The haunted cemetery

My brother Steve will deny this, which is to be expected; but this is how I've told the story to my children for a few years. You'll have to decide for yourselves where you stand.

The Old Stone Church is about 5½ miles from where we grew up, in the heart of Monroeville, Pa. It's on Monroeville Boulevard and Stroschein Road, right across from the Eat 'n Park diner and a quarter-mile uphill from the Miracle Mile.

It's the site of a former Presbyterian church that's more than 150 years old, which a while ago sold the property and moved to another location. It still gets used for photo ops, and for weddings; and of course for funerals, because it has a large open and active cemetery. (I mean active in the sense that it's maintained and in use, not in the sense that every Halloween the dead all get up and throw a head-banger of a party, but if you know differently than I do on that score, please feel free to share.) The place employs a caretaker who cares for the lawn meticulously, watering the grass and raking things when needed, among other responsibilities.

Like most other cemeteries, Crossroads Cemetery has accumulated a few ghost stories over the years. The land once belonged to a farmer named Robert Johnston. As the story goes in the spring of 1799 when the winter's snows melted, Johnston found the body of a small boy in his woods. Unable to locate his parents, Johnston decided to bury the boy by the spot where he had found him, which happened to be near where he had buried his sister-in-law three years earlier. In 1800, he dedicated that small piece of his land to be a cemetery.

Supposedly on some wintry nights you can see the boy struggling to find shelter. There are a few other stories associated with the place, much of which are bollux, like the supposed "Monroeville strangler" buried there, whom teens claim to have seen while they were walking through the cemetery at night, or Caroline Cooper, who legend says hated kids when she was alive and will pull you down into her grave if you walk on it. Standard stuff.

I tell you this not because I think it's particularly credible, but because it helps you to understand what happened back in July 1984.

My brother Steve was 12, and like most boys that age, was determined never to let people think of him as a chicken. And if you must know, he wasn't. When he was 15 and we went skiing for the first time, he dived headlong into it and was swooping down the intermediate slope before he had figured out how to brake or steer, because he was determined to enjoy himself and the beginner slope was too dull. (I pretty much stayed on the beginner slope the entire time I bothered trying to ski, and was ready to go far sooner than he was.) Maybe because he's the youngest of four brothers Steve has always been one to jump into things with both feet.

So when we dared him to walk through Crossroads Cemetery, he wasn't about to back down even after we'd been telling stories about Caroline Cooper and the Monroeville Strangler, especially once Bill started egging him on.

Blair and I were worried about getting trouble if our parents found out, but Bill was enjoying watching Steve squirm too much to let that stop us. We were soon all loaded into the car, with Bill at the wheel, on our way down Saunders Station Road and headed toward Monroeville.

Along the way, Bill spelled out the terms: Steve had to walk through the graveyard, from one corner to the other and back, right through the middle both times; and then had to repeat the process with the other two corners, while we watched. If he did this, Bill would give him ten dollars.

We got to the church parking lot, and after a little stalling, Steve got going. The moon wasn't out, and it was a little cloudy, so although we were doing our best to keep track of him, we kept losing him and then finding him again a minute later. After about ten minutes in, we were getting bored, and wondering if Bill would let Steve out of the bet early, when Blair noticed that Steve was slowing down. Then he stopped moving, and disappeared completely.

Later after he had recovered, Steve told us that he was actually a lot more frightened than he had let on. He'd been thinking of Caroline Cooper's ghost, and wondered where her grave was; and kept thinking of all the times he'd heard that story or others like it. And then there was that serial killer. But he'd pressed on, telling himself "There are no monsters, and there are no ghosts."

He was about five minutes in when he felt something brush his ankle. But he steadied himself, and kept going. "There are no monsters and there are no ghosts."

Now in the dim light, there were plenty of shadows, and plenty of places for things and people to hide, and we'd been feeding his imagination with plenty of stories earlier that evening. So it shoudn't be a surprise that when something actually grabbed his ankle, Steve started to panic.

"There are no monsters, and there are no ghosts," he told himself again, out loud this time, and he took another step.

Whatever was holding his ankle tightened its grip. He pulled harder, and so did it. After a moment, it gave way a bit, but only a bit. Something caught his other ankle, and slowed him down further.

"There are no monsters and there are no ghosts," he said, even louder, and he admitted by this point he didn't care if we heard him or not. He was getting that panicked.

He took another step, and something lunged at him from out of the darkness and knocked him out cold. He had time to scream, and he went down.

Back in the church parking lot, we heard him scream, and the three of us ran down to find him. I think we were all starting to wonder if there was some truth to the ghost stories, or if someone was hiding there to waylay people or just avoid police. We were worried about our brother, and we were worried what we were going to say to our parents to explain what had happened.

We found him almost on the other side of the cemetery, by Caroline Cooper's grave. His feet were wrapped in a garden hose, and he was out cold from being hit in the forehead after stepping on the caretaker's rake.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Attending School on Halloween

Malcolm attended the charter school in New Brunswick back in 2005, making him one of the kids who enrolled in the charter school the year after it finally had moved into its own building on the south side of the city. What happened to the kid is a damn shame.

Malcolm was a quiet and unassuming kid, all things considered. One of his teachers, who told me his story once we were at the school and I had joined the board, remembered Malcolm as someone who followed directions and did what was expected of him without complaining. Sometimes he was a little too compliant and didn't advocate for himself, but when push came to shove, you could count on him to find a solution to whatever problem he was faced with.

Malcolm was from North Brunswick, but transferred to the charter school when he was in second grade, thanks to the enrollment lottery. Nowadays that would be harder to do, because the school is established and its lottery fills up with students from its three home districts; but at the time the charter school was younger and never filled up its vacancies with local students. There were even a couple students from the Oranges who attended.

Anyway, back to Malcolm. Being as his family was new to the school and unfamiliar with its calendar, his mother (understandably) assumed that it was open the same days as the schools his older sisters and brother went to, and so that Halloween she packed him a lunch and dropped him off as usual since it was a Monday morning, and everyone had school on Mondays.

He got to school, and when he didn't see anyone running around outside, he just assumed he was late, so he went in. It wasn't quite what he was expecting. There were teachers there, and there were students; but none of them was anyone he knew. Feeling very confused and unsure what to do, he walked to his classroom and sat down.

Now when people think of schools that are closed, particularly on holidays like Halloween or Christmas, we usually think of them as empty. They're not. They're always filled with the ghosts of students who went there and the teachers who led the classrooms. Some of them died there, and others just had nowhere else to go, but they all come back. How could they not? When they were alive that was where they spent half their time. The school remembers, and it pulls them back.

So Malcolm sat there in class with a classroom full of 20 other students, all of whom were dead. The teacher? Also dead.

About halfway through show-and-tell, he realized he was the only one in the room who was breathing. This made him feel very awkward.

Not long after that they went to gym class, where the teacher had them play dodgeball. He felt he was at a disadvantage because the ball actually would hit him,whereas it went through the other students.

He had always loved music class but this new teacher played everything in a minor key and had them enter and leave the room to Chopin's funeral march.

When they returned to class and started their personal education packets, Malcolm started to feel that the other children were pointing at him and laughing. By the time it came for circle time and everyone gathered on the carpet, no one wanted to sit next to him and he was ready to cry.

