A Wonderful World in Des Moines

Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006) is a memoir of his growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1950‘s. Bryson was born in 1951, the year I celebrated my eighth birthday.

1951 was also the year my family moved from Des Moines to a small town 80 miles northeast of it. But we often returned to Iowa’s urban center to visit friends and family and so that my mom could shop at Younkers, which Bryson calls “the great ocean liner of a department store.” My earliest memories of Younkers are of long forced marches, punctuated by rides on its magnificent escalators and in its elegant elevators. In later years I appreciated its large selection of classical LP records.

Bryson and I lived very different childhoods, not because I moved from Des Moines in my third grade, but because we are wired very differently. I never imagined myself as a “Thunderbolt Kid” capable of vaporizing unappealing people into pools of liquid, though there were times I would like to have been that wickedly powerful. And I was for too modest to have collaborated with any of my friends in discovering that peeing on Lincoln Logs turns them white. Our differences are one of the reasons he’s a very famous writer and I only wish I were.

We were both paperboys–he of the afternoon Des Moines Tribune, and I of the morning Des Moines Register. Bill Bryson, Sr. was actually a sports reporter for the Register (his son says a very good one), and his mother wrote a column about domestic (i.e., women’s) matters. So Bill, Jr. was not confined to standing outside looking in at the Register and Tribune’s whirling printing presses as were most of us; he could actually go inside and hear their hum and smell their ink. We share memories of the huge globe that graced the building’s lobby. We also share memories of the newspaper boy’s life on the streets as we tried to collect the weekly fees people owed for our faithfully delivering the presses’ output to their doors. And we share grief now for the forking over of local ownership of papers like the Register to national corporations, for their decline, and for their impending demise.

Many details in Bryson’s memoir rang bells for me, though I’d like to know how he missed Triplet’s Toy Town, surely Des Moines’ most fascinating store. I excuse him for missing Russell’s Jewelers, owned by an uncle and aunt of mine; his father may have known about it because it produced trophies for schools and teams all over Iowa. I am not at all surprised he overlooked the Iowa Farm Bureau Building where my dad worked. You can’t know everything’s history, even if you are Bill Bryson.

He does recognize, mostly in retrospect, that the world beyond his Kid’s World was far from perfect. But the larger world’s faults and failures barely touched childhood as he traversed it, and the joys of his memoir is that he focuses on what being a kid in the middle of 1950’s Iowa was like for him.

In “The Thunderbolt Kid’s” final pages Bryson muses upon what has been lost since that decade. Among the greatest losses is the forced sterilization of urban experience by the Walmart-ing and Macy-ing and Starbuck-ing of our society. The bland and mindless uniformity of commercial enterprise as experienced by most middle class Americans means only the very poor and the very rich experience uniqueness when they shop for and try to buy things. A Des Moines Target looks like a Cedar Rapids Target, feels like a Chicago Target, sucks like a New York Target. And the centers of many cities (other than a select few) look like the aftermath of The Plague.

Which bring me to the point of this New Year’s Eve posting. Bryson writes that, “during a tragically misguided housecleaning exercise” in 1978, his parents threw out all the “stuff” remaining in his bedroom. He then reflects on how mass retailing, banking, media, etc. render our lives today uniform and bland (the words in [brackets] are mine):

“[Getting rid of ‘stuff’] is the way of the world, of course. Possessions get discarded. Life moves on. But I often think what a shame it is that we didn’t keep the things that made us different and special and attractive in the fifties. Imagine those palatial downtown movie theaters with their vast screens and Egyptian decor, but thrillingly enlivened with Dolby sound and slick computer graphics. Now that would be magic. Imagine having all of public life–offices, stores, restaurants, entertainments–conveniently clustered in the heart of the city and experiencing fresh air and daylight each time you moved from one to another. Imagine having a cafeteria [Bishop’s] with atomic toilets [you have the read the book to get that reference], a celebrated tea room [in Younker’s] that gave away gifts to young customers, a clothing store [Frankel’s] with a grand staircase and a mezzanine, a Kiddie Corral [in Dahl’s Supermarkets] where you could read comics to your heart’s content. Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.

“What a wonderful world it would be. What a wonderful world it was. We won’t see its like again, I’m afraid.”

Touched with regret

for wondrous worlds

we will not see again,

but expecting

(against all odds)

new worlds to be seen...

Happy New Year.

Nativity's Pledge and Pleasure

“To a guilty world you (God) have pledged yourself,

not out of duty,

but because such was your pleasure.”

Those words (in English translation) are attributed to Jacopone da Todi, a 13th Century Franciscan friar and poet. They are from his Lauda Per Nativita Del Signore (“Hymn of Praise for the Birth of the Lord,” often referred to as the “Laud to the Nativity”), which was set to music by the 20th-century Italian composer, Ottorino Respighi, the only composer whom I know to have done so.

(Readers interested in my experience with and views regarding Respighi’s setting of the Laud will find them at the end of this post.) 

Jacopone tells and expands upon the story of Jesus’ birth by juxtaposing the glorious heavenly announcement with the abject poverty of the shepherds and of the Holy Family and Mary’s humble obedience. He well understands Luke’s perspective and interests. The lines quoted above appear late in the poem, after the shepherds have left and while Mary is pondering what has happened. They are spoken (in Respighi’s setting, they are sung) in the middle of the angelic chorus’s exuberant singing of the biblical texts praising God. I hear it as Jacopone’s understanding of the reason for the sung praises, and as his invitation to trust God with all we are and have:

We can say “Merry Christmas” (or as our British cousins prefer, “Happy Christmas”) and the like because God acted for us out of the shear pleasure of doing so. I confess I do not fathom the pleasure God derives from being committed to this world, despite my theological education, etc. And there is much to ponder in the charge that “the world” is guilty, a far greater problem than any individual’s particular sins, etc. Most likely I will never fully comprehend either God’s pleasure or universal culpability.

