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“People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine.” This quote from a E.M. Forster short story is entitled “The Machine Stops.” Yes, that Forster of “A Room with a View” and “A Passage to India” fame. The short story was first published in the Oxford and Cambridge Review in November of 1909. “The Machine Stops” is a futuristic tale with only two characters: a mother, Vashti, and son, Kuno. An invisible Central Committee had designed an omnipotent and omnipresent Machine and decreed all babies put into public nurseries. “Parent’s duties,” said the Book of the Machine, “cease at the moment of birth.” Vashti could visit Kuno in the nursery until the Machine assigned him a room on the other side of the earth. Hence forth, the only means of communication for mother and son was through devices and screens. The populations of the earth lived underground in an elaborate honeycomb system with individuals housed in small, hexagonal rooms. Every need was met inside the room. All requirements to sustain human life in one’s personally designed abode was provided by the Machine and its Central Committee. Few ventured to the “surface of the earth” except for a rare flight on an airship with the sky windows concealed by blinds. For humans to view the earthly sights of nature was determined too distressing. Kuno called his mother located in the southern hemisphere and asked her to take a flight to the northern hemisphere. He had something important to tell her. Flying in an airship was frightening enough, but Vashti was even more terrified to speak to someone in person, even her son. The advanced technology of this brave new world had made face-to-face contact obsolete. Public gatherings were abandoned. Knowledge was passed through lectures on screens taken from the Machine’s Book of Knowledge. Vashti was horrified to learn her son had ventured to the surface of the earth without permission from the Central Committee. Kuno experiences the natural world and encounters others “hiding in the mists.” When she asked why he took such a risk, Kuno explains, “We have lost a part of ourselves. I am determined to recover it.” Vashti tells her son the fact that he was only threatened for his foolishness and not banished was a sign of the Machine’s mercy. “I prefer the mercy of God,” Kuno replies. The prescient qualities of “The Machine Stops” cannot be denied. As time progressed in the story and the efficiency of the Machine increased, the curiosity and intelligence of man decreased. The ultimate goal of the Machine was to free the individual “from the taint of personality,” limiting all human-to-human contact and channeling the need to touch and be touched only by the systems of machinery and screens. Have we assigned demigod status to our technology? What may seem like personal empowerment at our fingertips may become our undoing. Call me a curmudgeon. I’ve been called worse.

Who wants to live forever? I’m guessing most people would like to slow down the aging process by living a healthy and balanced lifestyle, but there are those rare earth billionaires among us who are doing their darndest to reverse the whole process. The thought is, if one has enough money and will power, one can stop death in its tracks. Wealth and success has provided true believers such advantages that us mortals can only aspire. It is no secret that people in higher economic brackets enjoy a better quality of living than those who don’t have the disposable income for high-end exercise equipment, the gyms and personal trainers, the pricey vitamins and supplements, not to mention the sums of money one has to shell out to purchase groceries. As we move further into the world of A.I. designed for the betterment of mankind, will these advancements leave our near-empty wallets even more empty? Will these mechanical devices that measure our bodily indexes really slow down the ever-ticking timepiece that Death keeps in its pocket? I can’t afford a designer workout wardrobe let alone multiple A.I. technologies to reverse my biological clock. Since recorded history we have been searching for the means to extend our lives, questing for the elixir vitae that would make us immortal. The ancient Mesopotamians believed a plant growing at the bottom of the sea could yield the cure. The Chinese believed a diet of the earth’s long-lasting minerals provided longevity. How do you say, “That boiled jade could use a little salt,” in Chinese? Now the Philosopher’s Stone is found in A.I. devices, the workouts on cross-training machines followed by mixing up those fountain of youth cocktails full of nutrients to reverse the cellular aging that comes with, well, aging. I suggest something better for those who want to reverse the effects of mortality. A carpenter turned rabbi turned savior offered himself as the spiritual source for living water. This nutritious drink came with a guarantee: anyone who drank this true elixir vitae would no longer need to seek remedies for eternal life from other sources. I’m not saying toss all A.I. devices in the dust bin or forget your exercise routines and donate your Lululemon workout clothes to Goodwill. But if you really want to live forever, start sipping the living water of the Son of Man and embark on a journey of the beautiful mystery of God’s grace.