The teacher noticed how sad and lonely he looked, so she encouraged him to sit next to her. She was pale and it was very cold next to her, but Malcolm didn't want to be disrespectful so he sat right next to her, criss-cross the way he had been taught.

"Now I know if you're here, you're probably still feeling upset about how you died and that's why you don't want to cross over," the teacher said. Her voice was calm and matter-of-fact, and it took a moment for Malcolm to realize what it was she just had said.

"Let's take a moment to talk about how we died, and share with each other how that makes us feel, and what we've been doing in all the time since," she said in her reasonable teacher voice. "Malcolm, why don't you go first?"

"But I'm not dead!" he protested. "I'm a live boy."

There are moments in every school when the entire classroom is focused on one student, and that student does something inappropriate. Maybe the student farts, or breaks the desk when they sit down, or just says something unrelated to the class activity. Whatever it is, it's something that turns the entire classroom on its head, wrests control from the teacher and leaves all the other students laughing.

That was what happened to Malcolm. The entire class burst into laughter and even the teacher had a hard time stifling back her giggles. His ears burning, Malcolm ran from the classroom while shouts of "Live boy! Live boy!" followed him.

He ducked into bathroom to escape the taunting, but in his hurry, he failed to realize it was the girls room. A girl ghost shrieked when she saw him, and her face melted away until he screamed and tried to run away, only to find that the door had closed behind already.

"Live boy! Live boy! Go away, live boy!" The taunts followed him out into the hall and all the way to the office. There he discovered that the door was locked, and the receptionist wouldn't let him out until school was over for the day. It was only 10 o'clock.

"Go back to class, live boy," she said.

Heartbroken, defeated and dreading the thought of eating lunch surrounded by a bunch of ghosts, Malcolm started shuffling back to class, when he found himself staring at the large trash bin the custodian was getting ready to take outside. Malcolm climbed inside and burrowed his way in until he was completely covered with paper towels and other trash. A moment later, the bin began to roll down the hallway, and ten minutes later he was free.

Alas, the story does not have a happy ending. When he made it home an hour later, pale and weak in the knees from his ordeal, his mother would have none of it.

"No son of mine is playing hookey," she said. "Your sisters are at school, and your brother is at school, and you are going back to school this minute. Ghost teachers and ghost classmates. The very idea!"

She took him back to the charter school and watched from the car as her son, defeated, walked back in.

On Tuesday, the education director came to school after a three-day weekend and found a disciplinary note on her desk with Malcolm's name on it that said he had been found truant and was being held after for punishment.

He has never been seen since.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The haunted park

A block away from our house is Feaster Park, a neighborhood playground with all the amenities kids these days could want. There's a sandpit, there are slides and monkey bars, swings for little kids and swings for big kids, basketball courts and picnic tables to sit and chill with one another.

We've taken the girls there many times, especially when they were younger and we didn't have the playset in the back yard that we eventually got a year or two before the Youngest came along. We've had good times there, even though the place isn't perfect. There's graffiti sprayed on the playground equipment, I've heard reports of drug paraphernalia in the sand, and there was one time I found a used condom on the slide.

"Also," I told Middle Daughter's friends Tanner and Isabella on the morning of Halloween, as we celebrated her eighth birthday party, "it's haunted."

I pointed across the street at Pittman Park, which looks and acts like an annex to Feaster Park. "That used to be a cemetery," I told them. (It did.) "After the Civil War, New Brunswick took the soldiers from the city who had died in the war, buried them there and dedicated the park to their memory." (All true.)

"So why is it haunted?"

"Ah," I said. "The soldiers saw some horrible things in the war, and died violent deaths. After all that, they found it hard to sleep, and when they moaned and walked at night, it disturbed the people who lived nearby, which is why they were sent back to New Brunswick. The people hoped that if the soldiers were sent home in honor, that they would finally rest and go to their final sleep."

That's how it worked for most of the soldiers, I explained. But there was one soldier who was especially restless, and even a quiet place like Pittman Park couldn't calm him. His ghost kept walking, and started disturbing the spirits of the other soldiers buried at Pittman Park with him, until finally the city dug up his body and moved him across the street to the corner of Feaster Park, where they buried him again, away from the other soldiers, and planted a tree on top of him to keep him still.

It worked, of course, but only for a while. The tree grew, and its roots held him in place, but he was awake and restless and being held there against his will just made him angrier. But the years passed, and without any new sightings of the ghost, people forgot about him and moved on.

Until one day, of course, when a boy saw the tree and decided to climb it. He walked up the tree and grabbed a branch and the wind shook the leaves and he thought he heard a voice say "Boy, don't climb my tree." But what did he care? He held onto the branch with his right hand, and he planted his left foot on the trunk, and he swung himself up into the tree.

The branches shook as he got his footing, and the leaves rustled, and he thought he heard a voice say "Boy get down now, and let me sleep," but he was only 8, and trees were meant for climbing, so he stood in the tree and he grabbed a higher branch — and his foot was stuck.

The boy tried to pull himself up, but it was no good, his foot was caught. And then for a moment he thought he was in luck because it seemed like the branches where he was stuck were giving way a little, and then he realized his foot was sinking into the trunk.

He gave a start and tried to push himself free with his other foot, but then it got stuck too, and in a moment he was caught up to his knees in the trunk.

"Somebody help!" he cried but the other kids were all playing in the middle of Feaster Park, and he was here by himself in the corner, and now he had sunk in up to his waist.

"Help, please!" he screamed again, but by the time anyone came he had sunk into the tree up to his neck and he couldn't grab onto anything to get loose, and no one else could help him either, They just watched as he sank lower and lower.

"Tell my mom I love her" was the last thing he said, and then his face disappeared into the trunk and his arm too, and he was gone.

"People have avoided that part of the park ever since," I told the kids, "but they say that if you walk past the tree on days like this, you can still hear the boy calling for help."

The girls were quiet, wrapped up in the story. It was Issa, the lone boy at the party, who spoke first.

"Yeah, right," he said, and he led them off to find something else to do.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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The ghost of Ma Kirby

Back when I was in college, I belonged to a men's living group called Kirby House.

Originally just a men's residence hall, Kirby House incorporated and became an alternative to the Greek fraternity system, I think sometime in the late 1960s. There was no pledge period and no hazing, just a common affiliation around the group we had joined and the building we lived in.

The building had been deeded by one of Lafayette College's wealthier alumni families, and was named after Allan Price Kirby. There was a plaque with his image on it in the hallway, and a giant painting of his mother hanging in the main living room. (Every year on her birthday, a confused-looking floral delivery person would show up, put an expensive arrangement of flowers on the table under the watchful eyes of the painting, and then leave, trying to figure out what was going on and realizing that he probably wasn't going to get a tip.)

That picture of Allan Kirby's mother dominated the living room. We'd have our aftergame parties there, and people unfamiliar with the history of the house would ask who she was. Parents and relatives would come to visit, and as we showed them around, invariably they would ask who she was.

"That's Ma Kirby," we would say.

A year or two before I arrived, in the mid-1980s, there was an incident. I don't know the details, but if any other Kirbs who read this want to chime in with a few particulars please do.