But despite all that, I can and do wish you and this broken world a Merry Christmas, and all the joys and pleasures of this season, because...

“To a guilty world you (God) have pledged yourself,

not out of duty,

but because such was your pleasure.”

(More about the music and me:)

Also often attributed to Jacopone is the Stabat Mater Dolorosa [“The Sorrowing Mother Stood”], which depicts Mary’s anguish at the foot of Jesus’ cross. It has been the subject of musical settings by many composers.

Perhaps the reason only Respighi (to my knowledge) has set the Laud to the Nativity to music is that his work captures the mood of Jacopone’s retelling and expansion of Luke’s birth narrative so perfectly that it is hard to imagine improving on it. The poet’s ability to convey both the poverty and the joy of the Holy Family and of the shepherds is convincingly re-conveyed by Respighi. A palpable sense of awe and wonder inhabits the entire 20-minutes-plus of the piece, and invites the listener into quiet contemplation of the holy birth. It may be the most authentic expression of “the true meaning the true story” of the birth of Jesus that I know.

Nearly 40 years ago I was a member of The Southern Maryland Choral Society, a community chorus conducted by Sandy Willetts. Sandy programmed Respighi’s Laud to the Nativity for our Christmas concert. As if singing that were not enough, we also performed Bach’s Magnificat at the same concert, so our work was cut out for us amateurs. They were each far beyond our obvious reach, but Sandy was an incredible conductor, and we pulled them off, and I like to think quite respectably. (Actually, the two are a beautiful programmatic pair.)

In any case, it was then that I bought an LP recording, which I recall had to be special ordered from England. It’s on the Argo label and is by the Argo Chamber Orchestra and the London Chamber Choir, directed by Laszlo Heltay, and sung in Italian. I cannot guess how many times I’ve played it, and it sounds like it.

After years of thinking I should get a new recording, last week I downloaded an old (1961, maybe) but recently (2010) re-released recording of the Laud by the Roger Wagner Chorale and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. it is directed by Alfred Wallenstein, is in English, and got good reviews on Amazon. And although I think think it is very nice, there is something about the old LP I’ve lived with for so long that I miss. There’s a purity to Heltay’s interpretation that I can hear through the scratches and hum that seems to elude Wallenstein. Maybe I will get used to it, but maybe I don’t want to.

In any case, if you love music Respighi’s Laud to the Nativity is well worth knowing. I’d appreciate any further information you have on any of this...including where I might find a new recording of Laszlo Heltay’s performance.

Why Jesus Weeps

Sylvia groped for answers – no, answers were not what she expected or even wanted. Answers asked too much. Answers were out of the question. Not explanations either – every explanation was beyond her imagination. Maybe responses. Any response would do, though she had no idea what it would sound or look like or who might offer it.

She caressed her coffee mug’s warmth as she tried to read about Friday’s massacre. Children and adults, warm and alive, condemned too young to death by a mad man with a gun. So quickly so cold, small bodies and bodies of their grown-up protectors. Then, a gun to the killer’s own head by his own hand, and the madness stopped. Silence, except for final gasps and moans, cries of survivors, weeping of children who had heard the chaos through thin walls. Cold chill.

“Answers” quickly posted on social media and confidently hawked by TV’s gurus (so full of themselves!) rang hollow: stronger gun laws and better mental health services and and more security in schools and less violence on TV and in games and stronger families and blah and blah and blah... “Explanations” cracked like gunshots in the electronic universe, as impotent and unlikely to change what needed changing as the flash of distant lightning at the end of a summer’s day. Real, yes; but distant, and silent.

Quasi-spiritual and religious answers and explanations most riled Sylvia, herself a good Christian. People justified their own beliefs upon altars built of children’s corpses, proposing that somehow their particular version of “god” made sense of it all, or maybe conveyed some comfort. As if their “god” had known what he or she was doing Friday morning. As if all those kids and teachers and administrators were somehow destined to “go to Jesus” then and there. As if that made the whole bloody affair okay, just fine, all neat and sweet...thank you, Jesus!

Nonsense! Whose “god” dared claim any right to do such a thing, or even just to have been looking the other way while a crazed killer’s gun preemptively sent time’s young to eternity? Sylvia could not imagine who could think her own grandchildren would be happier “with Jesus” than with their own families, or that those families would be pleased to think “god” had taken their children from them. No comfort in that. If “god” possessed any power at all, why the hell hadn’t he or she used it right then? Now it was too late, far too late. Sylvia believed...but this morning she didn’t know in what or whom.

The old coffee mug cooled. Low and thick clouds locked the morning’s dawn out of earth, still dark at 9:00 a.m. No light penetrated the absence of explanations, the dearth of answers. No light, no illumination, no response. Sylvia wept for the children, for the adults, for the shooter, for the families, for the future, for herself.

A knock on the back door lifted her out of her morass. Beth, her long-time neighbor and dear friend, stood in the doorway, bearing fresh-baked muffins on a plastic tray. Sylvia brewed more coffee, and they sat at the familiar kitchen table, silent, in the dark. The morning news paused between them.

They reached for the warmth of filled mugs and touched the warmth of friendship. They knew now, in that moment, why Jesus weeps.

Monday’s news reported that gun sales had been unusually good over the weekend.

