Friday, May 22, 2026
1950 Richard Strauss' "4 Last Songs" (4 letzte Lieder) premiered in London
2016 President Barack Obama arrived in Vietnam for a 3 day tour
2022 Report released on sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention, the country's largest Protestant denomination, detailed 20 years of suppressing many allegations
2024 Ireland, Norway, and Spain announced they will formally recognize a Palestinian state on 28 May, joining nine other European countries
2025 DHS Secretary Kristi Noem ordered the termination of Harvard University's Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, removing the institution's ability to enroll new international students and requiring current international students to transfer or lose their legal status.
In bed at 9:30, up at 4:15; 0425 146/73/53 101, 0440 125/72/52 205.0; 46/59/46 cloudy day, BEACH HAZARD CONDITION CONTINUES
Morning meds at 6 a.m., and half-dose of Bisoprolol at 5:15a.m. Trulicity injection at 8 p.m.
A long exchange with an old pal:
On Monday, May 18, 2026 at 04:49:59 PM CDT, Lawrence Anderson wrote:
Read with some interest your discussion of favorite hymns. Having done K-8 at a Lutheran school, necessitated singing in church with the school choir around once/mo. for 8 years. Consequently, I was exposed to several hymns out of "The Lutheran Hymnal” (Northwestern Publishing House, 1941). Chapel every night at Northwestern Prep alternated between “All Praise to Thee My God This Night”, (First or Second Tune) and “Abide With Me”. Abide With Me had 8 verses so we only sang about 4. But my favorite verse always included was verse 5 in the TLH. Since we were all teenagers, it was apropos.
Thou on my head in early youth didst smile
And though rebellious and perverse,meanwhile
Thou hast not left me oft as I’ve left Thee
On to the close, oh Lord, abide with me! s/f
On May 19, 2026, at 2:30 PM, Charles Clausen wrote:
As a general rule, I'm kind of turned off by hymns that speak in Elizabethan English, with "thee," "thou" for you, and didst" for did. I make a big exception though for "How Great Thou Art," which always moves me. Given my druthers, I'll always chose Black spirituals and C&W gospel music. For some reason, I have a hard time picturing you as a choir boy, but you probably have a hard time picturing me as an altar boy, which I was regularly from 6th to 8th grade and irregularly even into my undergraduate college days. s/f
On Tuesday, May 19, 2026 at 02:38:04 PM CDT, Lawrence Anderson wrote:
I wasn’t exactly a choir boy. It’s not like this was a voluntary exercise. At Good Shepherd Lutheran School in West Allis the lower grades (1-4) sang in Church about every other month. Choir wasn’t hard because we were all in one room. The “Upper Grades” (5-8, again, all in one room) sang about once/mo. Interestingly, my upper grade teacher, Miss Huth, is still alive at 105. Lives in Hurley and I went to see her last year. Lived in her regular apartment till she was 101. The 4 grades probably had around 40 kids. The woman had to be dedicated. s/f
Charles Clausen To: Lawrence Anderson. Fri, May 22 at 8:10 AM
At St. Leo Grammar School at 78th and Emerald Avenue on the south side of Chicago, we were also expected to sing as a group when we attended Catholic services together, masses or benedictions or Stations of the Cross. Some of the lyrics, though, were in Latin which most of us did not understand. However, we altar boys, hot shits, knew at least some Latin because we had to speak it when we served at mass. The priest would start the mass with "Introibo ad altare Dei", meanng I go unto the altar of God, and we altar boys would respond, "Ad Deum qui laetificat iuventutem meum," meainng To God who gives joy to my youth. It went on from there. Tom St. John and I used to test each other on how much of the mass Latin we still remembered in our adulthood, which was quite a bit. But the great unwashed who were not altar boys and knew no Latin, used to make fun of the Latin hymns, like turning the Tantum Ergo Sacramentum into Tantum Ergo makes your hair grow. Very irreverent. I still remember some of those Latin lyrics, like Genitori Genitoque / Laus et iubilatio, which is almost more spirit-deadening in English "To the Begetter and the Begotten/ Be praise and jubilation," Lyrics like these should make it easier to understand why I prefer Emmylou Harris singing "When He calls, I'm going to live with Jesus. In His Kingdom, he welcomes everyone" and Mahalia Jackson singing "He's Got the Whole World In His Hands." My Dad, who was raised Catholic but