A place for Pat to write, and you to read.

Yes, Michael Moore is a master of hyperbole.

No, there is nothing about his work that would pass for objective, but having spent ten years in journalism I genuinely believe objectivity is a myth, and not a very helpful one at that.

See the movie, “Capitalism, A Love Affair,” and decide for yourself.  Research the story from other sources, and still you will not be able to argue much against the general notion that our 700 billion dollar bail out of Wall Street banks has been the grandest larceny in world history.  When Senator Paul Simon ran for president in 1984 he called the financing of the national debt to pay for Reagan’s war build up, “The largest transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy in world history.”  This last boondoggle is far worse, far more criminal, for less documented in anything like what would pass for accepted accounting practices.

But beyond exposing the grand thefts of the Reagan and Bush presidencies, Moore has clobbered us again with the not so subtle ideal that our lives should be about what we do for the common good rather than what we own.  My cousin, Pat Hunt, wrote her column for the Waynesboro News Virginian just last week about the corrupting influence of a culture that judges us by what we wear, drive, and the houses we live in.

My response to experiences like seeing Moore’s film is always to wonder what can I do?  What should I encourage my friends to do?  How can we organize, work, promote, talk to each other, urge, plot, do something!  But my experience tells me I will do the best I can to write another blog, another newspaper column, another note on facebook, and preach as passionately as I can on Sunday morning at the Greenville Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, and let the chips fall where they may.  I’m not much of an organizer, worker, promoter, urger, plotter or doer beyond my writing and preaching.  I write and preach what I can.  The rest of you let me know how you are stepping up to the plate.

More on this later.  I promise.

F. Scott Fitzgerald told his daughter, Scotty, “Never lose sight of what you’re aiming at.” The target looks like an interaction in which one person, or a bunch of people, feel valued, validated, loved, encouraged, empowered, and as though they understand what is really going on. What is really going on? The universe is a conspiracy in our favor. We’re all in this together. Life is good, not a dirty trick being played by an old man and a devil cutting cards over whether we live or die. Love makes the world go round. Good guys don’t just make it in the movies. Love is all we need. Children, old people. dogs and cats are all highly underrated. We’re not all that bad. The best we ever do is who we really are. That last one hangs on Tommy Hicks’s wall. If you don’t believe it’s true, then get to know Thomas Mcbrayer Hicks. He’s on facebook. He’s been in a battle with Muscular Dystrophy since he was seven years old. That was 48 years ago. Kennedy was president. Even after 48 years of the toughest wrestling match you can imagine, he still loves football, poker, women, and Jesus, maybe not in that order. Not losing sight of what you’re aiming at has a lot to do with that cross stitch, which his mom did for him, hanging on his wall, “The best you ever did is who you really are.” Babe Zaharias also said, “A single moment of joy is a lifetime.” That one’s on the money, too.

Is love hard?

Must be, according to popular culture, songs, movies, the like. Here find two stories about the difficulties of love, the kind of love that heals, connects, helps the world get what it “needs now,” according to an old Burt Bacharach song.

In 1993, I worked for an organization that provided services to women who were victims of family violence, and to men who committed violent acts. Most of the men in the program were ordered there by judges who hoped our program would teach them about violence and how to avoid it in their relationships with women.

Yes, I know there are women who beat men, and there is some violence in same-sex relationships, but most of the family violence in this country is committed by men against women, so these were the folks I was dealing with. We had a pretty strict curriculum examining family systems, power, money, relationships with children, extended family, all kinds of past and present stuff that might trigger violence. But sometimes we just talked. One night the subject was love: love from our parents or caregivers as youngsters, love among family members, spiritual love.

Suddenly the conversation derailed. A torturer, a man who been convicted of sexually torturing a woman, called a halt to the discussion. He started waving his hands. “Wait a minute,” he repeated several times, and when he had everyone’s attention, he asked me, “You think everyone’s capable of love?” I said I thought so, sure. He looked at me with the coldest eyes and said with the calmest voice, “I’m not sure you’re right about that.”

That was 16 years ago. You don’t soon forget a moment like that.

Which brings me to story number two. A group of Methodist preachers gathered in Myrtle Beach for training. The entire group was comprised of ministers and their spouses, so they let their hair down a little. The question came up, “Are churches capable of love?” There’s that phrase again, that phrase that came from that torturer so many years ago. Are we capable of love? For several minutes the clearly beat up and tired clergy folk sat around and considered the question. They had known some hard knocks, cruelty at the hands of the church folk they sought to serve, betrayal, back-stabbing, nit-picking to the point that a heaviness took over the room.

