He's Back!

I see it has been 9 days since i made an entry here. That is what I call the Vermont factor. In California we live in an apartment on the beach and every morning I put my laptop in my backpack and hike up to my writing station at the museum where I spend five or six hours.

I get a lot of writing done. Including in this blog.

In Vermont, where we now are and will be until November, we live in an 1830 farmhouse in a rural community. Lacey has eight growing beds to tend, two vegetable and six pernnial gardens. The house can use around the clock tending. And we have a dial-up connection here. Slow and cumbersome.

I get antsy about my lack of writing time in Vermont, but I suspect it keeps me from being even more lopsided a person than I am already. The farmer side of me - virtually untouched until we moved back to Vermont from California - gets a workout and my busy mind gets a rest. Although I do find that as I am going about my chores here my mind is particularly busy. It's just that you don't get plagued with the outcome as much as when I am in California.

Last night my second cousin called to tell me that her grandmother, my aunt, had died. She was 94. Two weeks ago, after she knew that her great-grandson was safely returned from Iraq, and that her great-great grandson had been born and was healthy, she told the nurses that she would take no further nourishment. They could put ice chips in her mouth, but they were under no circumstances to try to feed her.

She and her late husabnd took me in when I came back to this country from the Philippines to go to boarding school. Their two daughters were a little older and they introduced me to the fast life of Westechester County, NY. I took to it with a little too much enthusiasm and became a trial to my aunt and uncle. He was a doctor, a Mahatma figure in the town, but not terribly present in the family. My aunt was tough as nails and managed to hold things together.

I had touch with her on and off the past many years. I think she thought more of me than I thought she ought to. She was impressed that I had been ordained and made my living as a parish priest. I had resigned a decade ago to do the writing I never had time for, and to feel free to write what seemed inappropriate for pious parishioners. I worried that she would be angry that I had strayed.

In fact I think it amused her.

Our Norfolk terrier investigated a big fat porcupine on our walk through the woods on Monday. We heard him scurrying around in the brush and when he reappeared his muzzle and chest looked as if he had been in a battle with indians. I freaked out. I had never seen a dog that was full of quills. We found a vet nearby who would take us right away. When we arrived she took one look at Cosmos, all eleven pounds of him, and said, "Weren't you the brave one? Not too smart, but brave." She gave him a shot to quiet him, took a pair of pliers and pulled more than twenty-five quills from him.

The next morning he was his old self. And, so the vet says, will likely do the same thing the next time he sees a porcupine.

So Vermont life is of a whole different order.

Good thing.

6:10AM


The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to
give, not our kind. -Mignon McLaughlin, journalist and author (1913-1983)

****

May 22nd - 6:10AM - 30º
skim of ice on the birdbath
the counterfeit bluebird waiting on the limb of
the newly leafed out black cherry kissed by a
first slice of sun sneaking through pine trees
at the crest of the hill that in the 100 year old
post card Tracey gave us is cleared to its crest with sheep
grazing

the pond steams as if recently on
fire, five Canada geese, two pair and
a solitaire shout at each other, one of the paired
males periodically makes a frantic flapping rush at
the solitaire who sullenly flies a few yards then
settles in some territorial dance which we likely
provoked by our efforts to protect our land with avian birth
control

the weekend we drove south to see our children’s
new houses. New to them and new to earth
when measured against rocks and turtles, one
a 200 year old half house, wonderfully wide warped
floors, without a single a plumb jamb in an 18th century
New England fishing village converted costly commuting
destination to the high tech parlors and hedge fund bettors of
Boston

the other a piece of an old town house beneath
the Tobin Bridge in Charlestown, where when I lived
in Boston, only Irish needed apply
squeezed into precious few square feet, a sweet condo with
a back patio that – like the black cherry – catches the morning
sun just before it bathes Back Bay, at the end of the street
an Irish pub provided Guinness and shepherd’s pie to die
for

steam is lifting from the pond so I can see the geese and a pair
of Mallards nesting – I hope - on the far bank where they may lay
we’ll watch for goslings, thrilled if they swim by our porch behind their parents. We discriminate. Canada geese are not welcome. Mallards may
nest and reproduce. The Irish once lived across the river in Charlestown where my daughter does because they were not welcome in Boston. Pleased and befuddled, we watch our children claim their place in a new
earth

Pond clear, temperature in the 50s already, geese silent, sun above the hill.

This morning I am sitting impatiently in front of my screen watching the infuriating little ball spin while I wait for my rural Vermont dial-up connection to connect me to various screens.

One friend sends me cute little throwaways several MGs in size and, when I see them coming I shut down Entourage and go to Web Mail and delete the throwaway rather than spend the morning watching the spinning ball. Reminds me of the earliest days of television when I would sit fascinated watching the test pattern. I wonder if anyone reading this even knows what a test pattern was? When we got our first TV - in maybe 1951 - there was only an hour or so of programming. The other 23 hours a test pattern - so called because it reassured you that this miraculous new device hadn't died - filled the screen.

