February 21, 2007 by djackson.

While walking the waterline of my island recently I recalled a line from Dylan Thomas.  In what he described as his “thirtieth year to heaven” (an admirable euphamism for a landmark birthday if ever I heard one) the poet rose early to stroll “the heron/Priested shore” of his hometown and to hear the muezzin cry of “water praying and the call of seagull and rook.” 

My island certainly has its share of avian clergy.  We are heron-priested by a variety of communions, with long-legged and scythe-beaked clergy in a rich array of vestments.  The great blue heron stalks our tide pools with bowed back, his wings settled to his sides like the hands of a minister clasped behind him as he broods with downward gaze on the upward path of righteousness.  The black-crowned night heron haunts the shadows like a sermonless preacher on a sleepless Saturday.  The tri-colored heron flashes blue feathers and a school-bus-yellow beak like a Pentecostal pastor trying to inject a little life into the rest of the somber flock.

And if sufficiently heron-priested, we are also abundantly gull-parsoned.  These low-church clergy cluster in larger - and louder - numbers than their more dignified brethren.  Their short legs sit them lower to the ground and their drab feathers humbly rebuke the exalted vestments of their leggier counterparts.  They preach raucous sermons in shrieks and shouts and often fly inland to minister on the town landfill.

Amidst all this feathered piety a pair of hard-candy-pink roseate spoonbills splash their unrepentant radiance like rakish revellers who refuse to take the pledge.  Like Shakespeare’s tippling Toby Belch they offer the Puritans a beery rebuke, “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” 

Amidst all this mad riot of bird life I stood and pondered the words of Our Lord, “Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?”  He feeds them all - the acceptably astringent and the riotously impious, the “unco guid” (or “uncommonly good,” as the poet Robert Burns called them in his Scotts dialect) and the common bad.  And we outrank them all - the bowed-back respectable and responsible among us and the happy-footed gadabouts.  This Sunday some of God’s ministers will wear robes and occupy pulpits and some will wear ripped jeans and recline on pillows.  Some will deliver doctrinal discourses and some will knit kingdom narrative.  Some will reverently intone liturgy and some will preach extempore.  If all proclaim Christ, they do the work to which God has called them.

Island Earth mourns in her isolation.  May her shores - the coastlines where doubt laps at the sands of faith and the tides of devotion ebb and flow - be heron-priested with men and women who look only to Our Lord for the food to fill fledgling mouths hungry to hear the true faith.

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February 10, 2007 by djackson.

“Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise.” - King Lear, Act I/Scene V

Attention Baby Boomers:  You’re getting old.

You can’t prevent it.  Your bones will grow thin.  You’ll lose muscle mass and reaction time and your faces will wrinkle like the seat of a cheap pair of chinos after a six-hour flight in coach.  Then you’ll die.  Your sheer numbers cannot protect you from the fate of all flesh.  Like King Lear, Shakespeare’s classic arrested adolescent, you meant to stay young forever and only ended up deserving a spanking for being “old before thy time.”  You aren’t special; you aren’t exceptional; you aren’t privileged.  You are a little pathetic.

While you can’t avoid aging, you can remain perpetually immature.  That’s one reason you’re dying off faster than necessary.  A current television add (TV has always been your epistemology, hasn’t it?) features Dennis Hopper snearing that “you’re going to rewrite the book on retirement” because he “just doesn’t see you playing shuffleboard.”  But it seems that a little shuffleboard might not be a bad idea:  accidents involving things like motorcycles, hang gliding, mountain climbing and jet skis bumped off a cool 31.5K of you in 2003.  About one in ten of you check out by this means, the gruesome tithe of your cohort.

Then there’s drugs.  You keep on coking and toking like you still had young bodies that could handle the abuse.  You don’t.  That’s why, though only accounting for twenty-six percent of the population, you rack up half of the drug-related deaths.  You cannot say with Shakespeare’s aging manservant Adam,

. . .in my youth I never did apply

Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood,

Nor did not with unbashful forehead woo

The means of weakness and debility;

Therefore my age is as a lusty winter,

Frosty, but kindly.

You applied hot and rebellious liquors in your blood until your corpuscles are practically phosphorescent, and wooed the means of debility like a streetwalker hustling a Shriner.  Your age is more like a nuclear winter, the permafrost of a fried ecosystem.

Then there’s suicide.  You’ve always led the league in this category.  At last count, one-third of self-inflicted deaths came from your generation.  A lot of that seems to stem from the fact that you rejected religious belief and got divorced a lot.  You set yourself free from God and from duty . . . and from the kind of support that makes life worth living when you’re no longer young and beautiful. 

Between the plastic surgeons and the celebrity diet gurus and the riotous triumph of style over substance, nobody ever took the time to tell you (and let’s face it, you weren’t much good at listening) that perpetual childishness is the opposite of Bob Dylan’s deep benediction that you “stay forever young.”  Your upstart gurus tricked you into valuing youth as an end in itself, and lied by hiding the fact (or maybe not hiding it; they probably didn’t know themselves) that youth, like all expressions of time, is merely a currency which cannot be kept but only invested.  Instead of trading youth for wisdom, you clung to youth, forfeited wisdom, and still didn’t manage to stay young. 

But it isn’t too late.  Time is merciless, but God is both timeless and merciful.  The author of the Ninetieth Psalm recognized that three-score and ten was a decent run, and four-score was borrowed time.  Instead of asking for a longer life, he decided to pray for a better one.  “So teach us to number our days,” he supplicates, “That we may present to You a heart of wisdom.” 

I’m a generational nomad.  I came along at the ebb tide of the Boomers, too soon to be a Buster or an X-er or a Nexter, and anyway I was raised by wolves and taught to say “sir” and “ma’am” and save my money for later and sex for marriage and how to tie a windsor knot.  But I’ve long admired the aged savants and aspired to join their number.  The chronology is out of my control; I’ll do what I can about the savvy.  And I invite you to get off your Harley and join me.

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