David Williams's Blog

The morning sun rose

Over the trees on the hillside

And a new day's light 

Shone so bright

Through a thousand drops

From the rain last night

'Cross that sea of stars, from left to right

A single bee, caught gold in flight

And as I, like caught in reverie

Was glorying in that radiant bee

Out of that bug's tiny ass

Came a spray of bee poop frass

Which glowed illumined by the sun

Fell fulgent bronze and then was gone

I laughed, how wondrous and absurd

The sun, the light, the bee, the turd

 

"Is it possible to achieve progress in charity by means that are essentially uncharitable?  If we dispassionately consider our personal experience and the records of history, we must conclude that it is not possible.  But so strong is our desire to believe that this is a short cut to Utopia, so deeply prejudiced are we in favour of people of similar opinions to our own, that we are rarely able to command the necessary dispassion.  We insist that ends which we believe to be good can justify means which we know quite certainly to be abominable; we go on believing, against all the evidence, that these bad means can achieve the good ends we desire."

Aldous Huxley, from Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods employed for their Realization, pp.27-28

No one told me how pleasant an MRI could be.

I'd expected it to be a little challenging, to feel a little bit entombed in that tube, surrounded by unsettling roarings and thumpings and rhythmic pulses as magnetic energies surged around and through my body.  Claustrophobic panic isn't ever helpful in a procedure, so I'd considered calming exercises, tools from meditation and prayer that would gird up my loins for the process.

I needn't have worried.

It was profoundly restful, and on several occasions, I had to attend to not falling asleep, which might have messed with the imaging process.  But it was more than restful.  No-one had told me that it was possible to feel the magnetic fields as they surged through your body.  It's not common, but there are folks who swear up and down that the electromagnetic pulses set off a response in their nervous system, and given that I'm just the teeniest bit hypersensitive to things, I guess I'm in that camp.  

CHUKCHUKCHUKCHUKCHUK, the machine would go, and with each beat, I'd feel a peculiar tickling, like every nerve along a plane would activate.  It felt like I was being bisected, over and over again, each slice very faintly pleasurable, like a caress of energy, an aurora in my flesh.  With that came a deep, comfortable warming, and it was lovely.  

"This is really nice," I thought, "I'd pay money for this."

Which, Lord have mercy, I did.

The bill, when it came, was well over four thousand dollars.  That's for the procedure only.  Having a radiologist look at the results for ten minutes was another two hundred dollars.  

I have insurance, thank the Maker and my congregation, so my out of pocket costs were less.  Blue Cross Blue Shield negotiated the asking price of the procedure down to a wee bit over three thousand bucks, of which the "patients responsibility" was eight hundred bucks.  I paid seventy two dollars and seventy three cents of the two hundred dollars for the radiologist.   Total cost to me: over nine hundred dollars.  Total cost to the insurer:  over four thousand dollars.

So, combined, roughly five grand total, for a thirty minute non-invasive procedure and ten minutes to assess the results.

I have Scots blood, through my paternal grandmother Arline Tionesta MacDougall, and this outlay stirred that thrifty gene more than electromagnetic pulses ever could.  I know, we all know, all of us, that this is too much money, that we're being fleeced by a system that doesn't even begin to represent the actual costs of the services provided.

Let's do that familiar "how much does it cost elsewhere" exercise.  Were I to get an MRI from a private clinic in Glasgow, Scotland, how much would it run me?  Here, I'm talking about going outside of the public health system in the United Kingdom to a privately operated for-profit clinic, and paying out of pocket.  I found a nice little clinic in Glasgow.  Costs for the process there varied, based on location and procedure, but for the lower pelvic/prostate, I could expect to pay about four hundred dollars, exchange rate dependent, and that includes radiological review and a formal actionable medical report.

Four hundred dollars.   A round trip flight to Glasgow?  Nine hundred dollars.  Two nights in a nice hotel in Glasgow?  Four hundred dollars.  Meals?  Two hundred dollars.  A rental car to putter around Glasgow for two days?  Three hundred dollars.

Total cost, to fly across the Atlantic, stay in a nice hotel, eat well, have the procedure, do a little tourism, then fly back?  Two thousand two hundred dollars, nearly two thousand bucks less than the "best price" Blue Cross Blue Shield could negotiate here.  

