Finding the A-Historical Jesus—an allusion to Schweitzer’s Search for the Historical Jesus—and to all seeking and finding as children waking from a nightmare…a Post-Inauguration Blog, with thanks to Gorman, Gaga, and company!

                                                           By Charles Peek

The main problem in any democracy is that crowd pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage and whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy — then go back to the office and sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.

Hunter S. Thompson, quoted from A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg )

God, almighty and everlasting . . . you have brought us in safety to this new day: Preserve us with your mighty power.

Book of Common Prayer, 100)

In preparation for the possible “war” the FBI had warned all 50 states about as the Inauguration was approaching, our Governor, a self-styled “pro-life” Roman Catholic with ambitions, announced on January 12 that naturally weapons would be welcome in the demonstrations, even inside the Capitol. He just asked people to be respectful.

Sorry, Governor Ricketts, the Streetcar Named Respectful left a few years ago. Not sure, in the wake of January 6, how you missed that change. But thanks anyway; at least now we understand why supposed “pro-lifers” have been so eager to get the right to carry concealed weapons. Of course, “concealed carry” was not necessary for the lone protestor who showed up with his AK47 at the Nebraska state capitol, lingered a while, and left. Perhaps he expected a welcome from the Governor who was too busy polishing his bleak resume to roll out the vaccine.

“Pro-Life” is not the only name today’s hooligans desecrate. Among other January events, January 1 is the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus for practicing catholic Christians, one of whom is the new President, and look how the vandalizing louts celebrated it! 

First, then, a word about what Pro-Life means. Even if reduction in the number of abortions is the only measure of being pro-life, then the health care programs sponsored by Pro-Choice folks have demonstrably done more to reduce the number of abortions than all the hurdles and heaps of shame hurled around by the so-called pro-lifers. That may make them feel righteous, but it hasn’t been a measurably effective approach to reducing the number of abortions. If they are sincere, this ought to give them pause. Instead, it has brought out a lot of votes for scoundrels who flew under one banner and then lined the pockets of the inheritors of the military-industrial complex against which Ike warned us, and ended up helping to foment the January 6 insurrection. They are pretty much today’s “Kansas-Nebraska act”!

And, of course, laudable as is a reduction in the number (and danger) of abortions, there are other measures of being pro-life, measures like opposition to the death penalty, like opposing willy-nilly but constant militarism, like not making life as hard as possible for those for whom it is already pretty hard. When you take all those into account, it doesn’t speak so well for many of those who protest they are “pro-life” and yet demonize their opponents and demean so many of their fellow human beings.

But let’s go back to the Holy Name of Jesus for a moment.  As someone just inaugurated might say, “Look, folks!”:

A note from friend Ted indicated that, as he and Kathleen set out the crèche during Advent, they discovered that the baby Jesus was missing. No clue where he now lay, except it wouldn’t now, as we like to sing, be on Mary’s lap.  No idea how he went missing. Just a baby, after all—many years before being of an age to go missing in the Temple. (He who was not just on one occasion apparently the master of a “gone missing” act . . . the decades between his twelfth and thirtieth year for instance!)

At the same time as we received Ted’s message, we looked catty corner to where the neighbors had set up a sizeable outdoor crèche. We saw it only once when it was occupied with tenants; by the next morning it was empty. We have no idea whether it appeared too dangerous to have the Holy Family on the front lawn these turbulent days when we seem bent on another persecution of the Innocents, or whether the figures had already been stolen (as a prank or a statement, who knows?) or whether the whole Holy Family had taken off on an early departure to Egypt.

Who knows? There’s been a lot of touting of putting Christ “back into Christmas,” usually by people with little interest in putting the Mass back into Christmas but bent on letting one of Jesus’ flocks bully all the other flocks Jesus told us also follow him.

Even the cloth backdrop in the neighbor’s wooden manger scene eventually swooped away in the Nebraska winds. In any event, Jesus had gone missing here, too. In fact, as you can tell by listening to any of the ritzy televised proclamations of the Prosperity Gospel the previous White House publicly embraced, any kind of recognizable Jesus has seemed missing in lots of quarters these days. Until yesterday, you could have easily found the address of one of those places on Pennsylvania Avenue in our nation’s Capital.

Case in point: a sign showed up at the insurrection at our nation’s Capital on Epiphany.  Epiphany! Sorry, I’m repeating myself—shock does that to a person, I know, but are these supposed Christians tone deaf to everything? Anyway, the sign could be seen in the rush of the mob carried by one of the menacing insurrectionists who had broken through the barriers and smashed their way into the halls of Congress. The sign read: JESUS.

Had the missing Jesus been found?

Sadly, no. On the contrary, just really lost this time.

(I suppose that possibly the sign might have been a half a sign—the other half left off, the part from the shortest verse in scripture; there could have been some sense to a sign that read JESUS WEPT!)

