Roger Barbee

By Roger Barbee

The other morning I was scratching the grey-haired head of Nolan, my wife’s hound dog who found her twelve years ago at the county animal shelter. I  talked to him as we humans like to do and scratched his head and behind his large hound dog ears, and something about the time caused me to remember Fred, a cocker type black dog that I found wounded under the house in which I lived while a sophomore in college. He had been hit by a car and his left back leg was damaged. After coaxing him out from under the house, I took him  to a local veterinarian who repaired the long-ago damaged leg as best as possible. However, for the rest of his life Fred walked with a distinctive limp, but his damaged leg never kept him from living a full, rich, and loving life. As I remember, I kept him for the rest of that school year, and he went home with me for the summer. After those few months living with my younger sister and mother, he decided not to return to the college, but to stay with them and live their way. While he and I shared times together when I came  home on vacations after that, he was now their dog, and when I  left my hometown to begin a career, he remained where he had chosen to be. So, when I thought of him on that recent morning, I  asked my sister to fill in the gaps of his life with them.

“You know,” she said, “after you went back to school, Fred became my dog. Yes, he and mother liked each other, but until I enrolled in Western Carolina, he was mine. But, after I went to college, he and mother formed a special bond because they both were now alone. She worked the second shift then, but they shared each day, and he stayed awake until she got home after her shift in the mill. He would ride with us when she drove me back to Western, and  when he heard the mailman step  onto the porch, he thought it was me coming home for a visit and would run to the front door. But, the most remarkable thing about mother and Fred was his leaving.

“He was not blind, but he could see only shapes. For instance, often he would mistake the white bathtub for the storm-glassed door and wanting out, he  would  walk into it, mistaking the white porcelain for the light of the door. Like us all, he aged, and mother sensed that his life was ending. For three nights she stayed home from work, but eventually had to return to her shift. But each night of that time, when she got home, she would sit on the floor and hold him  in her lap, they loving each other as they had for their years. But, he grew worse, and one morning when she let him out the back door, he would  pause on each step and look back towards her, then step to the next and look back. Finally, out of steps, he looked back one last time to her, hearing her tell him  it was okay,  before he crawled under those steps to die. Later that morning she called the mill refuge department telling the man who answered how there was a dead dog under her back steps. Could he come and remove it?

“You may not understand, brother, but I see mother’s act of letting her beloved Fred go the way he wanted as a courageous and loving act. As she had always done in her life, mother knew that she had done her best with Fred over the years and even now, so she had no regrets. He wanted to go his way, and she let him, no matter her pain with his choice.

“That’s what happened to Fred, and I hope when Nolan’s time comes, he will be given as much grace as was Fred. No dog’s last day should be his worse.”

By Roger Barbee

Mill Workers

                                    They emerge from the mist of cotton spun,

                                    pale cheeked, hungry eyed souls staring ahead.

                                    Spent men in mended bibs and misshaped shoes

                                    rushing from what was, not to what should be,

                                    followed by women in worn-thin dresses,

                                    too tired to rush for what waited at home.

                                    All carry the burden of too little

                                    and the responsibility of too much

                                    as they trudge from their lint-filled stations

                                    only to return in two-thirds of day

                                    to burden the owner’s load like his mule,

                                    each breath filled with fibers of work and death.

By Roger Barbee

We all have ways that we remember dear folks who have died: Photographs of the deceased may sit on a piece of furniture or shelf or hang from a wall;  a cut flower or other small object may be placed in a book; a plant may occupy a place in a garden; the ways to remember someone are only limited by the griever’s need and imagination.

Yesterday I heard of a Carolyn’s death, and the person sharing that news asked that well-used question/statement, “You know Donnie (her husband) died from COVID this past January?, a full eight month ago. Not much news from the Valley reaches us since we moved to Lake Norman five years ago, but some does, just not news of his dying. So when I was told of his death, I went to my shop and opened a particular drawer just to check. The bone with a place where a small piece had been cut away was still there. I held the porkchop bone in my hand and remembered.

Donnie and I met when my wife and I began attending Antioch Church of the Brethren. Over time I learned much about Donnie, such as his devotion to his family, but before long I was also exposed to his musical gifts. I don’t think he could read music, but he sure could play and sing it, especially his fiddle and mandolin. Once he asked me if I could  help him with some repairs with his violin because he had been told that I worked with wood. I told him that while I had a small woodshop, I was in no way a luthier. He said that didn’t matter, and we agreed on a day for him to come to our house.

