We sat down at 8.m. to prepare envelopes and stamps and stickers for the first chunk of the first mailing, and we just quite, sometime after 10 p.m. I think we did about 100 labels and envelopes, they are going out all over the country, as far away as California, Arizona, Nevada, Kentucky, Canada, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and many more.
The Army Of Good is an idea that is about to spread its wings a bit.
We have more stickers to mail out, but that’s enough for tonight, Maria has already gone to bed. The stickers cost $10, free shipping, all extra donations will go straight to the Gus Fund to help the Mansion residents and the refugees.
You can order the bumper stickers on Maria’s Etsy page, or if you prefer, you can send $10 in cash or check form to my post office box, Jon Katz, Post Office Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. Just mark it “Bumper Sticker.” This is special, a big step for us and for this idea, of doing good rather than arguing and hating one another.
The Army Of Good has done a lot of good this year, the bumper sticker idea obviously hit a nerve, the others are coming in every day, and thanks.
I hope it gives some of you some pleasure, I hope it helps keep good alive in our hearts and out in the world. I think good deeds are viral, they spread good feeling. Come see the bumper stickers here.
On Memorial Day, I remember when hard cover books ruled the publishing world, I wrote more than 25 of those books, and am finishing yet another, probably, and by my own choice, my last.
I have an old bookcase, a former rescued and renovated chicken coop, in my study, I love to look at it when the sunlight flashes across in the afternoon.
This morning, at a flower and plant sale, a woman came up to me to lament what the thought of as the “tragic end of books” in the way she knew them. How sad, she said, that children would read on screens and tablets, not hold paper in their hands. Reading, she said gloomily, is dying.
She assumed I would be sympathetic to this gloomy and narcissistic whine. She was wrong.
She said she will never read anything that is not a paper book, and laments the future of poor children today.
I do not share her views about books. Or children. Or reading.
The universe does not care if stories are told on papyrus or parchment or paper, and neither to children entering the world today. Just because it was what we did does not make it sacred and superior.
Just because it is done on a tablet or screen does not make it morally superior. Just because we are used to it does not make it better.
The children I know read much more than I ever did, they do it easily, in graphic color on portable devices, and for pennies. This may not be good for my long vanished royalty checks, but that is my problem, not the problem of kids today.
Survey after survey finds that paper books will still be around, that small and good bookstores will survive, and that there is no evidence that children are one bit dumber than we are. The kids I know are a lot smarter than I was, or am. The surveys also show that more people are reading more book and poems and stories in more different forms and less expensively than ever before.
And how can anyone who loves stories not bow to that?
Publishing careers like mine are fading away, it is getting harder all the time to sell a book and earn any money. The new writers are doing it differently. So am I.
So I tell my stories on my blog, and my world has not come to an end, it has, in fact, grown richer and more creative. And the truth is, I like it better.
I do honor books and love to hold them and touch them and look at them every day. They were the dream of my life, and gave me the opportunity to love my work every day that I did it. They are fading into the background of our culture, and I am happier and more productive than I have ever been.
What is the message in that for me, and for anyone else? I think is that change is not the exception, it is the rule, Change, like death, will come to all of us, and the test of a good life for me is not that it is perfect or static, rather that I handled it with grace and imagination and perspective.
Nostalgia is a trap in my mind. Just because I did something doesn’t make it moral or right. And stories don’t much care how they are read.
I am not a Christian, I am not a worshipper of Jesus Christ. I am a Jew converted some years ago to Quakerism.
Christ’s teaching and writings have given me moral and cultural inspiration and comfort and guide me today in so many ways. His work has helped provide a foundation for my idea of The Army Of Good and its commitment to supporting the poor, the forgotten and the vulnerable.
We are skeptical of the rich, and of a society that favors them over everyone else. I have always assumed that members of the Christian faith would embrace and work on behalf of the ideas that he so clearly expressed as a political radical and champion of the poor and the “stranger.”
We believe that truth is morally central to our personal and civic lives.
I am sorry to see that this is not the case, some of the most visible and influential of the people who worship and seek power in Christ’s name ignore the poor and their children and preach hatred for the refugees and the immigrants, and the people in need of health care. They are, in fact, the wealthy and disconnected priests he drove out of the Temple. They better pray he does not return.
On Memorial Day, I chose to honor the lost Jesus, the one his own faith seems to have forgotten, and pay tribute to his lost ideals. I also am happy to celebrate a new and growing movement, the one to reclaim the lost Christ.
These leaders and believers are not speaking from the left or the right, they are not interested in our crippling partisan politics, they are reclaiming the teachings of Christ, and denouncing religious nationalism and bigotry. They are reminding us that God favors no nation, and that religion is not about amassing wealth.
“We believe the soul of the nation and the integrity of faith are now at stake,” they declared. “It is time to be followers of Jesus before anything else – nationality, political party, race, ethnicity, gender, geography – our identity in Christ precedes every other identity.”
The identity of Christ does not precede every other identity or value for me. But it has never been more important to the moral underpinning of our country.
I don’t worship Christ as a god, but an idea, a direction our most celebrated Better Angel.
It is a landmark thing – sadly – in 2018 for powerful and influential Christian leaders to gather to reclaim the truth about Christ and what he stood for, even as millions of people who claim to be Christians seem to have forgotten him for political gain. This is the “crisis” of faith that is harming so many other people, Christians or not.
I think of the Mansion residents, many of whom are poor and forgotten, and of the growing attacks on refugees and immigrants, the target of vicious and cruel efforts to exploit them to divide our country, and do them great harm in the process.
