O Say Can We See?

"O Say Can We See?"

Love congregations, love cities, love congregations loving cities, for whom Jesus weeps; pure faded thrift-shop denim robe embroidered, backside Chicago skyline, frontside Spirit's flame: Jubilee, fresh starts, fair chances, forgiving whatever holds back and keeps down, spreading news, speaking to powers, loving in spite of them-and-our selves, skyrocketing numbers, self-determining peoples - O say can we see! From first fifty to nearly two hundred, Uniting Nations? Cities of God? New Jerusalems?

Reputation precedes primal preaching -- That carpenter! We know his family! Who does he think he is fooling? Coming so near as to dwell among us? No matter who knows us or not, where or how we grow up, how little honor paid fledgling prophets, on road with no food, no money, no extra clothing, no place to stay, nothing to offer but who we are and what Word's stuck in our guts?

I, who find myself stranger at home, send you to find home among strangers!

Religiously Protestant, Politically American, creatures of Reformation, Revolution, born to rebelling, resisting gross concentrations of greed with great expectations of grace -- Barfull of bikers in "Wild Ones" asking, What are you rebelling against? Brando responding, What you got? Finishing bathroom and breakfast each day, driving to work, already consuming from twenty-some nations, interdependencing all Creation, extreme social-costing: excluding, excepting, exploiting, extracting, expropriating . . .

Such are "Spiritual Forces of Wickedness," "Evil Powers of This World," up against "Freedom and Power God gives us to resist!" Holy Comforter, yes, but Counsellor, too; Moral -- even Legal? -- Representation confronting with Judges and Kings: "If the people speak, and the king doesn't listen, something is wrong with the king. If the king acts precipitously, and the people do nothing, something is wrong with the people." (Joan Chittister)

"Like lambs in the midst of wolves," declaring, "Peace to this house!"
We have come to be with you because God cares for your life, and because God cares for your life, we also care for you. Period. There would be nothing more -- no invitations to join the Church, no programs to offer for people or their kids, no rummage to give away, no groups to join or meetings to attend, no gimmicks, no concealed motives, no hidden agendas. There would just be the bare announcement of God's love, and the freedom which that love gives people to love each other . . . First of all, the Church must simply be in the world -- for the life of any person, just as it is. (William Stringfellow)

I saw Sam Song, full of cancer, doing that just this week, going from room to room, knocking on many doors, announcing God's love, at the Progressive Care Center in Sparks, where Sam inhabits a room by himself.

Biblical faith "eschatological," inveighing for "endings," "last days," to things as they are, by varying ways and means, to be sure, but living as if "ending" of evident evils were pressingly near --
"We must take our responsible and loving places at table of power . . . Our old revolution against oppression unfairness never concluded. A joyful revolution! If you will put yourself fearlessly into it, keeping always an open mind and a tolerant heart -- for those are the flags of justice and freedom. Yet those lofty banners signify your life now and onward to the last days of your happy, meaningful, and love-filled life." (Granny "D" Haddock)

Including, inviting, context of Declaration, "in Course of Human Events," not merely American ones! "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," not any one segregate segment thereof! "Opinion of Humankind," all of us, "a Candid World." Everything, everyone, still in Creation, in Evolution, new spaces, new species, surfacing universally all the time, urging us: Nothing more ennobling than "going on to perfection," wildest the dreams against greatest the odds.

Evolutionarily speaking, humans the Rest of Creation, who's left to go on? Related to -- Sabbath Rest! Pentecost Rest! Jubilee Rest! Seventh Day Rest! Seventh Year Rest! Even Seven Times Seven Year Rest! Arising, aroused, to the Rest of God? Breaking all cycles? All built-in oppressions? Rich cycling richer, poor poorer -- debt, plus addiction, plus prison, plus war, plus death.

Jubilee Promise finally, fully, freely enfleshing first time Jesus preaches -- Good News to Poor! Liberty to Oppressed! Embodying in Pentecost, Earliest Church, Acts of Apostles, giving all so none stays in need, solo submitting to symphonic senses of self, symptoms submitting to systems: New Wine, New Wineskins, New Patches, New Garments --
Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. TransAmerican Dream!

