The Wanderers Among Us

Jim Webb’s opus to the Scots-Irish is, I fear, a book I will not finish.  Given me recently by a friend, I sit down in anticipation to read not just of his people, but of mine too.  But his history is not mine.  He speaks of red-necks and trailer trash.  My people, my Scots-Irish people, were farmers by and large and country people.  But they were not and are not red necks or trailer trash.  The South is not my culture.  Slavery is not my defining react-against event.  The Civil War is not something my family speak of in the present tense.  And labor unions are not anathema to us – we will always join with others when it makes sense.  And we’re not afraid of education.  Some of us just haven’t had the same chances as others and others of us understand that education comes in many forms.

We are West Virginians.  He gives us some nods in the book, does Mr. Webb, but I realize anew as I read how vastly different our experiences are.  And he can claim the vote in favor of George W. Bush in West Virginia in the first election to be about guns all he wants.  We all know it wasn’t about guns; it was about steel.  And Mr. Bush promised to bring it back.  He lied.  We should have known that.  It’s a been done thing with us.  But that’s another story.

But there is one thing in the few pages I read before I put it down in frustration that does resonate: the wanderer gene.  It may sound funny to describe a family, a tribe, that has inhabited the same few square miles of ground for centuries as wanderers, but it’s true.  Substitute the word restless for wanderer and you may have a better idea what I’m getting at.

I come from generations of restless people.  In our time, you’ll know them as the ones who cannot sit still for very long, the ones who don’t stay long at a party before looking at their watches, the ones who know a little about a lot, the ones who, if they have land, walk it often and know it well.

My grandmother, Mary, was a wanderer at heart.  She never got too far off the farm for very long, but she wanted to.  Every chance of a trip, she sprang to it.  Every ride down the road, she was there.  And when she was at home, she walked.  Constantly.  When a chore didn’t tie her down to place, she was a woman on the move.  All the time.  If she’d been a man, she’d have fought in every war just for the chance to go somewhere, anywhere.  The night I sat with her in the hospital after she broke her arm and she got mad at me for refusing to take her home, she walked around the circle of the nurses’ station all night without stopping.  All night.  Her hip would barely hold her.  But she walked.  Her sight without her glasses would barely lead her.  But she walked.  Even with no destination, she walked, sure, somehow, that the next step would bring her to something better than the last one.  Or maybe she just needed to walk.

That’s the thing of we Scots-Irish in my family – we’re home bodies who are restless.  So we want to be here and not here at the same time.  Some of us walk our desire.  Some of us spend our lives out-of-doors.  Some of us travel for work or for pleasure.  Some of us run ten errands a day.

Some looking from the outside in think we were made to work; that we’re not content to just sit still.  But that’s not it – we can do nothing like nobody’s business.  What we’re not content to be is in one place for very long.  Variety is the spice of our life, even the variety found in sameness.  So some of us who seldom leave the house where we live can tell you every kind of flower and weed and bug you might want to know.

My own restless wandering gene is harder to catch as it tends to arcs of time rather than moment to moment.  Maybe that’s the luxury of living in a healthier time, being assured in probabilities of a longer life span.  I don’t know.

I do know that after a month or two in the mountains, my feet literally itch to go somewhere – anywhere, whether with purpose or without, I have to just get out of here and go somewhere.  It can just be for the day, but go I must.  And every seven years or so, it’s time for change – life change.  Sometimes that involves moving.  Sometimes it involves changing jobs or careers.  Sometimes it involves schooling.  Sometimes it involves nothing more than a new hobby.  But every seven years or so, the orientation of my life must change.  I must look in a different direction, navigate a different vista.  I may not move an inch in life space to do it.  But move I must.

It’s been seven years here.  And I’m getting restless.  Wonder what the next change will be?  And I wonder whether the dreaming/visioning process I’m dragging the church I serve through is necessary to our shared future (what I want to believe) or just another symptom of my own wandering gene.

The others will tell me.  Of that, I am sure.  For if a vision isn’t shared, I suspect it isn’t a vision at all, but a dream.  Dreams are had one by one, but visions – those are community things.  And so, for now, I wonder if anyone wants to wander along with me.

Falling vs. Fallen

Traveling back and forth between my home state of West Virginia and Virginia (where I now live), I have been in turn amused and bemused to note a difference in road signs warning of the same situation: Falling Rocks (West Virginia) and Fallen Rocks (Virginia).

What could have created the difference?

Do West Virginians perceive themselves as sufficiently adroit and quick-responding drivers to avoid the rocks as they fall?  Probably, and not without cause.  Have you driven those curves in those mountains?  It requires some skill as well as courage.

Do Virginians think the greater danger presented is to be found on what’s already on the road versus what might be falling down from above?  Perhaps.

