Posted on

Ages of Piety

“It’s early yet. All drastic changes don’t herald new ages.”

The fourth year of the Education for Ministry (EfM) program is devoted to theology. EfM years equate to Richard Hooker’s classic Anglican three-legged stool: scripture, tradition, and reason. The first two EfM years are on the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the third year is on church history and tradition. The fourth year is theology year, which I like to think of as the year for reason.

Our group’s fourth year students are now reading Timothy Sedgwick’s The Christian Moral Life: Practices of Piety. Sedgwick ties the practices of Christian piety to the challenges in life that vary over time. He depicts three phases of American piety.

The first, he calls “traditional” and ties it to the society typical of the first half of the twentieth century. At that time community survival was crucial. Vine Maple Farm is my name for the farming community in which I grew up, immersed in what Sedgwick calls traditional piety.

Social interaction was a necessity, not a luxury. Neighbors had no choice but to get along and work together. Tasks like putting hay in the barn, thrashing grain, and harvesting potatoes took more concentrated labor than a single family could provide, but with the cooperation of willing neighbors, everyone could survive and sometimes prosper.

But cooperation doesn’t happen without reciprocity. Rules are required, like returning borrowed tools  in better condition than when received. Visiting, exchanging meals, celebrating birthdays, weddings, and funerals were necessary to keep communications lines open and the community working. This spirit of cooperation and mutual support was the vital characteristic of traditional piety. Read my impressions of this life in posts like Chicken Catching Night.

Traditional piety declined in importance as people got jobs. Instead of relying on their neighbors, folks began to rely more on their job and employer. This, and other societal changes brought on the form of piety that Sedgwick calls “modern.” For me, this was the piety of the Vietnam War protests in which an equitable future became the dominant concern of folks who were morally concerned about their world.

I mark the beginning of “post-modern” piety to nine-eleven when America discovered vulnerability. I happened to be at the east coast Consumer Electronics Show in Atlanta when the Trade Towers went down. I entered the show hall early, preparing for a panel discussion on a new release of our team’s product that I thought was exciting and would make the company a mint.

By the one o’clock, my bosses and colleagues were huddled together in a hotel dining room worrying over what to do next. My boss, who lived in Brooklyn, was frantic because his eighty-year-old mother had been in Manhattan for the day and was returning home on foot, walking over the Brooklyn bridge. We were all figuring out how to get home as safely and quickly as possible. Since planes were grounded in Atlanta, a group from Seattle formed a caravan of three rental cars for forty-three hours of driving straight through back to the northwest. Our piety had shifted focus from the future to vulnerability and safety in less than a day.

In 2025, we’ve practiced post-modern piety for almost twenty-four years, but I wonder: have we moved on to a new stage? America changed decisively in November 2024. Have we passed on from community, future equity, and vulnerability to something new? And more terrifying?

This week, our EfM group discussed our changing feelings about Tesla vehicles. A year ago, a Tesla Y was a desirable vehicle. Its minimal carbon footprint, sleek design, and low operating costs were all attractive. But today? For some folks, a Tesla has become an advertisement for a nihilistic creator intent on rapid and radical change, reshaping government programs indiscriminately, and pursuing threat diplomacy.

It’s early yet. All drastic changes don’t herald new ages.

But caution has never stopped me from making wild guesses. I predict a decline in reliance on government and return to something like traditional piety in which personal cooperation shines more than it has for decades.

Today, government services and society in general appear disrupted and not as trustworthy as they once were. Consequently, we may have to turn more often to our families and friends for support. Personal communities will become more important, revitalizing bowling leagues, lodges, and churches. Neighborly visits and community potlucks will comfort us in a turbulent world. Computer networks will foster interdependent support groups and shift away from spotlighting blazing individualism. Helpers will become more prominent than influencers.

Sound utopian? Well, why not?

Posted on

We Forget So Easily

We forget so easily where we came from, what we are. Here I am, a solid citizen of Whatcom County who has served on a county board, has voted in every election for the past fifty years, and pays plenty of local, state, and federal taxes.

I wish that the anti-immigrants of today would realize that a hundred years ago, they would likely themselves be the target of their own anti-immigrant mindset.

Last week, the sheriff of Whatcom County announced that the department’s role would be “a collaborative partnership in participating in [federal] Task Forces related to criminal activity that affects our community—not immigration enforcement.”

Our attorney daughter pointed out to me that the announcement was unnecessary because it is a foregone conclusion. Local officials who enforce federal law violate the 10th amendment (the states’ rights amendment). Subsequent supreme court decisions have made the separation clear. She cited Prinz v. U.S. 1997 SCOTUS.

The sheriff’s announcement was publicized in Whatcom News, a popular– at least with me– local news source. I was disappointed that the reader comments on the announcement were mostly unfavorable.

For the most part, the commenters confused the roles of local and federal law enforcement, saying that the sheriff was shirking his constitutional duty, when, in fact, he was correctly stating his constitutional role.