I am impatient this morning because over the weekend we visited one of our children who has a 21st century connection in her 19th century house in a seaport town north of Boston. I have finally incorporated TV into my sense of how things are - though we don't have one in Vermont, and I still think color, DVD players and Netflicks are hard to fathom. Their house is wired for TV, phone, internet, music. So they - and I yesterday - sit anywhere they please and connect to the world.

One piece of which is connecting through Skype to our son and daughter-in-law who are living in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. Another story that - she with Mercy Corps, he a free-lance writer - but the impossible miracle to me is sitting in front of a laptop computer and talking aloud to them, 18,000 miles away and 11 hours ahead of us. At no cost.

So, back in rural Vermont this morning, tied to the umbilicus of my dial-up, I feel a little impatient. And then, remembering when a long distance phone call seemed too extravagant to make more than once a week, and that when we first owned this 1836 farmhouse in 1980 we shared our number with a neighbor on a party line ( I wonder what happened to that other person; we still have the same number.), I feel a little modernity gluttonous.

We drove from our daughter and son-in-law's house down to Charlestown to see another daughter who has just moved into her new condo. When I lived in Boston you had to prove your Irish bonafides to live in Charlestown. All I knew of the area was what I could see looking down from the Tobin Bridge on my way from the north shore to the south shore, onto the row upon row of three deckers. Our daughter paid three times what we paid for our Vermont farm house for two rooms in an old brick building. It has a tiny patio which likely added a zero or so to the price, and made it well worth it to our daughter. Walking Cosmos around the neighborhood we ran into lots of people like our daughter, young professional people with dogs, getting in their last hours of weekend before going back to managing the world.

She is fully wired, too.

On Wednesday we fly to Florida for the wedding of a young woman we have known over the years - Lacey plays tennis with her mother and I have played tennis with the daughter who was a college player - who is marrying a man from India. I have been commissioned to officiate at the American wedding on Friday and will be a guest at the Indian wedding Sunday. Rumor has it - may it be merely a rumor - that the groom will make his entrance on an elephant. I have had negotiations with the couple through email and phone about the content of the ceremony at which I will preside.

I no longer feel the obligation to impose credal orthodoxy. Not only because most young people simple cannot connect with such a view of reality, but also because neither can I. It looks as if God will not make an appearance by name, and that seems a good thing to me right now. I wrote my thesis in seminary - during the God-is dead days - on the possibility of using language about God with confidence that one could be sure what we were talking about. Or even that we all were talking about even remotely the same thing.

In the face of the positivism -led by Ludwig Wittgenstein - we were all feeling uneasy about the casual way we spoke about God and heaven and prayer, as if we understood and agreed what we meant. Or that such things occupied a space in reality remotely equivalent to a table or a hot dog.

I concluded that if one is to use the ancient language of faith, it was first necessary to acknowledge that it does not function in the same way as "normal" daily language. And also to admit that one had only a vague understanding of what one was speaking about one's self. (Apologies for that convoluted sentence.)

So, still persuaded of dimensions of reality that elude everyday language, I negotiated for language that is evocative, that causes bodily - emotional, affective - responses to critical issues like relationship, betrayal, beauty, sadness, risk, death.

So I'll be gone from this screen for a week.

And I will be wondering what it does to affective experience to go faster, traveling from California to Vermont to Boston to Florida in the space of two weeks. Children in 19th century houses and in the rain forest on the other side of the globe, with instant connection.

A walk up the hill to Tracey's barn this afternoon seems an important grounding.

Some time ago my cousin, whom I have never met, emailed me asking if I would send my DNA to a place National Geographic sponsors that will trace your ancestry - Genebase2.0.com. My cousin's mother and my father were siblings. He sent in DNA asking for his paternal ancetsry and asked if I would do the same so he could learn more about his maternal line.

That was some months ago. I have yet to hear back. I wonder if perhaps the new is so bad - I am descended from Jack the Ripper, or have dinosaur DNA - that they hesitate to tell me, or maybe that I have no ancestors, I dropped from space rather than from my mother's womb.

Two days ago the church where I used to work forwarded me an email from a man in New Zealand who has the same last name - Colmore - as I, and who says my first name - Blayney - appears all over his family geneaology. He had been researching his family origins on the internet and came across a reference to me connected to the church. So he sent them an email wondering if there was such a person and whether he was still living.

Yes, in Vermont.

My father perpetuated the myth - which he no doubt believed - that no one except our immediate relatives held our surname in the United States. And I never ran into any other than cousins.

But several years ago - after the advent of the internet - I Googled the name and came up with lots of Colmores in various parts of the country. I confess it initially was a letdown.

