SEMPER FI, Part II

"The conditions were awful. It would rain and rain for days. Your clothes would finally begin to rot off you. We lived in a sea of mud. And the heat and bugs. Some of the guys caught malaria bad. Then the stench of death- you could taste it in your mouth. I don't really know how we did it... Had too, I guess."

John Allen Deahl is sitting opposite me in a green leather office chair. He is dressed in his uniform- the one he wears when he does color guard service at military funerals. Behind him is this U.S. Navy flag and the "Welcome Home" banner. He is squinting because of the spotlight I have set up. I am drawing in paint with a brush on the large canvas on my easel- 4 x 6 feet. I am working on the design and composition and am beginning to sketch him into it.

"Pretty soon in them conditions, you lose the idealism, you know the thing that made me go to Pittsbugh on December eighth. You just want to stay alive and you want your buddies to stay alive, so you just make up your mind to kill that Jap bastard that is tryin' to kill you. It comes down finally to killing so you and your buddies will get to go home when the whole sorry mess is over. I still have bad feelin's about the Japs. I won't buy their cars or their TV sets. I saw this commercial the other day about "Mitsubishi" cars. Mitsubishi made the engines in the planes that bombed Pearl Harbor and now they're selling their cars in this country! Crazy!"

"I didn't realize this was goin' to be such a big painting. Makin' a reg'lar production out of this ain't you, Preacher?"

I ask him, "What kept you going?"

"Well, Chloe for one thing. I kept this picture of her in my helmet through the whole thing. The idea of Chloe being here when I came back. I didn't have much of a faith when I left home, but when you see what you see out there, it makes you think. Made me think, anyhow. And, I wanted to get back home and go to work and make a life. Hunt, fish, you know."

"We saw awful things, Preacher. And, we did some awful things. Didn't seem awful then and I still think some of it is funny. We was stackin' these dead Japs one day. Just to get 'em outa the way. There was this dead Jap officer who died with this huge erection- this happens some times when people die in battle. I read once that it happens to hanging victims. Anyhow, here was this Jap officer with this big hard-on, so we just tied a little white flag of surrender to it! I still think that's funny. I haven't even never told my children the stuff I'm tellin' you."

"I mentioned this forgiveness thing, Preacher. I want to forgive these people, but I can't forget what they did. They were horrible, worse than animals- what they did to the Kid and others. What they did to prisoners in them camps. I try to forgive 'em, then I remember something and I'm right back where I started. The Bible says that God forgets when he forgives, so I reckon I haven't forgiven them if I keep remembering stuff. Whatd'ya think."

I tell him that God's forgetting is probably a figure of speech to stress how fully God forgives. God can't not remember, but he chooses to forget in the sense of not holding it against us. We can do the same thing. Forgiveness is not forgetting, but choosing not to hold things against those who have injured us or those we care about. John studies this for a minute.

"I think I like that idea. That's stands to reason about God "can't not remember." I'll think about that, Preacher. How many times will I need to come up here? Not that I'm complaining; I like talkin' with you."

I tell him that three or four sittings will probably be enough and that I can borrow the uniform to work on it and his medals and ribbons without him in it.

In the weeks that follow he talks on and in doing so I think he talks a lot of pain out of his memories- memories over fifty years old.

"There was this sky-pilot, a chaplain, who talked with me near the end about faith in God. Told me God must have had something in mind for me to keep me alive through all those campaigns and all the mess. That's when I started to pray more regular. If I got back home I wanted my life to amount to something."

"Preacher, I'm really glad you decided to do this. All this talking has done me good."

When I finally finish the portrait, I ask Chloe and John to come and see it. Their reaction is mixed.

"I thought you were going to paint him like he was back then," she says. "And he looks so sour, so grim." All John says is, "Preacher, that mole on my face is as big as a Japanese beetle!"

I enter the work in the bi-annual West Virginia Juried Exhibition. It places and hangs in the Capitol complex for three months. I hear that Chloe and John are taking friends and family every week to view the portrait. I have called it "Semper Fi."

Months later the phone rings. "Preacher!" he says. "Come down sometime today when you get time. I want to show you something."

At the end of the day, I drop by. John leads me into his den and asks me to have a seat. Then he goes to his gun cabinet and digs around in it. When he returns he has a bayonet in one hand and his Marine Ka-Bar knife in the other. "I want you to have these. But, don't tell my kids that I gave 'em to you." I am visibly moved and so is he, but he brushes it aside. "I could get into a load of shit if they knew I gave 'em to you."

