“If you want to understand America, I hope you were in Washington on Thursday. I hope you heard the high ideals of President Bush’s inaugural address, and also saw the stretch Hummer limos heading to the balls in the evening…”

Starts out pretty pretentious and awful, doesn’t… Keep reading (from the New York Times this week):

“I hope you heard the president talk about freedom as the ‘permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul,’ and also saw the drunken, loud and privileged twentysomethings carrying each other piggyback down K Street after midnight.”

Wow!!! I’m really impressed by Brook’s insight:

“What you saw in Washington that day is what you see in America so often — this weird intermingling of high ideals with gross materialism…”

Of course, the rest of the editorial was a little skewed towards the conservative side of things — but I am really impressed with this summary of the way things are, and the way that things will be in the future.

Unfortunately, I think I probably know many of the folks that Brooks is talking about… I went to Middlebury College in Vermont, one of the elite schools in the country where rich folks send their kids to hobnob with other kids of rich folks. At that time, there were more Saabs than Fords, if you get what I mean. (I did, however, get a wonderful education, and find my niche among peaceniks, environmentalists, and musicians)

This is a culture that values partying. Even from our ‘ultra-religious’ president, we have learned the value of partying and drinking. Yes, he has rescinded his alcoholism, and found Christ, but who is he as a person? Have you all seen the video of George Bush after winning some election, looking at the camera, giving it the finger, laughing, and then saying that that is his, “one-fingered victory salute”? Click here to go to a site where you can watch the clip (http://www.milkandcookies.com):

And it is disgusting that George Bush, our president, once drove through the back of his garage, according to his mother’s memoir, because his wife, Laura Bush, told him things that she might have said differently in some address of his.

George Bush is attractive to the men of my generation, because he is a partier that has redeemed himself in the public eye. It is okay to wear cowboy boots, carouse and raise hell, because you can just repent someday and become president.

I have been reading in the New York Times, and on their site online, about Nicholas Kristof’s purchase of two girls in a Cambodian brothel. One costed 150 dollars, and the other 203. The one pictured above is named Srey Neth. She costed 150 dollars.

Can you believe that such a thing goes on in this world. It is one thing to read this in the newspaper, “…a teenager finds a path out of the sex trade…”, and another thing entirely to go online, and see her picture, and discover that she is not some strange person, but rather someone who could have been my classmate, or my sister, or my daughter… A kid that looks like any other kid.

Kristof points out that Srey Neth is only one out of ‘hundreds of thousands of teenagers who are enslaved by the sex trafficking industry worldwide.

You should check out his story on your own (just type “Nicholas Kristof brothel” into google) — but I will write a little more about it…

Kristof planned to give her money to build a shack and stock it with food and clothing, to start a shop in her little village, near Battambang. For a few months, everything worked, and she had plenty of business. But then her family stepped in, because her family couldn’t understand why they “should go hungry when their sister had a store full of food.” So they simply came and took food from her store, until she got mad…

And then everything was over — no one listens to a teenaged girl, and they kept taking her food, until everything was gone, and she had no more money to buy more.

Her father was coughing up blood from tuberculosis, and her older brother couldn’t afford to get married, and the family was in debt enough that they might lose their land.

In 2003, the same situation had led to her selling herself to the brothel.

Kristof finishes the story by telling how he intervened again, and everything has worked out… Srey Neth is now working to become a beautician… But the other story he tells in the NY Times, of the other girl is different… She is somehow ‘dependent’ on the brothel, though she hates it, and she always comes back… And she is afraid that she, like 30 percent of the women in the brothels, will get AIDS.

The world is so awful in so many ways. But what can we do? Can we all spend 250 dollars and buy two girls? Is that possible?

I wondered, when I lived in Palestine, what it would be like for me to take a little boy from Gaza and bring him to the fields of Minnesota where I grew up…

My beloved puppy, as a child, named Freckles, was a loving little chap — but my cousin kept berating him and beating him around the ears while we weren’t looking — and my puppy bit my cousin… and everybody freaked out — and we ended up having to send Freckles to another family in the country — so that he could chill out, and have a better life…

I guess it’s not really supposed to be that way very often with little kids, or people — you mostly just get the cards you are dealt — but it is so shocking to think that a kid would choose, herself, to sell herself into sexual slavery. Really awful, and it makes you think about how the world works.