Number One?

CNN reports the best quality-of-life cities in the world, according to a recent survey. Eight of the top ten are in Europe; the best the US does are Honolulu at #28 and San Francisco, tied with Paris at #29. And don't tell me Europe is broke; so are we. But they are at least seem to be trying to deal with their problems. Our leaders are just posturing, including the President I voted for.

I am glad I live in the USA, but we are not all we talk ourselves up to be. We are still by far the richest, most powerful nation on earth, yet the quality of life for many of us is marginal at best. A lot more honesty about who we are and how our citizens live and about who we want to be must take place if the USA is ever to fulfill its promise. 

Spielberg’s Lincoln, and Me

1. On Sunday, November 18, I drafted the following, intending to post it today (November 20):

          “The current issue of The Sun has at least two pieces of wisdom for our nation:

          “Sparrow writes (p. 18): ‘In American politics we no longer use the term “extremist,” but I would like to bring it back because I am one. I believe in the extremes of human hope, generosity, and intuition. I believe our whole nation needs a massage: one of those deep-tissue massages that are excruciatingly painful but that “release blockages.”’

          “And Will Durant is quoted on page 45: “Continue to express your dissent and your needs, but remember to remain civilized, for you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.”

         “Wisdom for our nation, for our world, for our neighborhoods, and for ourselves.”

2. Last night I saw Abraham Lincoln inhabit Daniel Day-Lewis in Steven Spielberg’s film. Go see it.

3. This morning I am thinking the above two quotes reflect fairly naive understandings of political process. I am quite sure that, had Lincoln given and received massages, the Union in the form we know it would not have survived, and slavery might have persisted for decades.

4. But he did demonstrate “the extremes of human hope, generosity, and intuition,” and he remained remarkably civilized (if not entirely legal) in the midst of incivility and chaos. At great cost, he prevailed.

5. I have a lot to learn about politics.

Who’ll Deliver the News Now?

I was not an outstanding paper boy.

Yes, I did the job faithfully. I rose early on all manner of 1950’s Iowa mornings, ventured forth on my balloon-tire bicycle to the corner of 8th and Main in Grundy Center, Iowa (pop. c. 2,500), and stuffed my allotted number of Des Moines Registers into the canvas bags fastened with bailing wire over the Schwinn’s back fender.

During the several the years I delivered the Register, mine was the shortest route in town. Despite our route boss’s best efforts - a man whose name (sounds like “Mr. Euwin”) I still remember because he told us “You ‘n’ me are friends,” which sounds pretty creepy 60 years later) - despite his attempts to bribe us with valuable prizes and an annual summer watermelon feed, I was never very enthusiastic about knocking on strangers’ doors to ask them if they wanted to subscribe to the big city daily, especially when their response was likely to be, “No, we get The Grundy Register every Thursday, and that’s all we read.”

Saturday morning collecting was also a chore I didn’t enjoy, but I did it and put a few dollars each week into my Farmer’s Saving’s Bank account. I kind of liked that, though even then amassing large sums of money was not a goal of my existence. Besides, I usually lost newer customers as soon as the “deal” they’d been offered to get them to sign up ran out. I resented trying to collect my 50 cents from such short-timers, knowing it would be my last.

But I loved delivering the paper itself because by the time I got home from my morning ride around the north side of town I had read the entire front page of the Register as well as the top halves of the first pages of all the other sections. (I learned that I could read much faster in the dead of winter than on a balmy spring morning.)

My route being short, I had little need to hurry through my deliveries, and as I slowly walked from my bike to each house to place the paper carefully inside the storm door or in the mail slot, I learned a whole lot about the world beyond Grundy Center, and Iowa even. I was first in my house to know that the governor of Iowa had been killed in a car crash and that Sputnik had flown off into space and all kinds of other momentous things. If knowledge is power, I possessed it, and anything that would hinder my acquisition of knowledge - such as a longer route - was not to be sought.

Of course, my dalliance at signing up new subscribers is one reason that the Cleveland Plain Dealer is rumored to be about to stop daily publishing and go to, say, three days a week. If only I’d found more new customers and built a bigger base!

Whether or not part of the fault is mine, I am devastated at the thought of Cleveland joining the growing ranks of cities that do not have daily newspapers. Yes, the world is changing. I check on-line news updates regularly through my day. My two adult children do not get the daily papers of their respective cities...and they don’t have land lines, either. They witness their parents slide deeper and deeper into cultural irrelevance.

But to be able to pick up, to touch, to linger over a daily newspaper! To wonder why a person who is willing to sign his or her real name would write such a stupid letter to the editor! To ponder the deep meaning of Doonesbury and predictable ordinariness of Marmaduke! To learn what the Indians/Browns/Cavs must do to win next season! To read dueling perspectives on a controversial issue right next to each other on one page and imagine what would happen if those two writers ever talked together! To be shocked by a scandal gradually unfolding headline by headline one day after another, or to be inspired by a columnist’s tale of unrehearsed kindness! To save “Kennedy Assassinated in Dallas” for your posterity and to stare at photographs whose stillness is destined to seal their moment in national consciousness forever! To know how to fold the paper so you can read it on the bus or subway! To see what’s at the movies and who’s preaching at First Pres and what charity benefit everyone who is anyone attended last weekend and who tried to shoplift what from Kohl’s the week before and who died ... the daily newspaper is a treasure trove of culture’s sublimity and silliness all in one fragile, but preservable, package. It will be missed, if not by my children, then by generations after them who will have to try to figure out how to “read” some antique flash-drive or floppy disk found in deceased parents’ attics.