Years later, I am telling another Marine friend this story.

"He must have thought a hell of lot of you to give you his Ka-Bar and bayonet."

Yes, I think he did.

SEMPER FI

His name was John Allen Deahl. He was born in 1920 and died in 2006. I was his friend from 1979 til the day I buried him in a cemetery in South Charleston, West Virginia. I was his neighbor and pastor for twenty-two years. We spent lots of time together because of our love of art, wood working, hunting, and tools. We regaled one another with stories and jokes (not always the Sunday School variety!). He may have been the funniest human being I have ever known- and I have known some funny ones. He was also rough and tough. There was a brutality in him, even though he was a very gentle, neighborly man. I am going to tell you how that brutality came to be in him.

He married his high school sweet-heart, Chloe. She told me once that her father, a German-Swiss farmer, not given to emotional displays, sobbed on her wedding day. He was sure that John was the wrong man for his little girl. But, they enjoyed over sixty years of wedded life, raised six children and sent them to college, working as a glass-cutter and a nurse. Chloe was a girl of film star beauty; even as an old woman who had endured fifteen major surgeries ("My body looks like a road-map," she once said to me.) and the births of those six kids, she was still strikingly beautiful til her last illness. Chloe was tough, too, more than a match for John. For more than sixty years they were faithful Christians, serving and worshiping in the church I pastored.

On Saturday, December 6th, 1941, John traveled from his hometown of Butler, Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh and bought a brand new Oldsmobile sedan with money he had saved working in the glass plant in Butler. On the following day, he took his uncle for a spin in the new car, the radio providing background music for their conversation. When the programming was interrupted with a special announcement, John pulled over on the berm of the country road they were on. They listened in silence as the announcer declared that the American Pacific Fleet had been bombed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

After they had listened for a while, John clicked off the radio and turning to his uncle, said, "I want you to go with me tomorrow to Pittsburgh, take this car back to the dealership, and get my money back. I am going to join the Marines." And that is just what they did.

From the 8th of December 1941 until the 18th of November 1945, John A. Deahl served his country and his fellow-Marines as a combat fighter in the Pacific. He endured some of the most horrific fighting and dehumanizing conditions in places like Guadalcanal and Okinawa. He watched as his fellow-Marines were cut down or obliterated. He suffered the privations and terrors that have been so well documented in the recent HBO series, The Pacific.

"I had this buddy from Baltimore," he told me, "who was always going into no man's land in the lulls between engagements...lookin' for souvenirs. You'd a been like him. Looking for all this Jap junk. Wanted him a samurai sword... Well, we kept tellin' him, 'They're goin' to get you, kid. You keep it up and they're goin' to get you, sure as hell.' Well, preacher, they did get him and we heard him screamin' all night long. Found him the next day. They'd tortured him all night long. Animals. Worse than animals! They'd cut off his privates and stuffed 'em, in his mouth before he died. Animals! I've had a lot of trouble forgivin' the Japs because of stuff like that. I still don't know if I have forgiven them. I know as a Christian I should, but it's hard."

How I came to hear such stories is a story in itself and I will tell it to you...

I am like the "kid" in the story John told. I am always looking for treasures among the junk that other people collect. Some days I am lucky. On this particular day I was very lucky. I was prowling in a real junk store (not an "Antique Mall") on west Washington Street in Charleston. It was a gloomy day and I was about to leave when I spied this plastic bag with something colorful in it. I opened the bag and inside it was a woolen U.S.N. ensign with the battles from the Pacific written in India ink on the canvas rim. Also, there was a home-sewn banner, probably a "kit" from the same period, with the eagle of the American Seal and the words, "Welcome Home" emblazoned on a navy blue ground. I was breathless, as hunters and collectors of such stuff are from time to time. I got both pieces for fifty dollars. I went straight to John's home to show him the stuff. And I asked him if he would sit for me to paint his portrait in front of the flag and banner. He agreed and we started the next week. In the meanwhile, I made a large stretcher and stretched and primed a Belgian linen canvas on it. I let it dry and waited for Tuesday afternoon of the coming week...

To be continued...

Angels Watching Over Me, My Lord

Tbone imagines the angels watching him at various points of his life...

