"The end is near" according to St. Strangelove

Unlike most of the rest of the world, I did not watch the debate tonight. But what I find really funny is I will still know who won. Fox news, Rush Limbaugh, and the Wall Street Journal will all insist that Bush won it. Buzzflash and Al Franken will insist that John Kerry won it. And Michael Moore will argue that John Kerry didn't try hard enough.

I think I am despondent about it; I fear the mess in Iraq is past the point that anyone can clean it up. It just sickens me to think of all those Iraqi children who died today, all the soldiers over there who can no longer figure out why they are even over there, and all the aid workers who are being threatened with being brutally murdered by some wingnut named Al Zarqawi who wants to make Internet snuff videos. The best we can hope for, I fear, is that the fires set there do not spread outside Iraq.

Sometimes I think that the Book of Revelations is going to turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I certainly don't believe that it is God's will to lay bare the middle east and then usher in the end of the world. But many people, weak in their understanding of scripture, thinks that is exactly what the Bible calls for - then they vote for politicians they think can make it happen. Frankly, I think human beings will do it, each side trying to force God's hand, as it were. (Most people don't know that Islam also has an apocalyptic end of world prophecy that has Jesus and some fellow named the Mahdi ushering in the end of the world, but in that version, it is of course Islam triumphant.)

And the scary thing about all of this is that the apocalyptic genre in the Bible was never meant in the Nostradamus sense in which we read it. As any serious bible scholar will tell you, John was writing about his own era - persecutions of Christians that began with Roman emperor Nero. He uses symbolic numbers and signs from Daniel and other apocalyptic traditions to make theological sense of their suffering - only in Chapter 21, once the inspired writer has riffed on Daniel does he truly move into prophetic voice.

So it scares the crap out of me that people are designing public policies around the poor eisegesis that has resulted in the premilennial "rapture industry." Look folks - God does not want us to try and kick off the end of the world! When John, the Revelations writer, asserts in one of his letters that "God is Love," do you picture that God as as a world-destroying Zeus?

If the world does end, and Jesus does come down, it will probably because of a fridge magnet I saw in the rectory.

It reads, "Don't make me come down there!!"

It is time for Christians to call each other to be a more hopeful people. Don't wait to disappear in your clothes. Establish in your heart the kingdom of God, right now - for it was already at hand 2,000 years ago.

Suffer the little children

Just awful - roadside bombers in Iraq have killed dozens of children today.

I am grateful for having faith upon hearing such a thing. How could a person make sense of this world, if you didn't believe in a God who will right it again? And right it He will - those children are now in His arms; noone can ever hurt them again. He will wipe away every tear. They will never know sorrow, sadness, suffering, or pain where they are now. Those are the passing things of this world, already forgotten to them. With God, they will remain children forever, and he surely takes delight in them, for whom the kingdom to come was made. I only hope their parents come to realize that one day, in hope, they will see their beautiful children again.

And unless their killers truly and deeply know sorrow and regret for harming such innocence, all I can say is that a special millstone is the only paradise awaiting them.

Whale Rider

Whale's up, dude!

My daughter would love this. She loves whales. She often wishes she was the girl in Whale Rider. Perhaps this will give her hope! :-)

"But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered over them."

The Passion of the Christ had the intended effect on me when I saw it. I was horrified, grateful, and sorry all at once. That is not to say I am unreservedly a fan of the movie. It did seem in some ways to overdwell on suffering - the crow picking out that guy's eyes was cinematically unnecessary. Another film that came out at that time, the Gospel of John, moved me much more, because it showed us who Jesus was and why he mattered before the flaying began (plus the actor was really good.)

One thing "The Passion" got right was Mary.

We Catholics portray her too often as a serene nun, the model of Catholic piety. On the other hand, other churches sometimes make her far too ordinary and extraneous to Jesus' life - just another sinner to be redeemed, far too pedestrian a fate in my opinion for she who literally gave birth to "God with us."

