The Less it Matters, The More I Know
Dear Debate Partners:
Here’s my opening disclaimer: This is not a musing about gun control. The most recent tragic carnage in Parkland, Florida, has occasioned my musing. Believe me, I have my opinions about firearms, and I’m pretty sure most of you would not find my policy proposals satisfactory. I’m also sure some of you would respond quickly and aggressively to my ideas. That’s what has me musing—how is it that people of similar experience, education and good will can be so diametrically and aggressively poised against each other?
I have a few theories about our disagreeable nature; hopefully, these are far less contentious than my bone-headed attitudes about the Second Amendment. My goal here is to lower the temperature of civil discourse, to provide some accounting for our incapacity to find compromise for the sake of a common good, or, at minimum, to create a case for constructive engagement.
I’m also not interested in suggesting civility is some treasured skill once commonly held in a pre-internet past; human history is littered with evidence of our inability to listen to one another. I would suggest it is in our nature to argue. When God asked Adam and Eve if they had eaten of the fruit, they both immediately changed the subject and blamed someone or something else.
What confuses me about most arguments over several policy issues is how aggressively we can battle over things that we most likely will never have to endure. I believe the further we are from a direct experience of a matter, the less it directly affects our lives, the easier it is for our attitudes and beliefs to become unyieldingly entrenched. Consider with whom you are most likely to start an argument. People who have little interaction with the impoverished and are the least likely to find themselves in poverty seem to have the most aggressive attitudes regarding the causes and character of the poor. Individuals living in homogeneous neighborhoods are pretty opinionated about diversity, and I hear the most confident theories about childrearing from the childless.
I am reminded of my mother, who told me a few months back they had a special program at her assisted living facility given by a nice young social worker. Her topic was “growing old gracefully.” She said the residents found her insights extremely entertaining.
My observation has been that I can most aggressively defend positions and attitudes that I am least likely to test. We tend to make up our minds about things that we will never have to mind, and there we find our temptation.
Avoiding that temptation is why I find myself spending less and less time talking about heaven or hell because it turns out my opinion will have little impact on what is objectively true. The likelihood of eternal damnation does not magically increase simply because I believe that should be your eventual destiny.
The stuff I have experienced is significantly more ambiguous than the things I haven’t. It’s much easier for me to articulate a coherent policy on social media security than it is for me to figure out what group should use the Fellowship Hall when we’ve accidentally double-booked. My problems are complicated; global issues are easy.
Working hard to avoid pointless fights, I remain,
With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor
Dear Good People of La Grange, IL/TN:
Last week I spent a few days in Memphis, TN, visiting my friend The Reverend Dr. R. Milton Winter (retired), a former colleague of the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. We spent one evening with Steven Smith, Director of Finance & Operations of Calvary Episcopal Church, Memphis. His residence is Tiarra, the former home of Franklin D. Cossitt, founder of La Grange, IL, and former resident of La Grange, TN. We also visited Immanuel Episcopal Church in La Grange, TN, a house of worship significantly more modest than Emmanuel Episcopal Church in La Grange, IL, but a tidy space appropriately appointed and substantially restored in 1977.