If you were looking for Jesus anywhere, it would have been in the face of a true Goodman, the brave cop who led the menacing mob away from the Senate chamber (and by the time of the Inauguration elevated to a Sergeant-at-Arms). Or, found in the aides who rescued the electoral college results reports, or in the news people risking a lot to comply to Jack Webb’s constant refrain: Just the facts! Or in the members of Congress, some on both sides of the aisle, who returned to the scene to do business where they had so recently been frighteningly threatened.

Or possibly you could see Jesus at the Inauguration itself in the guise of those scurrying now to protect from further assaults of violent and lying bigotry the new President and Vice President elect. Or in the uplifting songs and messages and poem. Or in the eight-year-old girl who had to ask her mother “What is an inauguration?” and “Who is Tom Hanks?” before she could appear in the program he emceed on “one nation, indivisible.” Or the ceaseless efforts of the man who sanitized the podium after each use of it.

If you don’t believe this would be where to look for the missing Jesus, check out The Gospel of St. Matthew, chapter 25.

In the sad wake of January 6 and uplifting wake of January 20, then, I offer this thought from Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

Ring out false pride in place and blood, / The civic slander and the spite; / Ring in the love of truth and right, / Ring in the common love of good.

What better prayer to offer in the wake of insurrection, in the face of the phenomenon of thugs and malcontents claiming the people’s house was theirs, in the wake of their new attempt at secession—this new Confederacy by other means—at the call of the Malcontent in Chief? Wasn’t that their flag also seen in the halls of Congress? Next to the Nazi flags it so often seems to appear beside? (Just celebrating “our history,” you know! Well, yes, we do know—now if not before!)

At least the Malcontent in Chief flew off to his resort “unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung” (as Sir Walter Scott phrased it) by any who will be more than a footnote in history. An entire grand old American party has to now decide which side of history it wants to be on. And the other party needs to heed all the recent reminders that the nation needs it to get down to business and stop its own posturing.

Kearney, Nebraska

January 21, 2021

Up with the kettle, down with the pot, or was it the other way around?

                                                                                    By Chuck Peek

Too much politics last year, so politics is no way to start the new year!

I ‘unsubscribed’ from a number of sites to which I had never “subscribed” in the first place and I’m moving on to a renewed focus on personal stories. We could all use a ‘new’ story. Politics can wait a month or two. Maybe. Or for the next month’s blog. Or possibly a post-Inauguration blog this month. Or…

But, first, a story of our exit from Lincoln as my Interim work at St. Mark’s on the Campus came to an end, which requires some added note about the kind of person you want if you are a parish looking for a priest—interim or permanent. You want my kind of heads-up guy!

What a find am I! Dateline Lincoln Nebraska Christmas Eve day: my quick wittedness clicks in and I say to Nancy, “Say, Nancy.”

This sometimes gets her attention. “Say, Nancy, we don’t know if any of the grocery stores in Kearney will be open when we get home late in the day Christmas Day. If we want a baked potato with our prime rib roast, we’d better get it now and take it home with us.”

“What was that, dear?” she says, now fully attentive.

All of which delightful conversation issued in a trip to Wagner’s A Street Market and the purchase of one fine potato to go back to Kearney and accompany our prime rib roast! I know, you’re thinking, “Now that is using the old bean! What a guy in charge he’d make!”

The timetable: open visitation at church from 12:30-3:30 followed by a service of song and story, canticles and prayers aired on Facebook Live, followed by some photos with two of our student assistants at St. Mark’s on the Campus and our Parish Administrator and some good-byes.

A wonderful custom there: the Parish Administrator—one of the two best I’ve ever had—sticks around and closes up the shop after everyone leaves. I knew he was ‘heads-up’ when I found he and Sherry liked Lee’s Chicken, one of our favorite old Lincoln haunts, where we got to eat with them twice, ducking in between Covid waves.

So, we pack up the few things left so we can vacate the office for the incoming new Rector, head back to our Lincoln apartment, have a simple soup supper, and spend Christmas Eve cleaning up and packing, certain we won’t be able to get everything in the car to head back to Kearney—once again, using the old space between the ears very carefully to separate what goes back for sure, what may or may not fit in, what probably will have to await a second trip.

Just so you get those categories clearly in mind—sorry to be a bit condescending but these categories came from a superior kind of person-you-want-in-charge mind—a sack of hangers can definitely go in the 2^nd trip, dirty clothes and food stuff are getting packed no matter what, and extra linens and clothes can either go or wait as there is room. Right! Accolades for brilliant thinking all around.