Finally my dear friend, the Rev. Dr. Mary John Dye spoke up. Mary John has been a major leader in the United Methodist world and currently serves as a district superintendent in the Western North Carolina conference. She is smart and edgy and funny and has a heart like a lion. She could not believe we were even considering the question.

“Capable of love?” she asked in disbelief. “Of course, our church folks are capable of love.” She agreed that they may screw it up from time to time, lose their cool, attack when they’d do better to consider the consequences of their actions, but surely, surely they are capable of the kind of selflessness, affirmation, support, caring, patience, kindness, and hard work that comes of love, that all of us recognize as love.

There is a lot of pain in the world caused by the failures of love, but obviously we know it when we see it. Since time began we have been taught that to find it, we must first learn to give it away. My bet is on Mary John. That man who ran his own torture chamber is wrong. We are all capable of love. It may be hard. But we can do it.

Gary Phillips asked me to suggest some things to say to 30 or so gathered young people about the question of service.

I’m working on yet another book, but I’m painfully aware there are already many wonderful books in the world.

 Let me tell you a story about two of those wonderful books, and something that happened to me and my true love, Gabriele, just this afternoon. We sat on Folly Beach near Charleston, SC and read. She read from Sue Monk Kidd’s “Dance Of The Dissident Daughter,” and I read from Jack Kornfield’s “A Path With Heart.”

For the 11 months we have been in love, I have been talking with her about the concept of nothingness or nonexistence, that fact that when you get to the core of the matter, life is an illusion that plays out in divine consciousness and none of us really exist separate from that which basically flows out of the nothingness at the center of the universe.

She has always told me, as only a lover girl can, that makes absolutely makes no sense.

So today, we’re sitting on the beach reading and I come across this passage in Kornfield’s book, and I read it to her, “You live in a illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality, but you do not know this. When you understand this, you will see that you are nothing, and being nothing you are everything. And that is all.”

Kornfield was quoting a Tibetan teacher, Kalu Rinpoche.

She looked at me as she often does when we speak of nonexistence, then returned to her book. Seconds later she said, “Oh my God.”

She read to me from page 28 of Kidd’s book, “The feminist theologian, Carol P. Christ, states that a woman’s awakening begins with an ‘experience of nothingness.’ It comes as she experiences emptiness, self-negation, disillusionment, a deep-felt recognition of the limitations placed on women’s lives, especially her own.”

While these are radically different views of nothingness, they do have something in common. Both the Tibetan teacher in Kornfield’s book and the feminist theologian in Kidd’s book are dealing with limitation once recognized that leads to oneness with everything. Gabriele still casts a sidelong glance at it, as though it might be snake oil or some concoction of my traveling medicine show, but it is striking to me that we would both be sitting on a beach reading about nothingness.

And here is something even a tad more freaky.

About four years ago, Sue Monk Kidd lead a writing workshop in Charleston. I was waiting on the workshop to start and wrote in my journal, “Jung says synchronicity is a sign you are on the right path.” I have had many synchronistic happenings in my life, and I often think about this Jung idea. Sue Monk Kidd stood up and opened her talk by saying, “Jung says synchronicity is a sign you are on the right path.”

Folks, if I’m lying I’m dying. I turned to the woman sitting next to me and said, “You have got to read what I just wrote in my journal.” She did and smiled and scooted just a little ways away from me.

So, maybe I shouldn’t write another book, but this one keeps knocking at my door, begging me to say to you, “Life will be better if we figure out our connections to each other and everything else.”

Here is my first column in The Greenville Journal

In 1985, the stock market crashed. The value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 500 points in a single day. People felt very panicky and a fairly serious recession followed.

The day after the crash I was in Annie Lee Epley’s office. Annie Lee ran the local branch of Asheville Federal Savings and Loan, the company that held the mortgage on my home. It was also the company with whom I kept my checking and savings accounts in Marion, N.C.

I loved Annie Lee because she had helped me survive one of my business failures in 1981 and ’82, during which I had gone ten weeks without a pay check and our company had piled up $60,000 in debt.

This was her reaction to the stock market crash. “The value of those companies has not changed. They have the same number of employees they had yesterday, the same cash, the same factories and equipment, the same trucks and company cars. Things may get bad for a while, but this country has a good economic system. We will be all right.”

Nobody knows less about money, economics, and what works in these systems than I. Well, maybe a bunch of fourth graders know less, but don’t put me up against your smarter fifth graders.

So rather than offering up my ignorance, let me must ask you to consider Annie Lee’s reaction to the 1985 crash, and also consider some questions that I genuinely can’t answer.