Meanwhile, a new edition of The Grundy Register is printed and published each week as it has been since I can remember. It no doubt faces its own set of challenges, but perhaps it’s one of those icons always to remain beyond changing. All politics is local; and in the end, so is all news.

Tell all the Truth Slant

“...it’s been a gift that I was born baffled and have trusted my bafflement more than my certainties. I have my certainties, of course, but I don’t altogether trust them, because so many of them have been derailed over the years. I do, however, trust the kind of certainty you find in poetry. The poets have a way of nailing the truth without nailing it. It’s what Emily Dickinson was talking about when she said, ‘Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant.’ I love the notion that you can see more out of the corner of your eye that you can by looking straight ahead.”

- Parker J. Palmer, in the November 2012 Sun, p. 11

Vote (Mostly) for Democrats

I thought I would do no more partisan political blogs, but Superstorm/Hurricane/Windstorm/Blizzard Sandy has pushed me over the top as if I were hit by a surge of water.

I doubt any climate scientist would say Sandy is “proof” of global climate change. But I am sure most would say that this ongoing tragedy is another sign of what most scientists have warned about: that the warming of the planet will result in more extremes of weather. Katrina...the continuing drought in our midwest...Sandy; they are all pieces of predicted patterns resulting from climate change.

People advise that we “not make politics from this disaster.” But why not? This is a political issue, for our political systems are the only power we-the-people have to stand up to short-term profit motives that compromise the long-term viability of our home planet. Healthy and responsive political power is the sole means by which we might assure our survival as a species, living at anything more than subsistence level.

The Republican Party is in the thrall of “know-nothing” self-anointed constitutional literalists. They only see things through ideologically-colored glasses, facts be damned. These are the very people who have brought us the idea of “legitimate rape,” of pregnancies that result from rape being “the will of God,” of childbirth never threatening the life of the mother. These are the people who call evolution, embryology and the Big Bang theory “lies from the pit of hell.” These are the people who believe Obama is waging a “War on Coal” (actually I think waging such a battle is a pretty good idea) and that “Obamacare” is a government "take-over" of the health-care non-system. These are people revising our economic history since Ronald Reagan to try to convince us that allowing the very rich to become very much richer somehow benefits the rest of us. (Check out “Why Obama Now” on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9G8XREyG0Q for a very partisan, but I believe much more accurate, telling of the story.)

And climate change? It’s as if they have never heard of it. I look forward to a video of Mitt Romney repeating to the people of coastal New Jersey what he said a few weeks ago: "I'm not in this race to slow the rise of the oceans or to heal the planet. I'm in this race to help the American people." Canned goods don’t cut it, Mr. Wanna-be President. We must lengthen our perspective on the challenges we face, and then face them. Doing that is the kind of “help” we need from our nation’s leaders, from our politics. Now. For our future.

Let me be honest: many Democrats are not a whole lot better. Too many of them/us wear blinders (not binders!) regarding our fiscal crisis. Too few of them/us make dealing with climate change a priority. If Obama is elected to a second term, he must pound the presidential bully pulpit and exercise strong political leadership regarding climate change. But if Romney is elected I am sure that won’t happen at all. Not a peep will come out of his mouth...well, unless he changes his views...again.

Not all Republicans are beholden to this historical aberration of cultivated ignorance, and a few Democrats are. And while a poll I saw today says more people believe Romney can “reach across the aisle” than can Obama, there’s little likelihood even Romney’s reach will extend as far as his party’s fundamentalist wing. Even John Boehner had trouble reaching that far, and he’s almost one of them. That’s why it is important to defeat as many far-right-wing Republicans as possible in congressional races, and to elect Barack Obama as President.

I have been tempted to vote for “Green Party” candidates to express my environmental concerns. But I cannot throw my vote away when the choice is so plain between electing leaders who despise science and other learning and those who pay at least some attention to facts and are thus more likely to make informed decisions for our nation’s present and future.

Given the choice between what the Republican Party offers and what the Democratic Party offers I urge you to vote (mostly) for Democrats...first for Barack Obama, and then, if you live in Ohio, for Sherrod Brown. They are by far the more informed choices.

Volunteer Tomato Gives All

During the summer I’ve subjected my Facebook friends to a short series of photos of a volunteer Roma tomato plant that had taken up residence in a window well on the south side of our house. For posterity’s sake, I will now commit (and finish) this story into the permanence of cyberspace on my Coeli et Terra blog.

In early summer I noticed, through the plastic cover over that window well, a huge green leafy mass filling the space. I removed the cover, and there, much to my surprise, was a somewhat bedraggled tomato plant in need of water and air. I carefully freed its vines and tied them to a stake, later adding adding two more stakes. I put this picture on Facebook...

Someone wondered if a volunteer tomato could/would produce fruit.  It was teasing me with blossoms. ”We’ll see,” I said. From time to time I watered the plant. That was about the extent of my contribution to its health and productivity. By September its fruit was growing under the thick foliage, but it was so thick I had no idea how much fruit might be there. As the tomatoes ripened they tended to fall into the well, making them very hard to retrieve. I practice defensive harvesting, picking tomatoes before they were fully ripe, when I could find them. Harvest was the hardest part of the whole story.

By October I had picked and/or retrieved quite a few tomatoes, and they were beautiful. When I posted this picture and wondered what to do with all the still-green tomatoes on the vines, people suggested fried green tomatoes and Kosher dill tomatoes.

The plant was beginning to look a little tired. It had worked very hard in the hot sun for three long months. It still hid most of its bounty from me, I being afraid to paw through the vines too much out of fear of breaking them.

