Perfect Songs: "Walk Away Renee" (1966)

Andra Suchy and Garrison Keillor and his house band perform "Walk Away Renee," first recorded by the Left Banke and wonderfully covered by the Four Tops in 1968.

A Stroke Of Reality

At least two people associated with popular culture are required to live forever: Bruce Springsteen and Garrison Keillor, who has left the hospital after being treated for a minor stroke. Eat your Honey Nut Cheerios, pal.

If You Cover It, They Will Read

Garrison Keillor on what he likes to read in the newspaper:

I look at the papers more often now and find more that I want to read. In the old flush days, the paper seemed to go more for high-minded term papers about positive things happening in our community, but what I want to read is a clear account of what the police say happened when that man allegedly assaulted the woman walking down the avenue four blocks from my house. It doesn't take a team of eight journalists to come up with that. I also want the paper to send reporters to the meetings of legislative committees and the city council. I don't read political blogs and broadsides and the withering crossfire of partisans. Not interesting. Government is interesting. The difficult choices facing President Obama these days, some of which seem to point away from the positions he took as a candidate: all interesting. But it takes dedicated talented journalists to make it so, and if you put out a newspaper that they write, people will buy it.

"The Most Available Democratic Experience"

St. John's Church at Easter; flowers by Kathe Hayden

A Sunday or two ago on the Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor read out a John Updike passage about churchgoing. Several listeners, including your correspondent, wrote in for the citation, and someone from the show thoughtfully provided it. It's from a "New Yorker" essay by Episcopalian Updike entitled "Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car," published on December 16, 1961.

I'd always wondered why I'd extravagantly bought the complete "New Yorker" on DVDs a couple of years ago. It turns out that this (maybe the third time I've consulted it) was why: Vocational encouragement at a pivotal time in my ministry:

There was a time when I wondered why more people did not go to church. Taken purely as a human recreation, what could be more delightful, more unexpected than to enter a venerable and lavishly scaled building kept warm and clean for use one or two hours a week and to sit and stand in unison and sing and recite creeds and petitions that are like paths worn smooth in the raw terrain of our hearts? To listen, or not listen, as a poorly paid but resplendently robed man strives to console us with scraps of ancient epistles and halting accounts, hopelessly compromised by words, of those intimations of divine joy that are like pain in that, their instant gone, the mind cannot remember or believe them; to witness the windows donated by departed patrons and the altar flowers arranged by withdrawn hands and the whole considered spectacle lustrous beneath its patina of inheritance; to pay, for all this, no more than we are moved to give -- surely in all democracy there is nothing like it. Indeed, it is the most available democratic experience. We vote less than once a year. Only in church and at the polls are we actually given our supposed value, the soul-unit of one, with its noumenal arithmetic of equality: one equals one equals one.

In the Middle With A Danish

Garrison Keillor says we are a hopeful people:

Paranoia belongs to the fringe right and left, not to genteel burghers like you and me. We sit under our fig tree and enjoy our cheeseburger without brooding too much about toxic chemicals used by meatpackers or thought-control drugs injected into the beef. Every morning in the newspaper, some columnist cries out in alarm that yet one more disaster is creeping toward us like a cougar about to spring and chew our throats, and we read a few paragraphs and turn the page and warm up another Danish.

I Guess. But What Was That Third Thing?

Garrison Keillor:

We have a new president coming in and I'm delighted about that and also pleased that he's a man of great discipline and decorum and isn't full of himself or vindictive and righteous and he invited that evangelical guy to give the invocation at the inauguration. Bravo, Barack. Enormous progressive changes have been wrought by mannerly people in ordinary clothing.

More Thinking, Less Understanding

Garrison Keillor on the blessing of worshiping in an unfamiliar church:

[S]lipping into St. Patrick's for Mass in Spanish is pretty wonderful. It's like a big family reunion at which I know nobody and so nobody is mad at me. Nothing said in Spanish offends me doctrinally or any other way. I squeeze into the crowd, under the placid stone faces of saints, the sweet smell of burning wax and a hundred varieties of cologne, and feel the religious fervor, and tears come to my eyes, and I light a candle, say a wordless prayer, and out into the cold I go.

It brought back memories of Christmas Eve in Copenhagen 20 years ago and how beautiful the sermons were before I started learning Danish.

A man gets a keener sense of the divine in a church that is not your own. Maybe Luther and Calvin and Jan Hus and all them were dead wrong and literacy is not the key nor an understanding of Scripture, and maybe the essence of Christmas is dumb childlike wonder and the more you think about it, the less you understand.