When the stock market loses a third of its value, where does the money go? In the exchange of stocks, is there not always a winner and a loser? What do the winners do with that money when they take it out of the market?

Is the rough ride we are experiencing right now more than a pulling back in consumer spending and the collapse of certain credit instruments? Could it also be a fundamental realignment in cultural values? Could it be we are healing from our national obsession with buying any dad gum object off the shelf of a big box store? Are Americans saying with our lack of spending that we are tired of being defined by our spending?

Almost everything I know about anything I know from listening to National Public Radio, and NPR has yet to explain to me what has happened to our economy, except this: massive foreclosures have led to a virtual freeze in lending, which has led to a serious downturn in stock prices, which has convinced most of us that we should cut spending, which has cost lots of jobs in just the past few weeks.

But NPR hints at another idea, this idea of a basic shift in cultural values, that we are not going to buy cars from either domestic or foreign companies until they prove their ability to run on alternative fuels or use less fuel. We are going to buy products that come to market through fair trade. We are going to recycle, reuse, and reduce consumption, even if it cuts into the profits of major retailers. Of course, these trends are not universal or even popular among a majority of Americans. These practices would only have to be used by ten or twelve percent to rock the world’s economies and change everything. And the examples I gave are only the tip of the iceberg. Doubtless many of you can think of dozens of other examples of how this recession is a shift in values and not just an economic adjustment. The earth is shifting under our feet.

It can’t be all bad. Let me know what you think.

Bill talked to me while he fixed the door handle.  He never looked at the outside handle, inside handle, button, post, or spring.  My 86-tear-old daddy, Allen Jobe, found the spring I had spent 15 minutes on my hands and knees looking for.  He said, “It was just sitting there in the kitchen floor.”

Bill says he can do this kind of stuff without looking, because, “I don’t know how many of these I have put on.”  But it doesn’t satisfy.  How hard can it be to do the first time?  Why would it be complicated to hold four pieces of a door handle and thread two screws?  Why?  How?  I am flummoxed.  I feel adrift, like a piece of broken styrofoam floating on the surface of a pool nobody uses anymore.  I am undone, by this defeat and the multitude of others in my life.  In the process of being hired by the Greenville Unitarian Universalist Felloowship, the board talked to over 20 people who have known me.  They said nice things, but I’m sure there are more than 20 who could talk about my foibles, weaknesses, failures, crimes, sins, and failures to yield.

That phrase, “failure to yield,” has always been catchy.  When do we yield?  When do we fail to yield?  Kenny Rogers sang, “Know when to hold ‘em.  Know when to fold ‘em,”  Clearly these are critical pieces of information to accrue, but how, when, where does do such knowledge come from, and is there not always the danger that such knowledge will come too late, just as the train is passing, just after they drew yours and your brother’s birth numbers in the lottery.  And would we do good by that mountain of cash, anyway?

The door handle has been installed.  Bill did it without looking.  Daddy found the lost spring.

The Proverbs tell us pride goes before a fall.  I fell all over myself this afternoon.

I was so proud to have taken the door handle off the storm door at my dad’s house.  The wind or years of use, something had bent the tongue that holds the door shut.  I loosened two screws, dropped the old handle by Alexander Hardware.  The great Tom Gray, a good friend and good guy, ordered me a new door handle, and I picked it up today.

I asked Debbie, the wonderful hardware genius in Tom’s store, to come home with me and put the handle on.  I told her I wasn’t sure I could get the new handle installed.  She said, oh so sweetly, she would be delighted if she were not already obligated elsewhere.

I got to my dad’s house swollen with confidence.  The swelling soon went down.  The handle is comprised of seven parts: a spring (I immediately lost the spring,) a button on the handle, the outside handle, two screws, a post that goes from the inside handle to the outside handle, and the inside handle.  I spent about 15 minutes looking for the lost spring.

How does one lose a spring walking from the kitchen to the front door.? I stopped to turn the AC on.  My dad has a habit of turning the heat on instead of ajusting the AC to run at a higher temperature.  I’m pretty sure he doesn’t do it on purpose.  He just wants the AC to stop and turning the heat on seems to work pretty well.  By the time I got back to the front door, the spring was gone.  I got down on my hands and knees in the kitchen, the hallway where the thermostat lives, and around the front door, both inside and outside on the porch.  After 15 minutes on my hands and knees there is no pride or swelling left.   Everything turns flat and desperate.

The spring was gone.  I decided to mount the handle, the button, the post and the other handle without the spring, thinking that it might make getting into the house difficult, but not getting out.  My dad rarely comes in that door, but he often leaves by that door.

