The Republicans' Supreme Court

     An old story tells of a king whose subjects grew weary of his demanding whims. They petitioned him for a body of law to give them known rules for framing their behavior.
     With express reluctance, the king agreed. But he wrote the law in so tiny a hand, and posted it so high on the castle wall, that only he could read it. Thus the law had no discernible meaning for the people. It had only force. It meant whatever the king said it meant.
     For ultimate explication of American law, the Constitution establishes a Supreme Court. However the Constitution offers surprisingly little detail on the court's size and shape, or the outer limits of its mandate. Particulars have evolved at the hands of presidents, Congress and assertive chief justices.
     In performance -- and more particularly in the public mind -- the modern court has emerged as a result-oriented institution.  Justices are perceived as using their power of decree to establish public policies they favor.  The referees are perceived as making a practice of throwing the game.
     Without any general expectation of impartial judicial temperament, the selection of justices becomes the equivalent of handicapping horses.  And the elevation of ideology above ability has from time to time placed on the court justices of dubious fitness. In at least one instance it has placed a justice of dubious character.  Events suggest that the Republican faction now controlling Congress is willing to place another.
     At a minimum, Brett Kavanaugh's behavior in Congressional hearings proved that he is an intemperate partisan.  Perhaps it is quaint to wish that this alone could bar him from confirmation, but some of us wish it nonetheless. Among us are the American Bar Association and the American Civil Liberties Union. Perhaps it is also quaint to wish that confirmation debates did not have the dignity of adolescent squabble. But some of us wish it nonetheless.
     Congressional Republicans have indulged a might-make-right ethic in governance. They have displayed no felt obligation to the legitimate interests of the many millions of Americans who voted for other parties. In muscling their agenda forward they have focused vigorously on the court, contorting rules to prevent one seat from being appropriately filled, and now insisting that another go to a nominee who is palpably unfit.
     The Republicans may be on their way to confirming a maxim: It is possible to win battles while losing the larger war.
     Their cynical self-interest has already called their party into disrepute. Their manipulation of the court may position them for history's disapproval.  If the court figures in the American mind as a kind of supra-legislature, it cannot be successfully  populated with philosopher kings who are markedly more conservative than the public at large. Judicial decree lacks one ingredient essential in fully functioning democratic governance: the consent of the governed.
     The behavior of a Republican-stacked court remains to be seen.  In years past, some justices have broken their presumptive stereotypes. But it is possible to imagine rulings short on meaning and long on the force of imposed ideology.    The country would not sit easy under such governance, and given the Constitution's silence on some sorts of detail, the court is not institutionally impervious to major political backlash.
     History may call today's Republican faction both reckless and foolish.

The Trump Aberration

   


     In America, anybody can be president. That is one of the risks you take.
                                                                                      Adlai E. Stevenson II

     Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half the time.
                                                                                     E.B. White

     Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
                                                                                     George Bernard Shaw

      Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
                                                                                     H.L. Mencken

     When I use a word ... it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.
                                                                                    Humpty Dumpty by Lewis Carroll