Same procedure, same results, half the price.  How many times have you seen this same exercise done?  The "you fly halfway across the earth, get a procedure done, and fly back for cheaper" schtick is well worn, and yet still we tolerate the parasitic drain of our bloated mess of a health care system.

Defenders of that system claim that it's the "gold standard," the best in the world, and that we should be grateful for the privilege.

But we know that's a load of bollocks.  

I was in the waiting room of a medical office, waiting to be called back for another round of imaging, and I was filling out forms on a tablet.  You know, the forms you've already filled out a dozen times, and filled out online before you came, but still have to fill out again?  Those forms.  
We all love those forms.
I was absorbed in the process of checking boxes when I heard her voice.  It was a loud voice, a we're-fighting-right-now voice.
"This is all your fault!  I couldn't do it because of you!  I've waited years and years for today, and you ****ed it all up for me!"
I looked up.  She was in her thirties, best I could tell, disheveled and awkwardly dressed, and the older man she was yelling at was likely her father.   From context, I figured she'd failed to tolerate an MRI, which I was looking forward to encountering myself just a few minutes later.  For some folks, the enclosure causes a claustrophobic panic response, and sedation is necessary.  I was about to find out whether I fit into that category.
"All I wanted was ten dollars, and would you give it to me?  No!  Just ten ****ing dollars, that was all, and you're too ****ing cheap and selfish to ****ing do even that."
This seemed a little baffling, so I continued to listen, as the father sat quietly while she paced and ranted at him.  "Just a little ****ing weed, ten dollars for a little weed to calm me down, and you wouldn't do it.  I can't ****ing believe you!  I've waited five years for that test, and you couldn't give me ten ****ing dollars!"  
It seemed fairly clear in that moment that ten dollars worth of cannabis would not be likely to solve that young woman's primary life challenges.  I wondered if that MRI would have been of her brain.  It seemed possible.
He began packing up a bag, still silent, and her raging intensified.  "I wouldn't be so ****ing ****ed up in the first place if it weren't for you!  You and Mom are the worst parents!   You're a ****ing sadist!  A sadist pervert!  You're PERVERTED, that's what you are!  A PERVERT!  A perverted masochistic SADIST!"  
The father looked up at her and smiled at this phrasing, just a little bit, as if he was suppressing a laugh.  Then he got up, and began walking to the elevators at a calm pace.  He seemed neither embarrassed nor angry.
She followed, cursing and berating.  But following nonetheless.
There is so much that a parent can endure for the love of their child.