Apparently ano5ther student had tried to get into a relationship with one of the Kirbs, only to be rejected. As many of us do at that age, she wouldn't take no for an answer, and kept trying to push the issue. As I heard the story, one Saturday in November during an aftergame party, when the alcohol was flowing, things got heated and there was a scene. A big one.

That night, after things had calmed down, she fell asleep on the couch facing the portrait of Ma Kirby. From what I'm told, she woke in the middle of the night and ran screaming from the building. She later claimed that Ma Kirby had spoken to her and told her to get out and never come back.

She never did.

Tormented with a creepy doll

Oldest Daughter went away to camp about two years ago with Concordia Language Villages to study Arabic in an immersion environment. It's stuck with her. She learned the Arabic alphabet while she was there, learned a few songs and chants that she immediately taught to her little sister when she got back from camp, and started taking classes in Arabic once she got to college.

Concordia has its language villages in a remote part of Minnesota called Bemidji, around a small and irregularly shaped body of water called Turtle River Lake. The idea is that students can attend the camp for two weeks or for four, during which time they can receive formal instruction in the target language. They share cabins with other campers, and during the daily activities they're expected to complete the learning experience by speaking only in the target language, which again, in her case was Arabic.

Because they're away from home for so long, the campers bring things to keep themselves from getting homesick: favorite foods, some pictures, games to play, an age-appropriate toy or two, just nothing that violates the spirit of language immersion.

One of the campers, a 16-year-old named Marcie, brought a doll.

It wasn't a Barbie doll or something made of cheap plastic. It was made with moving parts: arms and legs that swiveled and bent at their middle joints, a head that turned, and hands and feet that moved at the wrist and ankles. It represented an impressive amount of engineering for a cheap toy, but a lot of the kids thought it bordered on the creepy side. The eyes, instead of being painted on the surface of the face, were recessed into the face a little, the way real eyes actually are a little farther back than the front of the forehead. The effect was that, if you moved across the room, it looked as though the doll was following you with its eyes. That, combined with the sly Mona Lisa smile that had been painted on its face, was enough to creep a few people out. It was like the doll not only was watching you, it was smirking at you the entire time.

This one poor girl named Alexi was really bothered, and she made the mistake on the third day of camp of telling the other girls in her cabin how much she hated that doll. They started taking the doll with them to the mess hall,where they would place it on the table facing her; and every time she looked at it, they would wave its arm and have it say "Marhaba!" They made camp miserable for this poor girl. Alexi would go to class, and find the doll seated at the desk next to hers, its head turned toward her with those creepy eyes and that hollow smile. I'm sure she tried to be a good sport about it, but when something bothers you and everyone knows it but keeps on rubbing it in, it's going to get to you after awhile.

Around Day 10, Alexi went to the staff counselors to complain that the other girls in her cabin were bullying her. I'm sure she felt stupid when she explained how they were bullying her, but the staff handled it professionally. They talked to Marcie, who owned the doll; and they talked to every other girl in the cabin individually, and that night around the evening campfire, they reminded everyone without naming any names the sort of behavior and community spirit that campers were expected to uphold.

Oldest Daughter woke up that night to a contained riot in the other cabin. One of the other girls had thought it would be hilarious to take the doll out and put it in Alexi's bunk, next to her. Alexi had woken up when she rolled over and got its limbs tangled in her hair like the doll was trying to attack her.

There was a big to-do, and when no one would own to the prank, especially after the staff had just addressed the bullying that afternoon, the entire cabin was given disciplinary kitchen duty. Staff took the doll away, locked it up with all the cell phones and personal electronics, and told Marcie she could get it back when it came time to leave camp. Alexi got to sleep in the medical cabin the rest of the night, and was allowed to sleep in past breakfast, usually a big no-no, but I guess they considered this to be special circumstances.

Camp the next day was rough. The staff weren't putting up with anyone's crap, and everyone was trying to figure out who had it in for Alexi so bad. A few of the kids who shared the cabin with her thought they had an idea, but they couldn't prove it. For her part, Alexi stayed off by herself, crying and miserable and even the kids who weren't from her cabin weren't able to get her to do things with them. Marcie tried during dinner, when Alexi was sitting off by herself, to make it up to her by sitting with her and trying to apologize that things had got so out of hand. A couple people saw that as proof that Marcie was behind the hole thing, but she denied that, and it just stayed ugly. My daughter told me that that if everyone weren't on edge about the bullying and how upset Alexi was, it was the sort of prank with a doll that everyone would have thought hilarious.

They went to bed around ten, and then there was a new outburst. Someone actually had got into the lockbox. They hadn't stolen any phones, but Alexi was screaming at everyone when she started to get into bed and found that freaking doll waiting there for her with a knife taped to its hand, like it was waiting to stab her.

Alexi snatched the doll up, walked over to the dock at the edge of Turtle River Lake and threw the doll in, as far as she could.

Another big fight ensued. Marcie cried; the doll had been a gift from her grandmother. Alexi screamed; Marcie had it in for her and had been tormenting her for almost two weeks. The head counselor was yelling because someone actually had broken into the lock box. This was the worst group of campers they'd ever had. Everyone was at everyone else's throat. It was impossible to avoid taking sides in this fight.

The next day the campers who were there only for the first two weeks packed their bags and left. Talk was pretty subdued, but there were dozens of angry looks exchanged.

The day after Marcie came home from camp, a package arrived. Figuring it was something she had forgotten to pack, she took it to her room and put it on the bed then went to grab a snack.

She came back to her room just in time to see the package open from the inside, and to see a small doll step out.

Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.

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Burger King and the little boy's ghost

I took Youngest and one of her best friends to Burger King today so they could play on the indoor playground. As we were eating our fries — because you have to get fries when you're at Burger King, even just for the playground — I explained that the playground was haunted.

"A little boy died there a few years ago," I said. "He didn't tell his parents he was going there, and when he climbed to the top, he got too scared to come down."

The girls listened quietly, hanging on every word. Who doesn't love a good ghost story, after all?

There was nobody else in there, and since his parents didn't know he was there, he got locked in when the Burger King people turned off the lights and went home. He died up there that night, and it was two days before anyone found him."

It was a perfectly morbid story, and I was going to share an example of how the haunting worked, when Oldest, who was along for the ride, decided to cap it off.

"His body is still there," she said. "Kids won't touch it because it's gross, and none of the adults can get up there."

The girls cracked up, and so did I. For the next 30 minutes while we hung out, they would do things like climb to the top, pick up one another's arms and wave it at us through the window.

"Look, I found him!"

So that story didn't stick, that time. But you know, there was another family there, so who knows what their kids overheard and what they believed…

Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Encounter in the woods at dark

Back when I was a kid, there was a giant wooded area nearby that we loved to visit, especially during the summer. Sulfur Creek ran through it, with a bend where the water was deep enough to swim; there were trails up near Macelroy Drive where people rode their ATVs; and of course when hunting season came, it was the place to scout out deer. My brothers and I would go there a lot during the summer in the morning and come home for lunch, covered with dirt and sweat, only to return right afterward and stay away until it was time for dinner.

The area was vast. It started out a block away from our house in Penn Township, and it went down to Trafford, and ran all the way to Monroeville and probably farther. There were a few abandoned structures in there that had been built as part of a logging effort more than a century earlier, a railroad that had fallen into disuse, and God only knows what else.