     If we want to be tactful, we may say that Washington, D.C. is a world unto itself. If we want to be colorful, we may say that Humpty Dumpty could function there. Especially when the pressures of power struggles peak, connivance is a combination of art form and survival skill. Truth becomes a fungible commodity.
     Case in point: The leaking game.  Accomplished Washingtonians like to denounce leaking and do it, too.  Pro forma denials are -- well, pro forma. Veteran observers used to offer former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as an especially vivid example. He allegedly made a practice of denouncing his own leaks.
     At the moment, leaking has become torrential. Multiple sources have informed a respected journalist's new book portraying the White House as a chamber of fear and chaos.  A self-described senior official has written a newspaper article saying that the president of the United States is incompetent, delusional and amoral.
    From all directions, pro forma denials are rolling down  -- if not like justice in an ever-flowing stream, then like the practiced pleas of naughty children poised to blame siblings. And the hunt for culprits is on. An apoplectic president is demanding of his retainers to know who's been telling tales. Given the reality that people in a position to leak must be people with positions in-the-know, some of the leakers have in effect been ordered to track themselves down. In today's Washington -- or at least in today's White House -- this passes for rational response.
     The impact of the book and newspaper article is magnified by their palpable credibility. They have provided chapter and verse to what was already obvious. In Donald Trump, the presidency has passed into the hands of a corrupt, unstable man. Even some Trump partisans admit that they have sold their souls for the sake of prevailing on pet issues.
     Trump is not the first president with dubious mental health. Richard Nixon was episodically a drunk and consistently paranoid. Neither is Trump the first president whose aides -- according to the book and article -- try to trick him into neglecting his worst impulses.  Again, we need reach no farther back than Nixon. When he was in tantrum mode, his staff could turn a deaf ear to some of his directives.
     Nor is Trump the whole of the sickness in our governance. He is abetted by a perfect storm of malfeasance in Congress, where weaklings, opportunists and partisan hacks have combined to sabotage orderly deliberation. Republican leaders can fairly be charged with the architecture of this disgrace.  Beginning with their eight-year effort to undermine President Obama, they have functioned in open contempt for the interests of the millions of Americans who voted for the other party. Now in control, they use might-makes-right techniques to force their views on all comers.
     To speculation on impeachment one writer has added the intriguing notion that Trump might resign.  If equipped with a promise of pardon from Vice President Mike Pence, he could by this means hope to protect the privacy of his children and the secrecy of his finances and tax returns.  The writer presumes that a promise of pardon would be needed given the evidence -- not least in Trump's own frantic behavior -- that as a private citizen he would be vulnerable to criminal prosecution.
     The November elections will of course be a watershed for better or worse. The lesson of the current situation is not merely that in the push and pull of democracy bad people and bad ideas can gain sway. The lesson especially is that political peril rises if apathetic and inattentive voters leave a vacuum for zealous opportunists to fill. The Trump aberration is dangerous, yes. But voters need not brook it  past November, if only they will so resolve.
   
   

Treachery

     My friend Harry was in one of his reflective moods. After the server had delivered our beers,
Harry took a long pull on his, gazed at me and said "Why did Judas do it?"
     Now, the thing to know about Harry is this: What you see is not necessarily what you get. On the surface, he's a card. Particularly after he's had a couple of drinks. But Harry also is a reader and a thinker.  Something is always going on inside his head. Every now and then, out of the blue, he'll nail you with a question or a comment.
     "You mean the Judas?" I said, wanting to be sure I caught the right stride for the conversation.
     "Yes," Harry said. "The Bible says he got 30 pieces of silver. Not chump change back then. It might have been as much as four months' wages for the average guy, depending on which specific coins were used. But like they say, money is only a way of keeping score. It measures how much each side wants the deal, and how they size each other up. How eager is the buyer? How eager is the seller? And does each have a clear idea of what they're trading? The authorities were buying information. But Judas was actually selling himself -- his person-hood. From the way the story ends, I guess he decided he sold too cheap."
     Harry took another pull on his beer and asked, "Do you know much about Benedict Arnold?"
     "No," I said. "Sounds like you've been reading up."
     "I have," Harry said. "He was quite a big soldier for the American side. Very brave. Won some important battles. But he was kind of a prick, and people tended not to like him much. He thought he wasn't getting proper credit for what he did for the American side, so he decided he'd jump over and be a big soldier for the British side."
     "I guess people betray for lots of different reasons," I said.
     "Yes," Harry said, "but there's often a common thread. They're taking sides. They are trying to be in with one group or another.  Odd kind of thinking isn't it? Trying to get on someone's good side by showing that you can't be trusted."
     "Yes, I said. "Not the way most people think. Why all this talk about betrayal?"
     Harry gave me another long look.
     "Oh," I said. "You're thinking about the president and his groveling to Putin at Helsinki."
     "Yes," Harry said. "The big orange oaf himself."
     "You think he betrayed his country."
     "Well, he's been betraying this country's better interests for a long time. But Helsinki put a special kind of focus on it."
     "You think he's committed treason?"
     "I'm no lawyer, but I think probably he'd have to get caught passing specific secrets or something of that sort."
     "How about impeachment?"
     "Before Helsinki, I'd have guessed not yet.  The impeachment bar is pretty high, and intentionally so. The founders didn't want us tossing out presidents just because we became disenchanted with them. If unpopularity and slick dealing were grounds for impeachment, Abraham Lincoln would have been toast several times over.  But Trump has made it clear that he puts certain personal interests above the obligations of his office. That could affect the midterm elections. If the effect is strong enough,  that could put him in danger of impeachment -- which is, at heart, a political decision. And yes, I do think he deserves it."
     "Why does he do it? Abuse his oath  of office?"
     "Well, if it looks like a duck,  and so forth. He is extraordinarily deferential to Russian interests. He feels beholden to them in some way.  Or under their sway. They have some kind of influence on him. Could be dirty pictures or some such thing. I think it's more likely financial -- that he's hip-deep in financial obligations to the Russians and that's why he won't release his tax returns."
     "What do you think he's up to in the longer term?"
     "Surviving, for starters, and feathering his own nest. The thing to remember about Trump is that he has no real convictions. He is interested in two things: money and personal status.  I read the other day, by the way, that the personal status thing is part of his reason for throwing cold water on the Russia investigation. He can't abide the notion that his election wasn't entirely an endorsement of him personally. Anyhow, he's put himself in a helluva vulnerable spot. Putin can say what he pleases about what passed between them in their private meeting. Trump is such a notorious liar that any denial from him would be suspect among serious-minded people. Putin has positioned himself to lead an American president around by the nose. That imagery could be dangerous to Trump, and it won't go away. We will see a lot of that image on television as elections approach: Trump's foolish grin beside Putin's gimlet eyes."
     "You say it could be dangerous to Trump?" I said. "Could be?"
     "Depends on who bothers to vote," Harry said.
   

