Red on My Ledger

 Red on My Ledger

By Bobby Neal Winters

When my wife and I were married, it was in a Presbyterian Church.  The minister, knowing our plans to become Methodists when we joined a church together after our marriage, noted a difference between the way the Methodists and Presbyterians say the Lord’s Prayer.  

“The property-minded English Methodist pray for their trespasses to be forgiven, but a good Scottish Presbyterian would rather be forgiven his debts than his trespasses any day.”

Our sin is viewed as a debt, but as a debt owed to whom? 

Natasha Romanoff, aka “The Black Widow”, from the Marvel Avenger movies uses the phrase “red on my ledger” in referring to her past misdeeds.  She uses it to answer the question of why she is taking part in the Avengers’ activities.

A ledger is a place where we keep account of our business transactions.  Traditionally, profit is entered in black, but debts are entered in red.  For her the red takes on a second meaning as it is the color of blood, and she has had a very bloody past.  She has a deep sense--using a word the Avengers would never use--that she has sinned. 

But to whom is the debt owed?  Who can she repay?  The people she has sinned against are dead. 

By being part of the Avengers, being one of the good guys, she is trying to get that red off her ledger.  She is trying to atone. Her character progresses, but the red--in her heart at least--remains on her ledger.  She does not feel forgiven.  Whatever she’s done, it doesn’t feel like enough.

Blood is a part of our Christian tradition.

The first sacrifices mentioned in the Bible were those of Cain and Abel.  Abel’s was accepted but Cain’s was not, so Cain--in a fit of jealousy--killed Abel.

One question that always comes up is why didn’t God accept Cain’s offering?  This has been debated for literally thousands of years, but one answer is that Cain’s offering didn’t require the shedding of blood, it wasn’t a true sacrifice. 

It is more than somewhat perverse that while Cain did not shed the blood of an animal, in killing Abel out of jealousy, blood was shed, and Abel becomes Cain’s blood sacrifice as it were.  Because of this, in ancient Christian tradition, Abel is a type of Christ.  Christ’s blood wipes out all of our ledgers.

In Avengers: Endgame, Natasha sacrificed herself in place of her friend Clint Barton in order that they secure the “Soul Stone,” a McGuffin needed by their fellow Avengers. Ultimately none of her other actions--again, in her heart at least--were able to remove the red from her ledger. 

To put it in Christian language, the “red on her ledger” was a Cross to her.  Christ invited us to take up our crosses and follow him. When you take up your Cross,  you are giving your life.  For the overwhelming vast majority of us, we give our lives minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day over the course of our normal three-score and ten in service to our family, our loved-ones, and our neighbors.  A few are called to larger sacrifices, to martyrdom.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

2020, 2021, 2022, Pogo, and Pittsburg

 2020, 2021, 2022, Pogo, and Pittsburg

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last year about this time we began looking forward to the New Year with a great deal of eagerness as if the changing of a digit from zero to one would magically make everything new.

I think we are all over that.

There were some who believed the election results would magically settle everything down.  This is an easy trap to fall into.  It’s like having a Judas goat we can put all of our sins into and chase out into the desert.

The trouble with elected officials is that we elect them.  They  get elected by getting their messages synchronised with what we want to hear.  The successful ones put together a montage image that is attractive to just enough of the electorate while their opponents are hideous to just enough of the electorate.  But in the end both sides come from the same place.

To quote Pogo one more time, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

That having been said about politics at the national level, I am much more sanguine about politics at the local level.  This I think is due to the place I live.  

It’s a pretty good place.

It was my pleasure to be present at a candidate forum at the Noon Rotary Club the other day.  All seven candidates were there.  As you undoubtedly know, we’ve got three open seats that will be filled by the top vote-getters from this slate of seven.  From these seven, I would be comfortable with a random draw of any three.

This is not just coming from what they said.  They said what most candidates running for office would say.  Just as you can put together what a football coach is going to say about the coming year (“We had a good year last year, but we lost some strong players.  The folks we are playing against this coming year have been under-rated...”) there are things all local candidates for office say.

This is coming from the fact I’ve known some of these people for many years in contexts where it matters.  The word that comes to mind is this: Solid. These are solid people with solid values, and I am kind of proud to see such a group drawn from our fine community.

How is such a fine community formed?

I don’t know for sure, but let me tell you about my best guess.  There are two pieces that have to be put together.  If you do the first without the second, you will wind up with what we have on the national level.

Step one: You need to learn how to take care of yourself.  Step two: You’ve got to help your neighbor to do the same.  Billions of people working for thousands of years have been working on the details of implementation with, shall we say, mixed results.