On October 29, Frankenstorm’s rain falling and winds picking up, I decided tomato-growing season was over. With regret I cut and yanked out the vines, pulled the remaining tomatoes off, and replaced the cover over the window well. Maxine counted 70 tomatoes of various sizes and stages of ripeness. I think my volunteer tomato produced at least 100 tomatoes this year.

That for which I did nearly nothing did very well. The tomatoes I nurtured from seeds nearly died and didn’t produce a thing because I had no idea what I was doing. The hot house plants I put out in my garden did just okay...maybe 30 tomatoes from about 6 plants.

But the one that was a gift to me and that I just let be...that plant out-produced them all at least three-fold. Sounds like some parables I’ve heard somewhere.

Discovery

At the start of Sunday afternoon’s walk in my familiar South Chagrin Metropark, I obeyed a notion to take a trail I had never taken before. It was by no means a brave decision. I know that park; I am well-oriented to it; it isn’t far to a paved road from anywhere in it .

Still, I felt a certain thrill, a moment of anticipation: what would I experience on that unfamiliar route to some assured destination?

The trail was slightly obscured by the season’s leaves, and required a muddy detour around a fallen tree. After just ten minutes or so I came to a picnic pavilion I knew. A man was addressing a large gathering inside. He seemed to be giving instructions.

From there I took off on another new-to-me trail. It wasn’t difficult, and I enjoyed what I saw and smelled and touched. I loved the new experience.

When I reached a paved path, I saw small groups of walkers huddled around sheets of instructions. From one group I overheard a discussion of whether they would next try to find “number 45” or “number 36.” Another group was debating how to get to the bridge whose boards they were to count. I am sure they were on a scavenger hunt that had set out from that pavilion. Like me, they were no doubt walking new trails and seeing new things.

True explorers push into wildernesses whose only trails may be those of animals. They also strike out through dense green undergrowth or across trackless deserts or snow fields. The earliest humans probably explored such places with little sense of where they fit in to any bigger picture. Later, compasses and other navigation gear told them their direction, if not their destination.

Now we rarely explore anything without being quite sure how we will get there and where we will end up. Few of us ever explore what’s totally unknown, maybe because there’s precious little that’s totally unknown available to us.

So we follow paths new to us, but which others have laid out, enjoying the path we are on until we come to what we know. Or we follow directions toward specific outcomes and, focused on our goals, pay little attention to the path itself.

Do any of us dare dream of being first to blaze a new trail to a wholly new destination? Probably not.

Still, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able both to appreciate our own journey and to anticipate its end? Wouldn’t it be fulfilling to absorb completely both our progress toward and our discovery of the purpose life holds for us?

Turnpike "Evangelism"

In the men’s room of an Ohio Turnpike rest stop I recently heard the good news. Sort of.

As I faced the row of urinals, a man’s voice from behind me – from near the row of lavatories – rose above the other sounds echoing off the tile walls. He was preaching. This is what I remember of his words:

“‘Gospel’ is the good news of the love of Jesus for you. You cannot ever understand his love, or know why he has chosen you to receive it. All you can do is believe it.”

Then his tone changed.

“I don’t know why you said and did what you said and did to me. It hurt me a lot, but I forgive you. The love of Jesus is stronger than anything that happens. He has forgiven me, so I can forgive you. You must accept him and trust him with your life today, and you will receive eternal life from him.”

I lingered a moment longer, not sure if I wanted to turn around and see who was preaching to whom.

When the person to whom the man was apparently speaking said nothing in reply, the preacher concluded his sermon:

“The tragic thing is: the bulk of humanity will reject Jesus and spend eternity burning in hell.”

I finally turned, walked toward the lavatories, and snuck a furtive glance. Who had been involved in this attempt at evangelism on that early evening just off the Ohio Turnpike?

Two men - one black, one white - stood facing each other. I assumed, perhaps from the way he had been talking, that the speaker was the white man, but I could be wrong about that. I washed and dried my hands, looking straight into the mirror in front of me, and made for the door.

As I waited for my wife, the white man came out of the restroom. If I had to guess I’d say he was a truck driver, based upon the the way he was dressed...but again, I could be wrong. The black man did not leave while I waited.

Questions: If you have to believe something given to you that you will never understand in order to be saved, why would anyone be condemned for not believing? And why does such good news for one have to be bad news for the many?

Maybe this news isn’t so good after all.

Debate Post Mortem #879716537789786767

Wrote the following to a friend whose brother produces calbuzz.com, and who commented on last night’s debate. Check that out before you read this and it will all make perfect sense.

“Unfortunately, I think your brother is right. The real problem is the whole way these things are conducted and carried out, with no respect either for the public or for the rules. For the public because neither candidate can stand simply to answer a question without trying to tell us how to respond to that answer. For the rules because the time limit is something to be ignored if the one answering the question wants to wander into whatever far country seems to beckon. I am so tired of hearing "talking points" repeated over and over again. I do not know much about the people who "prepare" their candidates for these events, but if I were doing it I'd tell them just to answer the question as simply yet as fully as they can and let it be. Don't they trust us to judge for ourselves whether we like their answer? I'd vote for (almost) anyone would do that.

“All that having been said, I think Romney played the "bully" in this (Maxine says that's too strong a word) and pushed Jim Lehrer into the street the way a kid might attack an old man. That in itself said quite a bit to me about his respect for another person trying to do a job. I wonder if anyone in the media has commented on that.

