In her thoughtful and insightful homily—”What Would Pooh Do?”—Janet Anderson, director of Faith Formation, shared an inspirational message with all of us who feel both overwhelmed by the world’s headlines and motivated to do something. EMC’s Family Sunday worship, Oct. 1, also featured a video by Joey Miller of EMC’s teens’ summer trip to the BWCAW; a Winnie the Pooh performance by Nicole Chidester, Luke Sorensen and Annabell Sorensen; readings by Catriona Ray and Olivia Krebs; and much more. If you missed yesterday’s service or want to dwell in Janet’s message again, you’ll find it below.
What Would Pooh Do?
J. Anderson
It is dangerous to stand at a pulpit and declare one’s view on a culturally divisive issue—
perhaps more so than ever, when, across the wide expanse of the world, we seem so quick to
anger. Nevertheless, I stand before you this morning and declare that I am a fan of Garrison
Keillor. That is in small part due to the fact that I once hosted a book-signing for the radio
show host and writer, who showed up late because he had driven himself and had gone to the
wrong location, but who wore his famous red tennis shoes and a suit as rumpled as his hair and
was warm to every one of the more than two hundred people who had waited restlessly for him
as I passed out chocolates to calm their nerves. My fondness is in larger part due to the
wisdom that I find in his Lake Wobegone stories, which express both deep humanism and
generous Lutheran Christianity. One story, that I heard on the radio years ago as I washed
dishes in my kitchen, concluded with this line:
“Sometimes,” Keillor said, “all you have to do is just get outside.”
I get outside very nearly every day since adopting my dog, Santiago. We walk for up to
an hour, and when I come home, I list in a small, five-year diary, the most wonderful things that
we encountered: a fishing pier in the fog; a rock marking the 45th parallel; the wing of a hawk
lying at the edge of a wood; a snapping turtle on the walking path; an old man sleeping in a
recliner in his garage with a small dog on his chest; goldenrod soughing in the wind beside
railroad tracks; a transit bus with lights that blink, “Go, Twins”; a Mississippi River beach
covered in snow.
God is.
Going out of doors physically facilitates taking temporary leave of one’s mind—one’s
mind being a dubious place to reside. Shakespeare’s Hamlet observes that “There is nothing
either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” and, indeed, our thoughts—about data breaches
and hurricanes and racial animosity and whether our tax burdens will be high or low, or we will
be able to afford our health care, about our political impotence and the possibility of war,
along with all of the daily burdens of work and love—can make us as jittery as Rabbit in the
Hundred Acre Wood, desperately striking out in the most logical direction and winding up,
again and again, lost.
Not infrequently, I send photos of Santiago out adventuring—nose to the earth, tail in
the air, leash taut in an expression of eagerness—to my friends. One of those friends has
developed an admiration for Santi because, she writes, “He wears life like a loose garment.”
“He wears life like a loose garment.” It is a delightful expression. You may have noted
the same character in your non-human companions: the utter absorption in the moment, the
expectation that good things are ahead, the sense that life is protective and enhancing, that
one can move easily within it. Dogs, in particular, along with “bears of very little brain,” have
the simplicity of the Uncarved Block, the Taoist virtue that Benjamin Hoffman ascribed to
Winnie the Pooh. This spiritual quality is the antithesis to the mood and slogan of the moment,
which is “resistance.”
Where justice and charity are not in evidence, resistance may be what God asks of us.
But I prefer to approach peace-seeking another way: through the practice of radical
acceptance. Moses shrinks from God’s call to demand the freedom of the Israelites, saying,
“Who am I that I should go to Pharoah?” As the story continues, Moses whines at God, “I am
not good at speaking. Please send someone else.” Moses resists. He pushes against
circumstance and against God, and he uses as an excuse his supposed short-comings. His
thinking that God’s demand is too hard makes it so. Moses understands neither who he is nor
who God is. But as he begins to move lightly within the garment that God has sewn for him,
he becomes powerful. By accepting the radical idea that we are created in God’s image to do
God’s work, we, like Moses, become capable of miracles, of holding back the waves of the sea,
of delivering an enslaved people to a land that is sweet and plentiful.
The Danish writer Isak Dinesen describes this way of being in her short story, “The
Dreamers.” It begins on a dhow sailing under a full moon along the coast of Zanzibar. A
famous storyteller called Mira Jama, whose ears and nose have been cut off in some past
suffering, explains “that what particularly pleases me about dreams…is this: that there the
world creates itself around me without any effort on my part.” When we fully inhabit and
respect ourselves as creations of God, we let go of our egos, and fear, then, becomes
something that is intense but not frightening. We exist as we do in dreams, trusting that
events that cause our hearts to pound will be resolved and marvelling at the beauty that
surrounds us.
In a moment of global cacophony such as seems to now be piercing our ear drums, I
feel an urgency to do something. I am sure that each of you feels that same urgency. But, like
Moses, I am intimidated by my short-comings and by the sense that I have no authority, that
what I can do will change nothing. To resist means merely to wear myself out. And so the
newspapers lie unread.
A couple of weeks ago, I called Parkway UCC in North Minneapolis. I had a futon
mattress and frame that I wanted to get rid of. I asked if the church could use them in order to
sleep the homeless people whom they serve with Families Moving Forward. Pastor Kathy Itzin
said to me, “We could. But we also have members who are living on the edge of
homelessness themselves who might want them. Let me put out the word.”
A week later, a man and his son came to my house and hauled away the futon and the
frame, and a rocking chair, too. They didn’t listen to me when I told them how to unfold the
frame and carry it up the stairs, and after they left, there were two, long gashes on the stairway
wall. And I was happy. I was happy in a way that I hadn’t been for a long time. By the grace of
God, I had extra to give away, and I had listened to a man tell me about the apartment that he
would be moving into, about how it was being coated with fresh paint, and about how his lady
friend had been wondering what she was going to sit on when she visited. I had met Lady
Friend, out on my driveway, and she had approved of the feel of the futon cover, and I had
witnessed the man’s satisfaction in furnishing a home for himself and a person whom he loved.
I stood, as in a dream, allowing the world to present me with an opportunity to change
someone’s life a little bit.
In one of A.A. Milne’s stories, a blustery wind knocks down the house that Owl lives in.
Afterwards, Rabbit passes around notices suggesting that all of the forest animals help search
for a new home for Owl. Eeyore, the depressive and largely anti-social donkey, takes earnestly
to the task and presents to Owl a new habitation—which is Piglet’s house.
“And then,” Milne writes, “Piglet did a Noble Thing, and he did it in a sort of dream…”
“‘Yes, it’s just the house for Owl,’ he said grandly.”
This is real world stuff, this need to care for people whose homes have been blown
down by the wind or flooded by rains or crumpled by tectonic shifts. Even if we are small,
fearful animals, we are capable of grand gestures if we trust God to put us in the circumstances
in which we have much to give.
I confess that, along with Garrison Keillor, I also like the depressive and largely antisocial
Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Bergman closes his film Fanny & Alexander with a
toast given at a family dinner. I close with his words, which echo the Bible’s exhortation that
Jesus will return like a thief in the night, and that we must be ready:
“The world is a den of thieves, and night is falling. Evil breaks its chains and runs through the
world like a mad dog. The poison affects us all. No one escapes. Therefore let us be happy
while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not
at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world.”
Amen.