Faith And Corruption

                  ... and ... keep oneself unstained by the world.
                                    The Letter of James, 1:27
                                                                    NRSV

     Far from today in years and miles and more, my job involved me in planning a town's annual ecumenical prayer breakfast.
     Our whopping, 50-member committee was tasked with choosing a speaker. When we met to do the job, names were plentifully proposed. Some gained no support. Others gradually did. At length one name seemed to be emerging as a front-runner.
     A committee member raised his hand in objection.
     We can't have him, the member said to the chair.
     Why not? said the chair.
     Because he's a Republican. We had a Republican last year.
     Political partisanship had infected the blood and bone of the community.  Party labels were not only  shorthand for concepts of ends and means in governance. They were considered emblematic of character, even morality, in community affairs of every sort. Political screening of faith speech raised not an eyebrow. The Republican's name was tabled, and someone else -- a Democrat -- was chosen as that year's speaker.
     I moved away and  thought for years I'd left such extremes behind. Nowadays, alas, not so. National affairs have brought them back in spades.
     If it were a movie, today's Washington would be The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight as jointly imagined by a fantasist and a Klansman. In it, an amoral president has sought and received  the favor of religious moralists. (See fantasist, above.) This bizarre union produces regular outbreaks of irony. In one of the latest, an American embassy in Israel was opened with prayer by a clergyman who asserts that Jews are condemned to hell by virtue of being Jewish.  The overarching irony is that in coveting political power the religious moralists of the Christian right helped create a morally contemptible administration .
     Supporting actors are playing their part. In the House of Representatives, the president's party has given its highest leadership post to a human weather vane. In the Senate, the party is led by a shameless shill.
     The president can't keep aides for reasons ranging from incompetence to indictment. Congress maintains the demeanor of a soccer riot. National policy is made by partisan squabble or executive tantrum. Minorities are routinely libeled from a White House that is supposed to represent all Americans. And good-hearted people everywhere are praying -- so to speak -- that this movie will have an abbreviated run.
     Good hearts in my orbit worry about aftereffects.  Even when this president is gone, the bigots energized by his hate-mongering may be awhile crawling back under their rocks. For my own part, I also worry about lingering adulteration of politics with fundamentalist religion. An insidious kind of intolerance comes from the notion that some political opinions are divinely approved.
     And what of that adulteration in the obverse -- the break-in of politics upon religion? We should not cherry-pick the Bible to support a point of view, but the letter of James does come to mind. The writer is concerned with the difference between religious values and worldly priorities -- and with the capacity of the latter to corrupt the former.
   Today's mixture of religion and politics has in several particulars grievously corrupted both. I wonder how long a cleansing will take.