did not attend church after his experiences on Iwo Jima used to love to watch Mahalia Jackson's show on Chicago television. I just watched the YouTube recording of Mahalia singing "Precious Lord" and it still makes the skin on my neck tingle and tears to well up in my eyes. We held a memorial service of sorts at the law school for Ray J. Aiken after he died and I gave a eulogy, which I regret I no longer have a copy of. What I remember vividly thought is that at his funeral, they sang Precious Lord, and I spoke in part about the contrast between Ray in his old age when he had a bad case of Alzheimer's, and his teaching days when he was so strong and vigorous, sometimes almost pugnacious, as in his youth when he a Golden Gloves boxer. I was so moved by those lyrics "I am tired, I am weak, I am worn." I've struggled with religious faith all my life, indeed since at least the sixth grade, and throughout even my churchgoing years as an adult, but I've never stopped being touched deep inside by good gospel music for which I guess I should say, 'thank God.'
My wife, the farmer. We drove up to Home Depot this afternoon to take advantage of their big mulch sale. Geri bought 15 bags, each of which weighed about 500 pounds which I found out when it came time to get the bags out of the Volvo. Home Depot workers loaded the car but we had to unload them, quite a project. As usual, Geri did most of the work. The temperature was 56℉. Geri was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. I had to go in to put a warm fleece vest over my heavy flannel shirt over my undershirt. And a hat. I refer to her as a farmer because of all her gardening activity, but she really works like a lumberjack or a longshoreman. What a woman. She's 82 now. Here how I toasted her at her 80th birthday dinner:
A few years back, I started keeping a list on my iPhone of 'what I love about Geri and it started with her laugh. I was listening to her chatting on her phone with one of her friends and she was really enjoying whatever it was they were talking about and she was laughing, a wonderful, deep, exuberant laughter that was a pleasure to listen to, infectious since just hearing it made me smile just to hear it.
Later I added "sharing her thoughts" and "sharing time" with me to the list, realizing how she has privileged me by that sharing. I'm the only person in the world she shares so much of her life with. I have often thanked her for agreeing to marry me. It's a great and unique privilege married people confer on their partners, a privilege we too often lose sight of as we cope with the daily necessities and distractions of life.
Then I added her devotion to duty. It sounds as if I were thinking of a soldier or a 'first responder' but in all of the roles she plays in her life, Geri has an innate sense of duty. 'Sense of duty' doesn't capture what I'm referring to. As a child to her parents, as a parent to her children, as a life partner to me, as a sister to her brother Jim, and as a friend to her many friends, she is true, caring, trustworthy, attentive, and solicitous. The people in her life can count on her for help, for advice, for an open ear and a ready hand, to respect confidences, to pitch in when some pitching in is needed, and to butt out when some butting out is needed. When my twice-widowed father came to live with us, Geri became his best friend at a time in his life when he so badly needed a real friend. When her older brother lost his wife and his children were spread out across the country, Geri encouraged him to move near us and she personally cared for him for several years. We should all have these qualities but not all of us do and few have them as innately, as suffusely as Geri does. This sense of duty carries into all her undertakings, e.g., as an employee, as a volunteer (ombudsman at a nursing home, child welfare investigator, poll worker), and even to our pets. When our beloved cat Blanche needed to be hydrated by transfusion every day, Geri turned her ironing board into a gurney for her, hung the hydrating solution from a closet door, and served as her nurse. And as fpr Lilly, . . . words fail me.
She is courageous. She has faced some difficult challenges in her life and addressed all of them head-on. Where many, including me, would have faltered, or backed off from a difficult challenge, she has put her shoulder to the wheel and addressed them. She has guts, tough-mindedness, patience, and an admirable sense of self-respect and determination that lets her succeed at challenges that would defeat many of us.