David's ambiguous kingliness inching toward Jesus? Crucified Savior, "King of the Jews?" Audaciously admixing glories of gore, polyamorus peace? In apotheotic citizenship, embryonic discipleship? "Someone who has a ministry has citizenship with God that may conflict with citizenship in a particular state. There it is! If there is a ministry of the laity, then Church is no longer the same as Empire." (Loren Mead) "Citizens of God?" As well as Disciples of Whomever? Means always leavened by Ends? Witnessing larger, more spacious Hope and Purpose? So problematically inexperienced a nation, promising so impossibly much, growing impatience, the world with us, with divine might, divine right, passing to us -- So many Elijahs, slaughtering slews of rivals? Still biding, still hiding, in end-times, in end-caves? Stuck in ancestral cycles? Dismantling?

Jairus, consummate citizen, named and known, leader of class, nothing to do with Jesus, but for rash desperation, daughter lying near death; woman, defiant disciple, unnamed, unknown, unnoticed, without claim on Jesus at all, but for undieable, undeniable yearning within, fighting through odds against stealing a healing, freezing Jesus, dead to rights in his treasonable tracks . . .

Playing Our Part by Part

"Playing Our Part by Part"

Elijah finding through fighting, no closer to faith than before, stripping to essence, defenseless: Where is our God? Why is our soul cast down, disquieted in us? Why have you forgotten us? Why do we mourn? . . . Forty days living off angel-meals, lately delivered, gently called out once again . . .

"Jesus always and only for us Beginning Point with 'God,' Who goes by Other Faces, Other Names, Other Faiths, Other Works, recalling, retooling, relocating us: Family with All Others, Lovers of Diversity, respecting Every Identity,
Lovers of Complexity, respecting Every Integrity." (Progressive Christian Church, adapted) No longer "Shock and Awe" to us, nor even Earthquake, Wind, Fire; but Sounds of Sheer Silence! Very Absence of Right Answers! Only Questions, to ask and be asked, unknown, unacknowledged . . .

Second Wind, Second Fire, Second Calling . . . all things in beginning, entering history again and again: unlikely old nomads, Abraham, Sarah; despised tax collectors, "government workers," -- and sinners! Every call chance to respond as if never before, no one's example to follow, no introductions, instructions, curricula, or credentials, only trial, only error -- How else to be first of our faith? Everything bet on the promise, one dragging foot after another, Jesus our constant contemporary, "with temporariness," caught onto today, changed out of tomorrow, taken never for granted, contained or constrained, losing life in us, for us, chronically crossed up by risk, shamelessness of his company kept.

Imagining anyone waiting a lifetime for promise to find us! What is worth waiting our lifetimes for? Or losing lifetime's worth of waiting? "Juneteenth" of waiting for Word of Release! "No more dying there" -- in slavery, in passage, in resistance to capture at all! 19 June 1865, three years after, Emancipation reaching - even to Texas!

Grand Order Number Three: The people of Texas are informed . . . all slaves are free! Absolute equality, personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves! Freedmen advised to remain at their homes and work for wages . . . will not be supported in idleness!

Lifetimes of bonded labor entitling to no indentures of idleness? . . .

From holiness to holy mess, theories of life turn to practice, one long improvisation -- Jazzable? Paradoxical? Unexpectable? Inexplicable? Peaceable coexistences, oppositional elements? Tentative creative tensions, breaking forth, extravagant contradictions! Impossibility, lendings to endings, thriving on patient respect -- resilience, compassion, solidarity, care -- for cacophonous moods, moments of life-full bliss -- playing out conflicts of impulse within us, among us -- life's musics mending life's movements, at improvised intersections, insistent with irresolutions: yet Ishmael's, Isaac's joint custody of disposable patriarch.

We wake up inside Christ's body, where all our body, all over, ever most hidden part of it, is realized as joy in Him, and he makes us, utterly, real, and everything that is hurt, everything that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged, is in Him transformed and recognized as whole, as lovely, and radiant in his Light, we awaken as the Beloved in every last part of our body. (Symeon)

"Same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life comes from . . . You can survive on your own. You can grow stronger on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own." (Frederick Buechner)

Most Cosmic of Learning Curves, slowly bending, again, toward mothers, toward Mother and Children Earth! No longer, my children, your children, their children, our children, only "one children" now, all of us, of us all. Sacrificing another so maleish, so muleish: Who is a woman, especially a mother, to inform or to settle such things?