He came early on the chosen day, and he left after lunch, but before supper. The pace of the  day was easy as we talked, getting to know one another better, and he showed me a few soft repairs that he wanted to do on his violin. I honestly don’t remember the repairs we made, but he guided me and walked me through each. At best, they were cosmetic ones because I was not qualified to do any major repairs to such an instrument.  But I vividly remember the sound post.

We had shared lunch, talked a great deal, done a bit of the repairs when Donnie said, “Now we need a sound post.” I asked what that was, and he explained the sound post, its function, and showed me where it was to go. He looked around my shop and commented that he saw lots of wood, but did I have any bone because bone was best for that part of a violin. I motioned to the large yard outside the double shop doors and said, “We have three hounds, there must be a bone out there somewhere.” Donnie walked out to the yard and started looking. Soon he returned with a pork chop bone and said,  “This’ll work.”

I cleaned the bone and under his patient guidance I cut a piece from it to his specifications. We then inserted the bone sound post,  and he picked up his fiddle and tuned it.

Most days in my shop were good ones, but that day was one of the best as I learned about violins. But best of all was that a new friendship was formed, and Donnie picked up his violin, saying, “Let’s see how we did.”

My shop was just a wood shop, but for the next few minutes it was a grand concert hall as Donnie played his fiddle. Few songs have seldom sounded so sweet.

By Roger Barbee

 I was flying from Myrtle Beach back to home, and I had a connection to make in Charlotte.  As it seems to happen at times, I landed at gate D-20 something and had about 30 minutes to get across the airport to gate A-something. And, I am the first on a plane, but the last off. So, my connection time was shortened. However, after I de-planed, I gathered my two bags, placed them on my knees, and began quickly to cross Douglass Airport.

The concourses at Charlotte are connected by a rather steep, carpeted, and long ramp which I had managed before on trips. However, this time I had two bulky gym bags riding on my legs.  I hit the ramp with speed and was powering up quite well, and then the top bag began to slide, and before I recovered, the bottom bag began to go with it. As I tried to adjust them with one hand, my wheelchair began to turn sideways, and I was running out of time. I had a connection to make and this mess was going to cause me delay. As I leaned into the ramp, trying to hold the bags with my chest while pumping to get all the way to the top, I felt two hands take control of my chair and a strong voice said, “I got you.” Someone had taken control of my situation and before I knew it, I was on the level hub and the same voice said, “You got it now?” And before I could turn and say “Thank you”, he melted into the crowd, going back the way he had been headed.

As I think of the Cruxification and the latter words of Jesus, “I thirst”, I think of my experience. No, I was not suffering like Jesus, but I was in distress and an angel came out of the crowd and took control for me and gave me relief from my thirst. We thirst for many things in this life. Sometimes we thirst for knowledge and wisdom, sometimes we thirst for friendship, or love, or any number of things. And, sometimes we may thirst but not be aware of it, and I hope that you may have an angel come out of the crowd and satisfy your thirst.

By Roger Barbee

David McCullough’s The American Spirit is a timely read. A 2017 collection of fifteen of his speeches covering several years and settings, it is timely because its sub-title, Who We Are and What We Stand For is a reminder that 2022 is a good time to re-examine our character.

The selected speeches scan from 1989 to 2016 and were delivered at the White House and the United States Capitol and Monticello and other such settings, but, as fitting for a scholar like McCullough, most were shared at colleges and universities. As expected, each speech gave some history of the occasion, information about some of the people behind the occasion, and as he writes in the introduction, he always came away from each speaking date “with my outlook greatly restored, having seen, again and again, long-standing American values still firmly in place, good people involved in joint efforts to accomplish changes for the better, the American spirit still at work.” But, best of all, he gives a lesson or lessons in each speech.

 At Hillsdale College in 2005, for instance, he quotes Daniel Boorstin, Barbara Tuchman, E.M. Forster,  John and Abigail Adams, and speaks of such Signers as Benjamin Rush. Not surprisingly, all of his words are spoken from his love and appreciation of our history, which he implores us to learn. He shares how his friend Daniel Boorstin thought that “trying to plan for the future without a sense of the past is like trying to plant cut flowers”,  and he cautions us that, “Citizenship isn’t just voting.” And he shows us how to be more than just voting citizens.