I am repeatedly amazed how personal sentiment changes people’s minds. Not long ago, the same folks who favored immigrant deportation and suppression of minority rights were asserting states’ rights against federal protection manifestos. Now, as the federal pendulum swings, states rights are sent to the back of their agenda.

I am also amazed at the changes in my home, Whatcom County. I can remember (just barely, I admit) when church services in both halves of my German and Dutch immigrant family were regularly held in German and Dutch respectively.

I overheard conversations about deportation and internment camps for Germans that my grandparents feared during World Wars I and II.

My grandfather was born in Minnesota, but his parents were both born in East Prussia, Germany. I vaguely recollect hearing that my great grandfather formally became a U. S. citizen in order to get a U. S. passport that would ensure a safe return home after a visit to Germany, probably in the 1920s. However, until then, my grandfather’s citizenship was from his birth in Wells, Minnesota, not his parents’ citizenship.

My grandmother was born in Germany and was never a documented U.S. citizen. Her citizenship derived from her marriage to my grandfather. In today’s parlance, an undocumented immigrant.

It’s likely that if you were to scratch into the family history of anyone whose Whatcom County roots go deeper than the mid-twentieth century you will find undocumented immigrants among their forebears.

As our daughter points out, the difference is that those Whatcom County immigrants were white, not brown. When I counter that a white at the bottom of the social ladder is still at the bottom of the ladder, she frowns and says its easier to climb to the next step if you don’t have to change your skin color; I have to agree.

I wish that the anti-immigrants of today would realize that a hundred years ago, they would themselves likely be the target of their own anti-immigrant mindset.

Posted on

Chicken Catching Night

We lived differently in the 1950s on Waschke Road. Neighbors and relatives relied on each other when a job needed extra hands. Haying, thrashing, digging potatoes, hog butchering, and chicken catching were the community events that entertained kids before we began to see the wider world on television.

Chicken catching came shortly after the first killing frost. In Whatcom County, that’s often about now, mid-October. School had started by then. Kids were needed to help, so chicken catching night was usually the first Friday after a hard frost, which withered the squash and pumpkin vines in the vegetable garden. Their orange and yellow bounty brightened the stage for chicken catching.

In those days, my grandpa ordered cartons of baby chicks by mail in the spring. These chicks would replace the laying hens he kept in the chicken house.

Grandpa set out the chicks under a metal hood heated with light bulbs and suspended by a block and tackle from the collar tie rafters in our brooder house. As spring turned to summer, Grandpa raised the hood gradually as the growing chicks began to explore the brooder house. Summer wore on and the baby chicks grew into hardy pullets, that ranged over a wider and wider area, eventually running loose all over the farm yard, grazing on grass, weeds, and bugs. By September, they had begun to lay a few eggs and roosted in the orchard at night. They only went into the brooder house for water and wheat that Grandpa set out for them.

Towards fall, Grandpa would call Wallace Poultry in Bellingham. Today, city folks get coffee and bagels, something we had never heard of, at a shop called The Bagelry, which occupies the old Wallace Poultry store. Decades ago, instead of fancy coffee, Wallace sent out trucks to pick up the old hens from our chicken house. If a kid was lucky, the truck didn’t arrive until after school and the kid got to join the squawking mayhem of tossing the old birds into wire crates that the trucker loaded on his flatbed. We kids speculated on exactly what happened to those scrawny and scrappy old birds. Needless to say, we only sold to Wallace, never bought their poultry.

When the old hens were gone, my dad and grandpa would thoroughly clean the chicken house and spray it down with Carbolineum to kill mites and parasites in preparation for chicken catching night. Some years Grandpa would brighten up the coop walls with a coat of white wash, another job to entertain a kid if Grandpa didn’t finish before he got home from school.

Chicken catching night was a big event. Relatives and neighbors carrying flashlights came to help capture a couple hundred sleeping pullets. Anything in the dark with flashlights was fun for the kids. Squawking chickens added to the excitement. The men would shine their flashlights into the trees, reach up and catch the pullets by the legs. The kids would grab the legs the men lowered down and carry the noisy struggling birds to the chicken house feed room where Grandpa had a wooden barrel waiting. We’d drop the chickens in the barrel. Grandpa pulled them out one by one, looked them over, set aside the culls, then forced a worming pill down their throats and let them loose in the chicken coop. The chicks in the spring were all supposed to be hens, but a few roosters made it through and had to be set aside. Grandpa also didn’t like to feed runts and the occasional one-legged hen who wouldn’t lay eggs anyway.

When all the pullets were in the chicken house and wormed, it was late and we were all tired. My mother and grandmother would have coffee and dessert ready for everyone. In October, pie made with red Gravenstein apples from the orchard was the rule. Even the kids got milk with a little coffee. Tired folks in those days did not fret over drinking coffee at night.

Sleep always came easy after chicken catching night on Waschke Road.