Unstrapping, untethering outworn assumptions, even Goliath Somebody's Child, befriending of enemies too late if they're dead, killing so unimaginative, convenient, conventional, relentless lead stories on each Nightly News! Have we given up on ourselves? Have guns won? Doing one thing they know how to do? No bullet stray, no damage collateral, so many children so choiceless, David at least deviating from sword and spear to sling and stone, next step from killing to taming giants appearing, through youngest, lowest eye-levels, everywhere!

"What kind of logic lurks in your promise that the sky full of stars is like the number of our descendants and then demands the son's life who makes the promise possible? Can I trust a breaker of promises? What kind of game is this? . . . You --father God-- have yet to learn what it is like to be a mother . . ." (Madeleine L'Engle)

Healing Death

"Healing Death"

Death may be healing or not, neither or both; we are not about sanctioning, sanctifying death, but about solving, silencing, obstructing, opposing, overcoming, presenting our lives in the way of as much death as humanly, as complicitly possible! Making way for divine opportunity to move even further. Imagining, for instance, this miracle: We as a species stop killing! What other miracles, powers, lie just beyond our believing? Our doing for dying in all that we do, so all death inclining toward "natural," just lives in our bodies worn out in the end, none lasting forever, nor leaving alive!

Everyone's life about healing death! Every malicious intrusion on planet! Elijah beseeching for widow's unbreathing son, Are we, all imaged of God, not
ferocious with you for fairness in midst of every unfairness festering here?
Abraham arguing fates for Sodom, Gomorrah? Jacob wrestling for blessing all night? Moses standing with people stiffnecking him? People rebelling as PERSONS, as PEOPLE, from brick-broken bondage in Egypt? Psalmists, Prophets ranting for all? Jesus upending Law, Tradition, rallying, ringleading, access of all to each?

No winning without risk of losing: Most of a night in chaplaincy training, Intensive Care waiting room, with parents of 10 year-old never awakening from "routine surgery;" trying to outguess God, staying a step ahead, preoccupied with avoiding mistakes in my prayers, causing no god-staining shame or embarrassment; abandoning any, all solidarities, finally hauling ass out of there, hiding exposure as wrong about God, on losing side of my own prayers.

Faith not about winning but hoping, dreaming, living, working, for so direly better a world as bound to dismissed losers, taunted as flaming fanatics; for, after all, in a lifetime, how much can be won against violence and war? Poverty and disease? Racism and climate change? Our very Story inscribed by losers, most notorious "winner" strung up alone between treasonous fellow-strangers, even Omniscience, Omnipotence winning some, losing some -- or many!

Imagining numbers, much less names, of families numbly haunted with grief for children lost, and losing; Elie Weisel when asked "where is God" in Holocaust: on the gallows! in the ovens! No helpless reposing, resigning, with Jesus, always reopening, reinviting, rewelcoming, reempowering -- responding to every reaching by every unreachable, touching by every untouchable, moving by every unmoveable, changing by every unchangeable, fearless of any corruption or tainting of him, whom nothing outside can defile -- only our inside answers.

Where else Jesus learning of footcare, caress, if not someone doing it for him?
Where else, how else, do we learn? Washing friends' feet that last gathering, as this anonymous one -- onto to whom all other men present potentlessly project -- first washes his feet; with her tears, her bodily fluids, her hair! Even now sexiest, most controversial, coverable part of Herbody! Kissing, anointing, expensive perfume! Earned in proverbial "hard way?" Jesus not dying for rules, laws, or traditions -- but for her.