As you may have gathered, this was back in the day when it was fairly common for parents to let their kids run around outside without immediate supervision. It was a time to build forts, to explore, and to navigate the physical and social world on our own, without the constant helicopter presence of our parents. In fact our parents had only one rule about playing outside Be back on the block by dark.

This one summer evening when I was 12, my brother Steve and I were playing in the woods with his friend Kevin, who was visiting from Forest Hills. It was after 8:30 in June, and the shadows under the trees were getting dark. As the responsible older brother, I started to remind Steve and Kevin that we had to start home soon.

"Only if you can make us!" Steve said, and he and Kevin took off, their laughter trailing after them.

This was one of the ways Steve went out of his way to annoy me. He knew I was worried about getting in trouble for breaking the curfew, and he knew that him flouting the rules was just going to make me angry. He's two years younger than me but he's always been stronger and faster, and he's always enjoyed getting the better of me physically. He loved it when people thought we were twins, and enjoyed it even more on those rare occasions when they thought he was older, like the summer he got to ride the more advanced rollercoasters and I didn't. Getting at me by running ahead was just sauce for the goose, as far as he was concerned.

So he and Kevin ran ahead, and I ran after them, getting angrier with each step because there wasn't anything I could do about it, and then they stopped so suddenly that I almost crashed right into them.

"Are you stupid?" I asked. "We have to get home or mom's going to kill us!"

"Shh," he said, and he pointed at an oak tree nearby. At first I thought there was someone up there, and I was amazed at how far up they had climbed. I usually got about 8 feet before I stopped climbing, and Steve had been known to make it 15, but this person was easily past that.

And then I realized there was no way this was anything human. It was about seven feet tall, with long and spindly arms and legs, and it was thin like something that never got enough to eat. There was a bird sitting on one of the branches, and as we stood there watching and listening, the bird opened its mouth and made its final song of the day.

The creature crawled out on the branch as quickly as if it were walking, opened its mouth and mimicked the song it had just heard. It didn't mimick it perfectly; it sounded like what you might hear from the other end of a tunnel, but it worked. The bird walked closer, and this thing snatched it and swallowed it in one smooth motion.

It was too much. Steve made some sort of scared noise, but I'm the one who said the sort of thing out loud a 12-year-old would say, and as soon as it heard that noise, the creature stopped, and looked right at me. It had no eyes and no nose, but it had something that looked like it could be a mouth. That's what twisted into something like a smile, and it started to climb down the tree headfirst toward us.

We took off running, all three of us, crashing through the ferns and other plants that grew all over the floor of the woods. The whole time, I heard this thing crashing along the ground behind us, and it was getting closer.

Now the Shades grew up around Sulfur Creek, and the result is that the ground slopes quite suddenly in a few places. It's the sort of place you need to be careful even in daylight so you don't fall, but in the dark when you're running scared? Things went the only way they could. We fell down the slope, rolling on the trails we'd thought we were so clever for sliding down earlier. Kevin landed right by the creek, Steve tore his pants on a tree root, and I landed hard on one of the rocks beside the creek bed.

And then we heard it at the top of the slope, trying to find us. I don't know if it could look for us, without eyes, but it was doing something. We got up as quickly and as quietly as we could, and moved down the stream a little. Steve and Kevin made it to the other side of one of the big trees that had fallen, and hid behind its root ball. I hid behind one of the large rocks that stuck out from the side of the slope we had just fallen down, and looked around for something, anything I could use to defend myself. There was a branch nearby that must have fallen from one of the maple trees. It didn't have any leaves on it but it wasn't rotted and frail either. I picked it up and held onto it for dear life.

I heard the rustle of the undergrowth, and then the soft pad of feet on the ground. And then, horrifyingly, I heard it speak.

"Guys?" it said. "I think we lost it. Where are you?"

It was my voice.

It took a step past the outcropped rock and I saw it up close. It looked at me. It looked *like* me, and as our eyes met, it smiled this terrible, lopsided smile that made my stomach fall away. I screamed, and hit it as hard as I could on the head, again and again, and then it started screaming too, but in a voice that was high and shrill; and then it ran away, back up the creek.

Steve and Kevin came out from behind the fallen tree where they had been hiding, and we booked it back to my parents' house as fast as we could. I held onto the branch the entire time, in case we needed it.

We got home, and my mother didn't need to ask a thing. She looked at us, and she knew. My dad hadn't held a weapon since he'd left the Army in 1968, but that night he went next door to the neighbors, and borrowed a shotgun. My mom set candles in each of the windows and left the lights on in our rooms so we could go to sleep, and all night that night and the next she and my father kept vigil to make sure it hadn't followed us home.

And from them on, we made sure we were back on the block before dark.

Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Good Friday in America today

It was, of course, an injustice.

Police found Stephon Clark in the back yard of his grandmother's house after he reportedly had climbed over the fence to get there. They were looking for someone who had been breaking car windows on the street, and when they caught up with Clark they ordered him to show his hands. An officer shouted “He has a gun!” and Clark was struck with a hail of bullets.

He was holding a cellphone. There was no gun.

According to an autopsy, Clark was shot 8 times from behind or from the side. Police have yet to provide any evidence that Clark was the window-breaking vandal they were looking for.

Fatal incidents of police violence have been a matter of routine horror in the news for years, compounded by our rush to assure ourselves that, while unfortunate, there's really nothing we can do about it. It's just part of the cost of having a safe society.  Sometimes people get killed, but it's their fault anyway, because they didn't follow orders, because they acted aggressively, or because police felt threatened. And besides he had a rap sheet.

That reaction should chill the very marrow in our bones. I can think of no reaction further from the heart of Christ and the heart of the Good Friday story that we celebrated in our churches today.

Even those outside the Christian faith know the Good Friday story. Jesus Christ, an innocent man, was arrested under cover of night. Denied the due process of law, he was deprived of his basic human rights, brutally tortured and finally executed.

Preachers often play up the story of Jesus' trials and execution for the moral affront that they were. To convict, all the priests needed was for two witnesses to agree on a charge. The gospels note that they couldn't even manage that. For his part, Pilate, the Roman governor, couldn't find any basis for a charge. Neither could Herod.

So why was he executed? The chief priest was afraid that Jesus was disturbing the peace and getting people riled up. Pilate wanted to maintain order. Herod just didn't care.

Christianity used to be a religion of the powerless, but after 1,700 years of holding the reins of imperial power, we've become far too comfortable with the way those reins feel here in the West. We treat the execution of Jesus as though it's an aberration, a once-in-history occasion when the justice system failed in its duty and killed an innocent man. The effect is that we treat the Crucifixion as a one-time failure, an especially heinous act of evil. We always stress the innocence of Jesus to stress how shockingly unjust his death was.

I wonder, if we were to survey his contemporaries, how unusual they found it that Rome would kill an innocent man. I wonder how many peasants, carpenters and bricklayers there were who felt they couldn’t get a fair shake either. I wonder how many people could point to the mountaintop of Jerusalem, to Mount Gerzim in Samaria or to the rolling hills of Galilee and tell the story of family members, neighbors and friends who had been unjustly executed by the state.