So next year is probably going to be a lot like this one, but I am optimistic nonetheless.  Here in our little town we have good people. 

I know I’ve become better by being among them. 

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

Darkness, Cold, and Horror

 Darkness, Cold, and Horror

By Bobby Neal Winters

Halloween is a time for horror.

It is a dark time.  While the nights will be getting longer until just before Christmas, at Halloween it is just about as dark as it is going to get. Night is yet upon us when we leave for work in the morning as it is upon us again when we go home in the evening.  We wrap it around us like a cloak and hide within it. 

During the summer if we wanted to see the stars, we had to wait until very, very late, but around Halloween--provided the clouds don’t blacken even them out--they are there to see by the time supper rolls around.  While their beauty might provide comfort to some, if you think about it too much, they will help horror to descend upon you. They are reminders that the Earth is a mote of dust in space; we are fragile creatures protected from the many dangers of the universe by an ever so thin layer of atmosphere; one stray asteroid, and we are done for.

It has happened before.

The coming of darkness also brings horror because things happen in the darkness, things we cannot see coming, things we cannot defend against.  If we could see it, we could devise a plan; if we could see it, we could run from it; but we can’t. It’s there hidden in the darkness waiting for us, and there is nothing we can do. 

The name Halloween comes from All Hallow’s Eve. All Hallow’s Day was what we used to call All Saints Day.  From that nomenclature, one might think that All Saints Day came first, and Halloween followed.  The secular scholars will be quick to tell you that Christian missionaries co-opted the pagan holiday creating All Saints Day in reaction to it.  (“Bad missionaries. Go sit in the corner. No supper for you.”)  

For the sake of argument, we can grant that and note we’ve come from a point where we paid bribes to keep kids from over-turning outhouses to giving candy to children dressed as fairy princesses and ninja turtles.  (There are those who say it was human sacrifices in the beginning instead of tipping over outhouses, but that is another argument.)

Darkness is just a part of the horror.  The cold is coming.  We can’t grow our crops in the northerly latitudes, and unless we’ve prepared enough, starvation will come.

Halloween is a time after the harvest is done.  You’ve taken stock of your work and preparations from the previous year.  If you’ve not stored up enough food, death from hunger in the cold awaits.  Here the ignorant have an advantage: if you were just too stupid to plan, then you likely don’t know what lay ahead; if you were smart enough to plan, and the plan didn’t come together, you know the horror that awaits.  You can dread it as it comes.  If you are evil in addition to being smart, you start looking to see which of the neighborhood children is the fattest.

Trick or Treat indeed.

But surely this horror is all in the past?  Surely our knowledge will save us?

I think we’ve all seen these last couple of years that our knowledge is as thin as our atmosphere.  Unless we do a better job of teaching our children, here comes the darkness, here comes the cold, here comes the horror.

Halloween and All Saints Day are an inextricable pair. The Horror of Halloween is in tension against the Hope of the Saints.  Halloween is about the darkness of ignorance; All Saints Day is a witness to the Saints overcoming that darkness.

Now we stare into the darkness.  We know the light will come again. We pray that we will be strong enough to last until that happens.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

 I am...Iron Man

By Bobby Neal Winters

The character Tony Stark is introduced to us in the movie Iron Man.  He is a billionaire, philanthropist, genius, and playboy.  And he is also a narcissist.  He is kidnapped and has to create his Iron Man suit in order to escape. These few sentences summarize the first two acts.  In the third act, he comes home and does some superhero stuff.

When he does the superhero stuff, he is doing it as Iron Man, and no one knows it's Tony Stark.  The folks at his company and the folks in the super-secret organization SHIELD want to keep his identity secret.  At the end of the movie he is doing a press conference from a script, when he impulsively decides to simply say it, “I am Iron Man.”

He’s still a billionaire, genius, playboy, narcissist at that point, but something else is born. Tony Stark begins the process of growing into Iron Man, but his uttering the sentence claiming the name was the act of creation.

Those of us who follow the MCU (the Marvel Cinematic Universe) know there are many interwoven stories with many villains, but the prime villain these stories are working toward is Thanos. (This is the Greek word for Death, so it’s all there in the name.) 

At the climax of this part of the saga, Thanos gathered together the so-called Infinity Stones and embedded them in a gauntlet.  Doing so gives him the power to rid the universe of intelligent life with the snap of his fingers.  Those who’ve seen the movies will realize I am leaving a lot of details out for the sake of brevity.

