Author: edwarddavissmith

Edward was born and raised in LaGrange, Georgia. Upon graduating as Valedictorian from Flint River Academy, Edward attended Wake Forest University as a student athlete where he graduated Magna Cum Laude from the Wayne Calloway School of Business and Accountancy. He began his career in the Financial Services Division of Accenture, LLP. Edward joined Hutchinson Traylor in 1997. Over the years he has obtained his resident and surplus lines licenses in Life & Health and Property & Casualty insurance. He has also earned his Series 6, 63 & 65 Securities Licenses and obtained the Certified Insurance Counselor (CIC) designation. Edward is co-owner and Executive Vice-President of Hutchinson Traylor. Edward remains active outside of his vocation. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of LaGrange College where he serves on the executive committee and as chairman of the advancement committee. He serves on the board of directors for Charterbank and Charter Financial Corporation (CHFN) and is currently Chairman of the Downtown LaGrange Development Authority. Past President roles include the LaGrange Rotary Club, the Boys & Girls Club of West Georgia, and the LaGrange College Leadership Council, among others. Edward has enjoyed serving in a variety of leadership roles within his church, First United Methodist of LaGrange. He was a member of the Leadership Georgia class of 2005 and, in 2008, was selected by Georgia Trend magazine to their prestigious “Forty Under Forty” list.

The Servant of Unity

By St. Teresa of Avila

Most men in power have not the strength nor wisdom to be satisfied with the way things are.

The sane know contentment, for beauty is their lover, and beauty is never absent from this world.

The farther away light is from one’s touch the more one naturally speaks of the need for change.

Yes, overthrow any government inside that makes you weep.

The child blames the external and focuses his energies there; the warrior conquers the realms within and becomes gifted.

Only the inspired should make decisions that affect the lives of many, never a man who has not held God in his arms and become the servant of unity.

From “New Seeds of Contemplation”

For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things; or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.

— Thomas Merton

Rooted…Like Trees

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world. 

Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.
If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left [God].

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

—Rainer Maria Rilke [1]

Fear and Anger

Below is a very disjointed story.

It is indeed unfortunate that security and freedom will always be in tension. But when I make decisions from a place of fear or anger, or worse yet, with complete obliviousness to the history of our world, I am not honoring our God or myself.  I know…it is far too easy for me to say. I haven’t had it all that hard. I haven’t endured the challenges and suffering that so many others have. But, as Jesus reminds us, it is all one suffering. We aren’t human beings trying to be more spiritual. We are spiritual beings trying to figure out how to be better humans. We’ve had some great examples and teachers throughout history and none of them believed in the primitive tools of fear, anger, hate, or exclusion that are on such prominent display, and even celebrated, today.

 

 

STORY

“The first person in Sheridan, Wyoming, to learn that Hot Tamale Louie had been knifed to death was William Henry Harrison, Jr. The news came by telegram, the day after the murder. Harrison was the son of a member of Congress, the great-grandson of one President, the great-great-great-grandson of another President, and the great-great-great-great-grandson of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Hot Tamale Louie was the son of nobody knows who, the grandson of nobody knows who, and the great-great-grandson of nobody knows who. He had been selling tamales in Sheridan since Buffalo Bill rode in the town parade, sold them when President Taft came to visit, was still selling them when the Russians sent Sputnik into space and the British sent the Beatles to America.”

Khan’s case arrived at a curious moment in immigration history. The year before, an Indian man from San Francisco named Vaishno Das Bagai had been stripped of his citizenship, as had his wife and children—a particularly dire development for a California resident, because, by state law, those ineligible for citizenship could not own property. Sometime later, Das Bagai told his family that he was going on a business trip, booked a hotel room in San Jose, and killed himself. In the note he left behind, he described his suicide as a political protest. “I came to America thinking, dreaming, and hoping to make this land my home,” he wrote. “But now they come to me and say, I am no longer an American Citizen. . . . Now what am I? What have I made of myself and my children?” Das Bagai addressed the note to the San Francisco Examiner, which published it.

Tamales are old, as food goes; they preceded Columbus, and possibly Christ. They originated in Mesoamerica, likely courtesy of the Maya, and were the carry-out food of their day, much prized by soldiers, hunters, and other hungry people on the go. By the time Europeans got to the New World, tamales could be found, at a minimum, in much of Central America and throughout Mexico. As late as 1884, however, they were sufficiently unfamiliar in the United States that the Associated Press felt compelled to refer to them thus: “A queer article of food, locally known as ‘tamales.’ ”

“Contrary to the claims of Stop Islam in Gillette, however, the Muslims who established the mosque are not new to the region. Together with some twenty per cent of all Muslims in Wyoming, they trace their presence back more than a hundred years, to 1909, when a young man named Zarif Khan immigrated to the American frontier. Born around 1887, Khan came from a little village called Bara, not far from the Khyber Pass, in the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan. His parents were poor, and the region was politically unstable. Khan’s childhood would have been marked by privation and conflict—if he had any childhood to speak of. Family legend has it that he was just twelve when he left.”

The fight, when it arrived, came in the form of Bret Colvin, the founder of Stop Islam in Gillette. Colvin, who is forty-nine, grew up on a Wyoming ranch, left after high school, and spent the next decade in the Marines. Later, he worked in private security, in crab fishing, and in the oil and methane fields of the West. But these days oil is down, Gillette’s economy is suffering, and employment is hard to find. “You can’t even get a fast-food job in this town,” Colvin said; to get by, he’d been doing some computer and cell-phone repair.

That left him with a lot of time to stare at the Internet, which is how he learned about the mosque. Colvin was the one who organized the protests against it, and, according to the Khans, threatened to train a scope on it as well. He also menaced the town’s Muslims more generally; when he heard about a public lecture on Islam being held in Gillette, he used a podcast he produces to announce his plans to attend and “fuck some shit up,” and urged his listeners to come help him “run the ragheads out of town.” At some point, the threats grew sufficiently serious that the F.B.I. got involved.

Over and over, we forget what being American means. The radical premise of our nation is that one people can be made from many, yet in each new generation we find reasons to limit who those “many” can be—to wall off access to America, literally or figuratively. That impulse usually finds its roots in claims about who we used to be, but nativist nostalgia is a fantasy. We have always been a pluralist nation, with a past far richer and stranger than we choose to recall. Back when the streets of Sheridan were still dirt and Zarif Khan was still young, the Muslim who made his living selling Mexican food in the Wild West would put up a tamale for stakes and race local cowboys barefoot down Main Street. History does not record who won. ♦

A Case For Contemplation

He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. There is nothing more tragic in the modern world than the misuse of power and action. 

–Thomas Merton