Their Horsely Nature

Some very good friends of the farm started in with our boys and the horses this last Saturday, teaching them how to walk the horses, how to establish a rapport, how to avoid indulging their childish, "horsely," nature (my word), how to lunge etc, and I was pleasantly surprised at how disciplined Lockton and Samuel were in applying these new equine truths, yesterday when we did our first horse-homework together. Lockton worked on making Winston back up when he got too near a fence or too near the roadside grass, which seemed like a pretty advanced piece of stable-boy art--making a big Thoroughbred go into reverse on command.

It's against my nature, for some reason, to spend an hour in the afternoon pretending I'm a country gentleman, with the time to train horses, and be trained by them. (Getting my saddle muscles back, at 49, seems a little daunting.) Perhaps it's just because I'm always so worried about sales around here that I don't think I have time to ride, but really, this is, after all, a professional obligation. Don't guests expect farmers to know how to ride a horse? Right? ("Yeah, that's it.")

The truth is I'm troubled by the world, by a kind of truth-avoidance I see nearly every day among friends, customers, pastors, politicians, reporters. I watch lives, and nations, and churches going off track in ways that seem subtle at first, but then predictably tragic. It comes with age and the study of history--a kind of weariness at the same mistakes being made over and over and over again. With a horse--when you see it doing something stubborn and "horsely"--you punish it by stopping, backing up, and insisting the thing be done right.

With people, you can't even cough disapproval, or look sidelong, without the self-esteem police writing a ticket. I was having a great time at the Mother's Day event the other night, and then a friend told me he had expressed some of my ideas to a pastor who cautioned him with the same old good-Nazi-Lutheran rationalization for the church remaining silent and never, ever, ever being political. This particular pastoral evasion went like this: "since none of the candidates really represent Christ very well, we shouldn't endorse any of them." That's something like saying, "well, because 1930s American swing dancing was a little risqué, we had no right to go over and liberate Jews from the camps." That's like saying, "because that superior court judge is a bit of a gossip, he doesn't have the right to impose the death penalty on a remorseless killer." Pastors who refuse to make distinctions between the small and the great dangers threatening the flock, shouldn't be shepherding cockroaches into the dustpan, much less the children of God into the promised land.

I said so--very forcefully--and lost my temper in the process.

I am aware, of course, that churches operate under mandate from the federal government, or they lose their tax exempt status, but manufacturing a holy rationale for remaining silent in the face of evil seems particularly craven. I tell people, lately, "if your pastor hasn't given a pro-life, anti-tax, pro 10 commandments sermon in the last month--run, don't walk away. Find a real church."

I mean--really, what will those pastors say on the great and terrible day? "I preached the truth--as long as Caesar let me?"