“Read. Read, read!” A command from a fellow citizen who knows the necessity of being informed.

Now, I am sure that when McCullough delivered these speeches he was thinking of our secular citizenship and the debt we owe our country. He is correct that a good citizen does more than vote in every election cycle. A good citizen reads and studies and thinks of history and the events and people who came before. And a good citizen understands that those folks were like us-fallible humans.

But McCullough’s words are applicable to another citizenship role in many of our lives—the role of citizenship in Christ. Just as we are told to read our secular history, we need to read and study not only the Bible but other sources concerning Christianity.  Read the histories of Jesus’ world and better understand the forces He encountered. Read modern day Christian writers such as Clarence Jordan, Howard Thurman, C.S. Lewis, Samuel Wells, A.W. Tozer, or any number of the good writers available. Their words are reminders of how a Christian life should be lived, and when attending Sunday service do not act and think like the secular voter McCullough warns us against who believes that showing up is all that is required.

McCullough tells us that being a citizen requires more than voting just as Jesus tells us that being a Christ Follower requires more than sitting in a pew on Sunday.  Both citizenships require action: Acts of study, thought, and deeds. Anything short is false.

By Roger Barbee

The Gospels and Rome

Jesus and the Empire of God

Warren Carter

Cascade Books, 2021

Carter wastes no time in explaining his use of cultural intertextuality avenue for reading and studying the Gospels. He reminds us that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John composed while Rome ruled: “The empire does not disappear from the Gospels just because an emperor or  governor or soldier or tax is not mentioned.” He then uses selected Gospel texts alongside Roman texts to create an opportunity for the reader to “make meaning in the intersections among them.”

Intertextuality is an interesting way to read the Gospels and while I had unknowingly done it in the past, I had not been aware of its wide range. For instance, one of the Gospel stories that Carter uses is the scene where Jesus instructs two disciples to go into Jerusalem and they will find a donkey with here colt tied. If asked, the disciples are to say that the Master needs them. Jesus then rides the donkey into Jerusalem.

Carter shows how this well-known arrival by Jesus, where he is greeted by the screaming crown, is like the manner a Roman ruler or victorious general would enter a city.  He cites many historical accounts to support and then compare the entry of Jesus with that of Augustus, Gaius, and Titus into Rome or other locations.

I enjoyed Carter’s examination of the Gospels by intertextuality because it directly shows the Roman world that Jesus lived in with all its problems: “Rome-sanctioned, Jerusalem-based local leaders, pervasive sickness, food insecurity, occupied territory, language of sovereignty, fantasies of revenge, and visions of a new and just world all interact with Roman imperial structures and [practices.” Carter in those words shows us the world in which Jesus walked and preached. It should give us encouragement for the world we face.

By Roger Barbee

  My first Frederick Buechner arrived this week;  Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say)  is his reflections on literature and faith.                                                                                                         

Now, I have always been a reader. Not a good student, it is my reading that helped me salvage my academic and intellectual self. Because of my reading I managed to attend college and even read through to obtain an MA. My modest library contains books about literature, biographies of writers and other leaders, examinations of religion, political studies, investigations of nature, and more. As a life-long learner, I subscribe to the words of Abigail Adams quoted by David McCullough in his 2008 speech at Boston College’s commencement: “Learning is not attained by chance. It must be sought with ardor and attended with diligence.” McCullough goes on to tell the graduates to “Read! Read, read…. Read for pleasure, to be sure. But take seriously-read closely-books that have stood the test of time.” Those are words I followed, taught my students, and still follow in my retirement. And I especially like Adams’ use of ardor and diligence. However, I share my reading history not out of arrogance, but so that the reader can better appreciate my feelings when a good friend recently asked me had I read Buechner. My friend, also a retired educator with whom I worked, shared with me how Buchner had influenced his teaching, faith, and life. Interested, I later typed in Frederick Buechner on the Internet search engine only to read that he had died a few days before. I read of  his peaceful death at an advanced age, but I was swept away by the tributes to and the deeply felt appreciations of such a writer/thinker that I only had not read, but one of whom I had never heard. I wondered, as I read, exactly where had I been while Frederick Buechner was being such an influencer of all kinds of folks. Feeling ignorant and a bit self-cheated, I ordered two books—the one mentioned above and my friend’s favorite, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC.