“Obama has to get himself up for the remaining debates. Or is he simply too tired to give it his best? He has to be a candidate AND a president; Romney just has to be a candidate. There must be times when Barack says to Michelle, "Sometimes I wonder why the Hell I'm putting me and our family through all this for another four years of constant attack and criticism." (And maybe when the date was suggested he should have said, “No that’s our wedding anniversary.”) But then, after he wonders to Michelle and she wonders with him, he has to stand up and deliver. Otherwise he will give it all away. Makes me think of how LeBron played his last games for the Cavs.

“Shoot...I should have put all that on my blog; maybe I will.”

Well, I did.

BTW: If you care  to learn more about how I am voting, go back and read my September 8 post. (Last night’s debate didn’t begin to change my mind.) Interestingly, it is the least read of all my little-read posts, about which I tell folks mostly through Facebook, which says to me that my Facebook friends don’t care how I will vote and may mean pushing politics endlessly on Facebook may be counterproductive and risk friendships. Whew!

Modest Expectations of Great Things

There shall be showers of blessing;

Showers of blessing we need.

Mercy drops ’round us are falling,

But for the showers we plead.

I sang this old gospel song on a recent visit to Iowa, and it surely spoke a tantalizing hope to the drought-weary farmers in the congregation. By that August Sunday any showers that might come were likely too late to make much difference in this season’s crops. But they would, if they were sufficient, give hope for next year. In drought, a few drops of rain evaporate in the dust they stir up; what’s needed for a blessing are steady, gentle showers.

The song and its refrain have come into my mind at unexpected moments ever since. And I’ve wondered about the yearning for spiritual showers, which is the kind of showers the song is really about.

A shower of the spirit can wash away sin and guilt, of course; it can signal the arrival of new possibilities. But it can also, if it comes "too much-too fast" cloud truth about ourselves, make us feel superior to others, or justify our ongoing wrong-headedness. A shower can impair our vision, as anyone who has driven into a sudden thunderstorm knows. I am cautious around spiritual showers.

I do think sometimes I need to be more aware of and grateful for the drops of mercy - the forgiveness, the love, the peace, the justice - that fall around me every day. I need to reach out my hand or stick out my tongue and feel and taste the smaller mercies that are all around me, and worry less about the supposedly greater blessings that are not. I might learn that a few well-placed and gratefully-received mercy drops are all I need...and all I need to offer to others. Just learning that could be blessing enough.

And furthermore, I plan to vote for _____, because...

Fairly complete honesty forces me to admit that as far as I can tell, when it comes to “truth telling” at conventions (see my previous blog), the Democrats are only slightly better than the Republicans. I don’t know if they told any outright lies like Paul Ryan’s story of the GM plant, but their “shadings” of fact and of what actually happened and when and as the result of whose deeds and misdeeds seem to have followed close on those of the their counterparts in Tampa. Pilate was whispering his eternal question in speakers’ ears in both arenas.

(By the way, the most annoying thing the Democrats did last week was insert “God” into their platform. That was a cheap shot at the Holy One, worthy of another blog, maybe someday.)

I think a purist mind in politics is impossible to maintain. I excuse no one; since I am a Democrat most of the time I’d like to see that party do better. I even emailed someone at the Convention’s web site and chastised them not only for their misrepresentations but also for their silence on deficit/debt issues. Their response? “Send money to US!”

I think two things:

1) Politics is about deciding who you believe, even when they are not telling the truth. Put more baldly, it’s about whose lies you want to believe and whose half-truths you want to trust.

2) In the end, we rely on promises made in campaigns to capture our votes. That’s not as small as it sounds, because the promises politicians make are enfolded in the narrative they tell about and the vision and hope they have for our nation…and,

…at the end of these two weeks, I think the Democrats tell the truer overall narrative: we got into trouble economically because of the poor stewardship of our nation’s finances during Republican administrations (particularly W’s), and because of the deregulation of financial institutions the Republicans constantly push for. It’s really hard to deny those facts, and they are recurring facts.

Further I think the Democrats have a corner on the hope and vision thing: they more widely represent the wild and often unwieldy and marvelous human diversity of our nation, and are therefore far more likely to govern in a way that keeps us together rather than tears us apart. And, very important to me, I think the only real chance of our facing up to the environmental crisis is, for now, in the hands of the Democrats, small as that chance is.

And since I generally want to believe Democrats (whether they are in fact always truthful or not), and since I generally much prefer their vision for our nation over that of the Republicans, I will vote for Obama/Biden and (here in Ohio) for Senator Sherrod Brown.

There you have it.

And the Truth Is...

Paul Ryan’s apparent “mis-statements” in his speech to the Republican National Convention are disturbing and revealing. It’s hard to believe that he was able to tell the story about the GM plant in his own hometown in a speech that had been carefully (presumably) written and reviewed by a reliable team, and then even more carefully rehearsed, without someone, sometime, saying, “Hey, that didn’t happen! You can’t use that story!”

Hard to believe, but not in politics.

Some 2000 years ago a Roman governor named Pontius Pilate faced a particularly dicey decision about executing an innocent man because the polls on the street indicated the public wanted him dead. When Pilate’s detainee started talking about truth, and claimed that those who are committed to the truth listen to him, Pilate sneered the question, “What is truth?” (Read the Gospel of John 18:33-38 in the Christian Bible for the original story.)

Pilate sneered (better, spat out) that question because his political instincts were perfect: whether you are seeking to slay the innocent or to defeat your opponent, precious “truth” must not stand in your way. As he spoke Wednesday night, Mr. Ryan was apparently deafened to the voice of that man who stood before Pilate. Yet he makes loud claims to be one of his followers.