Immanuel Church (it is unclear why Cossitt spelled Emmanuel
Dear Dreaming Ones:
I received a phone call yesterday from an old friend in a near panic because a former neighbor had been picked up by ICE. This wasn’t some landscaper or shelter-abiding, drug-dealing day-labor roofer; this was a homeowner, father of an intact family with high school age kids. He had, until recently, been a dreamer—someone who came to this country as a small child with his parents who entered the country without appropriate documentation. As an adult, he was processing his immigration paperwork with an attorney through the proper channels. His immigration status was pending in a sea
Dear Atoning Congregation:
This time of year, I am reminded of a few stray and somewhat strange phone calls I received from classmates while in high school. As I’ve mentioned before, Omaha Central High School included in its attendance district the Orthodox Jewish Synagogue, Beth Israel, now located further west. As a result, I attended with a significant number of Jewish classmates who, during Rosh Hashanah, the days of atonement, were commended by their rabbi to
Dear Blessed Peacemakers:
With the assassination this past week of conservative pundit and Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk, our national anxiety is now on full display. I’ve been most impressed at the race between commentators to sound both compassionate and critical, with some losing their jobs within hours of trying to unpack blame and/or culpability on live TV for a heinous murder. It appears, as of writing today’s musing (a disclaimer necessitated by the firehose of information both vetted and made up, which may or may not render me dated, misinformed or perhaps unemployed by the time you read this), that Mr. Kirk was shot by an individual acting alone. What baffles me is how
Dear Fellow Star-shifters:
Let me begin with a disclaimer: I’m not the least bit interested in astrology. With all due respect for the amazing author and humanitarian John Green, I do not blame the stars for unfortunate events. That being the case, I was still a little startled by a NYTimes article this morning explaining how the astrological constellations relative to the earth’s orbit around the sun have shifted over the past two millennia. (Apologies if the article remains behind a paywall—it’s not worth a subscription.) So, imagine my chagrin when I discovered today that I was not a Scorpio, but in modern reality I am a Libra. I don’t even know what that means. But for a brief moment during breakfast, I felt like a guest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. learning that my great-grandfather was a
Dear Indulgence Seekers:
Stepping back from the counter with comically massive servings of premium ice cream billowing above our small disposable bowls, the two of us stood poking plastic spoons into four carefully curated flavors, capping off an end-of-summer New England evening. Watching the steady flow of customers stroll from car to serving window and back again, cones and cups brimming with creamy deliciousness, we couldn’t help but notice a short elderly woman carefully balancing two servings substantially larger than our own. Her order nearly eclipsed her head as she returned to her car with a massive
Dear Re-visitors:
I received a call yesterday from my sister in Canada. She had just listened to my sermon, in which I recalled how shabbily I had treated Joe, a neighbor whom my mother wanted me to befriend. Jill claimed she could not remember Joe, but after I reminded her of Joe’s sister, who was closer to her in age, she recalled, “Oh, that’s right. They were the family where the mom only wore a slip.” I remembered that too as she niched the characters back into memory. I couldn’t fault her recall; her relationship with that family never involved a trip to the church’s boiler room. My memory was more indelibly scarred than hers.
“You can’t go home again”—not only a reminder of the dangers of nostalgia, but also
Dear Fellow Primates:
Today is July 21st and marks the 100th anniversary of the conclusion of the Scopes trial, in which substitute high school teacher John T. Scopes was charged with violating the Butler Act in Tennessee by teaching evolution in a biology class in Dayton, Tennessee. Most of us are familiar with the trial through the lens of Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee’s play Inherit the Wind, the movie version of which came out in 1960 with Spencer Tracy and Gene Kelly. While neither the play nor the movie
Dear Fellow Fabulists:
Lately, I’ve been musing over a quote by Anne Lamott: “I may not be much, but I’m all I think about.” What stays with me are the many lies I tell myself just to make my own story more tolerable—or at least more interesting. I find myself bending timelines and tweaking details to keep myself at the hero of every tale. What’s troubling is how these subtle edits help me avoid honest moments of real powerlessness.
Of course, that first paragraph is itself an example of my tendency to stay wrapped up in self-focus. Even my attempts at confession can become performances—chances to shine as humbly noble, like the friend who says something self-deprecating just to hear others cry, “No, don’t say that—
Dear Curated Consumers:
I was talking the other day with Tom Stapleton about comedy videos. I mentioned that it seemed comics were becoming smuttier, evoking nervous laughter rather than real humor. Tom didn’t seem to be aware of the trend, saying most of the comics he was finding were thoughtful, not derogatory and, for the most part, clean. Perplexed, and perhaps a little embarrassed, I realized the difference between my experience and his could be understood by the impact of social media. Tom is not a big consumer of algorithmic feeds; most of the stuff he gets is from friends who send him clips through text messages. They know Tom’s taste leans towards drunk Irishmen stories, which may be a tad bawdy but seldom sexually offensive. On the other hand, I rely more heavily on sources curated by Meta, which means every time I listen to a comic to be appalled by their lewd content, my feed queues up a dozen more