My father was stationed in Morioka, Japan after the surrender in September of 1945. He had spent months in the Philippines witnessing the horrors of war, and transitioning from combat to one of occupation Japan’s surrender was a welcomed relief. The war had ended and a level of normalcy was beginning to emerge. Dad was a prolific letter writer. His letters to his parents were filled with rich details of his military activities. As I read through a batch of Dad’s dispatches, I was struck by how quick he was to volunteer for whatever extra-curricular task required his time and talent. I saw this quality growing up, but by reading these letters, I realized he had been living this way long before I was born. I thought I had been the first one in our family to ever perform in a Christmas pageant, but the cast photo in this “Conversation” shows my father standing at the end of the line on the far left dressed as a Roman soldier. The photo was taken on December 5th or 6th, 1945 on the stage at the town hall in Morioka. In the correspondences to my grandparents leading up to this event, Dad wrote in detail his involvement with this event, from music selection to conducting the choir to staging and performing. This might have been his first theatrical production. Here was a multi-racial cast with a Japanese Joseph and Mary along with some of the citizens of Bethlehem side by side with American shepherds and soldiers. Dad played the music on “a little pump organ the church had” while directing the choir. Dad writes to his parents, “That was probably one of the first times since the war started that Japanese Christians and American Christians sung together…and it was beautiful.” Once rehearsal was over, Dad and another soldier treated everyone to his version of snow cream. There had been a fresh ten-inch snowfall that day, and while he had no vanilla or chocolate and a moderate supply of sugar, Dad made do with pineapple juice that “ought to make a good sherbert – And it was (Dad’s underline) good. Everybody enjoyed it a lot.” Dad, and then with Mom, knew how to create something from scratch, from a theatrical production to concocting something tasty to eat afterward. Like the members of the cast in this Christmas pageant, my parents were so inclusive. This theme of hospitality was as natural as breathing to my parents. Not just at Christmas but all year long. So often it is impossible to appreciate what you had growing up until you don’t have it any more. But then as I review my own life and the lives of my siblings and our collective children, I see how the gift of hospitality originating from the joyful hearts of Buddy and Bernie has been handed down to the third and fourth generations.

I love a good fire and will use any excuse to build one. If the chimney in our house was not so old, we would have a “live” fire. As it is, we put in gas logs, so we get the flame and the heat, but not the snap, crackle, and pop of incinerating logs. The one consolation is that the hearth is open, and flame and heat are not trapped inside “the abomination of an air-tight stove.” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s words, not mine, expressed in his essay “The Old Manse” written in 1842. It seemed that the modern technology of the day dealt a crushing blow to old Nat’s inner peace and spurred a gloomier vision of the future. “I never shall be reconciled to this enormity. Truly may it be said that the world looks darker for it. In one way or another, here and there, and all around us, the inventions of mankind are fast blotting the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful, out of human life.” However his aversion to modern amenities, such technological advances did not prevent him from installing three of these “abominations” in his home in Concord. No doubt at the behest of his wife. For every generation there are those who point the bony finger of judgment on many things that might bring about our ruin: air-conditioning, space travel (when we landed on the moon in 1969 my great grandfather said, “If the Lord wanted us to travel to the moon, he’d a put stairs up there.”), television, comic books, social media, and oh my, Tik Tok. Has your brain dissolved into a puddle of slime at these potential hazards to society? Then there was/is the novel which has caused fear and trembling among civilizations. Thomas Jefferson was alarmed by what the reading of novels might do to impressionable minds. In a letter dated March 14, 1818, he stated, “A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels…when this poison infects the mind, it destroys its tone and revolts it against wholesome reading.” I guess if you wrote the Declaration of Independence you are entitled to have an opinion about the modern novel of his day as “this mass of trash.” I wonder if our third president had lived long enough to read Nathaniel Hawthrone’s romance novels might he have had a different opinion? Still, President Jefferson did read Shakespeare and regularly attend the theatre. He wasn’t a complete wastrel with his leisure time. I like reading a good novel. I’ve written a few myself. Whiling away the clock with a novel can be a worthy investment of time and treasure. Much better than doomscrolling. Having your imagination carried along by an author’s story, one sentence at a time, can be a pleasant experience quietening the noise of everyday life. We owe ourselves those tranquil moments and imaginary flights that only good stories provide us.