Gibson showed Mary as I've always pictured her: a young Jewish woman picked for a destiny she knew to be both wondrous and heartbreaking. He steps back in time and shows us a woman who is human enough to think her son's eccentric carpentry is a little too avant garde -- and then rips us back forward in time to that awful moment when Mary and Jesus see each other for the first time on the Via Dolorosa - the "Mother of sorrows" as tradition calls her.

But the mother of sorrows was also the mother of treasures. Luke 2:19 says, "But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered over them." What a journey it must have been for her - angels announcing her charge to her, her visit with Elizabeth affirming the incredible and wondrous life inside her... did it even seem real? But that starry night in Bethlehem, when God's own spirit took to this world in fleshly form as an innocent child, the way in which we all enter this world, how amazing it would have been to know her joy at that moment. How I wish I could have been one of the shepherds to see this.

Truly life is all about the highs and lows, peaks and valleys, isn't it, if even God's life is like that?

Keep Ken Bigley in your prayers

With the release of the Italian women who had been hostages in Iraq, and the visit of a delegation of British muslims, there may be enough good will created that the awful fate that has befallen other captured aid workers might be spared him.

This prayer is not in vain! "Pray until something happens," the saying goes.

He who sings, prays twice

While all religions feature music in worship, it is one of the things Christianity does best, in my subjective opinion. Everyone I know loves to sing in church - good singers and joyful noisemakers alike. This they share with St. Augustine, who wrote:

How I wept, deeply moved by your hymns, songs, and the voices that echoed through your Church! What emotions I experienced in them! Those sounds flowed into my ears, distilling the truth in my heart. A feeling of devotion surged within me, and tears streamed down my face - tears that did me good.

Booking that lovely cruise to Saturn

Soon, we'll be able to really get away from it all. Richard Branson plans on offering commercial flights to outer space.

Can you buy one way tickets, I wonder? :-)

I didn't listen in on peoples' conversations this morning...

'Tis a good thing! I never mean to, but I suppose it is an intrusion.

Fundamentals vs. Fundamentalism

We are rooted deeply in gospel fundamentals given us by Jesus and the Apostles, but we are not to be fundamentalists. One responds to the problems of the world and the Church with great love, patience, and steady perseverance. The other reacts with a sort of short-circuiting of both thought and emotions through an almost compulsive and paranoid preoccupation with "orthodoxy." It "misses the forest for the trees" so to speak. Genuine orthodoxy is meant to guide us to and deeper in God, not to be a god. One is healthy and life giving, the other strangles the spiritual life out of even orthodox belief and practice. Such an approach becomes a sort of inverted idolatry, making a god out of the otherwise good things of God.

- Singer John Michael Talbot.

This little light of mine

Its funny that I seem to write about things out of sequence. Here it is Tuesday, and I am about to tell a story about Sunday!

On Sunday afternoon, we had to rush back into town from the cottage to a potluck, for the RCIA. (RCIA is a course for catechumens and converts who will join the church at the Easter vigil next year.) Every year, the RCIA opens with this potluck, where the people who went through the year before prepare the food for those about to get started. The reason we go to this event is that my wife is one of the RCIA instructors.

I'm not much of a socializer at these events. So for a half hour or so after the appetizers got put out, I played with my daughter, who wanted to jump on me from the stage in the church hall.However, when supper came out, we diligently found a table with new candidates, and we had a long discussion about how kids today seem to be developing asthma and allergies at an alarming rate (compared to our day.) Two women mentioned to me that they really enjoyed the 8 PM choir, it was the best they had ever heard, and it had something to do with why they were joining!

When I went upstairs to start setting up the sound system, the leader of our folk group arrived, hauling his softshell guitar case. I immediately told him what the two had said about us, telling him that they had called us a "choir." (He hates that – we are a folk group, dammit, folk group!) At any rate, he was thrilled to hear this – he said he wanted us to be the rockingest folk group there was!

When I was up on the altar, I realized, looking at my wife, that I prayed for strangers, friends, even myself all the time. (Mass had been announced for my sister in law.) But it had become a way that I take her for granted, that I didn't often think now to explicitly pray for her. The realization hit me like an awful shock, and I resolved to change that.