In order to mount all four pieces and install two screws, I had to be able to hold all four simultaneously and thread in a screw.  The first three times I tried, I dropped all four pieces and was a tad embarrassed at how they crashed and clanged all over the front porch.  I tried maybe three or four more times.  This is the kind of thing my brother, Bill can do without thinking.  He might lock his jaw a few times in frustration, but he would not lose the spring, would not drop the four pieces three or four or five or six times, and would not conclude the entire process as I did.

I left out the button and the post and simply screwed the two handles together.  My dad can now lock his storm door, exit his storm door, and nobody on the face of the earth can enter from the outside.

If you want in, ring the doorbell.

On Friday afternoons, the thermostat is supposed to be turned way up, so the office is usually hot and muggy.  We don’t work here after three on Fridays, so this is a great time to write, but usually it is too hot. This afternoon somebody forgot to adjust the AC, so I am cool.

The Greenville Unitarian Universalist Fellowship hired me to be their new minister.  UU’s, as we call ourselves, are very unusual people.  We create together a space where Hindus and Jews can light candles and sing songs alongside Pagans, Christians, and Atheists.  Everybody gets a capital letter in this crowd. And that’s the way it should be.  No religion should presume to have its own special punctuation.  The Greenville crowd has been very welcoming.  Kind emails and words spoken after services and meetings make me feel very different from the new kid in school.  Rather they make me feel like a minister buddy did in a recent email.  I’m house sitting for him in July and he said, “Use anything you can find.”  That’s a welcome.

I wrote a Radio Free Bubba piece about the Greenville Fellowship five or six years ago.  I said if you can’t find love there, you ought to quit looking.  They are a very loving bunch, as is my home church in Spartanburg. Ours is a love born in part of finding a lot of things that weren’t love in other places.  Prejudice, hatred, the cold shoulder, the critical judgment, and other forms of psycho torture can be found in some of the churches some of us have known.  Every church I’ve attended has offered some loving people, but there are also people who let their politics, their theology, and their tomfoolery get the best of them.  They stab you in the back and smile as they watch your knees buckle.  To be treated like that drives a lot of people out of more traditional churches, and many of us landed among the UU’s, searching for genuine religious freedom.  It’s in Greenville and Spartanburg and other UU communities I have visited.  It is calming like deep breath, assuring like a generous gift, and affirming like a warm word of encouragement.  And it is so reasonable.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, a church I left to become a UU, said we should let our faith be informed by reason.  The UU’s I have found are so reasonable.  I am so grateful for them.  It’s nice to celebrate that in an air conditioned office.  Now, to go adjust the thermostat.

Duty called today.  I drove to four different events, took pictures, hugged, talked, told stories, saw people I have not seen in a long, long time, saw people I see all the time.

Tim Wilkerson, who is in a band called “Last Resort,” sang to me song lyrics I wrote 24 years ago.  That’s almost half my life ago.  He didn’t even know me when I walked up and asked his name, but as soon as I told him who I was, he started singing to me from “Crafted With Pride,” and “Cotton Mill Mama.”  He sang lyrics I don’t even remember, which I hear is not that uncommon for people who write songs.  There is a great story of Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot meeting for the first time.  They started quoting back and forth to each other, each from the other’s famous material, but neither recognized his own work.  When they finally figured out what was happening, they laughed and just began to have a conversation.  Life lesson: we are not our work, sometimes we are just doing whatever we’re doing at the moment.

Met Mike Marlow’s daughter, Taylor, a delightful 10-year-old with plenty of spirit and dancing eyes.  Hung out with my dad’s classmates from Mt. Vernon High School, Class of 1938. Again lots of spirit and dancing eyes.  Ruth Jones and Evelyn Feree are particular favorites, but all six of the gathered classmates were perfectly delightful.  The other four were Lillian Hedin, Max Edwards, Hubert Atchley and my dad, Allen Jobe.

Ended up at Tanner’s Grove, the United Methodist church where I worked for ten years from ‘93 to ‘03.  There the hugs and kisses were the best, and the food was the best and the smiles were the best, and my beloved friend, Elaine Clark, asked me if I were really, really good, not just saying I was good.   Elaine and I have now had this running conversation for 16 years.  We want to know, really know, how the other is doing.  But Elaine has forgotten.  It doesn’t matter how I may hate to watch my parents age, or grieve the loss of daily contact with Luke, or wish things were different in a half dozen ways.  What matters is the basic glory of being in the mix, living, breathing, eating, sleeping, dancing (which I also got to do todaywith my sweetheart, Gabriele) what matters is being.  If I am paying attention to what is really going on, I am in love with everything.  That is so wonderful.  Thank you.  I love you.  Good night.