Back in the day when Kay and I and our girls spent time in La La Land so I could chase the Hollywood dream, many times after a failed audition, my agent said I didn’t get the part because “I had no marquee value,” i.e., no one would buy a ticket to this movie because I was in it. It wasn’t like I was auditioning for the lead. Most of the time it was for “Man behind the counter,” no “marquee value” required. I believe it was my agent’s way of saying my audition sucked. After three years of giving it my best shot, we returned home, my tail tucked between my legs. When I started writing novels and shopping them to potential agents and publishers I was given a similar message, “We loved your novel, but you have no platform,” i.e., no marquee value. “Get a website,” they advised. “Write a newsletter, start a podcast, build a presence on social media. You need to create visibility.” Maybe it was the publisher’s way of saying my novel sucked. Tom Peters, co-author of “In Search of Excellence,” wrote an essay in 1997 in which he coined the phrase “personal branding.” “We are the CEO’s of our own companies: Me Inc.” If I was to have any chance of advancing my writing and acting endeavors, then I had to shape my world into my own branded image. This was disheartening, but I jumped in deep and signed up for many of the social media outlets, feeding the insatiable appetite of these platforms with content, all of which felt vain, hollow, and precarious. It reminded me of Jesus’ words, “So what if you gain the world and lose your soul?” Our world is a “Me” world propelled by the twin motivators ambition and anxiety. Ambition and anxiety could become the new AA society: “Hi, I’m Henry, and I am my own brand.” The world is more individualistic and competitive. If we have the right work ethic, we are deluded into believing we are self-made. And for many in our culture, we falsely assume there is a spiritual component to this way of thinking which adds more justification to our cult of me. We become hamsters on the wheel running ever faster to keep the platform of me from crumbling beneath us. If you are reading this Conversation, then you got drawn into the vortex of me. Sorry about that. I am as much a participant in that world as I am a critic of it. Work is a good thing. Work that satisfies the soul while enhancing the world around us is the best thing. Life is fleeting. My collection of birthdays is a constant reminder of that reality. We are created to serve one another, not a self-serving, rugged individualism philosophy. One is outwardly focused. The other is isolationist. One flourishes. The other dies on the vine.

I’m staring at one right now before I begin typing the words you are reading…a blank page. Whatever the medium, all artists stare into the shadowy starting point of creation. Self-doubt and the feeling of inadequacy arise as you await the spark. I would love to know what might have gone through God’s imagination while hovering over the deep pondering what was about to happen. In the liberty of eternity, time was not a factor, so God’s hovering and ultimate creativity was infinite. Ex nihilo is Latin for “out of nothing came something.” Once God finished hovering creation began with the beautiful and mysterious spoken words “let there be,” and as creation came into being, was finished with “…and there was.” This little planet was the original blank page awaiting descriptive language, the first empty canvas awaiting paint, the first music score awaiting notes, the first lump of clay awaiting form and symmetry, the first static dance awaiting fluid motion. All works of art are built on the sublime principal of “let there be...and there was.” In Scripture it states that we are God’s “workmanship.” The original Greek is poiema, from which we derive the word “poem.” While I may be a “work of art” created in the image of God, so I, like God, desire to create something unique and original, but unlike God, I am a jumble of insecurities and full of self-doubt. My soul is like the opaque, boisterous waters of pre-creation. I want to create something sublimely original, but my conflicting emotions and thoughts often fizzle the creative spark. I am sabotaged by my ego. It is why I wish to imagine, without sacrilege, God hovering over me as I begin a creative work. That image brings calm to my heart and a creative flow is possible. Perhaps then every act of creation is just creating on top of the original “let there be…and there was.” Perhaps there is no such thing as a blank page, an empty canvass, a vacant score. Ever since God’s hovering turned into acts of creation a whole repertoire of creative expression has flourished that informs my blank page before I write the first word, yea verily, before I have my first creative impulse to tell a story. While every creative act emerges in its own right bearing the image of its creator, no matter how flawed the creator or the creation, we artists build on what was created before us heightening the mystery of all acts of creativity.

