tales of copper city

Back in Bisbee and Happy New Year!

This was written December 10 and for one reason or another I didn't post it.  I am posting it now to celebrate four months in Bisbee, and also to wish all my friends here and in North Carolina and everywhere a Happy New Year.

I also would like to note that Dan Wikler and his wife Sarah and their son Sam were in Bisbee for 10 days and we loved seeing them and having dinner with them Monday evening. Dan and I have known each other for over 20 years and he is now at the Harvard School of Public Health holding a chair in population ethics.

Also, we saw my brother Steve and his wife Cristen over the holidays twice, the second time they brought their son, Greg with his new fiance Katia.  The fact that Steve and I are drawing close again is one of the best things that has happened in my life in a long time.

We've been back in Bisbee four months now. It feels good, really good.  Carole is finally beginning to get over the trauma of the move and of leaving friends and our wonderful house in Durham, NC. 

I also feel the loss of friends and place there too.  I watched "Loggerheads" the other night, a movie that takes place in three parts of North Carolina, the coast, the Piedmont, and western Carolina (Asheville).  I got homesick for that beautiful state once again.  We actually lived longer there than anywhere else in our 41 years of marriage. 

We have so many good friends in Durham and especially our friends at Pilgrim United Church of Christ.

The things we miss

We buried Dexter's ashes today, celebrating his life and the many years our lives were enriched with him.  I posted this entry on October 13 but am posting it again to note that he's now a permanent part of Bisbee, where nearly everyone knew him and still asks after him. We miss him.

The things we miss are in the absences, the gaps in our glances. We get out of the car and find ourselves looking and not finding him. We turn around at the pantry expecting him behind us and he isn’t there. We pull away from the house to visit friends or a restaurant and his solemn face is not at the door, watching, waiting, hoping.

The things we miss are in the silences, the shuddering sound as he shakes himself in the night, waking us up to go out; the bark at the door that announces his readiness for return;  the  sound of him slurping at the water bowl that goes on forever, the whimpering as he dreams.

Health care reform and the divided American democracy

Will we succeed this time in health care reform?  Who can say?

As the current brouhaha with Governor of Illinois reveals, in American politics, anything can happen.

The list reasons we must have reform is tiresomely long: as a percentage of gross domestic product, we spend way to much for health care when compared to other Western democracies. Yet 47 million Americans still don’t have health care insurance.

And until we provide insurance to all Americans we can’t do much very serious about controlling health care. I fwe limit the annual growth of spending for doctors and hospitals they will be far less likely to treat those without insurance.   

We are shamefully behind crucial health status measures like infant mortality, longevity, and the like.  We waste billions of dollars each year on paperwork and on health care procedures that remain unproven.

And so on.

Once again, the gospel of life itself

Once again, I am turning to the topic of life itself. I know I tend to go on about it and that's not always good, but the question, "What is life itself?" has been the great question of my life and I keep trying to answer it.  The fact that I am never satisfied completely with my answer tells me that it is a really important question. See my last entry on the subject and especially an earlier one, Jesus and the gospel of life itself.

It’s funny how some memories never leave, stick in your mind.

I once attended church in a big, prospering church in Austin, TX.  The senior minister was eloquent, successful, and powerful in the pulpit. He dominated Sunday mornings.

I was a sophomore at the University, back from three years in the Army.

More on life itself as gospel

For years now, and especially since our move to Bisbee in 1996, I have written about "life itself," in this blog here and many other places and, earlier, in a newspaper column for the Bisbee Observer, during 1998 to 1999. 

I have never been very clear in my own mind about what "life itself" means precisely.  I think this is a good thing. I have used the term to more or less refer to a stance of celebrating ordinary life, life with "nothing added," life itself as sufficient.

I think it was the Buddhists who first helped me use this term, the Western Buddhists that is.  They seem to endorse a “nothing special” existence that celebrates the world that is.  Charlotte Joko Beck comes the closest to expressing this view in her book, Nothing Special: Living Zen, but there are others who express this view also like Pema Chodron.

John Cowan doesn't use the term "life itself" explicitly but this is what he is talking about in his wonderful book, Taking Jesus Seriously: Buddhist Meditation for Christians. Again, I discussed his book here.

Don Cupitt on the religion of life

A few years back when I began to read Don Cupitt (pronounced “kew'-pitt”) I instantly recognized a kinship.  I recall particularly one week long trip to Mexico, to San Carlos, Sonora, and my spending much of the time there reading some of his books, such as After God, The Last Philosophy, and Life, Life.

Cupitt is an Anglican priest and philosopher at Cambridge in England who has over the past several decades or so articulated a "non-realist" view of God. Cupitt no longer administers the sacraments or serves a parish and we shall see why.  He is a very controversial figure who some see as an atheist, a term he rejects and dislikes.

Non-realism is a complicated word, but for my purposes I will accept Cupitt's definition: "non-realism" in religion stands for the idea that the Truth is Not Out There, despite the claims of the X-Files. 

The idea that the Truth is out there is part of our philosophical and religious heritage from the Greeks and especially Plato who argued that there is a realm of Ideas, Forms, and Reality that is eternal and true and that is available  only to philosophers and priests and not to mere mortals. This realm of truth is the Real Deal, meaning that we mortals are just passing through while the Truth is Forever.

"Tender Mercies" and the gospel of life itself

The movie “Tender Mercies” is to be shown on December 9 in Bisbee in the Fellowship Hall of St. John’s Episcopal Church, the second film in a movie festival being held to celebrate Advent.

I have written about the movie before here: the story is simple enough. Mac Sledge, played by Robert Duvall, is a famous country western song writer and singer who now is washed up, an alcoholic.

He was married to Dixie Scott (Betty Buckley), an aging country western singer who became famous singing Mac Sledge’s songs.Their marriage was tumultuous. In a drunken rage Sledge threatened to kill Dixie and she divorced him. They have a young daughter, Sue Anne, played by Ellen Barkin. She is now a teenager, 16. He hasn’t seen her in 7 or 8 years or so.

We don't learn any of this until the movie is well along.

The movie starts when Sledge wakes up in a forsaken little motel out in the middle of nowhere under a big Texas sky. He tells the owner, Rosa Lee (played beautifully by Tess Harper) that he is broke and asks if he can work off what he owes.

Rosa Lee says yes but there can't be any drinking and Sledge says, "Yes, Ma'am."

Rosa Lee is a young woman, much younger than Sledge, a woman widowed by the Vietnam War, with a young son  named Sonny.