It wouldn’t have been hard. After the riots that followed the death of Herod the Great in 4 BCE, when rioters burned the city of Sephoris, the Roman legions restored order through the process of decimation. One man in every 10 was pulled out of the crowd, taken outside the city and crucified as a warning against unrest, without benefit of trial.

Good Friday wasn't a once-in-history event for the people whom Jesus lived with and walked among. It happened all the time.

It's the same in America now. Remember the names of those who have been denied justice by the authorities and killed without a trial. Can you even remember them all?

Michael Brown.

Eric Garner.

Walter Scott.

Philando Castile.

Alton Sterling.

Tamir Rice.

Terence Crutcher.

Sandra Bland.

Freddie Gray.

Laquan McDonald.

Unarmed. Shot by police, their murders justified just as the execution of Christ was. They were disturbing the peace. They were resisting arrest. They had a history. There were extenuating circumstances.

We were afraid.

When we in our fear excuse, allow or approve the death of the innocent, we take the reins of Caesar in our hands, give them a familiar grip, and we say to ourselves, “This isn't so bad.” When give approval to their deaths, let us remember the words of Jesus.

“Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me.”


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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This is the sermon on guns you probably won't hear

There is a sermon you probably won't hear in church tomorrow, and that's a shame, because it's a sermon that needs to be preached from every pulpit in this nation, from coast to coast, from North to South, from city to city, from the highest mountain to the lowest valley, until we understand and our leaders finally listen.

It's the sermon that says that a society that claims to value life and freedom but brushes off death as casually as it puts on a new coat, is a society that has shaken off all semblance of morality and justice, and values nothing but power. It's the sermon that says that our nation has come unmoored. It's the sermon that says our guns have become an idol, the NRA has become the priesthood of a false religion, and our government has been bought lock, stock and barrel.

It's the sermon that says "In Christ's name, enough."

Seventeen students died at Parkland school in Florida earlier this week. Add those to the 58 murdered at the Las Vegas Strip last October, to the 49 mowed down at the Pulse Night Club, the 20 first- and second-graders at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Remember the 33 college students killed at Virginia Tech in 2007? How about the 15 killed at Columbine High School in 1999? That number seemed so large at the time; now it almost seems like it's barely worth mentioning. There have been so many mass shootings in America that it's almost impossible to remember a time when they weren't routine, when Aurora, Colo. (2012, 12 dead); Jonesboro, Ark. (1998, 5 dead); and Erie, Pa. (1998, 1 dead), would be burned into our psyches forever.

Why do we tolerate this?

A long time ago the Phonecians worshiped a god name Moloch. Moloch wasn't a genteel god who liked to collect baubles, hear a few rhyming prayers and let people go about their business. He was a god of power. His priests promised the people wealth and good crops, military might and protection from their enemies. If you followed Moloch, you didn't have anything to worry about when other people came into your country and tried to take your place, they promised. You didn't need to be afraid of thieves, or home intruders or any threat to your well-being. If you worshiped Moloch, he had your back. All he wanted was your children.

Moloch was a right bastard of a god, but the Phonecians trusted him. There are remnants of their architecture, their literature and their art. The Israelites, when they came to the land, were appalled at what they found, and did their best to eradicate all trace of Moloch and the other gods of his ilk. The ruins we've found indicate that he had a tremendous appetite for the blood of humans, especially children.

The stories that his priests told are the same ones the NRA tells today about guns. There's a lot to be afraid of, but if you have a gun, you'll be safe. There's no need to worry about immigrants, inner-city gangs or even your own elected officials if you're armed enough. The bigger the gun, the better off you are, so why not own the kind of hardware professional troops use in combat zones? And if someone comes to town and massacres a dozen or more children? Well, that's just the price of being free. Anyone who opposes the exaltation of firearms is someone who hates freedom.

The Israelites didn't get rid of Moloch. He just hung around a while and opened shop under a new name with a new priesthood.

Our national religion makes a big deal about guns, and it's managed to convince a number of people that our embrace of gun culture is something that squares well with Christianity.

It does not.

The NRA and its acolytes spread an atmosphere of fear. There are bad people out there, and no one is coming to help you. The only way to stop them is if you are armed yourself. If they are armed, you need to be too. Put guns into every church, into every store, into every school. Fire first, and don't back down. When everyone is afraid and everyone has guns, and everyone is on edge, then we will know peace.

Jesus warns that those who live by violence will die violently, and he tells his disciples to put away weapons of violence. Rater than fearing the alien, the outsider or the stranger, he encourages us to take the risk, welcome them, and befriend them.

This is a message the church needs to shout, and that it needs to live out as loudly as it can. I don't expect to hear it.

This Sunday, most churches are going to offer noting more than an anodyne prayer for the latest victims of the latest horror show. Some will offer even less. There may be a few churches that collect an offering, but that's as far as it will go.

Six years ago, Trayvon Marin was murdered by a vigilante who stalked the teen to the point that he feared for his life and felt the only chance he had was to fight back. (Zimmerman, who was armed, shot Martin and killed him.) Few churches said anything about it that Sunday; my own pastor made a throwaway comment about it in the beginning of the sermon where pastors usually use their bad one-liners as warm-up material, and seemed surprised that anyone responded negatively.

The truth is, we live in times that are marked right now by profound spiritual darkness. Our federal government has embarked on a relentless campaign against immigrants of color, it has placed abusive and racist men in positions of power, and it is led by a man of vulgar appetites with no regard for the truth, nor for justice. The church in America can choose either to embrace this darkness and call it "light"; to focus on ""spiritual things" like truth, morality and principles of clean living; or it can call out evil in high places.

The NRA's tireless advocacy to sell more guns is one place we can start. The casual acquiescence of our leaders to the NRA's culture of death is a second.

It's a sermon our country needs to hear. Let's start preaching it.


Copyright © 2018 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Reconnecting with the Ghost of 1987

Starting in January 1987 and all the way through that year, I had the incomparably good fortune to live in New Zealand as an exchange student through AFS.

Founded by workers with the Ambulance Field Service appalled by the carnage of World War I, AFS has a simple, straightforward goal: Promote world peace by sending high school students from all around the world to live in another country for a year. Let them discover another culture, another people, and find a new set of eyes to see the world with. The understanding they gain can change the world and help to keep us from plunging off the brink again.

I lived a year in Rotorua, on the North Island, where I attended sixth form in Edmund Rice College, later renamed John Paul College. (For those needing something to anchor this to, sixth form is the equivalent to Harry Potter's year at Hogwart's in "The Half Blood Prince.")

AFS had a number of get-togethers over the course of the year. I never thought about it at the time, but in hindsight it makes complete sense. Wherever we were from, we were in sync, going through the same highs and lows of culture shock, homesickness, conflict with our host families, bullying and acceptance at school.

I didn't get on with many of the other American students, but I made a number of friends from Thailand, Indonesia, Iceland, Spain, Japan and other countries.

Two in particular stood out: Alwin Keil and Anushka Pedris. Every time we had one of these get-togethers, the three of us would end up hanging out together. In a recent conversation, I compared the three of us recently to Harry, Ron and Hermione. Not that we got into their level of hijinks and world-saving, but the amount of time we spent together at these get-togethers. After the first one, I quickly started looking for the two of them whenever there was an AFS gathering. I cannot imagine that year without the two of them.