In her, "audacity, need coalesce, single impulse, tiny breakthrough, precipitates," moistens, liberates us, our creative juices, "into a precarious moment of hope. A dam of saline grief broke, making clear rivulets in a grimy flesh wiped clean with hair." (Elizabeth Canham)

Tentatively, she entered. She knew she was not welcome here . . . She and her child and her guilt survived on the lust and disgust of the likes of them. The poor who are always with us would do things differently if they could. Jesus looked right through her, and saw that she was good. (Miriam Therese Winter)

What keeps us from welcoming, especially, women, children? From seeing in them alternatives leading to more love than war? From holding together the most common truth: Everyone's somebody's child! Imagining hearts where our treasures are! Bleedings of billions a month into wars only making more wars. Demonizing another, all others, to point more deserving of death! "Failed" persons, peoples, states, we say, losing all Godlikeness to us, exhausting all claims to existence, expendable beyond contempt? Enabling our actions too grim to own, even to loan and return.

Like Fathers, Like Sons?

"Like Fathers, Like Sons?"

"God's love concretely universal in expressed partiality, preference for humanly unworthy, despicable." (Gustavo Gutierrez) Still willing, through us, to bless every being on Earth? "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." (Marianne Williamson)

Sarah, untold, overhearing, she is to bear son -- and she laughs! "After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?" (Surely we are not born with suspicion of pleasure?) We all laugh! "Is anything too wonderful for the LORD?" Checking our bets: What if IT is -- and we laughed?!! (Nor with suspicion of laughter?)

"Passion fully human and divine spark, leaping in face of cynicism, burning with commitment, neither God nor humankind finished." (Carter Heyward)

Like father, like son, God help us. Patriarchal compelling of wives, delegating of housemaids, surrogates bearing sons, hostaged homage to System's Economy.
Compulsion compounding, offering of spouses for self-protection from threatening kings, pretending them to be our sisters, inviting kings' ways with them, unvalued to or by us unless, until producing inheritable future -- dogmatically procreative! No sooner miraculous birthing of heirs, ruthlessly running off housemaids and sons, than System compelling again, submitting to wager whole faith-families' futures -- Like father, like son, God help us.

Jesus now making up, fleshing out "fictive families," among whom children, at least, for short time at least, respected, revered -- "In new family of Jesus, only children, no patriarchs! 'Call no one your father on Earth, for you have but one father!' Never transcend need for kinship . . . But failure to transcend patriarchal kinship system making democracy impossible -- As families are structured, so is the state!" (Walter Wink)

What mother attending to any such altar? No matter how holy, how unflaggingly patriarchal, patriotic, how emptily ego-inflating? When do we even start mouthing, "well-being," "best interest" of child? Questioning "teleological suspensions of ethical," no matter impotence of the suspended?

Suspecting, subverting self-sanctified ends? Unjustifiers of any mean means, obsessing on "manly duty," reducing divine direction to manner of murder --
How long do we bludgeon the children with ubiquitous violence of obedience?

"On the woodpile Isaac's body waits, as women wait, fever trilling under his skin. He will remember the blade's white silence, a lifetime under his father's eyes." (Chana Bloch)

"Never know what resistance or willingness Bathsheba offered to King's demand." (Joyce Hollyday) Nor any other such ordered assignation, dancing with death, battlefields everywhere, enemies fresh everyday -- daughter to one man, wife to another, lover to third -- whose story alone comes to matter?

Mission accomplished? Exploding on war's own spite-filled petard? Nothing but grief, scared children and brave soldiers, brave children and scared soldiers, leaders and minions of leaders, betraying, sending in places they will not go. What happens to hopes of children born into such lives at such wars?

Loaves and fishes, in hands to be trusted, scarcity shared to abundance, children as mimicking Jesus, inexpertly undifferentiating your gift from mine; while we perfect Phillip's penurious panic, "Don't you know how broke we are, for God's sake?" Exactly, says Jesus, attuning own brokenness, as any small child revealing, unless needs of body are met, no rest for the rest of us!

Children instinctively personal and political, part and whole: Anything good for me good for you, anything my need and right to need and right to of all -- asking we ask, of children at war, Would I want my kid in this damnable peril? Terror above and below? If not, who would? Whatever's bad for my kids is bad for their kids, too; someone with hand out approaching me on the street -- would I like to trade places? What we do for any we do for all. Jesus thrice sitting us down together, lowering, or raising, all to one earthen table, one eye-level.