But over time it has been rich to learn that our ancestry has spawned quite a variety.

So I emailed Peter Colmore in New Zealand hoping to learn more. What I wonder is how they got there. I have always believed that the English who settled New Zealand were criminals in exile. As were many of the original colonists to the United States. I didn't ask Peter if his forebears were, but when he emailedme back that his family had come there in the mid 19th century, I wondered.

I will write more about this, but it has me wondering. When I met another cousin for the first time - a cattle farmer in Rising Fawn, Georgia - a few years ago, I was struck by how much about him felt familiar, even though our upbringing was totally different.

Now that we are learning more about genetics, it is fascinating - and humbling - to wonder how much of what we think is unique about us because of our will - has little to do with will.

It's still quite unnerving - even after 20 years of migrating - to wake up in southern California, get on a plane that takes off over the Pacific Ocean (because of noise and wind direction, planes almost always take off to the west from San Diego), have an hour break in Dallas or Chicago, fly to Hartford (Hartford, Connecticut is the closest airport to where we live in southern Vermont), be greeted by one of our children, stop at a great restaurant in Sunderland, Massachusetts for a sumptuous dinner, and drive to our 1830 farmhouse in Jacksonville, Vermont where we spend our first night of the next six months.

I know it is as routine for many people as it is for me to walk every morning in California to my writing station.

But for Lacey and me it is quite a miracle.

And like all miracles, it rearranges one's perception of things.

Lacey is a busy interior designer in San Diego. She has been in that business for 40 years, in Boston and in San Diego, and she has clients on both coasts who know they would be wise to consult her before making any big moves in their houses. She also has become known as a "Green" designer, one who understands and is passionate about finding ways to do work that is as friendly as possible to the environment. She leaves the house around 8am and many days I don't see her again for 12 hours.

In Vermont - while she still does work every day through email, fax and phone, and travels to California every 6 - 8 weeks - she is a gardener and farmer. Eight gardens mark the perimeter of our place, six perennial beds and two vegetable gardens.

So, I see her quite a lot - usually when she needs me to dig up a garden or bring her a tool - but she is busy just as many hours, but this time up to her elbows in dirt.

In California I hike two miles up the cliffs over the ocean with my computer in my backpack, to my writing station at the Museum of Contemporary Art where I am Writer-In-Residence. For ten years I have had a carrel in their library where I go, plug in around 9:30 - 10am, write until 3 -4, hike home, play tennis or swim, feed and walk the dog, set the table and get ready to greet Lacey who will come home exhausted.

In Vermont I steal an hour or two at my keyboard - usually from 6 -8am - before the demands of an old farmhouse and Lacey's need for a garden assistant, eat up a good part of the rest of the day. Two or three times a week I ride my road bike with a friend, and whenever I can I hit some tennis balls with someone over at two red clay courts 40 minutes from our house.

Yesterday I bought a truck - a 2004 GMC Sierra 1500 - to replace the truck I ran into an oak tree last July. I set out to replace in kind - the most basic Ford Ranger pickup - but when I drove one, much as I love it, I felt its lightness and remembered how it fishtailed on the dirt roads we travel here.

I can still conjure up the sound and the feel of the truck hitting the tree, and when I drove the larger, heavier Sierra, my anxiety dropped.

So I bought it.

I had thought I might change the type of vehicle I drive here. Maybe a Honda Element. But somehow Vermont calls out to me to drive a truck.

In California I almost never get into a car. I walk everywhere. It is a taste of what life could be like if we were clever - or desperate - enough to redesign our culture so everyone didn't need a car to manage. And it is wonderful.

But not in my lifetime, if ever, will such a thing happen.

When the six months in either place have passed and we get ready to migrate, I get anxious and cranky. I don't want to leave. For the first couple of days in the new place I feel disoriented, as if I can't remember how to function. (More true in Vermont; when we arrive in California in November, having left early winter in Vermont, cold, dreary, I am always thrilled to step into southern California).

I think, I hope, this going back and forth holds back the senility I can sometimes feel creeping up on me. But the physical demands of rural Vermont seem more daunting each year.

But the seeming miracle - like having entered a time machine I used to read about in comics - of waking up on one coast and going to bed on the opposite coast, still works its wonders on me.

Maybe you've been following the very public and heated debates about God, No God and religion. A whole cottage publishing industry has grown up around the issue in the past few years.

I am a member of a salon in which we discuss such pressing matters as what we think about the idea of God, the likely consequences of global warming, the possible resolution to our Iraq debacle, whether we will run out of fossil fuel in the near future, and the fun of being old men who can gape at scantily clad young young women without anyone much caring.

All of us have significant history in church, as ordained pastors and as lay people. I would guess we represent the extreme left wing of those who call themselves Christians. One of us seems moving slowly closer to calling himself an atheist.