My Frog Totem

     He is a green fellow not quite as big as my thumb -- a squirrel tree frog, if I correctly read the  reference sources.
     We see him in the spring. He arrives unannounced.  We may first  spot him clinging to the outside of a den window. Or sometimes he chooses the window over the kitchen sink. Apparently he likes to watch us between our chores and at them, too.
     He seems to have a bold look in his eye. Perhaps they all do. I wouldn't know, as this is the only squirrel tree frog I have ever met. Or perhaps I infer boldness from his behavior.   When I step right up to the window pane for a nose-to-nose encounter, he is unperturbed.  I especially remarked the time he decided to join us at table.
     We had family in for a meal. A granddaughter announced -- with noteworthy aplomb -- that she could not sit because a frog occupied her chair. Sure enough, there he was, green as nature itself.
     Caught out, he hopped under the table.  This occasioned quick agreement on a goal of shooing him outside uninjured.    Execution of the agreement was not as smooth.  Several adults put head and shoulders under the table and opened a debate of the frog's precise whereabouts (he is quite small, after all) and the best means of inducing him to leave.   A couple of noggins got bumped in the undertaking, and no audible agreement was reached.
     The frog soon hopped out of the scrum on his own.   He was, indeed, uninjured. To my eye he was also unimpressed. At his own pace he made his way to a back door and waited there for one of us to let him out. The scrum took a bit longer to sort out.
     Literature, legend  and tradition are full of animal imagery.  From the ancient Greeks through Aesop and beyond, cultures have embraced versions of a  concept found among Native Americans as the creature totem. Human traits -- cunning,  courage, endurance -- are attributed to animals. A certain animal may be deemed to serve a person or a group as a symbol, example or even spiritual guide.
     If choosing a personal totem, I would go for the lion or stag. But tradition says that we don't choose our totems. They choose us. Thus the frog's attentions have caused me to wonder if I've been chosen by a tiny amphibian.
     According to people learned in such matters, I should not shrink from this notion. The frog is considered a symbol of purity, rebirth, healing and opportunity.  With due regard for purity, I shrink nonetheless.  The frog persona just isn't me. If matters totemic are indeed afoot, a happier notion is that the frog has mistaken me for someone else, and that somewhere a lion or stag is wondering how to find me.
     I am comforted in this view by the fact that we haven't seen the frog this year. Perhaps he has left to fasten upon his proper ward. But I assume that a wee frog has limited range. Even on someone else's turf, he must remain nearby. Thus, as I move among our neighbors, I watch for occasion to impart my lore. It could not be called  life-changing or hard-won. But in the business of the frog, it is what I have to offer: Don't let too many people get under the table. Just open the back door. He will see himself out.
   

Crooks I Have Known

     During my newspaper career I was acquainted with several crooks. This was strictly for professional reasons (mine not theirs).  They were not the violent sort. They were con artists, white-collar chiselers, petty thieves and grifters.
     Some had retired, or so they said. Others admitted that they were probably just between jail terms. Whatever their game, they shared one trait: They lacked a normal perception of moral and ethical boundaries.
      They knew that their behavior was at odds with societal rules. They just didn't believe, in their hearts, that their behavior was altogether wrong.  If others were victimized, the victims were culpable for not effectively protecting themselves and their property. Finders keepers, so to speak, even if the finding was done inside someone else's purse.  Little obligation was felt to refrain from doing what others didn't prevent.
      I think about this ethic sometimes when I watch the people in charge of our national government. Among them, an historic dearth of ability has been matched by a shortage of character.
      Elaboration on the character of the president is a challenge, as pejorative vocabulary is so quickly exhausted.  He  is the kind of man well reared children are taught to avoid.  With him, for now, we have a Congress that treats the American people as if we were dupes in a sidewalk shell game.
     A prime exhibit  would be the new tax law, which Republicans whooped through in haste and secrecy that kept the public from comprehending it. They now hope propaganda can persuade voters not to worry their pretty little heads about proper governance.  The emerging message says: Grab a short-term windfall, go shopping, and re-elect your sugar daddies in the fall.
     Nor should we overlook the blame-game opera of government shutdown, in which the worthies maneuvered to put a thumb on the scales of the November election.  With serial chicanery in Congress and serial mendacity in the White House, we are receiving a revelation of sorts.  The folks in charge have chosen the base side of the difference between leading people and herding them.
     This view of the consent of the governed gives license. Lawmaking is guided not by principle, but by the odds of voters making a nuisance of themselves.  And if voter consent is obtained by slippery method -- well, caveat emptor. Little obligation is felt to refrain from doing what the electorate doesn't prevent.
     Pundits who lament a failure of bipartisan spirit are speaking imprecisely, in my opinion. The true lapse is from a duty to govern in the broader interest of all the people. In just one example, Republicans who crow that their tax law will harm Democrats politically are thumbing their noses at the citizens who elected the Democrats.
     With complicity by leaders sworn to do better, our government has been Balkanized. Candidates and officeholders sing the tune of one faction or another. Zealous interests war outright against cohesion. A whole greater than the sum of its parts is not built. But the greater whole is, of course, the very idea of America.
     For this dismal circumstance there is blame enough to go around. An extra portion goes to  Republican leaders in Congress. They set a tone by working cynically for eight years to undermine a duly elected Democratic president. Now in power, they settle for ginning out cheap maneuvers while their own party's president challenges the gag reflex of the  world.
     History will call the lot of them authors of an epochal disgrace.











