Beneath Mount Santiago

Posted on July 11, 2002 in Neighborhood Reflections

We live in different worlds, my neighbors and I. All I have to do is look at the voter registration rolls when I visit the polls at election time and review the names along my short street. Republican. Republican. Republican. The list goes on. Then, nearly alone, two Democrats — Lynn and myself.

I sometimes joke that I have been sent here to prostelytize. Truly, howver, I am under no illusion that I can change hearts with either my words or my examples. What time tells me is that hearts will change themselves for better or for worse. I can only leave out my thoughts for others to see on these pages, maybe make an observation or two in casual conversation that will sink deep. Usually, I feel, it is best just to be kind. People around me have a desparate need to believe in our institutions in these days when our federal system limps along and the government comes under attack from many quarters — libertarian, millenialist, old line communist — who hope to bring it down so that they may realize some utopian vision that will cost many lives.

Unlike my neighbors, who all put up steel signs with the legend “God Bless America”, courtesy of Saddleback Church, I don’t look for moral decline in such things as the loss of the words “under God” in the pledge or the failure of our schools to distribute the 10 commandments to every pupil and every teacher. I see our moral decline as an increasing tolerance for calumnies against the poor and for sharp accounting practices intended to drive the price of stocks up following an annual report. I’m a middle aged Jeremiah, pointing to the Jehoiakim in the White House, and watching as no one reads the scrolls he puts out. Part of me has always dreamed that I had a calling as a prophet — ever since I discovered that my name, “Joel”, belonged to one of the anti-militarists of the Bible. Prophets have always contended with the fact that people are more riled up by vice and complacent about greed and military adventurism. The Bible itself speaks many times against these and very seldom against sexual problems. Yet the rants of the preachers, in our age of swords shattering plowshares, focus on sex and sex alone.

Unfortunately, a prophet must be feared and reviled. Parents must warn their children to stay away from the wild eyed man who stops to stare at the purple blossoms of the mimosa trees or to sniff the bark of a eucalyptus. When and if they read my stuff, I’m sure they feel a little nervous because like Ezekiel, I point to a valley filled with bones. It’s a scary thing to feel like a prophet, to know that your excuses about incapability won’t wash with the force propelling your pen. There, before you always, is the burning coal, ready to cauterize the falsehoods from your lips and make you write and speak only the Truth.

I have found, to my relief, that the truth is not only pointing to the bent backs of the latino gardeners who keep our waspish community a happy, green, place or gesturing down the wires toward distant nations where children spin, press, and pack our clothes in humid tropical sweat shops. The truth is also the flattish clouds drifting into the twin peaks of the Saddleback. It’s the heat in this night, the flame of day that billows without the luminance of the sun. It’s the fear encased in the tawny grasses on the hill sides that one match could ignite. And it’s the single, snowy blossom of the cactus that bloomed on my deck, for just a few hours yesterday, before Lynn could get home so that I could show it to her. Maybe it will open again tomorrow. If so, I’ll take a picture.