So far it doesn't seem to have much altered the way we carry out our daily activities.

Maybe this is really what the Islamists find most appalling about post-modern liberal western culture.

It hardly seems to matter whether we believe in God or not.

I have a very different take on this from those Islamists, as I do from radical fundamentalist Christians or the so-called religious right in this country. I remember, as a pastor in a New England parish in the early 70s, anxiety among the parishioners about our stagnant church membership, in numbers and in money, while the new evangelical churches growing up in the suburbs surrounding us seemed to be on steroids.

The lay leaders of our congregation read that fundamentalist churhces were growing while mainline churches were in decline. And they thought we ought to take a look at how we might do better. Maybe get a little more demanding in our beliefs.

What I thought - and still think - is that it isn't really about belief in God at all.

It is rather about what Ronald Reagan - one of my least favorite presidents - said about nuclear disarmament: trust and verify.

For me the question of God is moot. I happen to find it fanciful and childish to think there is some Great Being that intervenes in history and to whom one can - by good works, or, failing that, prayer appeal for a better deal in this life or the next. That seems like magical thinking to me.

Does that make me an atheist?

Not by my lights.

In some way, every day, however subtly or beneath consciousness, I test again the question that I believe not only matters, but has much more to do with whether one is a believer or not than whether one uses the Divine Name:

Knowing what I now know, is being here worth it?

Even understanding that I have no idea how this day will turn out, or even whether it will - because we do know that nothing is forever, that we and all around us, are here for a season - am I glad to be here, and will I put my shoulder to the wheel and make an effort to contribute to helping others be glad, too?

I know, pretty abstract, or ephemeral, compared with: Do you believe in God?

But, when you think about it, of far greater consequence.

I still occasionally take part in religious ceremony, even preside, as my ordination is an indelible mark. Yes, I understand there are those who find my understanding of what we are doing there pretty meager fare. But I don't. I find it rich, this participating physically in a sacrament, an avenue into the mysterious wonder of our being here.

And, in the central sacrament of the Christian (and just ablout every other, in some form) religion, the Eucharist, Communion, we put say OK, to the mightiest mystery of all, the wondrous new life that often comes from facing into the worst that life can do to us. Breaking the body, spilling the blood - dying - that seems to threaten and mock our every breath, is no match for the thrill of being here.

My computer's brain tells me I have written about this before in this blog.

Conundrum, that is. But maybe not this one.

Reading a piece in the local weekly paper about a coming conference sponsored by the Bahai temple.

I have never known much about Bahai except that they believe all religions are various expressions of the one God. And that if we acknowledged that, and that therefore we all are one, there would be no more fighting.

A close friend told me some years ago that his sister and brother-in-law led a Bahai community in Teheran. Until they were persecuted and run out of the country by Islamists.

It seems Bahais, though tiny in number, have been opposed wherever they appeared.

Because they are a peace group? Because they don't claim an exclusive on God for themselves? Because they never take part in partisan conflict?

The conundrum?

What about a group whose entire energy is devoted to peace and the oneness of everything, to lending aid to people in need, would provoke discrimination and persecution?

The only answer I can come up with - and it is such a paradox that it really is a non-answer - is that because the rest of us lust after power and control, anyone who appears not to, upsets the rhythm of human intercourse that we trust. And we trust it - even though we dream of living peacefully - because it is all we have known. Encountering a profound place of peace is, for most of us, like having the eye of the hurricane we have long been battling, pass directly over us.

If we know anything about hurricanes we know not to trust the beautiful sunny calm, because the other half of the storm, soon to hit, comes with an even greater intensity than the first half.

Conflict is what we know, and what we trust. What we believe to be the natural way for humans.

As a child of the 60s, I experienced the ecstasy of believing the end of human self-destructive conflict was in sight. The election of Jack Kennedy, the rise of the Beatles, the anti-war, civil rights movement, feminism, celebration of sex, all worked on my young psyche like an aphrodysiac.

Unlike most who look back on that time as one of excess we have been sheding ever since, I believe those few years changed everything about our being together on the planet. I regard the so-called neo-conservative movement as akin to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a last, desperate effort to lash together a structure that had already collapsed.

But the other half of the conundrum is that it looks as if our kind is so suspicious of life without hierarchy and power struggle that we may choose to destroy ourselves rather than risk such a thing.

The more the prohpecies of the 60s come to pass, perhaps most visibly and powerfully through the world wide web, the more desperate and angry becomes the determination of true believers of all sorts to shut down this celebration of freedom, connection, and possibility.

That there is plenty - food, shelter, wealth - for all of us to live decent lives, is anathema. What would we do if we didn't compete for scarce resources?

Since my flower child days I have lived in for a spell in Zimbabwe and watched our own country turn into a hegemon like the nation we fought against to gain our own freedom. Zimbabwe successfully fought a heroic war against her colonial masters, only to suffer under the tyranny of one of her own freedom fighters turned to an avaricious monster.