Dear Credibility Borrowers:
Many years ago, I was given a tour of Richmond, VA, curated by my friend The Reverend R. Milton Winter, PhD, an avid historian of the American south. Among the many landmarks and historic sites he shared was a brief visit to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. During the Civil War (or locally known as the War between the States), St. Paul’s had become known as the Cathedral of the Confederacy. This was nearly forty years ago, so the sanctuary still contained a commemoration of Jefferson Davis’ family pew draped with the 1865 flag of the Confederacy. This particular flag was the last of the Confederate flags, white with a wide red vertical stripe on the right end and, in the upper lefthand corner, thirteen white stars inside the blue diagonal cross contained in a red square. (This corner portion of the flag is now associated with Confederate sympathizers, but by itself it was never the Confederate flag;
I’ve been thinking a bit these past weeks about grief—the word, the experience, the process. A social worker acquaintance of mine commented that I must be very busy with my “grief work”. It struck my ears as odd to suggest that grief was some task akin to taking out the garbage or clearing outdoor pots for summer flowers. Approaching grief as a work project makes it feel like something I should put on my Things to Do Today calendar, somewhere between paying bills and shopping for dinner…
Dear Commencement Characters:
By July of 1948, Levitt & Sons construction company was building homes at a rate of 30 per day. This astounding record was made possible by the company’s forward-thinking president, William Levitt, who applied assembly line production methods to home construction. Breaking the process down to 24 steps, entire blocks of homes would be constructed semi-simultaneously as subcontractors repeated each process in sequence on property after property. This method of uniform construction met the massive housing needs of post-World War II America and placed Levitt among the most wealthy and influential industrial characters of the 20th century. So astounding was his influence on architecture, many claim him to have been the inventor of U.S. suburbia.
Dear Accidental Intercessors:
Many years ago, while new to my role as chaplain, one of my patients treated my first visit to his hospital room as an opportunity to vent every hostile feeling he harbored against religion, the church and God. Although we had just met, I found myself becoming defensive. I wanted to explain that I was not like those other religious folk who had disappointed, even injured, him; but he left little room for me to voice my protestations. Following such a drubbing, my first inclination was to skip his room the next time I performed my rounds, but after a long conversation with my supervisor I was compelled to try again. “Clearly he needed to talk to you,” my supervisor Fr. Jim Creighton told me. “I mean, look at how much he had to say in response to your just saying ‘hello’.”
Adjusting my ego, I returned to his room for a second visit,
Dear Companions in Care:
Over the past week several people have expressed their condolences, adding some expression of not knowing what to say. From my perspective that’s more than okay, because in some ways words give us a way to carry things around. When something is emotionally too big, or too heavy, or too messy to contain, our verbal boxes split wide open to reveal their unspeakable content, things that just are not easy to carry. Such is the case with loss, love, deep pain and euphoric joy.
The Apostle Paul alluded to the limitation of language, referring to “wordless groans” in the Spirit’s intercession on our behalf (Romans 8.26). What’s annoying
Dear Musing Meanderers:
I’ve mentioned before how I seldom provide my sermons in print. This is due primarily to the fact that I believe oral and written communications are very different dialects. What listens well seldom reads well, and vice versa. But from time to time, I believe some sermon or meditation lends itself to essay form; such is the case with my Good Friday meditation from our ecumenical service this past April 18 at Plymouth Place.
What follows is a textual re-working of my remarks that evening. I trust it’s readable and is of some edification to you as you reflect on this year’s Holy Week.
Dear Cargo Carriers:
This morning, I found myself re-reading an article by Dr. Deirdre McCloskey, currently of the Cato Institute, on her critique of mathematics currently employed by economists (History of Economic Ideas XIII (3, 2005): 85-102). In her conclusion, McCloskey laments how economic statistical models had become, in effect, cargo cults, which took the shape of analysis but failed to provide useful explanations of how human systems function in the lived world. Her cargo-cult analogy got me thinking about the state of the 21st century church. I fear we too have become obsessed with the forms and objects of Christianity, but in the end, we may have emptied our faith of a truly enlivening spirit.
Perhaps the most notable example of a cargo cult was the Melanesian Islanders who during World War II had their lives upended by modern equipment and appliances
The Apostle Paul wrote about the irony that God has entrusted the eternal gospel of grace to be carried in fragile, dust-resourced human bodies. He reminded the faithful that they should find no surprise in human frailty or mortality; we are but earthenware. The rich value is found not in the materiality of we are, but in the good news we are gifted to carry.