So, Christmas morning we get up and have a quick breakfast of juice and Clyde’s apple fritters (not recommended if there is a Casey’s open, itself not recommended if you are by good fortune near Kearney’s Daylight Donuts), and proceed as Nancy lugs stuff up the stairs and I load the car. Yes, it’s good to be King. Well, in fairness, she’s lugging everything not up the stairs exactly but the elevator next to them, which we gave a work out leaving just as we had on arrival eleven months before.

 I shovel out a fairly ice-free path to the car and load by priority. The big cooler of food, in first; the plant stand that had been at the church, back into the apartment to wait. Nancy pronounced the loading a work of sheer genius, the plant stand, reading pillow, and six boxes are on a table to be picked up in a later trip, we drive down to St. Mark’s on the Campus and drop off the SMOC keys, and head back to Kearney.

First order of business—get out the prime rib roast and see when it has to go in the oven if we want to eat about 6:00 p.m. Complication—it cooks at 325, we cook a baked potato at 425. But as all know I married above myself and Nancy the Ever Wise and Fully Attentive says, the baked potato can cook at 325—it will just take longer. Not the sole cause of my having married her but good enough reason in itself. When I taught Logic, I used to give entire lectures on varieties of cause and effect, so this knowledge is part of the upper level of my well-ordered thoughts, my keen intellect.

So, we proceed to prep the prime rib roast and decide the potato can go in when the roast does.

Okay then, “Nancy, I’ll prep the roast with my creative seasoning and you scrub and poke the potato.”

“Where will I find the potato?” she asks. Now, it’s no wonder she had to ask. When we had arrived home, she had been busy lugging all our luggage (you see why it is called luggage) up the stairs (no elevator in our house, or as one of the UNL students termed it, ‘The Peek Estate’). I was busy, as you might imagine, with checking on the back mail and setting up the computer.

I asked, “What do you mean, “where will I find the potato?” It was not a challenge . . . it was a sinking feeling.

After quite an extensive whole-house search—“I’ve already looked there”/ “Yes, but you didn’t find anything so I looked again”—the sinking feeling grew as the question came to an indubitable answer—you’ll find the potato back in the apartment in Lincoln . . . in the plastic pitcher that didn’t make the trip because being a second plastic pitcher consigned it to a third priority item and, hence, a later trip.

Now you know why St. Mark’s is glad their new priest has arrived.

Well, then, we had to try to figure out what the half-life of a baking potato is so we would know when we would need to retrieve the pillow, plant stand, six boxes—and one potato. (In case you don’t like suspense, by January 3 we had removed all the aforesaid, bid the apartment goodbye, and the potato, six boxes, plant stand, and pillow were all back in Kearney. A forgotten onion in the plastic pitcher with the potato had fared less well than might have been hoped, perhaps suffering emotionally from having been entirely forgotten.

Back to Christmas Eve: A baked onion took the potato’s place and what with the Ukrainian beet and cabbage salad, Rozachka, Russian for you’ll find some beets and cabbage amidst the vinegar and garlic, and some peas, we had a splendid Christmas dinner. Like the Stolichny-dobrynski loaf cake, the potato was totally unnecessary. The rest of the Stolichny-dobrynski is on the porch for the squirrels. Our only remaining question is, wasn’t Dobrynski one of our Secretary of State’s names back a few years. (Or, de facto, maybe just recently?)

Now, for the bookend—the outset of our time in Lincoln to match our ‘exit stage left’: When we started our weekly time in Lincoln to serve St. Mark’s on the Campus on January 31, 2020, we made a list of all the people we know in Lincoln aside from old friends at St. Mark’s but people we hoped to see occasionally while we were there. The list has disappeared but we rehearsed the visits so often that I can recall most of it.

On the list (here in alphabetical order): Lucy Atkins, Becky Boesen, Sam Boman, Lucy Buntain, Kirstin Warren and Steve Carrell, Paul Clark, Don Cunningham and Jeanetta Drueke, Susanna DesMarais and Dow Cessna, Rebecca Faber, Molly Fisher, Chris Grosh and David Pitts, Twila Hansen, Kay Horner, Dick Hove, Ron Hull, James Foster Hunter III, Peggy Jensen, Andy Jewell, Bryan Lewis, Nate Lewis, Richard Oehlerking, Gretchen Olberding, Paul Olson, Amy Plettner, Guy Reynolds, Sandy Roach, Marge Saiser, Dale and Diane Sall, Keith and Sharon Sawyer, Bob and Ellen Snow, Dick Spencer, Ed Tatum, Rod Wagner, Jane Wasserman, Linda Wiley, John Wunder . . . and I’m thinking I’m missing someone but can wait until 3:00 a.m. tomorrow to wake with the name—on the tip of my tongue.

