ACROSS THE LINES - Archive (2006-2020)

To many the work of a pastor may appear easy – even some church-going people seem to think that preaching on Sunday is all the job requires. In fact pastors must exercise many skills, from fundraising to counseling, from public relations to office administration. Pastors, I have heard it said, are the last generalists in a largely specialized professional world. What makes professional church work most difficult, though, are the people. At a gathering of pastors I once heard a colleague wisecrack, “You put that many people together in one place and they’re bound to stink after a while.” The rest of us laughed and shot each other knowing glances. Good pastors know that sometimes they stink up the joint, too. Last Thursday a Denver man, Mike Jones, announced on a Colorado talk-radio program that Ted Haggard, the lead pastor of New Life Church, a 14,000-member church in Colorado Springs, paid him for sex and used methamphetamines across the course of a three-year relationship. Jon

Five years after the only September 11 that will ever seem to matter, the world is awakening to the potential consequences of the Bush Administration’s apocalyptic reaction to the events of that most horrible day. Public opinion in Europe and the United States is growing toward consensus: President Bush’s all-or-nothing “war on terror” is itself a grave threat to global stability in the 21st century. The 9-11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington were so horrifying the early tone of absolutism adopted by the Bush Administration seemed natural enough. Nobody blanched when on September 14, 2001 President Bush intoned, “every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” In his greatest fit of hyperbole, President Bush declared that the aim of America’s war on terror was to “to rid the world of evildoers”? This desire is understandable, even admirable, as a visceral reaction to the events of September 11. Who would

Published in The Christian Century , August 8, 2006 Last summer I was invited by a hospice chaplain to accompany him on a visit to the family of Maria Durand de Perez, a Mexican woman who had died a few weeks earlier in the border town of San Ysidro, California, at the astonishing age of 111. Knowing that I had once worked as the pastor of a Spanish-language church, the chaplain, whose name is Andy, thought that my presence might prove helpful to Angela, Maria's 78-year-old daughter, who was mourning the loss of her mother deeply. In his previous visits, Andy, who spoke only English, and Angela, who spoke only Spanish, had depended for translation on Yrma, Angela's bilingual daughter and the owner of the San Ysidro home. Andy suspected (rightly, it turned out) that Angela was longing to have a more in-depth conversation about her mother's remarkable life. At first it seemed absurd that Angela's grief was so pronounced. It was not as if she had had insufficient time to p

Published in A & U Magazine , October, 2006 Life on the Line One HIV-positive woman’s account of crossing the U.S.–Mexico border in search of healthcare by John Fanestil Last summer I worked for a week in the mountains east of San Diego, as the volunteer chaplain at a camp for people with HIV/AIDS. There I met Lourdes Sanchez (not her real name), a twenty-four-year-old Tijuana woman who laughed when I asked her where she was from. “Yo vivo en la línea,” said Lourdes, smiling and using the Spanish slang for “border.” I live on the line. I picked up the conversation in Spanish: “Así que vives en San Diego o Tijuana?” So do you live in San Diego or Tijuana? “Los dos,” Lourdes said. Both. She went on to explain to me that she maintained residences in both Tijuana and San Ysidro, San Diego County’s border town. I found the idea fascinating, and so I asked Lourdes to sit down and tell me about herself, and to explain how it came to pass that she lived on both sides of the line. Lourdes S

Terry Schiavo died one year ago this Friday, thirteen days after the removal of the feeding tube that had sustained her since 1990 in what her doctors diagnosed as a “persistent vegetative state.” As all but the most media-averse will remember, Schiavo’s husband, Mark, and her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, disagreed bitterly about removing the feeding tube. Their dispute – which had been played out in the Florida legal system for over a decade – exploded in the court of public opinion last spring, when finally the Schindlers’ appeals were exhausted, and Mark Schiavo was granted legal authority to order the tube removed. The plight of Terry Schiavo and her family sent shivers of recognition across America – almost everyone could imagine their own family torn over what to do if a young loved one were cut down by illness or accident before having spelled out explicit end-of-life instructions. Schiavo’s tragedy also captured the public imagination because her family’s differences

Based on the eulogy I delivered at the funeral of my grandmother, Marian Smith, in March, 2006. I dedicated my first book, Mrs. Hunter's Happy Death, to my grandmother. She died the day before it first appeared in bookstores. This is a tale of three books, the first being the spiral-bound Spiderman notebook that belongs to Jacob, my four year-old son. The night before I left town to go to my grandmother’s funeral, I grabbed the notebook and a pencil as Jacob climbed into his bed, and I asked him if he wanted to write a note to his great-grandmother, whom he has always called “Gigi.” Jacob thought for just a minute, then motioned for me to bend over so he could whisper in my ear. “I love you,” he said. “I miss you. I want to visit with you in heaven.” Jacob giggled and sat up straight in his bed as I read his words back to him. Then, with a curious smile and a nod of his head, he said to me confidently, almost smugly, “You show her that. I think she will like what I wrote.”