Who knows whether there is some fatal flaw in us, a genetic defect, that will keep us in fighting posture until we do ourselves in? Perhaps some vesitgial memory in us senses that the universe will not support us as it has these past few thousand years, and our self-destructiveness is driven by frustration and depseration at not being able to control our destiny.

Whatever it is, I will continue to throw in my lot with the Bahais and whatever form the flower children take during the remainder of my life. Not because I am sure the Beatles were right, that love will carry the day. But because that's how and with whom I choose to hang.

An old joke tells of Adam turning to Eve as they leave Eden from which God has expelled them, and saying,

"Darling, we are living in a time of transition."

For the past ten years we have divided the year between Vermont and Southern California. Our eastward migration comes this Saturday. In a six hour plane ride our lives will change dramatically.

From our two bedroom apartment on the western edge of the continent - palm trees, surf, Asian fusion, California glitz, five restaurants within a one minute walk, as well as tennis courts, urban concrete always underfoot until we step onto the beach - we will walk into our 1830 farmhouse in a rural village of 500 - a twenty acre pond, across the street from the town burial ground (where Lacey and I will be buried, having given each other grave lots for Christmas several years ago), seven perennial gardens and two vegetable gardens, dairy farm up the road, 200 year old maple trees shading the house, the nearest restaurant, movie theater or hospital a forty minute drive.

Cosmos, our 5 year old Norfolk terrier, gives up his leashed walk along the coast, to run free in dense woods, flushing birds and dispatching an occasional vol. Jasmine, our 15 year old Siamese, doesn't go outside on either coast. But in Vermont she camps on a screen porch from which she surveys a panorama of birds, Hummingbirds, Canada geese, and beavers.

In May when the time to leave approaches I begin to grieve the California coast. In November when the time to leave approaches I begin to grieve the Vermont countryside.

When I arrive in California and take a walk along the beach, I feel as if I have been given a new life. When I arrive in Vermont and walk through the woods, just leafing out in that suprising yellow/green, and smell the fresh air, I feel as if I have been given a new life.

I am afraid of change. I always assume whatever is to come will be worse. I experience entropy in my bones. I hate to change doctors or mail carriers (postal clerks in Vermont where we pick up our mail at the Post Office), assuming I will never become as good friends with the new one.

If it were left up to me I likely would hunker down in one place.

Luckily, it's not up to me.

So we migrate. It's more strenuous, this moving every six months, than it used to be, and has the effect of making me feel as if time has speeded up. Can it really be that six months has passed since we arrived?

The first morning back in Vermont I walk the graveyard looking for fresh graves. Who has died since November? I walk across our plot and look back at the house and the pond and wonder when...

And wonder. Will we be winding down our Iraq misadventure when we return in November? Will Barak Obama be a distant memory? Will the stock market be testing new dizzying heights, or in one of its periodic plummets?

I will have had another birthday - I hope. Wll I have the drive to chase a hard hit backhand deep into the corner of the court. Or take a strenuous 30 mile bike ride?

My guess is that, however all that turns out, the universe will have figured out new ways to keep evolving.

Maybe I will have, too.

If you devote your life to seeking revenge, first dig two graves.
-Confucius (c. 551-478 BCE)

Scottish scientists were developing a pill that will simultaneously boost women's sex drive and decrease their weight. Harper’s Weekly

****

As I stepped off the curb on my morning walk up to my writing station one day last week, a Bentley Motor Car drifted through the Stop sign, the driver oblivious to me in the crosswalk. I did a pirouette as neatly as manageable for a 67 year old bearing a 15 pound backpack. Hardly elegant, but adequate to save the platinum blond lady driving, smoking and speaking on her cell phone, from involuntary manslaughter.

Her easy smile was, I’m certain, for the person on the other end of her phone call, not for my poor imitation of a dancer. I don’t believe she ever saw me.

Alongside my uncharitable thoughts about her, I considered how poorly adapted our species sometimes seems for the challenges that lie ahead.

Have we talked about the bees?

A few years ago our niece’s husband – who keeps bees – told me there are no wild honey bees left in this country. A mite began feeding on them and, unless the hive is treated with an antibiotic, the hive will die. A swarm – a big clump of bees that leaves the hive with a newborn queen, - must be captured and put into a domestic hive or it will not survive.

A neighbor in Vermont tells me it is not uncommon to lose a hive during the long winter. He then orders a new hive that arrives in the Post Office in a pouch from someplace in Georgia. The queen is in a separate pouch.

He thinks people who have allergies should eat local honey since the bees pollinate from the plants that cause the allergies, strengthening immunities.

Bees pollinate 130 different crops we eat – fruit, fiber, nuts, vegetables – adding an estimated $14 billion to annual crop yield and quality. Bees have been on earth for 30 million years. Einstein once said that if bees disappeared, humans would last only four years.