Falling versus fallen – maybe it’s a theological difference (I know, I know – I stretch the point).  Maybe Virginians emphasize our fallen nature while West Virginians emphasize our grace-filled redemption (represented by some, particularly mystic, writers, as falling into God).  As a West Virginia home-girl, I’d like to think so.

Apropos of nothing at all important, I puzzle and come to no conclusions, except to note that one picture really is worth a thousand words.

But West Virginia has taken the extra step of naming a town (well, not really a town – just a zip code, really) “Falling Rock”.  Now that’s committed.

Why I Don't Pledge Allegiance to a Flag

1. It feels like a loyalty oath, which means to me that even though I am a citizen of this particular country, others have deemed that I am obligated to continually establish something that is self-evident: that I am a citizen, or perhaps better, that I am a good citizen. I take good citizenship as a given, even though you and I might define good citizenship very differently. But I would understand the concept of good citizenship as the presumptive norm, which means it does not have to be proven or reproven.

2. I’m an only child.  It’s the only explanation I’ve got for my own instinctive rejection of group think, and collective pledges always put me in mind of group think, especially when the lack of participation becomes a matter of negative judgment or perception.  It may seem incredibly ironic that I would be a pastor and actively participate in the life of a church, given this worldview.  But Presbyterians affirm freedom of the conscience, which is about the only way someone like me could play in their sandbox.

Called a 'patriotic product'

3. Symbols matter hugely.  And I do not like what this particular symbol has become – a sort of litmus test  of acceptability.  Thus virtually every national politician wears a culturally-obligated flag lapel pin and the failure to wear one translates as ‘unAmerican’.  Who decided that?  I must have missed the meeting.

4. It feels like idolatry to me.  I’m not saying it’s idolatrous for others.  I am saying it’s idolatrous for me.  Investing pieces of cloth with the sacred, prescribing how flags are to be venerated, treated while ‘alive’, disposed of when ‘dead’, invests the symbol with a meaning that pushes me away rather than draws me near.  There aren’t that many rules (really, there aren’t any) for the disposition of the sacred texts of my faith.  When a Bible gets worn out, you just throw it away.  I may love where I live.  I may even respond to the many symbols of where I live.  But I do not worship them.

5. Flag-draped coffins.

6. The Pledge of Allegiance is too closely linked in my mind with triumphalism – the implied declaration that we are better than everyone else.  We are not.  Nor, in my view, should we wish to be.  Life is not a contest.

I really can’t recall a specific occasion when I decided to stop pledging allegiance to the flag.  As an adult who rarely attends sporting events (the only professional sporting event I have ever attended was a pro-wrestling event in our town my Dad took me to when I was a kid), does not work in a public school system, and is rarely at public political events, I am not often called upon to choose whether to stand with others and recite the pledge or not.

Thus you could know me for a lifetime and never know this about me.  Whenever the pledge is recited, I stand – as a sign of respect to you, not the flag, so my non-pledging probably goes unnoticed.

And I’ve had to reflect quite a bit to understand my own motivations.  The biggest reason I eschew flag-waving, -wearing, -pledging exercises, I think, is the linkage I observe between the flag and our militarism.  The language in the pledge of ‘indivisibility’ is a direct reference to our own civil war.  Flags cropped up all over the place in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, usually coupled with the language of violent revenge.  A friend who refused to hang a flag from her dorm room window was ostracized.  That she had family in the Pentagon on the day was of no interest to those who would judge her as lacking in some fundamental way.  So perhaps for me it’s a bit of a protest against our tendency to violence as a problem-solving technique in these United States.  If so, until now, it’s never been something I felt the need to announce.  Why now?  I’m truthfully not sure.  Maybe it has to do with spending more time than I care to recently listening to folks tell me how much they disagree with me or find me wanting when they really don’t know that much about me.  Maybe in effect, I’m saying, you want to really disagree with me?  But I don’t think so.  I really think that June and July, the months of celebration for statehood for my home state of West Virginia, and nationhood for the United States, wear me down, especially in election years.  I love being from West Virginia.  But I am ashamed of my native state, and especially the Democrats of that state, for voting in the presidential primary for a man currently incarcerated in the state of Texas over President Obama.  West Virginians declared by their majority vote that they would rather have a man they know nothing about save that he is a felon doing time as their presidential candidate than Mr. Obama.  It’s hard, if not downright impossible, to believe that is anything but overt racism.  And I am ashamed of us as a nation for our use of force as our first instinct around the world whenever problems arise.  I am ashamed that there are never enough guns to satiate our felt need for safety and power.  And I am appalled that we drape all of it in a flag and call it holy.  That’s my inner protestor speaking.  But maybe that’s a little high-minded for the truth when it comes to me and pledges.

Because maybe, just maybe, deep down, I’m more a libertarian than I’d like to admit.  Maybe it’s just that I’m unwilling or unable to do something, anything, simply because someone else expects or demands that I should.