When I heard it, I laughed.
This last week, the Least Christian President in American History (tm) sat at the Resolute Desk and recorded himself reading from Holy Scripture.  It was part of a week-long cover-to-cover Bible reading with scores of participants, one whose intent was to remind America of the power of reading the Bible, or so the organizers hoped.  
I am, rather obviously, fond of reading the Bible on the regular.  It's not a single book, mind you, but a Sacred Book of Books, a collection of texts assembled over a millennia that reflects the journey of a covenant people with their God.  It has many authors, but also one Author, and all of it, every last bit of it, speaks transforming truths that we need to hear and understand.  Reading it changes us, if we're willing to read it deeply.
And so it was that Donald J. Trump, Forty Seventh President of the United States of America, a man who is happy to hate his enemies and whose not-going-to-church-today golf-trip-motorcade blocked the Beltway and almost made my family late for worship this most recent Easter morning, recorded himself reading from 2 Chronicles. 
Trump?  Reading from Chronicles?  It was perfect, just perfect, so much so that again, I laughed.  The textual portion itself centered around national humility and repentance, which is not something Trump's America does, ever, not ever.  Demanding that people you despise repent, sure.  But actual, sackcloth-and-ashes we -messed-up-Lord repentance?  That's a sign of weakness.  The cardinal rule of MAGA is to always double down and punch back, and never, ever admit fault. 
It is, in a plain reading, wildly ironic.  
But it gets weirder if you go deeper.  
The books of 1 and 2 Chronicles are among the most MAGA-friendly books of the Bible.  Or, to be more accurate, they're all about Making Judah Great Again, even if M'JuGaH doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.  Sounds too much like meshuggah, eh?
Like the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, Chronicles was most probably written in the period closely following the Babylonian exile.  The people of Judah were rebuilding, having been returned to their land by Cyrus of Persia.  Tradition holds that the author of Chronicles was Ezra the scribe, and though there's the inevitable scholarly debate around that, it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.  Rebuilding requires having a powerful sense of what came before, and, well, that's the whole point of Chronicles.
1 and 2 Chronicles are a scribal retelling of the history of the national aspirations of the Hebrew people, as Ezra took the story that spans the older books of 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings and edited them to meet his interests.  He cuts and pastes those histories as vigorously as Thomas Jefferson, and those editorial choices are striking.  They speak to the purpose of Chronicles.
Because Chronicles...like Ezra...tells of a deep yearning for the restoration of a nation to greatness, and looks to the past with a powerful hunger.  That shapes the way memory is recalled, and the way that the story of the past is told.  
There are many changes, like largely ignoring the history of those cursed "northern Kingdom" Samaritans.  Most relevant, given the liturgist in question, is how Chronicles approaches King David, first and greatest of the kings of the Jewish people.
In the older stories of David, those told in the Deuteronomistic History, he is remembered as deeply human.  In 1 and 2 Samuel, David is an emotionally complex soul.  He cares deeply for Saul and his son Jonathan, even though the erratic, moody Saul threatens his life over and over again.  When David's son Absalom rises up to take power from him, David desperately clings to hope for reconciliation, and when the news of Absalom's death is brought to David, his heart is utterly broken.  David knows indolence and lust, murdering the honorable Uriah to cover up his infidelity with Uriah's wife Bathsheba.  The prophet Nathan is forced to confront David with the horror of his actions, and David is shattered and repentant.  At the end of his life, David is a weak and diminished old man, easily manipulated by Nathan and Bathsheba so that Bathsheba's child Solomon can take the throne.  
These are meaty, real, earthy stories, ones that speak to the truth of our human mess and the ways even the best of us fail to uphold God's covenant.  They teach and they preach powerfully to the human condition, and are willing to question power.  Particularly the power of kings, because kings are people, and people are a mess.
That ain't how Chronicles presents David.  
Even though Chronicles is almost entirely reliant on the history recorded by those earlier books, it spins their story with the doggedness of a White House Press Secretary.
David, or so Chronicles describes him, was perfect.  He's buffed and without blemish, run through an Instagram filter, naturally tan and with a full thick head of hair.
Ezra's David almost never puts a foot wrong or makes a bad choice, unless Satan himself leads him astray.  He never weeps or shows weakness.  The conflict between David and Saul is only mentioned sotto voce, and there is no discussion of any of the intrigue in David's house.  There is no Bathsheba-canoodling in Chronicles.  The fight with Goliath isn't mentioned, likely because that would suggest David was once small and not mighty.  David fights, and wins, and fights, and wins, and gives long set piece speeches about building the temple with specific attention to the choice of only the best and most expensive materials.  He hands over the throne to Solomon completely of his own volition.  
As narrative, it's pretty danged flat, and Ezra's scribal compulsion to insert Lists of People and Things don't help that cause none, neither.  There's a reason that all the stories we retell and remember aren't from Chronicles, because generally speaking, we don't read aloud from spreadsheets in worship. 
Taken as a whole, Chronicles is history as hagiography, history as a glossing-over of anything uncomfortable or difficult or messy, history that desperately wants to find perfection in the glories of the past and the shine of remembered wealth and power.  
Which, I would contend, is precisely why it is God's will that Chronicles remain forever part of sacred scripture.  Because human beings are great at editing out the hard parts, not being challenged or changed, and utterly failing to learn from our mistakes.  We need to remember
Lord, does history teach how we're great at that.

"Do not pursue spectacular deeds. We must deliberately renounce all desires to see the fruit of our labor, doing all we can as best we can, leaving the rest in the hands of God. What matters is the gift of your self, the degree of love that you put into each one of your actions.

Do not allow yourselves to be disheartened by any failure as long as you have done your best. Neither glory in your success, but refer all to God in deepest thankfulness.