When politics undermines theology, say the religious leaders, than it’s time to examine that politics.
Politics today is something Jesus Christ would have despised and condemned. In fact, it was this kind of politics he did despise and condemn. “Come now, you wealthy ones, weep and how for the miseries that are about to come upon you,” wrote Christ’s disciple James in epistle.”
The authors of reclaimingjesus have risen about the polarization and rage in our country and reminded us of what it means to be people of faith. They come from every religious and political spectrum They seem to have their spiritual feet on the ground.
“…we reject the language and policies of political leaders who would debase and abandon the most vulnerable children of God,” said the religious leaders.
“We strongly deplore the growing attacks on immigrants and refugees, who are being made into cultural and political targets, and we need to remind our churches that God makes the treatment of the “strangers” among us a test of faith (Leviticus 19:33-34).
We won’t accept the neglect of the well-being of low-income families and children, and we will resist repeated attempts to deny health care to those who most need it. We confess our growing national sin of putting the rich over the poor. We reject the immoral logic of cutting services and programs for the poor while cutting taxes for the rich.”
In his powerful and quite brilliant new book, The Soul Of America, The Battle For Our Better Angels, historian Jon Meacham writes of the gospel that became the ethos of the American experiment, espoused most clearly by Franklin Roosevelt as the Judeo-Christian ethic, the moral underpinning of the United States and the free world for many years
“The world was not perfect, nor was it perfectible,” wrote Meacham, “but on we went, in the face of inequities and inequalities, seeking to expand freedom at home, to defend liberty abroad, to conquer disease and go to the stars. For notably among nations, the United States has long been shaped by the promise, if not always by the reality, of forward motion, of rising greatness, and of the expansion of knowledge, of wealth, and of happiness.”
Could anyone describe us in that way today?
Jesus was not a comforter of the rich, he was a radical advocate for the poor.
The disciple James, says author Reza Aslan in his book Zealot, The Life And Times Of Jesus Of Nazareth, goes so far as to suggest that one cannot truly be a follower of Jesus at all if one does not actively favor the poor. “Do you with your acts of favoritism towards the rich really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?, ” James asks in the gospels.
The revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom Of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history, and to many in his own faith, the one that carries his name.
It seems many in the modern faith needed a different story, they rewrote the old one.
That is shame, because he seems to me to be someone truly worth believing in, not the slick TV preachers and religious entrepreneurs who sell faith to power today for money, our new priests.
I am happy to see true Christians begin to rise up and show their moral DNA.
I was thinking that if Jesus really was or is the son of God, then the moral religious leaders speaking up, his true followers, are the new zealots, they are walking across the new Galilee to defy the corrupt priests in the new temple. Religious scholars have no doubt how Christ would feel about the persecutors of the poor and the refugees.
Every day, someone messages me to tell me how depressed they are, how gloomy the news is, how frightened and despairing they are. But that is not my view, any more than the left and the right is. If you open your eyes, and turn off their news, you can see it all around you.
I feel a new moral awakening, you can see it and feel it everywhere, from women marching, to blacks and Hispanics and women seeking political office, the students marching against violence, in moral books and declarations, in marches and the stirrings of so many souls. And surely, in The Army Of Good.
Those of us who were asleep, are waking up, and in so many cases, doing good. I honestly believe, as someone who really belongs completely to no religion, that we are reclaiming the spirit and message of Jesus Christ who, was, after all, a warrior for the poor and the vulnerable, whether one worships him or not.
If he is not being reborn, then he seems to be being reclaimed. For me, an admirer but non-worshipper, that is just as good.
On Memorial Day, I honor his sacrifice for us all.
I went over to the Mansion today to check on the residents during our first heat wave of the summer, it was in the high 80’s today. Under state regulations, the heat in the Mansion cannot be turned off until June 1, and it’s sometimes quite warm in some of the Mansion rooms.
The residents can’t use the air conditioners we bought last year until the heat is turned off, and some of the rooms can’t be cooled because of electrical issues. Where possible, the Army Of Good has provided fans.
When I came up on the porch, Joan threw arms wide in welcome, and then got up to give me a big hug. It is hard not to love Joan, her radiance always finds a way to shine through. I asked her why she wasn’t wearing the new socks I bought her yesterday, I noticed hers were different colors, and she laughed and said, “what socks?”
I brought Joan a pair of cotton pajamas to wear at night, her winter pajamas were making her uncomfortable and warm. I ordered four other pairs of pajamas for the other residents who need summer cotton pajamas, they should be here early in the week.
The staff is kidding me about being like Batman, whirling in and whirling out on my missions
Now that it’s warm, more of the residents are sitting out on the rocking chairs in the porch, and several told me the chairs needed cushions, they were sometimes hard on their backs. I ordered four rocking chair cushions, they will be here early next week.
Sometimes I go to thrift shops for low prices on clothes, but for many things, I prefer to buy new things, I want to feel confident about anything that the residents use often, I like to read the reviews and be careful about it. Cheaper is not always better, I have learned.
Joan was very happy to touch and hold her new pajamas, but just to be sure, I gave them to Lorlisa, who was on duty. I got another hug for that. Two of the residents complained about the heat, Joan just threw her arms open to the world and laughed at it.
We came home with a big load of new flowers for the garden, Maria has been out there for hours in the sticky heat, this is something she loves so much it is a joy to watch her. I’m in charge of regular watering and some weeding. This garden is going to be great.