Three years ago bee keepers began reporting a mysterious new thing, the disappearance of hives. The keeper would go out to harvest some honey, lift the roof, and inside there were no bees. No bee corpses near the hive.

Although there are many theories – some think the spread of cell phone towers may interfere with bees’ navigation system, some that the stress of transporting hives in trucks cross country to pollinate crops has weakened them – all we know is that hives are disappearing without clue nor trace.

An observer from another planet might consider the long term survival of humans doubtful. But, while we are so far a mere hiccough in geological history, the bees have been here quite a while, through lots of challenges. Bee people think the mites and whatever is disappearing whole hives are not the first threats to bee’s survival. They are useful to the earth’s ongoing life.

Are we?

Every new report of suicide bombers or the production of cars that get 8 MPG throws it into doubt. That lady in her Bentley struck me as a harbinger of our end. Maybe the earth is waiting us out, waiting for us to extinct ourselves so she can get on with her healthier cycles.

Maybe, maybe not.

There are more bacteria in your gut than there are people on earth. Lewis Thomas once speculated that humans evolved at the pleasure of the bacteria. He thought that if you were searching for our evolutionary purpose it might be as hotels for housing bacteria.

I find it a noble vocation, one that our mother earth might consider worth saving us from our ego-infection. If the bees haven’t been brought to their knees because of their value to the planet, perhaps our seeming determination to poison the earth and do ourselves in will be somehow interrupted by the bacteria who have grown used to our hosting them.

It had to come to this.

Once the serious debate - long overdue - began over our Iraq adventure, those who wish us ill stepped up their efforts and now the toll grows exponentially. Americans and Iraqis dying in stomach turning numbers.

Those who still refuse to base their opinions and actions on reality have already claimed that those dying every day have been sold out by those who oppose the war and are encouraging our enemies.

And who, again, are our enemies, exactly?

There was never any clean or honorable exit from this nasty war once the administration went forward with the invasion. But the terrible cost of leaving gets higher every day now.

The wish that something might change that - as a few hopeful and likely sincere American warriors have suggested - is a fantasy. I am no military strategist and yes, I am guilty of second-guessing those who prosecute this war.

The duty of citizenship in a democracy.

But it hardly takes military training to see the reality.

What it takes is a modest portion of humanity and common sense.

Of course it tickled my old yellow dog Democratic loyalties to read in yesterday's paper that the Republican would-be candidates for president, who were about to have their first debate, were in a quandry about what to do about the head of their party, the incumbent president.

His approval rating in the country at large is in the low 30s. But among the Republican loyalists it is much higher.

The candidates have first to work for the nomination among Republicans. And then they have to run in the country at large. So what to do?

I am still agitated that Al Gore - thinking he faced a similar dilemma in 2000 because of Clinton's late adolescent behavior - acted as if he hardly knew the man whose vice-president he had been for eight years. One diferrence was that Clinton - in part thanks to the cynical Republican attempt to use Clinton's indiscretion and lack of impulse control in his personal life to bring him down - Clinton's approval remained suprisingly high. But, so I have been told, Tipper was so disgusted with Clinton that she insisted that Gore distance himself and choose the prig, the ineffectual Joe Liberman as his running mate, largely because he had been the first Democrat in the Senate to condemn Clinton's blow job.

Had Gore merely said that, although of course he didn't approve of everything Clinton did, and they are very different men, he was proud to have been a part of a progressive administration under which the country had prospered and the world had been a realtively peaceful place, the past eight years might have been very different.

So, yes, it tickled me to know that the Republican hopefuls were facing a similar dilemma, for reasons of much greater substance.

Today's paper reports - I didn't see the debate - that Bush's name was mentioned only once by one of the ten candidates. But the headline referred to the debate taking place in Reagan Country.

That is going to be the mantra - already is - of Republicans in the coming election. Each will claim to be the heir or Ronald Reagan.

Some of the strongest push back I have received from my writing came when - following the multi-layered pageantry lionizing Reagan after his death - I wrote that I have never understood the reverence for this man. Republicans and Democrats took me to task for besmirching the memory of this great American.

Recently a Republican pundit, searcing for the reasons for the meteoric rise of Barak Obama, said he was the first national politician since Reagan to exude unfailing optimism.

We Americans like optimism. Reagan's favorite image was the one he borrowd from John Winthrop as he landed in the new world and quoted the biblical prophecy about being a light on a hill to the world. He never completed the passage which said that, should the nation fail to provide the opportunity and freedom it promised, that light would expose it to the world.

It always seemed to me that the basis for Reagan's optimism was either his refusal or his inability to see reality.

