Midlife Meditation

Sunday morning in Fort Bragg, California, 1961: my mother, my father, and me. For 25 years, I heard my father answer the telephone with the greeting, "Pastor Elam." I loved this friendly, informal touch. In public settings, others would call him "Reverend Anderson," and I appreciated this, too: my father was a man of distinction who held an office worthy of respect. Once I began serving churches, I called myself "Pastor Mark," and encouraged others to dispense with the formality of "Reverend." But in my first church, a rural chapel in southern Illinois, I was called something else: "Preacher." I heard this from many of my parishioners, in the same way, now that I'm in a classroom, my students will often just call me "Teacher." At the end of that student pastorate, I returned to Oregon for a month, and shared with Dad the title my flock had called me by. He smiled sadly and told me he'd been wishing for his entir...

The Anderson, c. 1932 (from left): Victor, Elam Sr., Elam Jr., Colena, Frances. Elam Jonathan Anderson, Jr., was born July 8, 1926, in Shanghai, China. His parents, Elam Sr. and Colena, were American Baptist missionaries, sent to Shanghai to run a Chinese-American school. It was a turbulent time in China, with threats of violence both internal and external: the Empire of Japan would, in a few years, be invading and occupying the country, even as Maoists plotted a revolution that would transform China into the world's largest Communist country. Reading the signs of the times, Elam Sr. knew Americans would not be welcome in China much longer, and began working to hand over leadership of his school to indigenous people. This was met with resistance by the American Baptist mission board, so he left his post to found his own school, an academy that would be self-sufficient. In 1932, he was recruited by telegram to become president of Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. The And...

Elam J. Anderson July 8, 1926 – December 29, 2014 The Reverend Elam J. Anderson, 88, passed away on December 29, 2014, at his home in McMinnville, Oregon. Rev. Anderson was born on July 8, 1926 in Shanghai, China, the son of Elam and Colena Anderson, American Baptist missionaries. The family returned to the United States in 1932, living first in McMinnville, where his father served as president of Linfield College; then in Redlands, California, where Elam Anderson Sr. passed away during his presidency of Redlands University in 1944. Elam Jr. continued his studies at Redlands University, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in physics. He studied graduate psychology at the University of Washington before enrolling at the Berkeley Baptist Divinity School, from which he received a Master of Divinity in 1952. He served American Baptist congregations in Oakland and San Jose, California, where he met his future wife, Jean Richard; and Fort Bragg, California. In 1964, Rev....

"I want an official Red Ryder carbine-action two hundred shot Range model BB gun!" "You'll shoot your eye out, kid!" Which is what he did: Though, to be accurate, what Ralphie really hit the first time he fired his precious BB gun was his glasses. Had he not been wearing them, he would've had to change his nickname to Popeye. Now that I've refreshed your memory of this beloved holiday classic, I'm going to unveil my own personal heresy, likely to send many of you flying to your keyboards in protest: I really don't care for A Christmas Story. (In a further effort to forestall the outcry from the hordes of people for whom this is the BEST MOVIE EVER and how DARE I not like it, hey, haters gonna hate. If it's that important to you to know that everyone in the world shares your taste is questionable entertainment, STOP READING NOW, before your feelings can be hurt; and before you fill up my comment boxes with righteous indignation, ...

First the grumblings: Tucson the city is like everything that's wrong with Portland's TV Highway--times ten. Yes, there's a quaint downtown with interesting shops, an arts district, and a few good places to eat. As soon as you've passed the rattlesnake pedestrian bridge, though, Tucson is nothing but mile after mile of unremitting suburban sprawl: strip malls, fast food franchises, car dealerships, and nothing to distinguish it from any other American metro monoculture. We came to Tucson hoping for some Southwestern flavor, Mexican influence, some sense of place. The neighborhood we're staying in has adobe-style houses, but apart from that, we might as well have stayed in Beaverton. And in case you're wondering, yeah, it really sucks to get sick on the first day of a vacation. But now on to the wonder. The main reason we chose Tucson for our winter vacation was the cactus. Tucson borders the Saguaro National Park, and is within daytrip distance of the ...

Three police officers were shot and killed last weekend. two in New York City, one in Florida. In the New York incident, the shooter then killed himself. The shooting may have been a reaction to the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. In the Florida shooting, the perpetrator is in custody; no word yet as to what motivated him. Spokespersons for police unions blamed politicians and protesters for the New York killings, insisting the cause was that too little has been done to defuse anger over the Brown and Garner killings, and suggesting that more stringent measures should have been taken to put down protests. If the context of these words wasn't so tragic, the sentiment expressed would be laughable. In fact, though, police daily put themselves on the front line between order and chaos, and from time to time, they die for their efforts. I propose a different interpretation, one that anyone who has read my blog in the past will find completely unsurprising: what ties these...

The worst part of it is that I still kind of like 24. The Fox action drama that spins out a very bad day in the life of counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer distinguished itself from the beginning with the extremes he would go to to extract information not just from obvious villains, but from well-meaning but misguided innocents. Shouting, threatening, torturing, even shooting one in the head to get his crony to talk--no action was too atrocious if it got Bauer the intel he needed to avert a far greater catastrophe. He was the ultimate pragmatist, doing whatever it took to defend his country, even as his friends, colleagues and superiors cried out in protest. He became a patriotic martyr whose actions, even though they had saved countless lives, rendered him an outcast, rejected by the country he loved. In the process, he endured torture, abuse, gunshots, even death (CLEAR!), not to mention the loss of every friend and family member he had. With its compressed storytelling, each...

An iconic image from Abu Ghraib. Eric Garner dies in a choke hold. Two press releases that came within days of each other lead me to wonder: how far does it have to go before we realize what we've become? Americans have long known about the horrors of Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison where US Army and CIA personnel subjected prisoners of war to treatment Americans normally assume is the province of demented fascist regimes. Two days ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report detailing abuses committed by the CIA that go far beyond the stories we've heard from that hell hole. This came just four days after a grand jury failed to indict an NYPD officer for killing an asthmatic African-American using a department-prohibited choke hold. At first glance, these two stories have little in common: Abu Ghraib was in Iraq, while Eric Garner died on Staten Island. The prisoners abused at Abu Ghraib were believed to be war criminals; Eric Garner was detained ...

And what happened, then? Well, in Whoville they say - that the Grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day. And then - the true meaning of Christmas came through, and the Grinch found the strength of *ten* Grinches, plus two! I've been such a Grinch. The original purpose of this blog was to provide me with a platform for venting. Since leaving the ministry in January 2000, I'd been without a pulpit. After more than a decade of being able to say my piece in front of a captive audience at least weekly, I was now reduced to guest preaching, no more than monthly at first, eventually tapering off to not at all. I wrote occasional essays, submitted some for publication, and even made it onto the Oregonian 's op ed page twice (though the second one was only in their online edition). Even when I was guest preaching, I was doing my best to behave, tempering everything I had to say to keep it from shocking my listeners. So when, after thirteen years of bottling it ...