Later, after church, the leader of the RCIA team spoke to my wife. This woman is a lovely person, whose soul is practically visible. Humble, loving, and kind, she is a charismatic – but not the kind that makes a big show of it, hollering for all to see his or her piety. I think she is one of those few who really has the charismatic gifts, for she takes them on humbly, tells few about what she sees or feels, and doesn't have a self-promoting bone in her body. My wife is one of the very few who knows. At any rate, she told my wife that she had seen a pillar of light shining down on her all night.

God loves her! He does – my wife sometimes fears she does not have the deep connection, emotionally, with her faith that she feels she should – that beatific sense that God is with you. She caught it when she went on Cursillo, but when she didn't attend Ultreyas the connection she felt to the Cursillo movement petered out. (she was worried I would feel left out, as my Cursillo was a month later.) A prayer group she was going to start got invaded in the planning stages by a friend she has who likes to take everything over. I know she feels frustrated at every turn.

But she has always been like an angel to me. She defers to everyone, helps everyone, laughs with them, cries with them, consoles them, affirms them – it may have been a surprise to her that light shone down on her from Heaven that night.

But it came as no surprise to me.

Why do I blog?

I think my biggest reason for starting a blog was the romantic notion that someday when I am really old and my kids are in their thirties, they might want to know what I was like. I have no illusions it is anything but a romantic ideal, of course; I haven't printed out so much as a single page of this blog, and all of this content will be destroyed, in utter anonymity, when Microsoft buys out Google in 2009. :-)

So why write now? In part, because the world needs people to stop, think, and reflect on who they are. Self awareness may be in part a conceit, an illusion that our individuality sets us apart from everything else. But it is also the first step in understanding that existence has meaning. It is the first step taken on the road to Emmaus.

The bus people: update

Well I overheard the followup to Friday's bus conversation. Apparently the boat cruise was awful. An aunt said it was the worst cruise she had been on.

You know, I find it funny that older people become so expert at cruises, and vacationing. I think it is fantastic that some seniors become almost professional adventurers, always looking to have a new experience in a place they have not gone before.

We younger folk often stereotype older people as folks who are set in their ways and won't do anything new. And yet, whenever you go on a river cruise, most of the people on the boat are retired people! My parents just came back from Stonehenge and the London theatre scene, places I have never been near.

In fact, I read today about a 93 year old fellow from England who came to Toronto and ran a marathon. I am forced to conclude from this anecdotal evidence that.... senior citizens are in fact quite cool!

The end of summer weather

The Weather Network tells me that from here on in, it is fall temperatures. It is difficult to accept that I can't wear short sleeved shirts outdoors for six months!

Hopefully, we will get an Indian summer. The leaves are as pretty as they can get. Red, red maples, and orange oaks... they may peak before Thanksgiving (which for us is in two weeks.)

A la prochaine, as they say.

Fight the good fight

One of tonight's readings (the standard lectionery) was 1 Timothy 6:11-16:

But as for you, man of God, shun all this; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.

In the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you to keep the commandment without spot or blame until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he will bring about at the right time--he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords.

It is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see; to him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.

The gospel was the parable of the rich man who died and saw Lazarus with Abraham. So the theme was all about the afterlife, and what to expect. Given that tonight was announced as dedicated for my sister in law, it was certainly a theme much on my mind.

What was in store for her? We have such little idea what Heaven is. Artists can't paint it, without silly images of angels strumming harps on clouds. Writers, other than St. John who describes it so beautifully in the end of the Book of Revelation (21:1-5), seldom portray it with anything other than whimsy.

One of the few to do so in a way that seems real and genuine to me was a young woman I knew of who, well... I should not qualify what she wrote in any way, other than to commend it to you.

I certainly like to picture Heaven as that place. Perhaps it is different for everyone. :-)

The fire in the dark

At about 6 AM, this morning, I woke up, shook off the strange dreams I had been having about the emperor from "Star Wars," and came downstairs. I was the first one up, and it was cold. I like the dark in the morning, so I turned on the dimmest light I could find, and took some kindling and paper out of the woodbox. Soon, I had a roaring fire, and I made myself a roast beef sandwich. I noticed that all the windows were open, and thought to myself, "Summer habits die hard." I went around and closed them all.