If you are discouraged, it is a sign of pride, because it shows you trust in your own powers. Never bother about people’s opinions. Be humble and you will never be disturbed."
Mother Teresa, from Called to Community

How do we get what we want?

As a Virginian, I’ve been musing about that a bit over these last few weeks, as my state dips into the well of gerrymandering to tip the scales of power one way or ‘tother.

Gerrymandering, as we all know, is the process by which the size and shape of political districts can be fiddled with to ensure that a particular political party has more representatives. Typically, it involves diluting the influence of another party by concentrating their voters in fewer districts, or creatively recombining regions. Gerrymandered maps are filled with snaking, convoluted lines, creating districts that bear no connection to regional identities and that are intentionally designed to disadvantage and disenfranchise opponents.

Across the river these days, Virginians are wrassling with whether to abandon the current, nonpartisan districts, and replace them with maps that…well…they’re not. My congressional district, for example is VA-7. VA-7 would be redrawn to run from Annandale westward, all the way out through the Shenandoah Valley and right up to the border of West Virginia, with another section snaking south to around Goochland…yes, Goochland. 
If the change is made, VA-7 will look something like a stylized crawdad, or perhaps a ghost wearing boxing gloves.

All to regain a political advantage, because Dear Leader has taught us that maintaining political advantage is more important than having a representative democracy. Once you’ve got power, there are countless perfectly rational-sounding reasons for you to use that power to press your finger down on the scales, and for some reason that troubles my soul.

It’s the temptation that power always dangles before us, as we allow ourselves to believe that dominance is our goal and purpose in life.

At the beginning of the season of Lent, rolling ‘round every year, we Christians retell the story of the temptation of Jesus, of his trial and challenge in the wilderness. 

In the first of the three tests, Jesus is tempted with physical need. “You’re hungry, but you don’t have to be ,” comes the seductive voice of the whisperer. “Turn that rock into bread, my friend. Don’t feel limited to matzoh, I mean, you’re the son of God, and those desert nights are cold, so how about some warm-from-the-oven chocolate chip banana bread? Wouldn’t that be just right?” But Jesus responds with Deuteronomy 8:3, a snippet of the Law which declares that our relationship with God is more important than anything else.

All of a sudden, the scene changes, with the Tempter and Jesus up on the highest point of the temple.

“You say you trust in God above all else,” comes the sly suggestion, as they teeter on a ledge. “Then jump. Surely God will protect you from harm.” And then, well, then comes the kicker. “Angels will protect you,” he hears. “They’ll bear you up.” Both words from scripture.  Jesus responds with a single verse, from Deuteronomy 6. “Don’t put God to the test.”

Alrighty then, says the Man of Wealth and Taste. Let’s take this higher still. Suddenly he and Jesus are way up on a mountaintop, with the whole world spread out below, like Mufasa and Simba overlooking the pridelands at Sunset, only Mufasa would have to be the Devil and Jesus his Simba-cub-son, so that way of visualizing it breaks down pretty quickly.  
Still, you get the image.

With the whole world before him, Jesus is tempted with political power, with control over all of it. “It’ll all be yours, if the price is right,” smiles the Tempter. “Just worship me.” Again, Jesus responds with a passage from Torah, from Deuteronomy 6:13. And again, he affirms that his relationship with God is central, vital, and unshakeable, and that the human hunger for power doesn’t rule over it.

Each of these tests are trials because they’re entirely understandable. There are strong internal logics to the desire for sustenance, for safety and security, and for control.  Who doesn’t want, no, need food? Without food, we die, or at a bare minimum, get so hangry that we’re not the sort of person you want to spend time around. Why wouldn’t we do whatever it took to get what we biologically require? We want a sense of safety and of being protected from harm, and who wouldn’t want that?

And what wouldn’t we do to be in control, to be the king of the hill, top of the heap, A Number One?  All you need is power, and you'll use it perfectly, the best, no-one has ever seen power used so beautifully before.

Temptation finds reasons to set aside values and virtues when they become inconvenient.

I’ve always found gerrymandering repugnant, to return to the moral question I'd been wrestling with. Politically motivated creative redistricting betrays the purpose and integrity of a republic, and that is true whether political expedients or bald-faced lies are used to justify it.