My iPhone list is a lot longer and includes stuff like leading the way when there is tough, unpleasant, nasty work to be done. She is the first to pick up the mop or the shovel, not waiting for others, including me, to get at it. But my list is inevitably incomplete. She is who she is in all her uniqueness. She is special in large part because she doesn't treat herself as special, as better than or not as good as anyone around her. But she is very special to me, and she's very special to her family and to her many friends who count themselves privileged to have her in our lives.
in no particular order.
(1) I'm wondering whether a large part of Anne Lamott's popularity comes from her offering her readers a modus vivendi for living with what Reinhold Niebuhr accurately calls "an impossible Christian ethic." Niebuhr argues, irrefutably I think, that the ethic of Jesus is contrary to human nature which does not incline us, for example, to turn the other cheek when attacked, to love our enemies, or to forgive those who wrong us not once or twice, but seven times seventy. Human nature inclines us to protect ourselves, to defend and preserve ourselves. It's human nature and not the Devil that causes us, even Jimmy Carter, to look at others with lust in our heart.
(2) She is not afraid of saying or writing "fuck" and "shit" and "asshole" and their variants. She acknowledges sleeping with her boyfriend though they are not married. She bore her son Sam 'out of wedlock,' and had an abortion (like Dorothy Day.) I note that she is a member of a mostly Black congregation of Presbyterians, and that she probably would not be accepted in a lot of more evangelical, fundamentalist congregations. I wonder whether she has a lot of Southern Baptist readers and fans, I wonder what Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson would think of her kind of Christianity.
(3) For me at least, Lamott's writing is best enjoyed in small doses, one essay at a time. Traveling Mercies is a collection of about 25 essays, and I have read them all in about 3 days, too much too fast. I also watched her on YouTube in different settings, but not only her style but also the substance of what preaches (wanting a better term) do not vary much from essay to essay and from public appearance to public appearance. A reader/watcher gets a bit of a "been there, done that" feeling if she is consumed in big gulps.
(4) What I liked about the book first was its humor, or rather her humor. She has some very funny lines, funny metaphors and similes (or are they called 'tropes' now, one of my least favorite words). After that, I liked the way she accepted and forgave her faults, her failings, her sins, and her mistakes, She doesn't hide them from the reader, but she's also not proud of them, or maudlin about them. Her life was complicated, and she accepts that. She accepts too that most lives are complicated, maybe all lives are. I have to think the subtext or message of the book is something like 'Life is hard but life is good, live it, getover it and get on with it, and it's a lot easier if you believe you have a friend in Jesus.' ["What a friend we have in Jesus / All our sins and griefs to bear / And what a privilege to carry / Everything to God in prayer."]
(5) There have been times in my life, most recently and especially in my old age, when I have been heavily burdened with guilt and shame over how I failed to return to my mother and my sister, and even to my father, the love they had for me. My mother's early death accelerated it. I learned a lot about both my mother and my sister from the several years my sister and I were blessed by long, daily conversations at the start of each day. Stuff like how my mother opened at the letterbox in the entryway to their apartment building the first letter I sent back from overseas informing the family that I was on my way to Vietnam andthat and cried as she read it. That was 61 years ago and my heart aches even today thinking of it. Stuff like how my sister was heartbroken when she and my parents dropped me off at my dormitory at Marquette 67 years ago, how lonely that drive back to Chicago without me was for her. I was so wrapped up in myself in those years that I was oblivious to how my life and my choices were affecting others in my family. One of Anne Lamott's lines in Traveling Mercies is that we are not punished for our sins, but rather by our sins. It's a bit similar to the theory I've written about that the Last Judgment is not God Almighty judging us, but rather ourselves having to look at a mirror that shows us all our failings, a mirror from which we cannot hide. We judge ourselves. I seem to have been going through that kind of experience in my early and mid 80s. It's why I so often quote the 5th stanza of Years' Vacillation.
Responsibility so weighs me down.
Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.
Lamott's book urges me to get about forgiving myself and getting on with whatever is left of my life for which I am thankful to her.
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