This was in the days before widespread email and long before the Internet had moved into the home. The sun set on 1987; and Anushka returned to Sri Lanka, Alwin returned to West Germany, and I returned to Pittsburgh. The times and distance being what they were, we fell out of touch.

I've thought about them a lot the past 30 years, but when I've looked for them online, it's been like trying to find one particular drop of water in the ocean, or a specific grain of sand in the Gobi. You can Google "Hinako Tanaka," but if you don't know Japanese, good luck understanding the results. And Facebook helps you find only people who use it.

I still haven't found Alwin.

But I connected with Anushka last week, and that 17-year-old I used to be is somewhere inside, doing cartwheels in a school uniform I haven't worn in three decades.

Kitchen stove, stuff of nightmares

It was the worst nightmare I'd had since I was a child dreaming that Sleestak, reptile men from “The Land of the Lost,” were invading our house through a hole in the basement wall.

Nightmares. We all have them. Dreams are the brain's problem-solving mechanism working overtime while the conscious mind sleeps. When we have a nightmare, it's because the subconscious is trying to warn us of danger. “Stop watching 'The Land of the Lost!'” your brain screams. “Get dad to patch that hole in the basement wall.”

The truth is, there was no hole in the basement wall of the house I grew up in, although I did have an older brother Bill. We used to watch “The Land of the Lost” together on Saturday mornings, and we got along so well that sometimes he even appeared in my dreams, at least until the Sleestak got him. He stopped appearing after that.

When you get down to it, this was a fairly stupid dream to be scared over. It's kind of like having a dream in which your oldest brother becomes a dancing skeleton, and you get so scared that you lean over the railing to your bed and throw up on your younger brother while he's sound asleep in the lower bunk. You just can't help but feel a little silly afterward.

This particular nightmare was nothing like that. It was legitimately terrifying, with horrors beyond anything Stephen King has given us. There were zoning law violations, bad computer coding, defaced kitchen appliances, questionable H.R. decisions, and ultimate evil loosed upon the earth after a long captivity. Nightmares don't get worse than this.

In my dream, I was married to the president of the board at the Christian school I used to teach at in Bethlehem, Pa., and we ran a private airport out of our home. If the paperwork for that mixed use wouldn't be bad enough, our home was also a church, an honest-to-goodness Assemblies of God church with yellow padded pews and a baptismal at the front of the sanctuary.

I'd like to think that the dream at this point carried some emotional heft. My wife was leaving on a trip, taking the airport's only plane. I'd like to say that our hearts were heavy, our faces besotted with tears that mixed with the rain as it fell, but it was sunny and my wife merely smiled in her flight suit before she donned her helmet, and flew off from the runway that doubled as the church's rear parking lot.

I went inside, where I joined my friend Scott, our lone air traffic controller, in the kitchen; and we approached the stove.

Most kitchens have stoves, and most stoves are unremarkable. They have burners, and they have controls to control the heat. Whether your stove is gas or electric, it works pretty much the same. Turn it up, and the heat goes up; turn it down, and the heat goes down. Your stove may be black, it may be white, and it may be yellow, but probably the most memorable thing about it is how well you can use it to make a grilled cheese sandwich.

This stove was different. Years ago, someone had faced beings of indescribable evil, and with powerful enchantments they had locked them one after the other inside the stove. The stove had six burners, and each one held a different devil prisoner. As long as they were trapped there, the world was safe, but if they were ever set loose, we were doomed.

It was a heavy responsibility to have such a stove. As long as you were careful not to write the name of the imprisoned entity in an opening HTML tag right above the dial before lighting the burner, things were fine. You could even make a grilled cheese sandwich, and no one would be hurt.

“You need to free them,” Scott said. “Write their names.”

“But I don't want to,” I said.

“But you have to,” Scott said. He was nothing if not persistent.

“OK,” I said. He was also persuasive. “But I want to note that I don't agree with this.”

I wrote "" on one burner, and then turned it on. A blue flame blossomed amid the smell of burning gas, and the devil was loose. The horror was getting real, and I didn't even have a grilled sandwich to show for my troubles.

Just as I don't know what happened to Bill — did the Sleestak sacrifice him to their god, or did they torture him and turn him evil? — I don't remember everyone who was imprisoned in the stove. Aside from Satan, the only one I remember clearly is Dootor Doom, arch-enemy of The Fantastic Four.

All I can say for certain is that in one dramatic moment, I saw the armored arm of Doctor Doom rise up from the stove, and I started awake. The room was dark and all was quiet, save for my own rapid breathing. I was coated with sweat and filled with horror that I had unleashed such tremendous evil on an unsuspecting world. (Damn you, Scott. There, I said it. Damn you and your silver-tongued arguments. Damn you to hell, sir!)

It's been 18 years now since I had that dream. In that time, we've seen the worst terror attack on U.S. soil in history, and in the wake of a war that destabilized the Middle East, we've watched as ISIS has thrown the entire region into chaos. Domestically our social contract has unraveled as the wealth disparity between our richest citizens and the rest of us has grown ever wider, and far right ideologues have sought to undo all the hard-won progress of the past 60 years.

When you go to sleep tonight, if you find the stove in your dreams, stay away. Remember, I lit only two burners before I awoke.

There are still four more to go.


Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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(I wrote about this before)

Building a better mouse, one trap at a time

Some time ago, we had a mouse problem at our house.

Now, by “mouse problem” I do not mean that I was unable to beat my wife's high score on Windows Solitaire because the tracking ball on the mouse kept getting stuck. Nor do I mean that a mouse may have been politely poking her head through a hole in the wall and demurely offering to come back later if this was a bad time to come visit.

“Ooh,” we did not coo. “You adorable little thing! You must be starved. Here, have some peanut butter and crackers.”

No, we had a problem.

I would be working at the computer and from behind me I would hear not the pitter-patter of little feet, but the skitter-skitter of tiny paws. Sometimes instead of paws I would hear tiny teeth gnawing away at the wooden struts inside the walls, or at things that had fallen unnoticed to the floor at the back of the pantry and remained there unseen. We would be abed, and my wife, a far lighter sleeper than I, would hear an unwanted guest scurrying across the floor.

This was no dramatization of Aesop's fable. The city mouse hadn't merely invited the country mouse to come visit her in the city. She had arranged a full family reunion from Uncle Sid to distant cousin Yeta, with our house the grand hotel, safe from the feral cats that wander through our back yard.

Admission to the family reunion cost only $200, and came complete with access to an open bar and presentations on the history of the mouse family, from the time Uncle Webster and Cousin Cyrus spread plague the length of the Ohio River down to the present breakthroughs in spreading leptospirosis.

There was a time when we would have made a trip to the store and bought some poison. I'd have opened the boxes and placed them in strategic places where the children wouldn't see them, and where the dog couldn't get them. The mice of course would discover them and perform a tarantella in wonder over this unexpected bonanza of delicious green pellets, right up until they died of thirst, preferably outside.

Changing rules and concerns over the wisdom of putting such poison in the hands of homeowners meant that we could no longer buy the poison ourselves, so we called an exterminator. He came, sized up the problem, and made us an offer.