Angel 1: "What's he doin'?"

Angel 2: I'm not sure."

Angel 3: "Not THAT, surely not THAT!"

Angel 1: "He's goin' to do it. I'm sure of it!"

Angel 2: "Naw, surely not...I don't think he will."

Angel 3: "Well, he's done that kinda dumb, stupid thing before..."

Angel 2: "Yeah, I remember, now..."

Angel 3: "No, no, no! Please, Tbone, don't do that! Please, please, please..."

Angel 2: "There he GOES!"

Angel 1: "Oh, NO, please God, NOOOO!"

Angel 2: "He's DONE IT NOW..."

Angel 3: "Well, we're in for OVERTIME again! Blast YOU, Tbone!"

Gratitude and the Sovereignty of God

One of the curses of getting older is what I call "the retrospective obsession." This may be because we think the happiest years of our lives are found in the past. Or, to the contrary, we may be captive to injuries or violations that took place in the past, and we cannot or will not forget or forgive them. Sometimes, we are fixated on bad choices and violations we have ourselves perpetrated. Mark Twain, speaking of his own dark memories and the sleeplessness they entailed, said, "Like the rest of mankind, I am never quite sane at three o'clock in the morning."

The Christian world-view offers us a way to put our whole lives into perspective- whether the past, present, or future, whether the good, the bad, or the ugly. This is because the Christian view believes that the whole of life is under the wise and loving direction of a sovereign God. I say, "believes," because this is a faith claim. Like all faith claims this cannot be achieved by observation or verified by proofs. When St. Paul says, "And we know that all things work together for good..." Romans 8:28, he is saying that we know and are confident of this through faith in God.

Permit me, to again be autobiographical. My own life has been a life of extremes, extremes of tragedy and blessing. My beautiful and vivacious mother died of cancer just after my first birthday. My young father, lacking her faith and stability (she was his faith and stability), wandered, literally and spiritually, for the next twenty years. I was a fellow-traveler in these wanderings, moving over fifteen times before my thirteenth year. For a time, I lived with him and one of his several wives. She was a tragic mental and moral wreck, and having herself been a victim of abuse, abused me from the time I was five until I left at age thirteen.

But, from eighteen months til five, I lived with my paternal grandparents and their younger children in a household of pure love. They taught me what it is to be loved and cherished. This grounding in love enabled me to survive those bleak, dragon-filled years of abuse.

In my high school years, I lived with a Christian family who opened their hearts and home to me. I have written elsewhere in a critical vein of those years, but I want here to record my undying gratitude to them and many others like them who loved, nurtured, forgave, and put up with me. Many of these helped provide me with the financial assistance necessary for my formal education, and one unknown person paid for my first year of college- courses, books, room and board. There is no doubt in my mind that these people were motivated primarily out of their love for Christ and for me. I would be a cad if I did not recognize their role in my life and achievements.

My adult life has been spent in service to three Christian congregations. The first of these received me in my early twenties and survived the ten years I spent among them. (This is a argument for the existence of God!) My family and I were supported, encouraged, respected and loved by these people. In those ten years, there were many mistakes, petty quarrels, betrayals, and misunderstandings. Many are to blame for these things, not least of all myself. But, when Kathy and I visit the people from that time and place, the thing we indulge is our love for one another and for those who have gone.

My next church was a conservative congregation made up primarily of people the age of my parents and older. I was a child of the fifties, so I was in their minds like one of their adult children. I was also of a liberal bent of mind. Given those things, conflict was inevitable and sharp. They suffered from this, as did I. But, during the twenty-three years my family and I spent there, they generously supported us, enabled us to build a beautiful home, put up with my excessive travel to preach at conferences, tolerated and encouraged my art-making, and endured and forgave my eccentricities and all-out-less-than-Christian lapses in judgment and behavior. I buried most of that generation, and our mutual love for one another enabled me to turn their funeral orations into a final act of love and an art form.

During these years, Kathy and I have enjoyed a marriage of growing love and respect and have raised three beautiful, interesting children.

Now, all of these years have been marked by the same things that mark every human life: moral failure, ignorance and stupidity, miscommunication, good intention gone awry, bad intentions fulfilled (and, mercifully, thwarted), acts based on unworthy convictions, hurts, deaths... But, they have also been crowned with blessings: acts of love, self-sacrifice, altruism, humor, gratitude, generosity, sympathy, support, encouragement, and countless other things like these.