Hopi Tribal Wisdom: All sit in circle centered on Children's Fire, where grandmother, grandfather sit, for process discerning community will, every proposal for change, last word grandparents', alone with power to veto -- Does this proposal help or hurt the Children's Fire? If it would hurt the children, any children, why in the world, on the Earth, in God's name, would we do it?

Children so body-bound, so unmistaking abtraction for justice due all of us in our bodies.

"Binding Boundaries, Languishing Lands"

"Binding Boundaries, Languishing Lands"

Is Naboth not all our children? Resisting insisting? Upon surrendering ancestral inheritance? People + Land = Promised Land! Liberated Zone! Midst of all occupied territory; piece of the action, stake in the game, Earth herself holding what hope remains for us all, joint heirs of God, every member, every species -- how dare we suffer the children to be Jubileeless?

Merely conveniencing Ahab, our vineyard next door for his vegetable garden -- his Manifest Destiny, Eminent Domain, Fair Offer -- all at "Cash Value?"
This land is our life! It is who we are. It is what we do. Linking us with all Earth.

Indigeneously impoverishing, polycratically dispossessing, kings dooming own kingdoms, too much "Good Fortune," borrowed well-being of everyone else - as if any saved without sharing!

Bishop Camara: "When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I also ask why they are poor, they call me a communist." Faith about insistent asking, the way to our practice, orthopraxis, freedom not from but for others. While all systems of vested interest exclude to excruciation: "Where will our precious freedom be then," Paul asks, one broken world just wanting to know . . .

"The free spirit is incompatible with selfishness," with limiting ways we love one another, with limiting selves to selves, with fearing everyone else must be against us, out to take back what we call "ours," in effect stolen from all without "theirs." Loving others as selves? As addicted to selves? To those nearly "like us" as possible? And all it requires to keep us that way?

Little wonder still learning war so well, our trouble and training to do it so often, costing us more than all nations combined -- pretending by other names, justifications, any less driven by who profits most? Idealized nations, self-made exceptions, excuses for wars? All along nation-state, nation-mind lines?

"My hope: that young generations demand end to war, that your generation do something not done in history: wipe out national boundaries separating us from other humans on Earth." (Howard Zinn)

Hmmmm . . . wiping out national boundaries . . . sounds like job for a Flood! "Wickedness of humankind, great in the earth, every inclination of thoughts of their hearts only evil continually?" No sorrow like that of Creator despairing of hope in Creation. "Only God has authority to end life on this planet. All we have is power." (William Coffin)

Even world without weapons not world without war -- but what better place to begin? Making wars cease to the Ends of the Earth? Breaking bows, shattering spears, turning to plowshares, to pruning hooks? Removing all gain from arming to kill? "We can no more win a war than we can win an earthquake." (Jeanette Rankin)

New peoples, nations wracking with labor pains now, conceptually birthing, challenging not by numbers, even by very existence per se; but by peripheralized vision, by amplified voice, every last one, whatever size, whatever age, extensively seen, exhaustively heard. Nationhood, peoplehood organized, institutionalized, without flagrant nationalism? Less globalization, one size fitting all, than glottalization, every size finding, keeping voice of its own?

"The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will." (Czeslaw Milosz)

Ark of Noah, World House of Dr. King: To pray is to build your own house. To pray is to discover that Someone else is within your house. To pray is to recognize that it is not your house at all. To keep praying is to have no house to protect Because there is only One House. And that One House is everybody's Home . . . That is the politics of prayer. And that is why truly spiritual people are always a threat to politicians of any sort. They want our allegiance and we can no longer give it. Our house is too big. (Richard Rohr)

Too big for anyone to be left out!

"Third Rock -- Between Ark and a Hard Place"

"Third Rock -- Between Ark and a Hard Place"

Multitudinous times, magnitudinous spaces: Holy! Holy! Holy! Wholly Earth filling with Glory! Alluring to "unclean lips," tendering Earth-Self to limits -- the haphazardly holding of robe, defiant dimensions, intensely tapping, repellent garment -- bleeding selves dry without cure or relief.

"Here I am, send me!" Mend me! Must there have been some mistake?
Who, us? Spirit on Wind, lonely train whistle, humming us, haunting us, through fitful nights, willing to bear us, wherever we are to be borne.