I know, for example, that the relentless dark-money mailers and texts and calls I was getting "opposing" Virginia's gerrymandering are pure refined weapons-grade hypocrisy.  All of them are in the service of crass kleptofascism, which is only opposed to gerrymandering if Democrats are doing it.  
Which left me, as a voter and a Christian, with a moral conundrum.  On the one hand, a "yes" vote would have violated a bright line about representation in our tattered constitutional republic.   "We know it's wrong, but we're doing it just this once, honest," is always a dangerous ethical stance.  On the other hand, a "no" vote would have affirmed and supported a fundamentally corrupt regime that is doing everything in its power to manipulate and discredit the electoral process, and that couldn't care less about our fundamental right to choose our own leadership.
In that toxic, lesser-of-two-evils binary, I can't choose the good.  
And so I didn't.  As hard as it was to refrain from voting, that is what I did.
But I also didn't post this until after the election.

Every year, I'm tantalized by the weather and my eagerness to put my hands in the soil.

I step outside, and it's coming up on mid April, and the temperature is in the nineties, and I think, Lord, but it has to be time to plant.  Then I check the calendar, and there's that average last frost date, just a week away.  And the forecast, for summerlike warmth, all the way to that average date and beyond.

Some years, if I go into the ground early, it means an early harvest.  But others?  Others are like this year, when despite a run of days hot enough to draw sweat standing, the evening wind suddenly turns cold and fierce.  

I'd gotten my basil in the ground ten days ago, all the little seedlings that I'd started back in late March.   Surely, surely we were done with winter.  But winter wanted one last word in, and so up went the frost warnings.

They were right on the cusp, particularly for life here in my inner suburb.  Heat island effect is a real thing in Annandale, with temperatures here usually running five or six degrees warmer than they do out near my rural congregation.   That's a buffer, but one can't be sure, particularly with frost sensitive seedlings.

So I covered all of them at sundown last night, putting each under an inverted growing pot.  Heat would be retained and frost staved off.  Hopefully.  Or maybe not.  My plan: remove the pots only when the morning sun cleared the little rise to the East, and the air and soil were warmed.

Stepping out into the still morning chill, I looked across the lawn, at the frosted tips of the recently mown grass.  Then I glanced down the little bed by my driveway.  There were the pots, in neat little rows.  Beneath them, there were seedlings, unobserved and unobservable, and each those seedlings were either alive or dead.  

Which was it?  Which outcome might it be?

I'd have to wait until the sunrise.

I'm doing a whole bunch more thinking, writing, and reading around small church vitality these days, as my publishing Magic Eight Ball goes from "Reply hazy, try again" to a consistent "Signs Point to Yes."

Having served tiny fellowships for the entirety of my ministry, of the most strikingly consistent features of small congregations is that they aren't organizations, not really.  Some of the structure of institutional life filters through, but they're networks of human relationship first and foremost, with all of the idiosyncrasy and organic complexity that this entails.  Those relationships are...if healthy...a great source of congregational strength, as members of a community share life together in all of its joys and sorrows.

The character of those relationships is shaped by the core purpose of the community, which is...church being church and all...following Jesus and living as he would have us live.  That shared purpose is the common goal around which any church forms, and the closeness of fellowship in an intimate community is one of the collateral benefits of journeying along that Way with others.

Meditating on this recently while puttering about in my garden, I found myself thinking about what happens when we make the category error of seeking one of those collateral benefits instead of the thing itself.  

Like, say if your stated motive is "growth."  Growth is a collateral benefit of faithful labor and mutual discipleship, some of the time.  When and if it arrives, it is a blessing, albeit one orders of magnitude less important than deep and sustained human relationship.  But if growth becomes the emphasis rather than viewed as a side benefit, that focus skews how we view our purpose, and tends to become something less than Good News.  We all know what that looks like.  It looks like business models, marketing, and manipulation.  It looks like you've confused Mammon with Jesus, and I'm talkin' to you, Kenneth Max Copeland.

But focusing on numerical growth isn't the only way we can wander astray, because big churches and churches that strive for the gold ring aren't the only ones that wander astray.  What about relationships, then, that great strength of intimate community?  Can that become a blight?