All but the most recalcitrant have abandoned the fiction of supply economics. The tax cuts for which he is still praised created deficits never before seen, although Bush has managed to exceed them. (Yes, I know tax receipts have reduced the size of projected budget deficits, but those predictions were - prior to Bush's taking office - about growing surpluses. The concern then was whether it was sound fiscal policy to actually pay off the deficit.)

What are we to make of the rest of the world loving Bill Clinton and finding Ronald Reagan and George Bush perplexing and much worse?

American exceptionalism. We Americans want to believe we are a special people, set aside from the rest of the world and somehow not subject to the same forces as the rest of the world. Reagan and Bush operated on American exceptionalism. Clinton was a world player.

The last president before Clinton who believed we are one nation among many was Jimmy Carter, and on that basis Reagan sliced him into tiny pieces.

The so-called neo-cons are only a little about economics and a lot about American exceptionalism.

I hope the next election will provide a Democratic candidate who understands that the global economy is not only about the economy.

I have just come from St. Paul's Cathedral in downtown San Diego and the requiem Eucharist for Robert Munroe Wolterstorff, first bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of San Diego, about whom I wrote yesterday.

Despite having spent my entire working life in the church, I have an aversion to institutional life. I was naive enough to think the church was not so much an institution as an amorphous band of pilgrims who gather periodically in search of the elusive nature of reality.

It isn't. And the past decade since I laid down my vestments have been a huge relief for me, as I have gone about my quest, finding occasional people, like you who read this, who also want to go on that pursuit.

Today the entire piece came together in a Mass that made me feel so glad I am a part of the church.

Odd, because Bishop Wolterstorff was the old school. He was a stiff, maybe even rigid moralist. He fought against the ordination of women and made clear to me - I was rector of the parish where he had been rector before being elected bishop - that he thought my leadership of the parish was lax and lacking boundaries.

He wasn't wrong.

But, as today's preacher pointed out (the preacher was the present rector of that same parish) Bob Wolterstorff let go some of his white knuckle grip on life and let many of us into his life.

But maybe what happened to me today wasn't even all about who and what Bob Wolterstorff was.

It was also about what is happening to me in my advancing years.

For sure I was laid out in that coffin in front of the altar today.

I pictured his weathered body lying in there, now compost, and marveled that we will fill a church, sing, pray, tell stories, eat a thousand little sandwiches afterwards, and then go home and do what is before us, knowing it won't be long before that is indeed me in that box.

I wept when we sang one of my favorite hymns - based on the very sentimental 23rd Psalm - and when the Paradiso from the Requiem by Gabriel Faure was sung my knees wobbled.

I felt like a drowning man watching his entire life pass before him as I looked around that Cathedral filled with faces of people I remember from decades ago - some I liked, some not, some names came back to me, some not - and understood all those tapes that ran incessantly through my head when I was trying to figure out how to keep from faling into the pit of failure, have run out.

There was one person there I would once have crossed the street to avoid, with whom I had an animated and warm exchange.

Being free of all the plumb lines we drop beside ourselves to try to figure out if we measure up, is a delight I never dreamed.

Imagine tasting that in church. At a funeral. For a bishop.

A few blogs ago I wrote about the mystery of disappearing honey bees.

In today's news the issue seems to be escalating.

It may turn out that climate change is not the issue that will most challenge our tenure on the earth.

One-third of the human diet comes from food that is pollenated by honey bees.

I first met him when I was interviewing for the job of Rector of St. James by-the-Sea in La Jolla, California, a job he had for many years. There had been one other person between his tenure and mine. When the Episcopal Diocese of San Diego split off from the Diocese of Los Angeles, Bob Wolterstorff was elected its first bishop.

Helen, his wife, made it clear right away that she had loved life when he was rector and didn't much like life when he was bishop. They had come from Minnesota and liked southern California for the reasons we all do. Helen was plain spoken and didn't go for the fluff people often brought to the bishop.

But being bishop was a mostly thankless job by then. But it suited Bob.

I remember being amused that he had set up in his house after he retired as bishop, an office that was almost a replica of the office he had down at the cathedral. It was like the Oval Office look-alike you find in presidential libraries.

He received me sitting behind his desk and, with that booming jovial voice that was his trademark, interviewed me as if the decision was to be his rather than the search committee's at the church. I felt anxious because I knew his reputation and he and I were on opposite sides of pretty much every one of the many divides in the Episcopal Church over the past generation.

But Bob wasn't interested in controversy, asking me about my family, seminary and how I liked the parish I was coming from in New England.

He had staked out a position opposing the ordination of women when that issue was at the top of the church's agenda. A woman whom I had shephered through the ordination process back east had come to San Diego to do some work with Jack Sanford, the best known Jungian analyst in the church. She presented herself to the bishop and told him she was going to be around for a year and would be glad to help any way she could, since she was an ordained priest.

"So long as you're in San Diego," Bob said to her, "you will not functionn as a priest."

