past cannot be undone, it need not determine the future. The fact that we make mistakes does not make us a mistake. The ability to acknowledge our weakness is in fact what makes us strong.

         This is the alchemy of forgiveness: in knowing it, we are able to practice it. And in practicing forgiveness, our knowing grows wider and deeper.

         The invitation to imposed ashes is not an act of subservience but of liberation from our disordered desires, from the market’s insistence that we are what we consume, that we are each on our own—no promises, no covenants, no communal bonds; only desires, interests, and accumulations.

         In the real world, we are told, might makes right; only the strong survive; you own what you can take and keep. We are told, relentlessly, as one bumper sticker puts it: Those who beat their swords into plowshare will plow for those who don’t.

         But there is another story.

         My most vivid Lenten season occurred 25 years ago. For three years the Baptist Peace Fellowship board of directors devoted part of every meeting to engage in conversation about sexual orientation. We operated on a consensus model of decision-making. At least three members of the board were willing to do welcoming but not affirming to the presence of lgbtq folk in our midst. We were stuck.

         Finally, though, in our February 1995 meeting, a fully-affirming vote was cast. It surprised us all.

         As it happened, I was scheduled to begin my first-ever sabbatical at the end of that meeting, which was in Ft. Worth, Texas. I drove from there to a ranch in northeast New Mexico to begin my leave. But when I arrived, the first thing I had to do was get on a conference call with the board’s executive committee to plan a response to the firestorm of reaction to our board’s statement. Baptist publications which had never before mentioned our name were now printing full-page editorials of condemnation.

         Long story short, I knew in my heart that this controversy could very well prove to overwhelm of our little organization. A good number of our own members and contributors were upset with the board’s decision. I spent untold hours walking the high desert pastures and climbing the mesas, dodging cow patties and watching pronghorn antelopes in the distance.

         I sensed that my dream job was coming to an end. And I kept repeating in my mind all the good work we had done—and were doing, and would be doing—and asking why this should be lost. I was convinced what the board had decided was the right thing to do. But I also sensed that it would prove to be our undoing. There was no turning back now. It felt for all the world like an impending death.

         I can’t say where exactly, or when; but my hopes for hanging on finally “died,” so to speak. I finally got to the place of accepting what seemed to be inevitable: that I would have to administer the end of our work—work which I had a key role in creating—and find a new career, not to mention a different source of income.

         It was only that relinquishment, that apparent end of my personal dream—which felt like death—that I fell into the arms of a restful peace, which is what we call hope.

         Lent’s call to penitential living is not feeling bad about yourself for some mistake you’ve made. It’s not punishing yourself, which somehow makes God happy. Lent’s penitential invitation is to an orientation acknowledging that we come from God, that we live in God, and that we return to God.

         Lent’s invitation is to recognize that nothing—not even our failures, not even the ending of our most noble dreams—not even death—can separate us from the love of God. It’s to recognize that nothing is wasted. It is to recognize that there is a buoyancy in the world that we do not create, that we do not manage, that we do not fund. There is, in the lyrics to that old hymn, a great faithfulness which we can count on, whereby “morning by morning new mercies I see.”

         This is the freedom to which Lent invites us. Having been freed from the presumption that we have to make the world right, we are able to relinquish the need to use violence—physical or emotional—to maintain breath. As we are released from being consumed with our own safety and security and applause, that’s when we are freed to pay attention to the ash heaps, to mingle with those who cannot do us favors or help us get ahead or bolster our reputations.

         Lenten works takes us into the wilderness with Jesus, where resources are scarce. Lent demands that we take a hard look at the compromises we’ve made, the temptations to which we have succumbed, to secure our place in the world. Lent invites us to consider how our desires have become disordered and dangerous; our days cluttered and anxious; our relations strained and destructive.

         I won’t take time to fully unpack the text from Matthew about the temptations Jesus’ faced while in the desert. Just remember this: every one of those offers the devil made to Jesus includes a veiled reference to a text in the Bible. The devil, too, can quote Scripture. Or, as William Sloan Coffin put it: “Like any book, the Bible is something of a mirror: if an ass peers in, you can’t expect an apostle to peer out!” Or as the Bible itself says, “There are some [texts] which the ignorant and wicked twist to their own destruction” (2 Peter 3:16b)

         Jesus’ refusal to don the robe of royalty, the power to own and dictate and assume the presumption of power—this was the key to his freedom, the kind of freedom that enabled him—and enables us—to move toward the world’s ash heaps, to stand in resistance to the forces of shame and injustice.

         It’s from the ash heap God is seen. Always, always from the ashes. Ash Wednesday, and the Lenten days that follow, is God’s program of theological education.

         I love the way singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson puts it: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

         This freedom work involves immersion in prayer—in honest transparency and correction and self-surrender to a purpose greater than our own skin. For us, that purpose looks like Jesus.

         This self-surrender of prayer then propels us into self-surrendering, reconciling work in a world of hurt.

         Several years ago I lived in South Dakota for eight months, taking care of my sister during her dying days, as well as Mom, who lived with her, Mom frequently looked at me and said, “I’m sorry you have to go to so much trouble, son.” And I would respond, “Mom, when you’re family, trouble is where you go.”

         When you combine that with the way Jesus completely revised what “family” means—when you learn that family is more than tribe or clan, more than race or class or nation-state or any of the others ways we divide up who’s in and who’s out—you can see how Jesus’ vision threatened those who believed Almighty God had anointed them to ration grace, to enforce a quota on mercy, to demand a ransom for justice.

         Stingy hands only know how to suppress trouble by coercive means. But Ash Wednesday’s smudge allows us to risk trouble, because trouble is where we go.

         There’s a reason we celebrate Mardi Gras festivals and the sweet goodness of maple syrup on Shrove Tuesday, before we put on our Lenten crash helmets for the trials and tribulations to come. Trouble is where we go because underneath it all is a Great Faithfulness and the promise of new mercies to come. Keep this in mind in the troublesome days to come.

         Sorry you have to go to such trouble, Circle of Mercy. But trouble is where we go.

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