I wrote a piece of music for the string bass — you can listen to it at www.kentgustavson.com/providence — based on a quote from Garrison Keillor… “It is a wicked world in which the power of any individual to cause suffering is so great and the power to do good is so slight; but here we are… and signs of loving Providence are everywhere around us.”

I figure that it is a ‘blog’ thing to title your blog creatively and mysteriously. So I have gone for the creative title, and decided to opt for less mystery: here is where “Three Sumach-Red Dogs I Run With” comes from:

Valley Song by Carl Sandburg

Your eyes and the valley are memories.
Your eyes fire and the valley a bowl.
It was here a moonrise crept over the timberline.
It was here we turned the coffee cups upside down.
And your eyes and the moon swept the valley.

I will see you again to-morrow.
I will see you again in a million years.
I will never know your dark eyes again.
These are three ghosts I keep.
These are three sumach-red dogs I run with.

All of it wraps and knots to a riddle:
I have the moon, the timberline, and you.
All three are gone–and I keep all three.
—
(1918 - from Cornhuskers)

I have been astonished for years about the depth of this poem. It is about the entirety of our existence, past and future and present, so incredibly nostalgic…
And then he throws in that phrase… “These are three sumach-red dogs I run with”

Such an incredibly vivid image, and yet, I’m not sure what he means — I just feel what he means. I know the depth of color of sumach, and I know what it is like to run with dogs… What a vivid and powerful image…

This is the way our life goes — we run with sumach-red dogs.

So this blog will be a description of what I see, the dogs I run with, the coffee cups turned upside down.

And everything wraps and knots to a riddle…

My mother boldly wrote a letter to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, which she posted at her new blog site http://cynthiagustavson.modblog.com — which closes with the following passage:

“What is a Christian church that doesn’t follow the teachings of Jesus, the one who included prostitutes, tax collectors, and lepers, the one who challenged the role of women in his conversations with Mary and Martha, the one who healed on the Sabbath, the one born in a manger?”

She doesn’t write this out of a desire to break with the church. On the contrary, she is a devoted Lutheran, and is even an elected member to the nationwide meeting of the ELCA from Oklahoma, where they live.

Jesus was born in a sheep and donkey trough, surrounded by the smell of manure and dust. Jesus healed on the Sabbath — even in Chariots of Fire, the main character doesn’t run on the Sabbath because of his faith convictions 2000 years later. What does it mean that Jesus ate with tax collectors, and told the crowd, “if you don’t have sins, throw the first stone…”?

If homosexuality were a sin, I would still believe in acceptance, as a Lutheran, as a follower of Christ, and as a compassionate human being. I don’t believe that homosexuality is a sin, and especially not because of what the bible says. If I believed in the bible in that manner, I couldn’t interact women on the days of their menstruation, and I could be killed for many other offenses.

And even if we did believe in the ‘literal’ interpretation of the scriptures, we would need to go back to the roots of the laws contained therein, and to understand the situations for which the codes were used, or applicable. I have been told that, in the time of the Old Testament, it was customary, or at least in practice, that the conquering army would rape their prisoners of war. And I have heard that male prostitution was as common as female prostitution.

The possibilities for literal translation of these passages is endless because of our own little knowledge on the historical significance of the laws.
So what about now? What do we believe as Christians, or simply as members of this society. Do we believe that it’s okay on television, but not in church (Will and Grace for example)… Do we believe that Spongebob is gay, and decide to homeschool our children, and shelter them from the outside world of ‘Atheists’?…

Again, I quote my good friend Jeshua Erickson from his blog at www.jeshuaerickson.com/blog:
“The Jesus I’ve experienced in my life is the Jesus who watched over me when I slept a night on the street or who joined me when I slept in a shelter, or who guided me when I hitchhiked across the country alone, taught me this: there is enough judgement and condemnation in the world. What we really need is faith to know that God can still do his work even if we aren’t busily condemning folks in his name.”

I encourage you to also visit Lars Clausen’s website, where he writes details about a plan to explore the condemnation and the compassion of this divisive discussion, http://www.onewheel.org/244.html:

“Sometime early this summer I plan a month-long solo unicycle ride to explore beyond the divisive issues of gay marriage and seek the stories of everyday GLBT people in America. My hope is to add a word of compassion to the contentious “moral” conversations of this past election.”