“I can set some poison and get rid of them for two hundred dollars,” he said.

That's a lot of money for something you'd like to think that you can do for yourself. So we resorted to traps, which after all are a fairly straightforward affair. You bait the trap, the bait attracts the mice, and the mice die. Maybe they fall into a bucket of water and drown, maybe they walk over glue and get stuck, or maybe they trigger a spring and it all ends with a loud snap. As long as it ends with a dead mouse, it's a story with a happy ending.

Alas, I failed to consider the role of evolution and the population pressures that humans have been applying to mice since time immemorial.

It's a principle of evolutionary theory that species adapt to changes in their environment, and each generation is slightly different from the one before it, and therefore harder to get rid of. Antibiotics eventually produce superbugs that are virtually unstoppable. Head lice develop a resistance to the insecticide that we place in delousing shampoo.

And mice? Ever since "Tom and Jerry" debuted, they've been getting uppity. They've learned to outrun the cat, and now they're figuring out how to avoid traps.

I set up a bucket of water in the basement, a tin can smeared with peanut butter, resting on a metal rod over the middle of the bucket. The idea is that a mouse will climb the ramp to the rim of the bucket, walk out into the middle to get the peanut butter, and then roll into the water and drown.

The mice weren't having it.

We set glue traps. In the morning the traps had paw prints on them, next to what I only can assume was mouse script for “Calvin was here,” written in the glue with tiny sticks.

We also set the traditional spring-loaded traps that go snap in the night. These proved to exert the biggest population pressures of all. After we eliminated the mice that were stupid enough to set off the traps, we were left with a mouse population of gradually increasing intelligence.

At first the smarter mouse would convince his companion to run across the trap and see if it was armed, and then eat the bait. After this had gone on a few months, the surviving mice, born from the intelligent mice, had wised up to this trick, and formed a union to protest their unsafe work conditions. That in turn led to exploratory committees that investigated ways to get the food without setting off the traps, and even administrative requirements that the mice forage where there were no traps at all.

It seemed like it was all over at that point. Mouse unions had bettered the working conditions and livelihood of everyone but the people trying to kill them.

Deliverance came, of all things, from plaster of paris. Apparently if you thoroughly mix a cup of it with a cup of all-purpose flour, you create a lethal combination. Drawn to the flour, mice also will eat the plaster of paris, which turns to rock in their guts and kills them. You can add milk if you want, to create dough balls, but either way intestines of rock apparently are detrimental to a mouse's good health.

Problem solved.

At least until the next evolutionary leap.




Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Final thoughts on the Nashville Statement

Honestly, I feel sorry for the people who signed the Nashville Statement, in ways that I can't even begin to express. They've imagined a god who is small and petty and made themselves more like it through their worship.

It's not that they consider male-on-male sex to be a sin, it's the way they have elevated it to become the Sin before all Sin, the one that warrants special attention, the one that must be guarded against before all others, and all the while the wall is breached, the enemy has poured through the walls, and the city has been taken.

They could have spoken against racism, against the seduction of wealth and power, against the dangers of polarization and division, against cruelty, child abuse, divorce, domestic violence and so much more, but instead they focused on this.

There are some very real and very personal demons bedeviling these guys, and hope they get the help they need.

The never-ending game of peek-a-boo

I'm from Pittsburgh area. My parents still live there. It's about 300 miles to get there, or roughly six hours, given the occasional pit stop.

A little less than 16 years ago, we took Oldest Daughter and her foster brother out to visit my folks. Oldest had proved herself excellent at entertaining herself on the trip before, with the Elmo Toy From Hell and other diversions as may occur to a 2-year-old on a long trip, such as naps and shouting "Again! Again!" every time her favorite Jimmy Buffet track had ended.

But Lumpy? We had no idea. He was only beginning to discover how to play at our house, and we had no idea how he would fare in a car.

We needn't have worried, Since he had come to stay at our house six weeks or so earlier, Lumpy and Oldest had bonded quickly. Besides dressing him in her best princess clothes and flowery head bands, she ran around the house with him, played "This little piggy" on his toes once her language skills had reached that point, and consistently challenged and engaged him in regular, wholesome play. She was just beyond his ability, and just his size, so they made for natural engagement.

For example, you probably knew that if you cover yourself or your child with a blanket, and then pull the blanket away, you can shout "Peek-a-boo!" and have lots of fun together, You probably also know that it teaches object permanency, the idea that things continue to exist even when we can't se them, and that after you're bored with it and are ready to hang yourself with your child's blanket, she will want to keep the fun going for hours more.

And if she has a foster brother in the back seat with her, it can.

Jesus isn't about morality

Jesus was a moral guy, but he hasn't built his kingdom on morality.

There's no indication that he engaged or won over anyone but avoiding them over their moral behavior. Rather it's his presence in their lives and in their homes that did that. Given an invitation to a gay friend's wedding, I've no question what he would do, whatever you believe his views on homosexuality to be. He'd attend. Look at the biblical record.

When Adam sinned, God didn't stay away, fearful of appearing to approve the decision to wreck their harmony. Instead he went into the Garden, looked for him, and called to him.

When Jesus saw people overindulging, he didn't stay away for fear of being seen as a hedonist. He ate and drank with them, and become a friend of gluttons and drunkards.

When the father saw his son, he didn't hold back to avoid endorsing all that his son had done in a faroff land. After spending all that time looking for his son, the father ran down the road to meet him, welcomed him home, and threw a party.

Years ago I heard about a missionary in India whose neighbor had a valuable cow. The missionary believed that the cow was valued inappropriately, but when the cow died, he went and mourned with his neighbor.

Scripture enjoins us to laugh with those who laugh and mourn with those who mourn. We'd make a much better and more Christlike impression by attending the weddings of our gay friends and wishing them well than by absenting ourselves and claiming that we're doing it out of obedience to God.

God never commanded a anything of the sort, and it's not what Jesus would do either.

A matter of justice, not morality: The Nashville Statement

Let me tell you about one of my best friends.

About two years ago, I was in a really dark place. All I could do to mark the passage of time was to see the shadows cast by the sun as it moved overhead, This friend let me call her and cry even when I couldn't explain what was wrong. She made me promise each night that I would text her in the morning so that she would know I was all right. She watched as I bared the worst parts of myself, and never looked away. All she did was to express her support for me, her confidence that I was a decent person, and her promise that if the world burned down, she would stand in the ashes at the end of it all and still be there for me.

In short, Indigo was the very real, very human and very necessary presence of Christ in my life when I most needed him.

Did I mention that she is gay?

She is not just slightly gay, she is completely gay. She is so gay that she leaves rainbow smudges as she walks down the street, and gets followed by a trail of unicorns even when she goes to Target.

Indigo is not gay by choice. If she were, she would have chosen to stop sometime during the week after her parents discovered that she was gay and put her through hell over it. If she were gay by choice, she would have chosen to stop some time in college when she saw how society provides all sorts of mechanisms for men and women to meet each other and date, but far fewer for gay couples to meet. If she were gay by choice, she would have chosen to be straight all the lonely years of her 20s.

Do you know what Indigo wants more than anything? She wants to be loved She wants to spend her days with someone who loves her, and come home at night to that person. She wants to chase dreams with someone who loves her, have someone there to hold her hand when it gets frightening, to snuggle with for the nice parts, and to make the big decisions for her when the time comes.

