I live on the farm I was born on, land homesteaded by my great-grandparents at the end of the nineteenth century, ten or so miles from the Salish Sea and the Canadian border, one of the last areas in the country to be subsumed into white European culture. A few years ago, I began to think seriously about the original owners of our farm. I now believe that my grandparents learned some of their farming techniques from the Lummi Indian Nation.
My immediate family lives on the road that was my grandfather’s driveway. Most of my working life was on the Seattle east side, reporting to management in New York City, but my family stayed on Waschke Road. Instead of leaving the homestead, I learned to work remotely with teams spread across the globe.
My grandparents, my parents, my sister, and my cousins are all dead or moved away. My wife and I live in our mother-in-law's house. Our son and his family live in the old farmhouse and work the farm. Our daughter is a newly-fledged attorney starting a family law practice. She and her family also live in a house on the family farm.
I was not born breech, but I came out contrarian. When someone says it’s night, I involuntarily think of all the reasons and circumstances that might cause what they call night to be day. This habit brought unbounded joy to my teachers in elementary and high school.
My mother’s family is stalwart predestinarian Dutch Calvinist. My father’s family is stubborn German Lutheran. While I was growing up, my mother and father got along fine, but the families clashed regularly on the fine points of their respective churches. Holiday theology depended on the side of the family we had dinner with.
After cleaning barns on the farm, college was an intellectual adventure. I started in mathematics. On a contrarian whim, I insisted on taking Far Eastern Civilization instead of Western Civ, which delighted me with alternatives to the Dutch-German thought patterns I grew up with. Learning Chinese and the discipline of historical study of ancient Chinese texts, roughly contemporaneous with the Hebrew bible, fascinated me. Before long, I was immersed in a PhD program in early Chinese history and literature.
I was academically successful but emotionally flat-busted, aching with homesickness for the farm on Waschke Road, which is odd when I think about it now because I much preferred living on the south side of Chicago.
Finally, with about half of my dissertation written, I packed up and returned to Waschke Road to finish my thesis, which I soon abandoned.
For a decade, I was lost. I tried to return to my Lutheran roots and earned a journeyman carpenter’s certificate through a state apprenticeship. Neither worked out. Intellectually, I couldn’t jam myself into the constrained package that my family congregation insisted on, and I struggled to find enough construction work to support my wife and two children.
With my wife’s encouragement, I took a big gulp and returned to college to get a degree in computer science, which came quickly with a background in mathematics. This led to a thirty-year career in software development with an inside view of multi-national corporations as a software developer and manager, reporting to bosses in New York City, while living on Waschke Road.
Ten years ago, I retired. Since then, I have searched. I volunteered as a public library trustee, trying to use my business experience for the public good.
When the pandemic lockdown hit, I stumbled on to the livestream services from Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle. I found something I had been missing for a long time. Working remotely on video screens was nothing new for me— I had worked that way for decades— and I soon signed up for Saint Mark’s online programs, which led me to EfM and acceptance into the Episcopal Church and membership in the Saint Mark’s congregation. The cathedral is a hundred miles from the farm.
“Whatsoever was written aforetime was written for our learning.” (Roman 15:4)
This is the beginning of my third year of EfM. I’ve participated in many bible studies, but the reading of the entire bible and apocrypha in the first two years of EfM has crashed over me like a rain-soaked wind off the Salish Sea.
Too often, prior to EfM, I have heard patriarchy, brutality, racism, and violence in scripture explained away as allegory or veiled and indirect language instead of examined and discussed. How often has the unspoken message been, “We all know that this can’t mean what it says, so let’s move on.” This approach is unacceptable to someone trained in the study of ancient texts.
EfM gives its participants an opportunity to read and discuss scripture without checking intelligence and reason at the door, a freedom that I had never allowed myself prior to EfM.
EfM has cleared away heaps of slag and ordure, revealing much more difficult scriptures, but with great depth and beauty.
I’ve noticed this in St. Mark’s evening prayer, a service I zoom into several times a week for confession and prayer with readings from the lectionary. Almost every evening, I hear something in the readings that touches on some troubling or inspiring fact or event of the day. A line in the Psalms that speaks to the cache of gold bars held by the senator from New Jersey, or an image in Kings that describes the cruelty of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Text from Revelations that could be eyewitness reporting of the earthquakes and floods in North Africa.
These are not the moral lessons I was taught to seek in Scripture. Instead, I see that life and scripture both have unjust, brutal, and violent elements, but all ultimately lead to the love of God, the resurrection of the body, the life everlasting, and the kingdom of heaven, although the way is not clear, and we all stumble.
Scripture and life are not instruction books or how-to manuals. They are messages, seldom simple or easy to interpret, but for our learning,