When we last left our terrified hero I was dreading the inevitable return to our gas station and the maniac that awaited us behind the bay doors. The fateful day arrived, but thank God, the bay doors were closed when we pulled beside the pumping island. A kid’s curiosity got the best of me and I climbed into the back seat, rolled down the window and stuck my body halfway outside. I wouldn’t venture out of the car. I wasn’t that daring. The other-worldly sounds behind the closed bay doors upped my fear: pounding hammer blows, rattling metal, loud gusts of pressurized air, revved engines, and over-modulated human voices. The monster must be ripping off his iron chains readying an escape. Then the mechanical door began to rise on one of the service bays and out stepped an unrecognizable life form. Not the spiffy attendant with his crisp uniform and ready smile, but a creature dressed in ragged, grease-stained coveralls, hair disheveled, oily streaks across his face and arms, strange tools in his hands—scabby hands with busted, swollen knuckles—a liquid brown substance oozing from one side of his bulging mouth, and bloodshot eyes that bore holes straight through me. My blood froze at the sight of this modern-day Gadarene Demoniac. Where was Jesus when you needed him? After this, I began to notice “Maniac on Duty” signs at nearly every service station we drove by. The world was filled with “The Walking Dead” before there ever was “The Walking Dead.” Whenever we pulled into a station advertising their “Maniac,” I locked the doors and dropped to the floor board. When my parent’s asked for an explanation of my curious behavior, I pointed to the dreaded sign above the bay doors and asked, “There’s a maniac in there.” Once the different words were written out and definitions explained, my world was restored. While this particular linguistic puzzle was resolved, the misreading of signs, yea verily, the garbling all things literary, continued to be a problem. There was the humiliation of the first-round eliminations from grade-school Spelling Bees and the writing assignments returned with a fury of red ink scrawled over my papers by an aggravated teacher and long, hot summer schools. It wasn’t until my early twenty’s when we discovered my youngest brother was similarly cursed. The expert diagnosis was that we had dyslexia. All this time I thought I was “slow of mind and tongue.” It did not bode well for a duel vocation with a heavy emphasis on language. While there is no magic pill to unravel the wiring in my brain, my imagination was never imprisoned by my reversals of words and jumbled sentences. Who knew a “maniac on duty” would launch a career?

Back in the day when gas stations were service stations, when the attendants wore uniforms with caps and bow ties ambling out of their small office with a smile and a congenial greeting, you were confident you and your automobile were in good hands. If the employee was above average, he might even remember the names of the patrons. After inserting the nozzle into the tank and turning on the gas flow the pleasant associate would ask, “Check that oil for you, Mr. Arnold?” Soon there will be no one alive who will remember having been asked that question. Most service stations, ours included, had one or two service bays with mechanical doors that opened and closed automatically. Oh, the wonder as I watched the doors rise into the ceiling without human effort as if Ali Baba had spoken the magic, “Open Sesame.” Once the vehicle was inside the bay, the door would lower back to the ground concealing all the mysteries inside its asylum. Yes, asylum, for my nascent literary skills and my vivid imagination were not in sync with reality. When it came to developing an aptitude to identify letters, recognizing written vocabulary, and understanding how a succession of words created a meaningful sentence, I was easily stumped. On the outside wall above the bay doors of our service station was a sign that perplexed my innocent mind: “Mechanic On Duty.” I understood the second and third words, but the first word remained a mystery until I unscrambled the jumble of letters and settled on “maniac.” Still the meaning of the word eluded me. I needed clarity, so to the parents I did go. They were not curious as to how I came to inquire after such a unique word. The answer came with a Bible reference, our source for many of life’s complex questions. The story was “The Gadarene Demoniac.” My ear caught the rhyming association of maniac/demoniac and my imagination filled in the rest. In short, a demon-possessed man lived in a cave, howled night and day terrorizing the locals, tore apart the chains and irons used to subdue him, and was named “Legion,” meaning that inside this poor man lodged an overcrowded, devilish household. But good news…Jesus healed him. Now I knew all things; our service station had a resident demon-possessed man, but at least our service station was thoughtful enough to put up a warning sign. Fear and trembling struck my heart. The service station was unavoidable, and the next time we needed a fill-up, what would I find just inside those bay doors? (To be continued)