   

Golf And The Super Bowl

     My son involved me in golf. He was only 12, and could not have understood what he was doing. He could not yet have seen that his father lacks even a scrap of physical grace. Eye-hand coordination is a foreign concept. Manipulation of a dinner fork is a complex undertaking.
     Nor could he have known my inner ridicule of the game and those who ate, drank and breathed it.  The wardrobes and the jargon were subjects for arch conversations with myself. Ditto the sotto voce commentary of the television sportscasters. The world of golf was beneath serious regard.
     But the boy came home from summer camp, bright-eyed with new experiences. He had been introduced to golf and wanted me to join him in it.  And so we plunged in.
     We took lessons at a local driving range. He progressed. I floundered. The pinnacle of my achievement was in losing my grip on a club that flew so far down range the proprietor had to stop all the other customers so that it could be safely retrieved (see dinner fork, above).
     Being a bright and diligent young man, my son eventually moved on from golf to other pursuits. Not being as bright or diligent, I stayed on a slippery slope. I bought golf magazines in reams. I became a compulsive student of grip, stance and swing arc. I must have tried a hundred remedies for my slice. (None worked. See dinner fork, above.)
     Finally I was saved by arthritis, and by a streak of the parsimony ascribed by tradition to my Scottish ancestry. The game began to pain my hands and my wallet along with my pride. I gave my clubs to a nephew and quit.
     Golfer-me now appears in life's rear-view mirror as I imagine reformed gamblers seeing themselves in retrospect. What was I thinking?
     Our culture tells every little boy he should care about sports. Even we who didn't care heard the message. Perhaps some inner part of golfer-me hoped that, by learning a game at last, I could stop being the kid assigned to right field in baseball because less happens there.
     But I did actually like golf, even from within my unconquerable ineptitude. Hindsight says one reason may have been that it remained, at heart, a gentleman's game.  Matches were to be won by mastering the skills and respecting the rules of the sport -- not by trash-talking opponents or manipulating officials.  Sportsmanship mattered.
     And games matter in remaining truly games.  A wise man wrote that the word recreation  means exactly what it says: Re-creation. It is restorative. Of what?  The far corners of health, I think.
     Insofar as we frame recreation around skills and achievement, we touch the part of ourselves that wants to do a thing well if we're going to do it. If we favor watching athletic contests, we hope to touch the part of ourselves that admires seeing a thing done well.
     But in the high-dollar sports frenzy made possible by our country's affluence, something else emerges. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that something is lost: The principled difference between surpassing performance and merely besting an opponent.  Winning becomes a value that need not be closely attended by other values. It is pertinent that this year's professional football championship featured one team of notorious cheats, and another team known for fans whose vividly unsportsmanlike conduct includes violence.
     Nor is such as this without consequence. The culture tells little boys they should care about sports, and the evidence of life whispers to them that if they are good enough they can be set apart. Winners are allowed to bend the rules. Winning matters more. Principles of ends and means matter less.
     A bookish boy who was sent to right field can enjoy sports only vicariously. And I do like a good game. My favorite sport is college basketball. Properly played, it has balletic grace. Yet even in the best programs there, the winning-as-conquering ethic creeps in. If I settle down to watch, I must remain mindful that the performance of fine young athletes may at any moment be adulterated by cheap gamesmanship.
     It is a worm in my apple. Such is my attitudinal hangover from having learned years ago to appreciate golf. A little bit of golfer-me remains awake -- but only a little bit. I am not foolish enough
to try playing again (see dinner fork, above).  And I have always been able to observe certain self-chosen limits. I never adopted the wardrobe, for example. Even at my nadir I was not that far gone.