She wants the same thing you want. She wants the same thing I want.

Now, morally, according to the Nashville Statement people, what she wants is a horrible thing because Indigo is gay and cannot find that level of connection and intimacy with a man. The Nashville Statement signatories tell her that she needs to be alone, never have sex, and never have the sort of emotionally intimate life partner that they take for granted.

It's not enough for them to say she can't have the sacrament of marriage with another woman. They don't even want her to have the legal protections and benefits of a state-recognized union.

And yet the chief issue for people of faith is not morality but justice. That's the major theme of Scripture. Pursue justice above all else.
And what the signatories of the Nashville Statement are after is not a moral issue, it is a fundamental injustice. As such, it is something I cannot in good conscience as a follower of Christ accede to.

Not to condemn: Jesus and the Nashville Statement

Jesus never let a person's morality or immorality get in the way of making friends with him.

When a prostitute made a big scene of showering him with kisses, he castigated the people who judged her for her sinfulness. When he met the Samaritan woman at well, he stirred up scandal by getting into a conversation with her. In both those cases, he acknowledged their lifestyles, but that was never the point of the conversation; it was more like an aside.

It's like acknowledging that your son has boogers in his hair, but hey, he made it downstairs in time to catch the bus, and that's what matters right now. To the woman caught in adultery in John 8 he does say, "Go now and sin no more," but that's after he's already set her free. "Has no one stayed to condemn you? Then neither do I condemn you." His whole message to her is liberation and freedom,and has been from the moment the priests brought her out and humiliated her just to see if they could trip Jesus up.

Jesus' tone is entirely different from that of the Nashville Statement. Jesus was willing to risk people saying he was soft on adultery -- and they did! The oldest MSS of John's gospel don't include that story, because it was so shocking -- just because he wanted this unnamed woman to know that she was free.

When he says "Go and sin no more," that's a final declaration of freedom, that she can leave, that she can have a fresh start and none of these men are going to hound her. The Nashville Statement is so set on drawing a line in the sand that it's willing to alienate people in the name of "tough love," to bar from fellowship people who disagree. It's so determined to be right, that it 's OK with alienating the outcasts whom Christ came for.

Church history often isn't as unwavering as we think it is. Many Christians today will claim that the church has always been opposed to abortion, for instance, because the Bible teaches that life begins at conception. The Bible actually says nothing about conception, it calls for inducing an abortion when the mother is suspected of adultery (caveat: rabbis generally agree that it wouldn't have worked, which suggests it was God's way of telling jealous husbands to calm down), and in fact the evangelical church largely welcomed Roe v. Wade at the time.

In the same way, the church's stand on homosexuality historically is not definably the same as we now perceive it. For starters, there is no koine word for "homosexual," in part because our notion of sexual orientation has been informed and shaped by science , so we understand that people;s sexual attractions fall along on a spectrum.

The New Testament has a few places where it refers to same-sex sexual relations, but it uses different terms, which suggests that it's referring to specific behaviors. These phrases have been translated as "homosexual offenders" and "abusers of the flesh" at various times in church history, and as "effeminate men" in others.

Church leaders at times throughout church history have written in praise of love between men in ways that would make the Nashville Statement signatories uncomfortable, at a minimum.

The Nashville Statement: Two points

There is nothing Christlike about the Nashville Statement. It upholds a code of morality at the cost of people. In Christ we see someone who included people at the expense of a moral code.

It's a bold claim to assert that the Nashville Statement merely repeats what the church has said for 2,000 years. Homosexuality has been a pronounced bugaboo of the Christian Right only since the late 80s and the fall of the Soviet Union.

Regarding the Nashville Statement

I'm going to say something that may shock you. Being gay isn't about sex.

I swear to God.

That's not the impression you would get from the signatories of the Nashville Statement, freshly released by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. The Nashville Statement -- so called because it was written and signed in Nashville -- is an attempt by certain prominent evangelical leaders to draw a line in the sand over the cultural shifts in the United States the past 50 years.

It makes the sort of strident condemnations that we've come to expect from such groups: adultery is bad, polygamy is bad, premarital sex is bad, transgenderism is bad, homosexuality is bad. The whole thing is couched in a series of 14 affirmations and rejections that focus on what the signatories presume is the "clear meaning" of the biblical texts, all focused on the configuration of people's genitals and what they do with them in private.

"Clear meaning" becomes more suspect once we consider cultural and literary context in an attempt to understand what the biblical authors actually were talking about, and how to apply those principles in our society. But that doesn't seem to matter here.

What the Nashville Statement and its signatories miss is that gay people are, well, people, with the same desires and life goals as other people.

Being gay isn't about whom you have sex with, it's about whom you love. Like heterosexuals, gays want to be with someone they love, to spend their lives and grow old together. The little things that matter in a straight relationship -- reading a book or playing a game together, sharing a meal, having a conversation when you come home from a day on the job, sharing what matters to you, making plans together, the touch of a hand, and having someone to hold you when you're upset, scared or lonely -- those are things that matter in a same-sex relationship as well.

Article X is the killer, though. According to this statement, it's not possible to be a Christian and support your best friend's decision to transition from male to female, nor to affirm the happiness another friend has found with her fiancee. Do these things, and you've left the fold. You're an apostate.

This is some serious stuff. It requires a response.

I thought about all the great times I've had with my best friend, who was born David but is now Jennifer. There's the time Chicken Soup for the Soul threatened to sue us. One afternoon at college as she was listenig to "The Acapella Project 2," I opened her door just to say "This is really cheesy" and then shut it just as quickly. I stood at her wedding, and she stood at mine. We've been there for each other through divorce, head injury, three kids apiece, and even an unfortunate escapade with white Christian rap.

I thought about another friend and our late-night conversations over the Internet when she was working and I couldn't sleep. There's been snark, there's been laughter both out of control and out of bounds, a cascade of puns and an exchange of books. She's been there when I've stood on the brink and the void threatened to swallow me; and I've seen the high cost that can be exacted by the attitudes celebrated in this Nashville Statement, when her family discovered she was gay.

Or there's Darren, one of the friendliest and most drama-free people I've ever worked with in the theatre world. I've found him to be a rock: supportive, professional, flexible and a joy to work with as an actor, as a stage manager and as a co-producer.

These are the people the authors of the Nashville Statement say I have to reject in order to go to heaven with them.

But I think of all that I've been through with them, and the kind of people they are, and I find that I must borrow a sentiment from Huck Finn.

"All right, I'll go to hell then."



Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Hell is not other people

Jean Paul Sartre famously said "Hell is other people."

All respect to Sartre, the man was full of shit. Hell isn't other people; it's no other people. It's having as much space as you could want, even more, and no one to share it with. Count yourself king of infinite space, gaze upon the desolate void you inhabit, and feel the desolate void that inhabits you.

Why do you think the cruelest and most inhuman prisons put inmates in solitary? It's because we're not given our own soul, we're given a piece of one big soul, and in hell our piece withers and blanches and takes all life, all hope, all joy with it as it dies.

Watch the shadows move on the wall of your cave, pilgrim. We live in hell, and the only one with the key is the person in the cell next to you.




Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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