I sat by the fire for the next 40 minutes, watching the dawn slowly arrive. By the time my brother in law woke up and came downstairs, the view out the window was essentially the same as the photo in "Dawn on the lake." The sun is up now, he's playing Halo, and I am working on my Dad's book again. The music for Halo sounds like Gregorian chant, which somehow feels right when you're watching a sunrise in the fall.

Later we have pot lights to install. We'll see how that goes, but right now, I am content to work quietly enough to hear my own thoughts. Our days get too hectic sometimes for that simple pleasure.

I'll be the moonlight

"The sun it was golden, though the sky it was grey, and she wanted more than she ever could say." Suzanne Vega, The Queen and the Soldier

The last two nights, I have gone down to the dock, sat down, and watched the moon reflect on the water. But where last night, the moonlight rippled across the water, tonight the water was still as glass. Because of that, there was a moon in the sky, and a moon in the water. There were a few wispy clouds in the sky, but it was otherwise clear, so the water looked as unending as the starry sky.

Perhaps the infinite beauty of the universe, which you can only really begin to see at night, was what I needed to break through the melancholy of a dull day. I can't help but remember in my kitchen song that I included the line, "I'll be the moonlight, the sun on the dock." Where others are seeing hummingbirds, perhaps that is the way in which I am kept in her presence.

The ancient creeds of Christianity, the Apostle's Creed, and the Nicene Creed, refer to the "communion of saints" - which speaks to the way in which those of us who are living are part of the same community of faith as those who have left us. It is a comforting thought. Those who are now beyond the reach of our senses are with the great, glorious God of Heaven, who alone perhaps can help them reach us, when we feel lonely.

To look at the moonlight tonight, it certainly seems that way.

"Last night, I got loaded" (Apologies to Los Lobos)

I didn't, actually, I just thought quoting Los Lobos would be cool. I went to bed at 11:30. No, my wife and my brother in law got right tanked. He was supposed to get up and go duck hunting at 4 AM, and never ended up getting to bed. The bottle of whiskey didn't even get opened until after I went to bed, and by 4 AM, it was 3/4 gone. She went to bed, he went duck hunting, not having slept at all. The first duck hunt of the season, he is normally quite animated. Instead he fell asleep in the duck blind. :-)

When he got back, he went to bed, and slept til noon. My wife got up at noon, too, and promptly discovered just how hung over she was, rushing to the bathroom to venerate the porcelain altar.

It is just as well I suppose. My back is still sore, and I did not really feel like working today. I cut a jig for the pot lights, and that was the extent of my efforts today. I napped outside, came back in, napped inside. When I came back in, it was actually to read. I picked up my NRSV, and flipped it open, where it fell to the opening pages of Ecclesiastes. I read, reading past "There is nothing new under the sun," past "For everything there is a season," until the weariness of Solomon got to me, and I fell asleep, dreaming dark dreams.

Right now I am supposed to be working on my Dad's book. He is having to publish it himself, even though everyone he has had sent it to just loved it (including the publishers who demured.) He even had a leftenant-general of some note write the book's foreword… I guess nobody is publishing new authors these days. I actually produced a fully printed and bound copy of the book for him for Christmas last year. He was really touched and grateful. More importantly, it motivated him to get the book published and out there, so I suppose I had better get to it.

*Sigh* Why do I still feel like everything is a vanity, and there is nothing new under the sun, today?

Stupid farging computers

I am a computer programmer by profession. As a result, I think people assume that I like computers.

I hate them. Sometimes.

Computers are stupid. I think that is what I find most frustrating about them, because people always assume computers are intelligent, people always assume that the programs running on them are intelligent, and… well…. ARGH!!

I have spent this morning, since 8:30 AM, trying to rebuild my brother-in-law's IBM TouchPad. (One of the other assumptions people also make is that, because I am a computer programmer, I know more than they do about how to install software and load drivers, which, other than understanding the plumbing better, is not necessarily true.) This stupid laptop has taken right up until now to get going. Windows had no driver for the kind of external CD-ROM he had. I had to go online, long distance, and Google the driver. Since the driver was designed to take every last byte of a 1.44 HD floppy disk, I had to go through about three disks to find one without bad sectors, that would accept the driver install (which would probably have been a lot smaller if it had not been bloated up with InstallShield.)

