Perishing Words

“And he confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Christ…He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord.”  St. John 1:20,23

We are living in an age of powerful words.  Over the last few months, women from every corner of public life have found the courage to come forward to say: “I was violated, demeaned, treated with cruelty.  Sexual abuse affected me too, and I will be silent no longer.”  And it seems that every morning there is another apology, another resignation of some powerful man. 

In the last few years, people all across the nation have spoken out about racial discrimination and brutal treatment of African Americans.  There have been bestselling books, protests and counter protests, verdicts rendered.  Old statues have fallen, flags have been hauled down, and a few football players sit on the sidelines.

Words are, of course, the oxygen of politics. 

Ponder: "Lo,' he said, 'the lamb; there is no longer need of the goat."

Now the the garment of mourning is rent; we have put on the white robe
Which the spirit has woven for us from the lamb’s fleece of our Lamb and our God;
Sin is taken away, and immortality is given us, our restoration is clear.
The Forerunner has proclaimed it.…

O, the message of the Baptist, and the mystery in it!
He calls the shepherd lamb, and not only a lamb, but one to free from mistakes.
He showed the lawless that the goat which they sent into the desert was ineffective.
“Lo,” he said, “the lamb; there is no longer need of the goat;

Put your hands on him,
All of you who confess your sins,
For He has come to take them away, those of the people, and of the whole world.
For lo, the One whom the Father has sent to us is the One who carries away evil,
Who appeared and illumined all things.”

Romanus Melodius, Kontakion for Epiphany.

Good News from a Far Country

“Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see.”  St. Matthew 11:4

They ran a picture with his obituary in The Washington Post on Tuesday, “Star of the Green Hornet Dies at 82.”  I’d never seen Van Williams, the masked man with his gun pointed at the camera.  His starring role lasted only one season, back in 1966, more than a decade before I was born.  That had been the high point of his acting career, one show that no one really liked as much as Batman.  Williams had played a character here and there after that, and then hung it up to be a deputy sheriff and then a fireman in Southern California.[1]

I’ve read quite a few stories like this lately, as we slowly bid farewell to so many who stepped briefly into the public eye in that great flourishing of popular culture in the decades after World War II.  A few weeks ago, there was a famous dancer who had married a respectable dentist in her early twenties.  He didn’t like the way men looked at her on the stage, and she hung up those satin slippers for decades of ferrying children to music lessons and a hand of bridge once a week at the country club.  There was a man a few months before that who hit 23 home runs one golden summer in the mid-fifties.  He hurt his shoulder, and spent the rest of his life selling insurance in Western Nebraska.

Second acts can be very hard indeed.  Our talents fade.  Public taste is fickle.  The next generation always seems a little more clever and ambitious.  We wonder about the thoughts running through their minds as they watched the stop light and turned over restlessly in bed.  Was it all worth it?  Did I do something wrong?  Who am I now?  What will I do with the rest of my life?