Years ago I heard some wag suggest “the homiletical theory of truth,” which is: “A statement or story is true in direct proportion to its usefulness in preaching.” If it works, present it as truth, even if it isn’t. And the better it works, the truer it surely is. Preachers in pulpits and politicians behind podiums are subject to very similar temptations when it comes to truth-telling. And the claims of politicians who sound like preachers require our most critical scrutiny.

UPDATE: I turned off Mitt Romney after he told us Paul Ryan loves his mother. Maybe he does...but that doesn’t excuse his lying about his home town...also makes me wonder...but it’s unkind to wonder that...

Hot Enough for Ya? Do the Math

I subscribe to a periodical called Orion (“Nature/Culture/Place”), which identifies itself as striving for “a broad philosophy of nature rooted in a deep attentiveness to the world that makes a new relationship between people and nature possible, and that brings responsible inhabitation of the planet within reach.” That’s an awkward summary of Orion’s purpose, according to the editors in the current issue (July/August 2012).

Basically I like reading Orion, but often its writers make me squirm. The issues and choices before the human race regarding our relationship with and in the natural world are overwhelming and urgent...but I don’t want to have to change a thing about how I live. I want someone else to do what must be done to save our planet from us. I want Orion to leave me alone

Bill McKibben’s column in that current issue is a real squirm-inducer. Entitled “A Matter of Degrees: The Arithmetic of a Warming Climate,” it states that scientists calculate that if the earth’s average temperature increases two degrees Celsius, we will enter “the guaranteed-catastrophe zone.” Then McKibben puts some other numbers before us:

• “Scientists also agree that to stand a reasonable chance of avoiding the two-degree rise, we can’t emit more that 565 gigatons of CO2 over the next forty years.”

• “Some analysts in the UK” have added up how much carbon all the world’s fossil fuel companies and countries (like Venezuela) have listed as reserves...that is, what they have found and plan to dig up and burn. They figure we have our hands on enough oil and gas and coal to generate 2,795 gigatons of CO2.

• “Exxon Mobil, for instance, boasts that it spends $100 million every day looking for more gas and oil–that is, in spends $100 million a day looking for carbon that scientists say simply can’t be burned. In 2008, it spent just $4 million on renewable reserves–for the entire year.”ˆ

McKibben is a responsible guy, so I have to believe there’s validity to his numbers, though he does not give sources. And I trust that if there are serious doubts about any of those numbers, Orion’s readers will let its editors know and in turn they will let us know. (And readers of this blog are encouraged to comment with figures they think are correct, and I will post them in a subsequent blog.) But even if he’s 50% wide of the mark, the numbers are the stuff of nightmares.

I’m a good guy...I drive a Prius. Then I read that a meat-eater who drives a Prius is responsible for more carbon than a vegetarian who drives a Hummer. I’ve been cutting down on my meat consumption for years, but I’m not there yet. My Iowa agricultural roots run deep–some of which I nurture in my little vegetable garden and through our CSA membership.

Best of all, of course, would be not to drive at all. But how long would it take me (and the rest of our family) to get to a long-awaited get-together in Maryland this week if we all had to take public transportation? Maybe forever.

So I blame others, especially our political leaders and candidates who are virtually silent on the issue. Their relentless pursuit of the title “Job Creator” never allows them to talk seriously about what kinds of jobs doing what for whom and with what compensation? Republicans have their heads in the encroaching sands of growing deserts, rarely considering evidence, scientific or otherwise, that challenges their ideological purity. Democrats are little better, their leadership timid before the sound-bite style of campaign messaging so effective in a disinterested public. I’d vote Green if I wanted Republicans to win, but I don’t so I won’t.

So I lament our politics, and I like the frackin’-cheap natural gas (from under Ohio, yet!) that heats my home. It’s enough to make me squirm.

Paterno and Philosophers

Sign placed at the foot of Joe Paterno’s statue at Penn State: “Remember - He was a Man, Not a God!!”

True enough. But a man who convinces others and himself that he is at least somewhat god-like is the most likely of men to forfeit his humanity and to deny others’ humanity as well. (Applies to women, too.)

“Real Life Adventure” cartoon (Wise and Aldrich): A man and his daughter sit across a table from one another and have this exchange:

"Man: I’m glad you’re going to college. It’s just that I wonder about your major.

"Daughter: But I like it, Dad.

"Man: I’m sure. But it’s just that I’ve never heard of a company hiring...say...a Chief Philosophy Officer."

Might that be the problem, Dad?

Suggestion: If institutions (companies, universities, churches, governments, etc.) hired Chief Philosophy Officers they would be less likely to confuse their temporal interests with eternal truths, and therefore beyond any judgment but their own.

Coelietterra Interestingly Interviews Higgs Boson

Eons after Coelietterra (C&T) began searching for and chasing after Higgs Boson (HB), they finally met. Reluctantly, HB agreed to a brief interview, provided that s/he could talk like Yoda whenever possible in order to seem to add mass of his/her words. (The sex of HB remains uncertain, but that does not mean s/he has no interest in the subject–see below. Neuter pronouns do not do justice to his/her most prolific life.)

C&T: Here is something about you and your work by New York Times writer David Overbye: “Confirmation of the Higgs boson or something very much like it ... [would affirm] ... a grand view of the universe ruled by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws, but in which everything interesting in it, like ourselves, is a result of flaws or breaks in that symmetry.”

HB: Wow, awesome that is!

C&T: Indeed...but “Are you HB, or only something like HB?”

HB: So foolish that question! Just look at me!

C&T: Help me understand the “simple and elegant and symmetrical laws” by which you rule the universe.