After that, I tried to install his Kodak EasyShare. It told me that I needed Internet Exploder 5.01. I went searching through the cottage looking for disks. I had an old Microsoft SiteBuilder disk which said it had Internet Explorer on it. It didn't - it just had a lot of hype (disguised as technical articles) about XML technologies in IE5. I found an MSDN CD, but it had an even older version of IE5 than the one that was on the laptop. (I've ditched IE for FireFox myself, but third party applications seem to need it a lot of the time.)

I gave up, and went to install his WordPerfect 2000, and that went fine. Then, after scouring the cottage again for ISP coaster CDs, I tried again with EasyShare. It warned me about the IE 5.01, but let me get through it.

I'm going swimming. It is a calming activity, and one that, if I go now, will help keep at least one IBM laptop from going for a swim instead. ;-)

Posting from cottage

It is long distance, so I rarely do it. But I had to go online to find device drivers for a broken laptop. So good morning!

Last night when we got here, which was about ten thirty at night, I went down to the sauna, got my bathing suit on, and went swimming. The moon was out, bright, and rippling on the water. Have you ever had that feeling that something you got to do was a bonus, a little more than you deserved?

That is how I felt about swimming in the moonlight. :-)

100 years of special relativity

Einstein developed his theory of special relativity a century ago. I recently read a whole series of articles on this in Discover magazine. The faster you go, the slower time passes for you, such that the speed of light always, to you, appears to be 299,792 km/s. If you go 9/10 the speed of light, you will be so lethargic that time will fly by on Earth while you hardly age at all... just so that time continues to appear to travel at that constant speed.

It reminds me of that DeNiro movie, Awakenings, but I've already written about that. :-)

A quote someone gave me

What's behind us and what's ahead of us, is nothing compared to
what is inside of us.

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

We do not own each other

On the bus this morning, I was doing the overhearing thing again.

A woman beside me was telling her friend that she was going off this weekend on a Thousand Islands cruise this weekend, with her parents (or something like that – when you're listening in, you do not catch all the details.) She'd booked it a month ago, and told her boyfriend about it.

Just last night, he began to whine about this. "But it is the weekend, and we should be together," He said. The woman went on to further say that he is such a control freak that, one time, on a trip to Niagara Falls, she hid a thousand dollars on herself so that if he became particularly jerk-like, she could take off on him, and just come home on her own.

The friend sitting beside her, looking for a way to empathize, told her about a new guy who started at work a couple of months ago. Apparently, this guy is permitted by his wife to belong to a gym, but he can only work out between one and two – lunchtime at work. And he is not allowed to go every day. He is not permitted to go out with people from work after work, he is required to rush right home. If she has a hair appointment, he must go home early. The woman said that he does not have any friends, and his wife likes it that way. “We have each other, you don't need friends,” She tells him.

The marriage license is not an ownership certificate. It is a commitment to many things – partnership, teamwork, and above all, intimate friendship. And it does come with obligations, too – to love, honour, and cherish. But there is a reason we've dropped "obey" from the wedding vows. A wife is not a servant, nor is a husband a vassal. Partners are willing cooperators in an endeavor, and not people who have been bullied into doing what the other wants.

What is the big deal if one person, with a month's notice, takes a weekend to do something on their own? And where does anyone get the idea that your spouse does not need friends?

Here's a revelation, and nobody should be insulted by this: not one of us - not one - is so interesting, as a person, that we can deny our mate friends of their own. I know I'm not! My wife beads crafts. My idea of a craft is Kraft (dinner.) I like to play endlessly on my electric guitar, sometimes. I do not expect my wife to sit there and watch rapturously like I am Jimi Hendrix (she wouldn't do that for him, even.)

But I think all of us know this, even the woman in my story. Reading between the lines, she is worried he will grow away from her, perhaps, or even have an affair. Who knows?