Then, right on the heels of getting settled, there came COVID-19! So, the meager results of our planning: we saw Don and Jeanetta in their driveway, Susanna and Dow got us settled in our apartment and soon after began to shelter in, The Snows and Chris were at my first SMOC Eucharist. Nancy ran into Molly out walking in her neighborhood where our church was helping with a garage sale, I saw both Lucy’s, plus Kay and Dick, on zoom for my Olli class (along with Mary Lutz and Marcelline Hutton from St. Mark’s). We were guests at a nice dinner at Chris and David’s, saw Andy for two seconds at his door, spoke briefly with Nate at Cork and Bottle, drove out to the Audubon near Denton to see Amy, and saw Linda at her home as she passed on some of her late husband’s things into my care.  By sheer happenstance, Guy was walking by St. Mark’s just as I was pulling in the drive. I told him to watch where he walked—and we still had a good conversation! Passed Dick Spencer in the Holy Trinity parking lot.

However, despite the great disappointment, all was not lost. Nancy had kept a Lincoln phone book from our last year there, 1971—don’t even ask—so we dug it out and on our way from St. Mark’s at 13^th and R to our apartment at Holy Trinity at 60^th and A, we would make excursions to see where we used to know people! (See Edward Arlington Robinson’s “Mr. Flood’s Party”.)

By the way (or BTW for those of you in a hurry), there is quite a line up out in our A Street neighborhood—the Unitarians, Episcopalians, and Pius X High School within sight of each other—Unity, Piety, and Trinity! Reminded me of the rare theological tome I received at my ordination from the Calandra’s, then in Germany. It was wrapped in pornography and labeled “heresy wrapped in lust!”

In all, our tours took in a lot of places no longer there and a few still standing: Alice’s Restaurant out by Union College, Ben Simon’s at 1215 O, Judy Bishop and Freddy Hummer’s at 2525 So. 37^th, Dr. Brown’s office at 1620 P, Ebba Bullock (our first landlady, and there’s a story!) at 322 S. 26^th, Betty and George Carpenter’s at 1727 So. 26, Casey’s bar at 1115 P, Der Loaf and Stein run by high school band-mate Bob Russell at 1223 P, the original site of the original Don and Millie’s at 1823 O, Larry Freeman’s house at 3927 A, Galen Hadley’s residence at 5317 Metzger, the old Gay Nineties buffet at 1316 N, Hal Hasselbach’s on 4705 South, Herm’s Liquor at 1644 P, the Hob Nob back of Golds at 1120 N, Hovland-Swanson’s at 1230 O, King’s Food Host (the one at 19^th and O, not the one on Cotner), Diane Krueger’s at 430 Hazelwood Dr., Lebsack’s at 1126 P, Lee Lemon’s old house at 1908 B, the old Lincoln Community Playhouse at 18^th and L, the old Lincoln Hotel at 147 N. 9^th, the Lindell Hotel and Cliff’s Smoke Shop once together at 12^th and O, Magee’s at 12^th and O, what we think was the old Monterrey Mexican restaurant at 600 N. 48t, Paul and Betty Olson’s old place at 2535 A, the Parson’s house at 56^th and Saylor, what we think must have been the old Providence Hospital, now part of another health care facility, Glenn and Gail Reed’s house (whose address I’ve now forgotten, the Sam Lawrence Hotel at 1042 P, Scott’s pancake house at 13^th and L, Tony and Luigi’s at 5140 O, Triangle Fraternity at 1235 No. 16^th, Les and Vivian Whipp’s at 2412 Ryons, and out at what was then called the Air Park where the Lynn Nelsons, Gerry Parsons, and we lived on Carswell, Vance, and McGuire (respectively), and the pink house on Vine where Mike Cartwright, Denny Calandra, Don Cunningham, and occasionally Tom Hoban lived.  Missed finding where Bob Griffin lived, where Emily Uzendoski lived, where Fred and Peggy Link had refinished the oak floors, and where our old Vet used to treat our dog Deiser.

Also went down the alley-way behind Bullocks where the basement apartment in which we lived the first year after we were married, where Dick and Judy Wood had lived before us and Pete and Barbara Clark moved in after we left. And drove by the old residence of Fr. Lyn and Mrs. Macmillan—he was the first rector of University Chapel and the Canterbury Club used to carol his wife in the mid-1960’s. And we rediscovered the joys of walks at Pioneers Park, where we used to run Deiser (a dog, not a child, though similarly behaved) and discovered the joys of walks at Holmes Lake, Nine Mile Prairie, and Memorial Drive.

And, of course, we found our old friends at St. Mark’s and met and grew to love other parishioners at St. Mark’s on the Campus. One of the joys of going back where we first met!

All of which goes to prove the old adage, if life gives you lemons, trade them for some of Sehnert’s Stöllen or give them to Kate Benzel for the frosting on her pound cake muffins!

Kearney, Nebraska

January 14, 2021 Blog (next: probably shortly after Jan. 20!)