I am what I am today, not simply despite the bad things, but because of their mixture with the good. I have known darkness, but I have also enjoyed immeasurable, blinding light, the light of love. I have been loved and continue to be loved by countless people. I have been blessed to love them back. My life is multi-storied and rich because the stories of these people have become mine, and mine has become theirs. And this love has been lived out in the face of much human weakness and sin- theirs and mine.

All of which is true, I believe, because of the preexisting and over-arching love of God. The love of God has worked in my life in such a way as to make me a better sort of person. The love of all these various friends has worked in the same way: to make me a better sort of man. This is true despite my many moral and spiritual weaknesses, blind spots, and vulnerabilities.

Thus, God in his wise and loving sovereignty works the warp and weft of our lives, creating things of beauty and strength. This he does through his love and the love of other human persons.

Which leads me to say one, final thing: All of it, the whole sometimes baffling, always complex, but wondrously polychromatic thing, makes me grateful, grateful for each actor in the play and for the great Director of it all. Grateful.

Truth and Dialectic

"The truth is like a fiddle string, or a piano wire. Loosen the tension and you lose the tune." Rabbi Tbone

"The truth is never at one extreme or the other. Neither is it in the middle of extremes. Truth is always at both extremes...simultaneously." Charles Simeon

The Lust for Little Things

There is a problem using the word "lust" in a piece like this. This problem lies in the fact that in the English language, "lust" almost always has dark, negative connotations. This is not true in other languages. In common Greek, the word for "lust" and "strong desire" is the same. Context means all. So, in my use of the word, I mean "strong desire" or "over-powering drive." Context means everything.

What I am urging is this: We must replace our lusts for those things that are most commonly the objects of our strong desires, sex, money, power, fame, etc.- things are are usually destructive- with a an over-powering desire for and appreciation of the little, common-home-and-garden blessings and gifts of our daily lives. These are things that enhance our lives and make us a blessing and gift to others.

In one way, all of this comes down to what visual artists call "seeing." The painter is engaged with the world as one who "sees" what is in front of her. She is aware that she comes to the world full of conceptions of it, that is, mental ideas. But, in order to depict the world before her, she must put aside her mental ideas and really and deeply observe. When she successfully moves from conception to perception (from the left brain to the right brain), the world and the objects that are the stuff of the world begin to show themselves in their wonder and mystery. Something similar takes place in the life and brain of the successful field-biologist.

We must learn to "see" in this way- though I use "see" to encompass all the senses. We must take the time to be quiet, to look, listen, smell, touch and taste the world we are in.

We must take time. We are too much in a hurry and those who rush through life pursuing a variety of goals very often achieve their goals while missing life. Think of that morning cup of coffee. We may gulp it down or pour it into the travel mug for the commute. But, what a difference there is to take the time to savor it, and, better, to savor it with a loved-one or friend.

We must engage all our senses, connecting with the morning light, the birdsong, the new growth in the garden, and the voice or fresh-showered smell of a lover.

The best things in life are free. They are also carefree. Nature, family, friends, books, music, food and drink, honest work, gardening, sports, play,the family dog or cat, and on and on... These are things available to us all. They are among the things that John Berryman calls "the quotidian miracle."

The more enamored of these little quotidian things we are, the more we shall see their compulsive power to eject from our lives those darker, destructive impulses.

And for the Christian believer there is more. The Giver of all these things is the God who has affectionately known us from all eternity. He has given himself to and for us in the bloody death of his Son, Jesus Christ. In Christ's resurrection, he has given us hope for a future that will return us to ourselves and the creation- in body, in mind, and in heart. Each facet of our beings at peace and each at peace with the others. And, each complete human being at peace with every other complete human being.

So, in a culture driven by lust let us cultivate this lust, a lust for little things.

Cousin "Shinbone" on Wisdom

"I spend a lot of time studying on thangs, but a lot more jist lookin'."

"I always try to let the other feller talk more'n I do. That-a-way, I can be a'thankin'. It also helps me to avoid makin' a fool of myself, which is always a good thang."

"A man never was a fool for keepin' his mouth shut. I have tried the other way around too many times, and always regretted it."

"A windy man is like a windy day in March. Both of 'em tend to agitate and irritate me."