We have to open our hearts, and trust. And I know – that is taking a terrible risk. When we place trust in our spouses, we have taken our most precious and fragile treasure, and perched it where anyone can try and take it from us. We risk having our very spirit crushed, and it takes a lot of courage to do this.

But that is what intimacy really is. It means, with that one special person, making ourselves as vulnerable as we know how to be, and risking everything. But this also is what makes it special; if our trust is borne out, and if it is returned, a couple truly are two made one; man and woman made one flesh.

ORANGE ALERT!!! He might sing "Moonshadow!!"

http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_13649.shtml

Please pray for this man

Kenneth Bigley

...that the men who have captured him abandon the heathen gods of war and allow the true God, the God who is Love, into their hearts; that they may show mercy to a man who does not want to die, as they did to Scott Taylor. And that the political leaders who have the power to influence events in Mr. Bigley's favour, can find a way to do so in time, and that God might help us understand how, in our own small way, we can contribute to building a world where this no longer happens - ever.

My favourite anthropologist

Richard Leakey certainly has a pedigree. His parents Louis and Mary practically invented paleo-anthropology; through their discoveries, they were the first to unearth a scientific context for the emergence of the human race.

One of the ideas that immediately began to carry weight after Darwin's "Origin of the Species" is the notion that humans war and compete because it comes naturally - we're all fighting in the primordial ooze to survive.

Leakey's take is almost a quasi-spiritual one.

When he looks at human prehistory, he does not see a species whose most obvious characteristic is internicine conflict. He believes that, in fact, what singles human beings out is that we became adept at altruism.

What is his evidence? Well, for starters, look at language. Where primates can convey significant information to each other through gestures, eye contact, and posture, human beings can share themselves, their innermost selves, by manipulating their vocal chords into a recursive vocabulary of sounds with syntax and structure - language. And language, if nothing else, is a tool for understanding (and making oneself understood) with tremendous subtlety.

He looks at sharing in human and primate cultures. Chimpanzees have a certain kind of rudimentary sharing and begging, but nothing comparable to what humans have. In every human society on Earth, it is common for a person to give of not only their surplus, but even of their need, to another, even a complete stranger.

And in the fossil record, there is no evidence of war - anywhere - prior to the time that human beings became sedentary and agricultural. Once we began to have possessions, we began to fight over them.

Perhaps that is why, deeply rooted in our faith, we have the idea that sin began with Adam and Eve. We were made in the image of God - altruistic beings not inclined to selfishness. When God looks favourably on Abel's sacrifice (meat - that of a nomad), and frowns on Cain's (grain - that of the sedentary 'civilized' man,) maybe He was trying to tell us something?

If Nothing Else

If Nothing Else

(by me, June, 2004 - the link leads to the MP3 version)

I saw a man who went up to the mountain
A crowd had followed him to hear him speak;
He looked at us, a billion strong and then
He began to talk of the blessed and the meek

You are salt,
You are light
A shining hill cannot hide
So shine your light, shine it to the world

He said if nothing else
All our time is borrowed
Consider even the lilies have their home
So if nothing else
Leave your cares to tomorrow
Each day brings enough of its own.

I saw a smiling girl, she was struggling to her feet
He came to her and gently took her hand
He carried her, leaving footprints on the beach
She asked him why he took her from the sand

You are salt,
You are light
A shining hill cannot hide
So shine your light, shine it to the world

He said if nothing else
All our time is borrowed

Consider even the lilies have their home
So if nothing else
Leave your cares to tomorrow
Each day brings enough of its own.

I saw a man we followed to Gethsemane
He said the hour has come, yet you will all be mine;
His friend drew a sword, and cut away my ear
He healed my wounds then told me it was time.

You are salt,
You are light
A shining hill cannot hide
So shine your light, shine it to the world

He said if nothing else
All our time is borrowed
Consider even the lilies have their home
So if nothing else
Leave your cares to tomorrow
Each day brings enough of its own.

How far back can you remember?

I think I remember my earliest memory.