Shortly after I began my tenure as rector of St. James I decided to hire a woman priest on the staff. I went to visit Bob, who had made it a habit to come to the early service at St. James every Sunday since his retirement. When I told him I was hiring a woman, I could see he was dismayed. But he was a good soldier.

"You're the rector," he said. "You have to do what you think is right."

"Thank you, Bob. Now, a lot of people have told me that you will leave the parish over this. I am hoping you won't."

He said he needed some time to think about it.

He continued coming to the early service. People noticed that when he came forward to receive communion, he would make it a point to go to the opposite side of the rail from where Susan was administering communion. But he was cordial to her and I could see that he really liked her. Bob in fact did really like women.

So the day came when he headed for his usual side, hesitated, then crossed the aisle and received communion from Susan. We never talked about it. But one day, months later, he said to me, "One of the good things about getting old is that it's not so hard to admit when you're wrong."

He was just the sort of man who intimidated me. Certain of his position, stern, like my father. I came to love him.

By the time he died last week at 93, we had taken to greeting each other with a hug. At least what passed for a hug with Bob, two elbows locked around my pectorals as if I was in a straight jacket.

Tomorrow his funeral at the cathedral will be like burying a Pope, with all the pomp.

Deservedly.

On Friday we went to the Station Parade Deck, Marine Corps Air Station, Miramar, California for the Change of Command Ceremony.

My godson, a Lt. Colonel, was taking command of the Flying Tigers, a helicopter unit which he is scheduled to take back to Iraq – his third deployment – in January for a year’s tour.

The ceremony – right out of central casting, a band, a platoon of Marines doing close order drill, a Major General in battle fatigues like all the other Marines, flowers for the outgoing and incoming wives, speeches by both men that could have been written for a movie, the playing of America The Beautiful, the Navy hymn, the Marine Corps song From the Halls of Montezuma… - pretty much finished me off for the rest of the day.

The first ceremony in which I encountered Lt. Colonel B. Morgan Hall, III was in 1967 when I went to see his mother and father – my college roommate – in Hamilton, Massachusetts where that Sunday morning I baptized my new godson in Christ Church.

I had flown east from my first post as curate at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Akron. The Tuesday before, largely because I was the newest, youngest person with the least to lose in the newly organized group, I had been made President of the Summit County Committee for Peace in Viet Nam.

Summit County, Ohio had sent an unreasonable number of young conscripts to that war. Many Gold Star Mothers. A few of us thought to end that war.

Today I went to get my hair cut by Q, who, about the same time as Morgan was being baptized, was born on the high plateau in Khe San, Viet Nam during a siege that was to last several weeks and cost the lives of dozens of American Marines and untold Vietnamese on both sides.

As the band played the Marine Hymn on Friday, I sensed Morgan’s father, my old friend, standing in front of me, beginning to come unglued. I put my hand on his shoulder hoping to steady us both.

After the ceremony I told him how moved I was and wondered what it was like for him, having been a Marine before Viet Nam.

Such a beautiful ceremony, he said, and to think what these young people are being asked to do. Neither of us was up to finishing that exchange.

The lunch afterwards at the Officers’ Club was lively, toasts regaling each other with inside humor between these vigorous young people whose bonds had been forged under circumstances we were glad to have been spared.

Lacey and I sat at a table with Morgan’s wife and three children. For the past three Christmases we have gone to their house and made a gingerbread house and had a Christmas lunch. Lacey always asks them to let us at least get out the front door before they begin the demolition. Morgan was with us for this year’s lunch.

He and I dance gingerly around the issues of the Iraq war. The night after the ceremony his father gave a toast in which he said having me for a roommate was the first time he had ever really personally known a Democrat.

I couldn’t track how much my emotions were triggered by the band and ceremony as only the Marines can provide, and how much by my anger and sorrow that this precious piece of our future is being squandered in a war that needn’t have been.

Q’s English, while a world better than my Vietnamese, is not yet strong enough for us to have a coherent conversation about the two major wars that have torn the fabric of our nations and the world since he and Morgan were born. He vaguely remembers his family’s escape on a boat at the war’s end. Somehow, even though I only get my hair cut every six or eight weeks now that it hardly grows, Q remembers all the details of our kids’ adventures.

Some days I despair, wishing our country might have learned something about managing power and wealth, how using it to try to rearrange the world in our image turns to dust. I was younger than either Morgan or Q when I joined the protest against our Viet Nam debacle. When we finally fled, as we will one day from Iraq, leaving behind the detritus of our hubris, I felt certain we were a chastised nation, more mature and ready to play a responsible role in a diverse world. When the Soviet Union imploded it was thrilling to think the long nuclear standoff could end.

My despair is tempered by Q and Morgan, by their strong wives and arresting children, forged somehow, strong as iron, in the fires of our arrogance.