Two Grandmothers

    Share the gospel at all times. Use words if necessary.
                              Variously attributed to St. Francis of Assisi

     Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself? ...
     Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?
                                Baptismal Service, Episcopal Book Of Common Prayer 


     In my boyhood years, a child's experience of family life was largely matriarchal. Thus I remember my two grandmothers, especially, as bookends on early lessons in the difference between doctrine and faith.
     My father's parents lived in a middle-sized southern town. My grandfather was an accountant, my grandmother a housewife.
     She kept one foot in old ways and another in the fresh ones emerging in  the  New South of the 1950's.  Long after electric refrigerators were commonly available, she preserved food in an old-fashioned icebox. The iceman came regularly with his huge tongs to put in a fresh block, remove the remnant of the old one and empty the drip pan.
     On the other hand, she was quick to adopt a then-newfangled cooking device -- the pressure cooker. People said it was the equivalent of putting a bomb on your stove-top. She nonetheless used it early and often, and clucked at those who worried with the loving smile that was her hallmark.
     I loved spending after-school time with them. They were by nature gentle, nurturing people. And having reared three sons, they had a houseful of books that were made for me. I spent hours with an old encyclopedia for children called The Book of Knowledge. Through adventure tales of all kinds (the westerns were best) I nourished my love of storytelling.
     Much as I loved them and their house, I avoided spending weekends there if I gracefully could. They were strictly disciplined churchgoers.  This meant that I could not go on Sunday afternoon to attend any of my beloved movies. One had to keep the Sabbath. And it meant that I had to go with them to services on Sunday morning.
     They were old-timers at an historic, mainline protestant church. It was for me a tedious place. Also I was bothered, in a vague, pre-adolescent way, by sensing there a disconnect of word from deed.  As I experienced the behavior of the burghers in the pews, hallways and classrooms, it seemed that in matters of loving-kindness they might be longer on precept than example.
    Thus my grandparents' devotion to the place was a puzzle.  Loving-kindness was their stock in trade.  The dour atmosphere of the church didn't square with my grandmother's cheerful, charitable strength -- much less with the saucy love of life she displayed when she made my grandfather blush by flirting with him in public.
     Meanwhile, my mother's parents were small farmers and country storekeepers.  They kept pigs and chickens. They kept what they called a garden, though it must have covered nearly an acre. From these resources they obtained much of their own food. Each season had its mainstay purpose: planting, tending, harvesting, butchering, canning, curing, storing.
     Here again, my portion of life was largely matriarchal. This grandmother was the wiry, hard-working product of a hand-to-mouth rural upbringing. She helped with the animals and the store, tended the garden, reared four children, kept the house.
      Preparation of each day's meals could be a chore of many hours for her, as much of the food might have to be harvested before it could be prepared. A Sunday chicken dinner routinely meant catching, killing and cleaning the birds, from the feathers onward. Though her kitchen was fully equipped, she also kept there a relic of her childhood ways -- a huge, iron coal-burning stove. It helped to heat one end of a house that had no central furnace. And she said it was the only proper thing for making her cornbread.
     Her days were chock full of work. Yet there was always time to exemplify loving your neighbor. No need of friend or family was too small -- or too great -- for her to extend an offer of help. She was a regular visitor to my grandfather's lonely and reclusive spinster sisters. She kept grandchildren while their parents worked at getting a start in life. When a black employee fell ill, she moved across the tracks -- literally -- to live in the woman's home, nurse her to health and take care of her children.
     This was the sharpest kind of departure from the segregated racial norms of the time and place. I had earlier learned the hard way how much my grandmother hated them. In those days, the n-word was such a commonplace that I didn't realize it was an epithet. One day, as little boys will do, I decided it might be time to try out some grownup words. I used the n-word in front of her. Without a hint of warning, this woman I loved and admired backhanded me across the face.
     My grandmother was an unusually fine human being. Yet apart from weddings and funerals, I never knew her to enter a church or even speak of one.  As I grew up, we became especially close, and eventually I decided I could risk crossing a private, personal line. I asked her point blank if she ever thought about going to church. "Sometimes," she said with a small smile that amounted to changing the subject.
     And so my two grandmothers represented both example and puzzle to me.  My city grandmother was observant of doctrine yet above it.  Among my country grandmother's personal qualities was something special. Everyone who knew her said so. If required to name it now, I would call it a workaday manifestation of the proper spirit of the Christian gospels. But I don't think she would have called it that, or agreed for anyone else to.
     Along my own search for a path I have learned that the church, being filled with human beings, can behave well or badly. I have learned that those who involve themselves in the church may there find faith, lose faith, or go through motions but be unaffected. And I have learned that the most faithful among my friends call that aspect of their lives a journey.  By this, I think, they mean to note that true journeys involve work and struggle, and  that among the discoveries of a true journey are questions as well as answers.
     My grandmothers would not have put so many words to it. At the heart of their wonderful grace they were simple people. But I think they would have agreed with the idea of the thing.
     And I think St. Francis would have liked them.