          To the present, I have only read the first two writers Buechner reflects on in Speak, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Mark Twain. His reflections of the writers at first encouraged me to rush on into this thinker’s words. Yet, reading a sentence such as the following one he writes to describe Hopkins cautions me: “Again and again Hopkins chooses words open to so many interpretations that, like prisms when the light touches them, they cast across the page a whole spectrum of possible meanings.” That is a sentence to chew, taste, and savor for what it says and how it says it. If you doubt Buechner’s insight, read The Windhover and then wonder at his depth of compassion that leads to  his deep understanding for Hopkins and Twain.

I look forward to reading and studying Buechner in the same manner that Abigail Adams advises to approach learning–with ardor and diligence.

By Roger Barbee

Many years ago a fellow member of a church I then attended gave me a small piece of paper. As he handed it to me, he said, “I’ve always tried to live this poem.” On the paper was printed “A Better Way”  below which were twelve lines of rhymed poetry. At the bottom of the  page was printed Edgay [sic] A. Guest. While I did not like the poetry in and of itself, I did like the message by Edgar A. Guest.  I tucked the small rectangular piece of paper in my Bible and read it or referred to it often. Recently I even used all twelve lines of A Better Way in an essay. Until yesterday.

Yesterday our pastor used a poem in his weekly message to the congregation. He shared how he had read the poem in the 7^th grade and was influenced by it. The poem he referenced was Live Your Creed by Langston Hughes. My wife noticed the similarities between Guest’s and Hughes’ poems, and she asked me about them. Oh, what I discovered about the poets and me.

 Edgar Guest was born in Birmingham, England in 1881, and his family moved to Detroit, Michigan when he was ten. When his father lost his job, young Edgar worked odd jobs after school and in 1895 was hired as a copy boy for the Detroit Free Press, where he would work for almost sixty-five years. When he was seventeen his father died, and he began working full time for the paper. He slowly worked his way up and his first poem appeared in the paper in 1898, and by 1904 his weekly column, “Chaff” was published. Eventually his verses became the “Breakfast Table Chat” which was syndicated to over 300 United States newspapers.

Guest broadcast a weekly NBC radio program from 1931 to 1942, and in 1951 his show “A guest in Your Home” appeared on NBC television. He published over twenty volumes of poetry and has been called “the poet of the people.” Concerning his poems, he said,   “I take simple everyday things that happen to me and I figure it happens to a lot of other people and I make simple rhymes out of them.”  Edgar Guest died on August 5, 1959.

Now, I was more familiar with Langston Hughes and his poems. I had even taught some of them and admire his work. However, after much looking on the Internet and reading the listed poems in the PDF of The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, I can find no poem titled Live Your Creed composed by Hughes.  I did find many praises to the poem for its inspiration written by ordinary folks like me, but no references from serious scholars.

The two poems are too similar: The Sermons We See begins: “I’d rather see a sermon than hear one any day”, and Live Your Creed, as quoted by several admirers,  begins: “I’d rather see a sermon than to hear one any day.” One word (in bold) difference. I found that Guest wrote his poem in 1926 and that the poem I had carried all these years was just the first two stanzas of Guest’s four stanza poem and “A Better Way” was not the title. The original poem had been all hacked, and I had blindly accepted the fake. Now I know better, but I still have not found out all I want to know about the poem alluded to Hughes. I now stand corrected and better informed about Guest and will continue reading and searching more about Hughes.

By Roger Barbee

The freedom for college athletes to make money by sponsorship opportunities has begun. While that is an on-going active discussion concerning how being paid through an NIL will affect college sports, some folks are preparing for NIL’s seeping down to high school or even lower athletic programs. One of those folks who is getting prepared for that seepage is Henry Jolly III who has two sons he is packaging in order to take full advantage of the NIL’s. Jolly has created a family logo, “Born to Go Pro” and his sons wear headbands that read “Jolly Boys.” The boys are 9 years old.