"I Told Jesus Be Alright If He Changed My Name." No way of hiding God's priding in us! Called wherever we find ourselves being. "Wide open spaces of God's grace and glory, standing tall, shouting our praise!" Showing off every least creature.

Peter's Trinity: Rock, Rock-solid, Rock-solidarity.
South African Women: "In us you have struck a rock!"
Indigenous right where we are, whatever rock lying just under our surface, nearer our heart. Noah: dreamer, ark-builder, savior, every last species! Including our so-called own?

What are you? What am I? Intersecting cycles of water, earth, air, and fire, that's what I am, that's what you are . . . Earth -- matter made from rock and soil . . . Earth pours through us, replacing each cell of the body every seven years! Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we ingest, incorporate, and excrete the earth, are made from the earth. I am that. You are that. (John Seed, Joanna Macy)

Trinity of Trinities: Ingestion! Incorporation! Excretion!
Law of the Universe: Eat, and Be Eaten!
Life on the Ark: Get along closely or not at all! Noah's children still left to cover past asses, drunk and naked, face-down in the tent. Sins of our parents: Buried by us? Carried by us? Floods followed forever by Promise made new?
"I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, nor will I again destroy every living creature."

What an impossible species we are, so much like the Species-Maker, testing our limits at every chance, getting away with whatever we can -- yet learning to be, indigenously, one species among countless others?

"In history, there are no solitary dreams; one dreamer breathes life into the next." (Sebastian Salgado)

"Getting to Three: Come! See! Believe It Is Good!"

"Getting to Three: Come! See! Believe It Is Good!"

Meandering Monotheists? Essentially choiceless? Muted but mutable? One-godders, made to wander, to wonder, like Arameans, what lies all along life's flung-spiral lines, linking lineages, to us, from us, through and beyond us. Latitudes, longitudes -- fixatings of the unfixable?

Backsliding, Blindfolding Binitheists? Two-godders caught between foreclosing choices? Bound strictly to one or the other? This way or that? Clashings of truncatable loyalties, over our heads, like cloned drones! Disembodying death! Fall or Redemption -- as if no Creation? Parent or Child -- as if no Holy Spirit?

Little Tougher-stuffed Trinitheists? Three-godders? Triangulating? Trusting in, trying out, randoms of freeness? Fairness, fullness, each tine and place, each thing and person? Unpredictable, unrestrainable, uncapturable, unliturgizable. One's conscious, two's company, three's crowd -- four's contagion! And counting?

Quadrupeds? Seasons? Directions? Elements? Stages of life cycles? Dare we add -- Game quarters? Diamond bases?

Who Are We To Be: "Little less than God" "Crowned with glory and honor?"
"Given dominion?" "All things put under our feet?" Under ours, of all feet?!
Sophia, our Wisdom, our Proxy, Presumptive Progenitor, crying forth birth of all things! Path from Autonomy! Through Subjectivity! To Full Communion!
Dominion without domination? Still fearing our own momentousness?

God showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand . . . 'What can this be?' 'It is everything that is made.'" (Julian of Norwich)
Yahweh, Sophia, "Us" -- "Let us make adam in our own image" -- polytheist from the jump! Creation maturing, awakening wake of Babel -- hierarchies crumbling, homogeneities fragmenting, orthodoxies scattering -- colors, cultures, nations tongues -- every species of human assemblance, displaced, dispersed, diasporated; human condition remaining but refugee, alien, stranger in strange land, no more escaping, avoiding, ignoring each other; frontiers left only within us, between us, among us -- sexual, spiritual, in all ways relational -- lending selves gladly to anyone?

By some, Creator never named, by others, named ninety-nine times, still looking for perfect one hundreth. "God of many names, gathered into one, in your glory, come and meet us, moving, endlessly becoming." Living peoples, Living Faith! Living Creator, Living Word! Living Savior, Living Works! Living Spirit, Living Witness! Living Body, Living Service! Living Ends, Living Earth!
Evolutionary Creativity?

Spirit commissioning, universally, unimperially, sharing Pentecost Power, long-distancing disciples, Letter now leavened with Spirit of Law; discipleship heart of our citizenship; refusal to trade more Bibles for lands, more rituals for resources -- made more modestly, honestly whole by each "other" we meet.