The one born in a manger surely doesn’t close the door on our brothers and sisters of faith who were born differently than those of us who are societally considered ‘normal’. We who are ‘normal’ should concern ourselves more with ourselves, and our embracing of our brethren and friends in faith.

When people are born to preach, let them preach. When people are born to play music, let them play. Let people love whom they love. And let them, and let us, treat those we love with the respect that Christ begs from us, whatever that might mean…

I have to refer you to a dense little article on my good friend, Jeshua Erickson’s blog http://www.jeshuaerickson.com/blog — he beautifully sums up the difference between politicians by quoting Natan Sharansky…

Sharansky has pulled the entire administration to a new understanding of itself, and it ain’t that great… To quote Jeshua’s new blog entry, “The Iraq war continues indefinitely and Bush’s latest hobby appears to be finding authors who support his disasterous foreign policy decisions.”

What I find the most interesting is that Mr. Sharansky likens our government’s pursuit of terrorists with World War II, the Holocaust and the pursuit of the ‘evil empire’ — while at the same time, so many folks around the world (much to the horror of our president and his cronies) liken the present American administration to the Nazi government.

Chariots of Fire is an unbelievable movie. I just picked it up at the public library and watched it tonight… If you haven’t seen it, it is an incredible film.

Maybe I like it so much because of my interest in running, or because of my deep intensity… The movie is about essentially two characters, a Jewish man and a Christian man, two runners with passion enough to power a steam engine…

The Christian man, Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), runs for divine ecstasy… with little form, he churns past everyone else with raw determination and love — really unbelievable to watch… and he preaches after his races — he tells people of the spirituality of this running… If he didn’t run, he would be disobeying God.

And yet, near the end of the movie, (this doesn’t entirely spoil the plot, but don’t continue reading if you don’t want to know what happens near the end…), Liddell refuses to run on the Sabbath.

And the Jewish man, Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), runs with a passion born out of anger — out of his need to replace the discrimination and anti-semitism in society with something — and he vows to beat everyone — his quest is to win — also for something greater than himself…

The movie takes place around 1920, right after the great war, and remarkably deals with the incredible moral dispersion of British/Scottish society… Jewish and Christian, country and city…

I was moved again not only for all of these things — for the powerful meaning of the running, and for the movie’s incredible grasp of the divine — but for a more personal reason.

My father is the best runner I have ever known. Not that he always won. But that there was this fierce determination, this joyous love, and incredible breath and blood and muscle caught up inside of him, and it burst out with the steady pounding of his legs on the pavement, or on grass, or dirt.

My father ran in airport terminals. He ran in tuxedos rented for weddings after the party was over. He ran to school at age 3. He ran a sub-5 minute mile at age 50. He lived for running. He lived for the sweat, for the heat and the cold, the pounding of his feet on the pavement.

And my father and I were in a terrible car accident about 4 years ago. And the doctors said he would never walk again.

And today when I watched the scene in Chariots of Fire when Liddell is pushed off the track, sprawling on the lawn, and he gets up, and he runs with the passion of a ‘wild animal’, driven on by his faith, and by the passion he said was straight from God, with all the speed he could pull from his heart.

And my father is the same way. He walks to communion every Sunday. He bikes almost as fast as he used to, going out for hours through the city and the hills of Tulsa, OK. But he will never run again.

It makes me want to cry every time I think about it. I was with him in the car, and I wasn’t hurt at all. My wrist broke, but it healed perfectly, and my body was bruised, but I healed. I wish I could give my dad use of my legs for one run, for one time tearing through the streets…

But I know all of us have certain parts of us that fade away, certain traits that go, certain people that we lose touch with. And often, those things are exactly the parts of us we would love to keep most.

When Liddell in Chariots of Fire was given a choice, he chose to stay with his morals, to stay with his character, to run only for God, and not for his own glory… And he couldn’t run in the race that had been the focus of his life.

We always have something. We always have God. And beyond that, we have our own love, and our passion. Mine is for my music. My dad’s is for that feeling he gets when he is riding free on his bike, when he used to run with every ounce of strength he had. And we have our love for each other.

God bless.