I was standing in my crib in the dining room of our house in Orleans. I remember it seeming very spare, which would make sense - we moved into that house when I was an age where I would soon outgrow being in a crib, so we would have just moved in.

The crib was in the dining room. What I remember most about the moment, is not anything that happened, because nothing did happen in this memory. Instead I remember thinking. If I can recall it correctly, because I was not entirely thinking in words - I am standing the crib. And I am wondering who I am? What am I? Where do I come from?

I sense my own newness - I know somehow that I am something of a blank canvas that has yet to be painted. And I have just the faintest trace of a sense that I come from somewhere, something, or someone. It is not only my earliest existential moment, my first memory - it is my dawning spiritual awareness. I can feel that my soul, not that I know a word for soul... comes from something.

I have other early memories. I can vaguely recall seeing something on television about the death of Gus Grissom and the other astronauts. I remember running in the yard of my great grandmother, and climbing her porch. I remember riding the subway in Toronto with my mother.

Funny how little we hang on to who we were when we were really young. I remember most of all how much the internal "me" - the one thinking existentially in his crib - has always been a lot like how I still am. Who we are imprints on us very early, I suspect.

Dawn on the lake

This is what the water looks like at the cottage right now, in early fall. And with the dawn only coming at 7:00 AM now, you do not even need to get up terribly early to catch it. :-)

The sixth sense

There is an apocryphal saying attributed to Solomon in the deuterocanonical "Wisdom of Solomon."

Yet these people are little to be blamed,
for perhaps they go astray
while seeking God and desiring to find him.
For while they live among his works, they keep searching,
and they trust in what they see, because the things that are seen are beautiful.

There are many people you meet who seem to have that mustard seed of spirit in them, but have not taken that full step, and become fully alive. My brother in law told me this weekend that seven weeks ago, before his wife's passing, he could say words like "higher power," but only in that impersonal vague way so many of us do. Now he uses the word "God" proudly - because the night she left us, he truly believes he was in His presence.

My hope for most people is that their first encounter with God is not at so desperate an hour, for He is always waiting.

But better then than never.

Peace Train

Homeland Security apparently has put the boots to Cat Stephens.

Notwithstanding the fact that, early in his conversion to Islam he made remarks that gave the impression he supported Salman Rushdie's death sentence (he apologized for that), good ol' Cat doesn't exactly strike me as the suicide bombing type.

"Now I've been crying lately, thinking about the world as it is; Why must we go on hating, why can't we live in bliss" just don't seem to have that Al Qaeda ring to it - but hey - that's just me I guess. ;-)

A faith so bright

St. John of the Cross, a Carmelite monk who lived in the 16th century, wrote this in the "Ascent of Carmel."

FAITH, say the theologians, is a habit of the soul, certain and obscure. And the reason for its being an obscure habit is that it makes us believe truths revealed by God Himself, which transcend all natural light, and exceed all human understanding, beyond all proportion. Hence it follows that, for the soul, this excessive light of faith which is given to it is thick darkness, for it overwhelms greater things and does away with small things, even as the light of the sun overwhelms all other lights whatsoever, so that when it shines and disables our visual faculty they appear not to be lights at all. So that it blinds it and deprives it of the sight that has been given to it, inasmuch as its light is great beyond all proportion and transcends the faculty of vision.

Reading the paper earlier this week, I read about some scientist who believes he has discovered the genetic source of faith. (Sorry, no link, it never made it to the online version.) Who can be surprised that faith is inbred in us? God wants us to make that connection to Him. If this scientist is right, He has even left us His phone number, right in our DNA!

The problem, as always, is the human personality. As St. Paul says, "the Jews want signs, Greeks want wisdom." (He is not being anti-semitic, just contrasting two personalities of skepticism.) We seem so determined to make God prove Himself to us that Jesus literally has to walkthrough our doors, into our rooms, and put our hands in his wounds!

I am guilty of this. I remember after I made my Cursillo weekend, which was full of incredible coincidences, too many to recount here, a friend of mine saying, "Next time, don't make God work so hard!" He is all around us, with us every step. Faith is such a strong sense - not only our sixth, but our most powerful sense, that as St. John of the Cross says, we become blind to it. And yet we perceive everything through those very faculties - our hearts, our awe. How can we not see what is right before us?