HB: If you understood, you would think yourself like me, and like me you are not.

C&T: Maybe just one example?

HB: There is no “one” in a universe ruled by symmetrical laws.

C&T: Mmmm...I see where this is going.

HB: Only partially, my friend; only partially do you see anything.

C&T: Overbye calls humans “interesting.” Do you find us interesting, now that you have met us?

HB: Interesting not by half; I find you positively terrifying!

C&T: Terrifying? Why?

HB: Read again, O pretentiously-named one.

C&T: “Everything interesting in [the universe], like us, is a result of flaws or breaks in that symmetry.”

HB: You “interesting” human beings busy yourselves trying to make what Overbye calls “flaws and breaks” go away–trying to force everything to be like you, to fit into molds of your own design. Or, you emphasize the “flaws and breaks” you can see in order to exploit or to control or even to kill one another. You turn what’s interesting into reasons for conflict and destruction. But those very particularities and differences make your world what it is and you who you are. Enjoy them you should; fear them you do. You are about to ruin forever your most beautiful of all worlds.

C&T: Are you sure?

HB: About some things I am not as uncertain as you speculate.

C&T: May I ask you a personal question?

NB: Person I am not, but best I can will I do.

C&T: Well, I am uncomfortable referring to you as “it.” After all, I am talking with you as if you were a person, and persons are male or female Do you understand the concept of sex, and are you male or female, or both, or neither?

NB: [smiles] “Do I understand the concept of sex”? Let me count the ways...

Just say this I will: sex is the most interesting way all you interesting creatures celebrate the sentient universe’s flaws and breaks...and even try to overcome them. Vive la difference–every last one of ‘em! Wrong it is how you use gender differences to control one another; sad it is how you burden sexual expression with shame and guilt.

As for me myself, I prefer to keep you guessing. I know myself for who I am, and that is enough.

C&T: Let me try another subject: whom do you favor for President of the United States?

HB: Frankly, from my perspective it is of small consequence whom you choose. I am concerned that Mr Romney’s religion teaches strange cosmology and bogus history; I wonder what he thinks of me?

C&T: So you are an Obama man?

NB: Still concerned I am! Talk and think beyond November 6 they must. Your planet is at the tipping point beyond which it will not be able to avoid falling back to where it started...to me and my kind. Green my vote would be...if I could vote.

By the way, is it I, or is it warm in here?

C&T: I am afraid it is not you. So, despite all your concerns, do you like it here, on earth I mean?

NB: What’s not to like? As your poet, Adrienne Rich, says, “The sourest apple makes its wry announcement/That imperfection has a certain tang.” Tang is good for the tongue...it is “interesting.” Poets and artists knew that long before your physicists figured it out. “Interesting” have they always understood.

C&T: One more question: are you “the god particle?”

NB: Whoever “god” is, s/he is not a particle. Of that you may be certain.

C&T: Thank you for your time. Can I try to answer any questions for you?

NB: Well, I saw a plastic bag of something called “Chex Mix” yesterday. I am not sure what was inside of it, but on the outside it said it was “A Bag of Interesting.” What’s in there? Little humans?

C&T: No, not at all. Just something to snack on. It’s called “marketing” when someone claims for something far more than it really is.

NB: Thank you; I was worried you’ve made the results of my work into a product to sell.

C&T: Keep worrying; we have.

Where I've Been

Friends,


I'm still alive, despite the lack of new postings for several weeks. My wife and I visited our daughter and family in Birmingham, England, for a week; then the two of us spent three days in Paris. Then our other daughter and husband visited us for a week. It's been a great time.


Along the way, I have been collecting ideas and beginning to think about how to start to begin to turn them into blogs.  Something will come of it all soon. Don't give up on me and I will won't give up on you.


Besides, it's summer, and hot, and humid, and it's just a bit too easy to be lazy. I kind of like that.


Dean

12 Questions for Candidates

Our political candidates and their parties are not talking about what drives their agendas in ways that I can easily understand. Even candidates for whom I will probably vote are not articulating clearly the convictions that underlie their plans for our nation and what values will guide them as they try to turn their plans into political reality.

Maybe it’s me.

So, for my sake, here are 12 mostly “domestic issue” questions for candidates to which I’d like straight answers. I have tried to state them as fairly as I can–they are not intended to be “gotcha” questions. Candidates’ answers will no doubt raise many follow-up questions. But all of these questions should be answerable in no more than a few words.

1. As an elected representative, do you represent all the people living in the area that has elected you, or only those who voted for you?

2. Do you believe our planet’s climate is changing? If so, do you believe human activity is contributing to that change?

3. Is the availability of health care properly determined by market/economic forces alone? If not, do you think government has a role in assuring health care’s availability to our citizens?

4. When your religious/spiritual convictions are not the same as the constitutional and legal rights of all Americans, do you submit your personal convictions to the general public interest?

5. Should GLBT Americans be accorded the same rights as other Americans?

6. Should considerations of environmental impact help determine the kinds of jobs we create?

7. Is there ever a good reason to raise taxes?

8. Would you consider compromising any of your convictions about deficit spending and the national debt in order to fashion a bi-partisan plan to deal with those issues?

9. Are you concerned about the widely-reported “gap” between the richest and the poorest Americans, and the “shrinking middle class” between them?

10. Is there a role for public and/or private sector unions in America today?

11. Do corporate power and money in elections threaten our democracy?

12. If your opponents and/or their party win this election, will the American republic survive the next 2-4 years?

Could these be more clearly stated? Do you have questions of your own? How could we put them before candidates and get them to respond?