According to the Washington Post,  Jolly has taught his boys that everything they do is part of their brand — from the way they play to their shoulder-length brown braids, which their father has made clear must be allowed by any middle school or high school coach recruiting them. He curates their social media feeds, spends hours editing their YouTube highlight videos and sometimes wears a T-shirt he made with the logos of seven youth basketball rankings websites, all of which have rated his sons the top second-graders in the country. The father is quoted, “That’s part of my strategy: Build their name up, build the expectations up, build their skills up, build their bodies up, so that by the time they get to high school, these companies are going to pay them to play. We want to do it as early as possible. I believe we’re going to be the pioneers.”

The seep of money invaded the NCAA during the 1930’s and has, in my opinion, ruined the game. Instead of learning through sport, we now have “How much can I make?” By today, the seepage has slid lower, and we have parents all over the country like Henry Jolly III. While he is free to parent as he wishes, his parenting skills remind me of a meeting some years ago when administrators were discussing possible actions to help a struggling student. As we examined the comments and actions of his father a fellow administrator observed, “To get a dog you need a license, but anyone can have a child.”

A book I read has the  following words: “For the love of money is the root of all evil:…” Sadly, those words are often mis-quoted as “Money is the root of all evil.” If quoted correctly and followed we will view money as what it is- a commodity to be used by us, not use us.

By Roger Barbee

Two articles from last week’s reading resonate with me—one from a religious magazine written by a minister and the other in a major newspaper written by a columnist.

The columnist writes about “feelings of hopelessness and self-hatred [that] can leave you to live with a smoldering rage.” He writes that the problem facing Washington, D.C. is not one of moral failure but “public health problems coming our way at the point of a gun.” He asks, “But what are we doing about what we already know about the forces driving violence?”

The minister shares her need for heaven, but not the heaven “beyond clouds, harps, and chubby baby angels.” She objects to “Our culture’s images of heaven [that] are so saccharine, so sentimental, so boring.”  What she wants is for us to have a heaven with the “possibility of actual peace, reconciliation, and abundance for all.”

Both writers want the same thing—an assurance for a better world, one free from hate, poverty, chronic pain, violence, and more. They both want a world of justice, one full of hope. But how do we give hope to those who suffer from the massive violence of our country-the violence not only of guns, but the violence of injustice, the violence of a low-paying job, the violence of chronic pain, the violence of addiction,  the violence of believing that this is all there is? If we can give citizens hope, then they will more likely be equipped to fight the obstacles of modern-day life.

One writer’s obvious way to combat the ills she faces in her personal and cultural life is her religious faith and “The hope of heaven is the glimmer of steady light that guides and protects me in the valley of  the shadow of death.” Her hope drives her days.

However, the newspaper columnist tells us that “The exposure to violence does something to you.” It is that violence lived and seen daily that probably causes there to be “no hope in the future to drive the day,” so why not gravitate to the easy path of drugs, guns, wanton sex, and alcohol that make life something not cherished but something cheap and expendable?

How do we give hope to such a life as that? We can’t by ways of large government programs. They can help, but we should have learned that large government won’t succeed because we have tried for years to give hope to downtrodden members of our communities through that channel.

I grew up in a single parent household during the segregated south of the 1950’s and 60’s. My mother hemmed washcloths in a cotton mill and reared 6 children. We were poor. We were White. But we were not trashy because our mother demanded of herself and us children. She once told a sister that she, a fine-looking divorced woman, could have spent every weekend at the beach, but she stayed home with her children, doing the hard work of a single parent. She made us go to church, and she had expectations  of us. She parented us. She was not perfect, nor were we, but we all grew into professionals who contributed to society. She showed us “hope in the future to drive the day.”

Governmental programs, as churches and schools,  help individuals succeed. However, when an individual faces the brutality that some of us do each day, that person needs an adult to guide him or her as if lost in a dense forest. A map of that forest is like governmental programs—it can help, but it can’t offer encouragement at each step and turn the same way as that of a guide. The guide not only leads but gives hope, and that kind of hope can only be built from the intimate involvement of an adult who gives unconditional love at each  step on the path through the dense forest. We all need maps, but we also need guides who will help us, not hinder our journey. And the best guides are parents like my mother who did the difficult work of guiding and encouraging.

This kind of hope comes from a belief that there is more to life than what is seen. It comes from a belief that there is something larger than self—call that something whatever suits you, but real hope comes from believing that each of us is a part of a larger existence. This kind of hope will give a future to drive each day.