What worlds might be created from disturbed places? Our lives can easily crack apart, a surprise fissure in life can cut right into our well-constructed plans. Most of the time such an interruption is not pleasant. Disruption is rarely welcomed. From a child screaming on an airplane, to local natural disasters, to global upheavals, to getting the call from your doctor saying, “It’s cancer.” The Latin word ruderalis is where we get our modern word “rubble.” The ruderal plant grows in the disturbed areas, the waste ground, between the broken stone and rotting wood, even in the rubbish and refuse tossed out and forgotten. It does not require a trained botanist to spot life growing out of the waste places, an ecosystem disturbed and disrupted by man or nature. The gardener creates this marvel when she turns over the soil. We can spot the ruderal plant life in the fallow field and along the roadside. We humans do not like any “disturbance in the force” of our personal lives. We want control; no surprises and minimized the risks. The need to “be prepared” like the good Boy and Girl Scout is strong within us. However, if you have lived on the planet long enough, then you know life rarely cooperates with our well-made designs. With a quick pivot, we do all we can to escape life’s dangers. To avert disaster we keep to our safe routines: take those vitamins, say those prayers, mumble those mantras, do those good deeds to balance out the moral scales, but a fixed way of living makes the soul sluggish. It is deceptive to believe we can create a thriving life by recurring behaviors. By banal repetition we become the poorly created characters of our own stories, those characters who never change. When characters in a story fail to develop, the story collapses, it bores and quickly discarded. Self-protection, never taking those leaps of faith for fear of what such disruptions might ensue, will never offer the opportunities to discover the ruderal life that can spring up when our ridged routines become broken and disturbed. A ruderal disruption springing out of the darker moments of life’s unexpected events only deepens the wonderful mystery of who we are as created beings in God’s image and who we might become. When we begin to understand that these moments of turmoil to the ecosystem of our soul can be a gift, then the story of our life is more meaningful and our living example to those around us becomes a gift.

When we last left our heroes, terrorized by the sharp blast of the teacher’s whistle, Raymond and I were summoned before the judge and, in our case, the executioners. The teacher chose the firing squad as our punishment. She ordered us down to the lower level and stood us against the retaining wall. Then she scratched a jagged line in the snow with her rubber-booted foot and told all those who had suffered under our assault to assemble behind it. In her rush to judgment, she did not specify the real targets of our revenge, and consequently, more kids confessed to being victims than was the actual number. Mob mentality starts at an early age. The teacher announced that upon her whistle, the mob was free to rain down snowball vengeance. Surely she had seen too many movies with tin-pot dictators using such tactics to dispatch their enemies. While the kids dug their hands into the snow and began shaping the white powder into a small cannonballs, I was praying for a Russian bomb to fall from the sky. Raymond had a different idea. “We don’t have to take this,” he said, his face calm and smiling. If he was planning on running then his swiftness could outrun the velocity of any snowball. If Raymond’s blood cells failed to kick in, my only hope was to get caught up in his draft as I followed behind him. But this was not his course of action. “We’re fighting back.” Raymond did not ask for my opinion. We were blood brothers, and his call was my call. Fight back no matter the odds. Before the teacher blew her whistle, Raymond and I started scooping up snow, compressing the powder in our hands, and firing at will. We rushed our executioners like Newman and Redford at the end of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” I never felt more alive facing the bullies, the mob, and yes, the teacher. When Raymond and I mixed our blood I was not thinking about Civil Rights or unity of the races. MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech was still two years off. I just wanted to be fast like Raymond, and should science and biology be in my favor, Raymond’s DNA flowing into my veins would give me Mercury’s winged feet. It was not to be. Raymond Brown gave me more than an infusion of his precious blood. That day on the playground his true character stood for something, but more than that, he did not stand still. In the face of superior odds, he dashed forward braving the onslaught. Until that day, all my enemies were imaginary, played in childish games of battle. That day my foes were real and Raymond inspired my heart with courage. I followed him and I was proud to do so.