After a huge battle, Thanos, wearing the gauntlet, with all appearances of victory, snaps his fingers while uttering the line, “I am inevitable.”

However, Stark has taken the stones by subterfuge and has embedded them in his own gauntlet. The use of the gauntlet releases gamma rays which are fatal to normal human beings, and Tony in spite of being a billionaire, genius, etc. is a normal human being and knows that using it will be the end of him. 

Nonetheless, Stark snaps his fingers to defeat Thanos’ alien army and save the world while answering Thanos with the phrase, “I am Iron Man.”  

The world is saved, but not for him. He dies a billionaire, philanthropist, genius, but not a narcissist or playboy.

The process begun when he first uttered that phrase has come to completion.  He’s become the ideal set forward in the words.

There is power in the word.

God spoke the universe into existence.

In his epistle, James warns us that the tongue is like the rudder of a ship; Jesus warns us that we are made unclean by what comes out of us.  The things we say affect us. Can we even create ourselves out of our own utterances?

Being who I am, when I hear Stark say, “I am Iron Man,” I also hear, “I am that I am,”; “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light”; “I am the Vine and you are the branches.” Is that something real or is it just philosophical tinnitus?

I listened to a long YouTube video the other day explaining that chairs don’t exist.  As I was sitting in a chair as I listened, I wasn’t too worried about it; maybe I should’ve been.  It did highlight the difficulty of capturing concrete objects in words.  At a certain level, a thing is a chair because I say it is, because a human says it is. That introductory phrase “At a certain level” is probably carrying a lot of weight, but let's let that go. 

But there is also a process involved.  One day some caveman was tired of sitting on the ground, cobbled some rocks together, and said, “This is a chair.”  The folks around him were confused because they’d never heard of such a thing, but as time passed people figured it out. Now I can put a box up against the wall and call it a chair and people will get it.  The idea of “chair” has propagated itself through the collective conscience. But a human calling it a chair was what got it started. While chairs might be made out of wood, plastic, or naugahyde, they were created with a word.

If we declare an identity and hold ourselves accountable, we will grow toward that identity.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )

The Beat of the Drum

 The Beat of the Drum

By Bobby Neal Winters

Listen to the wind blow,

Watch the Sun rise.

--Fleetwood Mac

I am not a musician.  When I talk about it, it is like a eunuch discussing sex: ever the observer. But here goes.  One day while listening to Fleetwood Mac’s song The Chain.  The music is all about that drum beat.  There is a single rhythmic pounding.  I guess the drummer has a pedal that he uses to create a rhythm on his bass drum.

The rest of the musicians come in and play their parts around that. They have to be in time with each other or they might step on each other's notes as it were.  In this way they are like dancers, they don’t want to bump into each other or it is disaster. 

Building an active life is something like that.  There has to be a bass drum beating somewhere to create the rhythm, to create a structure to build everything else around.  We all benefit to a certain degree from the 7-day cycle we call the week, but I do more so because church provides my bass drum. Even in the days when I only did Sunday School, even during the lockdown when I only did online Bible study, the weekly visit with others who seek God helped me keep it all together, helped me keep a calibration on time.

Others have different ways.  They’ve got their own bass drums.

Once you’ve got that established, you can start working-in other things.  You can set up a daily routine.  Just as they play the notes on the banjo between the beats of the drum, you can run through your days.

These days I am up early with stretching, shaving, making hot tea, eating breakfast, studying Spanish (and French), and then off to work.  Work is less predictable.  Ten years ago I thought of myself as being like Christopher Robin in a Winnie the Pooh book; these days I am more like Liz Lemon in 30 Rock. Then I come home, take a walk, eat dinner, watch some TV, stretch, and to bed.

Thus we cycle: “Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”  But that is okay. Every day is part of the song; every day is a note vibrating on a string.

The weeks stack up and the song changes.  We progress through the year: winter yields to spring, spring to summer, summer to fall. We complete a circle. So I look back to that previous sentence and as if “progress” is the right word if we just circle back to where we were before.  And I have to say yes.  Just like singing a new hymn.  On the first verse, we might be tentative; on the second verse we are stronger; by the third verse, we’ve got it, especially if it is a good chorus.

“I can still hear you saying you would never break the Chain.” (Not a hymn I admit, but thanks for your forbearance.)

Our life is a song we sing.  Gordon Lightfoot would say, “The song that you sing should not be too sad and be sure not to sing it too slow.”

But you have to have the beat of the drum to tie it all together, to pace it all out.  You have to have something to weave your melody around.  What is your foundation?

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )