Everyone’s invited

Tomorrow is my birthday. Banks and schools will be closed across the country.

Tomorrow I will turn 57 — the same age Warren G. Harding was when he dropped dead from a heart attack.

I suppose that reminder of my own mortality ought to be grim and ponderous, but remembering that Harding’s sordid presidency came to a surprising and sudden end actually just makes me feel hopeful and cheerful and all warm inside. I know what I’m wishing for when I blow out the candles.

Planning a big party for next weekend. Everyone’s invited.

“Everyone’s invited” is the big theme tomorrow because it’s Pentecost Sunday, which should be a bigger deal than it is. Everyone Means Everyone is good news — about the best news there could be.

Celebrate Pentecost while you still can — a holy day and holiday explicitly centered on diversity, equity, and inclusion might not be legal for much longer. If you’re “anti-DEI,” pretty much the whole book of Acts is something you’ll need to burn and ban.

Anyway, if you’re not a church-goer, you can still celebrate the spirit of Pentecost next Saturday in a non-sectarian setting.

RIP Walter Brueggemann, who studied the Bible as if he believed it was true.

The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that make it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.

— from The Prophetic Imagination