Of course.

Let's talk about a soul we've all known (or been) who had "being in a relationship" as their goal.  Whether from the clawing void of loneliness, fitting in, hungering for intimacy both physical and personal, or any one of the many reptiles of our minds that whisper our inadequacy to us in our isolation, all that matters is being with someone.  Anyone.  The actual person doesn't matter, and Lord, does that never, ever, end well.  It's something that fails over and over again, as that benighted soul makes terrible choice after terrible choice, just so they won't have to be alone.

What about relationships that give a sense of power?  Where you enter a relationship because it can satisfy your need for dominance and control, where you can be in charge, where those around you are dependent on and submissive to your every whim?  Where everyone loves you and despairs?  I've seen what that looks like in large churches and small.  The little congregations with a patriarch or matriarch who has discovered the sweet taste of power, reigning unchallenged and unquestioned?  These are the farthest thing from a blessing. 

Pursued for its own sake or as an ulterior motive, then, "relationship" is theologically and morally meaningless.  So is "growth."  And "community."  And "political power."  All manner of things.  All of them are not why church is church.

When we gather as disciples, there is a greater purpose that defines us.

Last year, my gardening plans took a blow.

Every season for a decade, I've grown a crop of green beans, a trusty productive bush varietal that graces my summer and fall tables with plump and sweet goodness.  And every season, I've saved seeds from the strongest of those bean plants, so that I've developed a long and fruitful relationship with their lineage.

Twenty twenty five was to be no different.  I started the season planting a single four by eight bed of beans, which I set into the ground in early April.  By late July, that first crop was spent, providing a dozen meals worth of veggies, and a fat gallon bag full of blanched and flash-frozen beans for later.

I prepped another four by eight bed for a late season harvest, and put in another three rows of beans.  These, I'd both harvest and seed-save, following the pattern of the last decade.  The good hearty beans came up dutifully, dozens of cheery little seedlings poking up diligently as they always had.  I watered and weeded, and all was well, the plants bustling along nicely.

Then in late July, I left for a week at the beach.

When I returned in early August, they were all gone.  

All of them.  Given the hoof-prints in the completely devastated bed, the culprit was clear, one of the dastardly devouring does who wander through our green and leafy inner suburb.  I'd sprayed the young plants with repellent before leaving, but it had rained and rained again in my absence, and the spray must have all washed away.  The crop was wiped out.

I still had the bag of flash-frozen beans, which meant that my tradition of using my own beans for the obligatory Thanksgiving casserole could continue.  But I had gathered no seed stock from the spring harvest.  None of what I had expected to use to plant my crop in 2026 had survived.  Not a bit of it.

This presented me with a bit of a conundrum as the weather warmed this season.  I had no fresh green bean seed.  I had some stock left from 2024.  And I had even more stock left from 2023, because I'd had a roaring bumper crop that year, hundreds of beans in a big ol' jar.

But beans, wonderful as they are, don't last forever.  Three to five years, typically, if kept sealed away, cool, and out of direct light.  After that, the peculiar magics of seed genetics, the complex organic triggers that wake with water and warmth?  Gone.

With the last frost reasonably behind us, and a mid-spring heatwave well underway, I decided to try the oldest seed first.   I figured I'd have a nontrivial failure rate, so I tripled the density of the spacing.  Not six inches apart in a row, but more like two, massively oversowing the rows in anticipation of a lower yield.   I planted all of that three year old seed, every last bean.

Then I watered, and weeded, and waited.  A week passed.  Then another.  The earth was warm, and other volunteers sprang up where I had planted, squash and cantaloupe, from the looks of them.  But not a single one of my beans poked a familiar head out of the earth.  Literally hundreds of them, and the success rate was zero point zero zero percent.

That's the nature of the stale and the sterile, and those things that have forgotten what they are.

You can still put them in the ground, but they dissolve into nothingness, not growing into the purpose that made them, but instead becoming one with the soil.  

They have lost their sense of self, the intrinsic and essential potential which made them alive in the first place.  The gift of life has left them.

Good thing I have that stock from two years ago, I thought.  We'll see how that goes.