Boyscouts haven't helped me yet

I am walking today like a little old man. We just started gathering firewood in earnest this weekend, and splitting wood is very hard on the back. It takes me a few weeks to get used to it again.

So this morning, I am hobbling around like grampa Walton. I am quite a pathetic sight, really!

The Beginning of Wisdom

"Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," is what the book of Proverbs has to say about fear of the Lord.

But what is this fear? Sometimes, the way God is portrayed, I think we picture practising this fear as though we were ants running from a cruel and vengeful deity. But surely such a fear is inconsistent with the generous and loving God Jesus tells us about, the one who so loved the world He gave it His only begotten Son.

I think we get a glimpse of this fear in its proper context in Ezekiel 2:2:

The heavens were opened,
and I saw visions of God.
When I saw this, I fell on my face,
And I heard the voice of someone speaking.

Reading this passage, I try and put myself in Ezekiel's sandals. What happens when the sky opens up, and insignificant mortal me catches a glimpse of the eternal and omnipotent God who created everything I know, and all the other things I do not? I imagine that I tremble in awe of the eternity now so plainly on display. I imagine my heart breaks at the incredible beauty laid bare before me, so terrible in its relentless purity. And worst of all, I imagine the incredible pang of shame at my own inadequacy, all the times that I acted against the will of the great light before me. But the light in question will reach out and gently fill me with its kind forgiveness, and renew me with vital purpose.

Fear of the Lord is not fear of a smiting - it is the plain and simple recognition that God is awesome, vast, beyond comprehension, and beautiful beyond any compare. It is the intimidating presence of one so high that, as Darlene Zchech might put it, "Mountains bow down and the seas will roar at the sound of Your name."

Next time someone asks you if you are "God fearing," ask yourself if you would be stunned, amazed, and humbled to be in the magnificent presence of God. You will surely be able to answer, "Yes! I certainly am!"

Violence done for God

The Quran, the holy book of Islam, says, "Whosoever kills a human being without (any reason like) man slaughter, or corruption on earth, it is as though he had killed all mankind." (Sura 5:32)

It is unfortunate that the one thing that insurgents and terrorists latch onto in a statement like that is the qualifications, and not the general theme itself. It is as though it was a license to take the beautiful essence of this statement and insert man-made legalisms that reverse the meaning in Orwellian fashion.

The idea that God wants violence done is alien to me. Reading between the lines of my own religion's scriptures, the Bible, I find that I am justified in my thinking. Take for example David. In 1 Chronicles 22:8, God tells David that he will not be the king that builds God's Holy temple, because David has too much blood on his hands.

What I take from that is that even though many have been tempted to shed blood righteously, even in defense of that which is holy, God does not accept bloodshed from us. The sacrifice of ourselves - in turning the other cheek, if necessary - is the only way to preserve our collective dignity. Who in history do we think of as more dignified than the peaceful protesters of Gandhi's non-violent resistance to English rule? (Interestingly, Gandhi was inspired in part by Christ in this.) And yet these people were mercilessly beaten in the streets. Gandhi himself was killed by one of his own people, after pleading for peace between Muslims and Hindus.

But we don't remember the indignities - what we remember about Gandhi is the dignity.

And I regard Jesus the same way! He was born poor, preached to the poor, and died a death that afforded no human dignities at all - even thirsting naked and prone on the cross, He was offered only vinegar. And yet, God saw fit to exalt Jesus, who we see in his humbled state every Good Friday in our churches. Jesus lived the Sermon on the Mount - He didn't just preach it. The men who unjustly took Him, whipped Him, and crucified Him were the very ones He prayed for, from the cross itself.

We do God's will when we let our anger subside, when we partake of a share in divine justice by forgiving, instead of seeking justice in revenge. God has never sought anyone's head.

Such things are for Herodias, not God.

Luke, I am your father!

Tomorrow is the big day for that. Honestly, how great is Star Wars? You've gotta love any movie where a seven foot guy all dressed in black armour tells you he's your daddy (with a funny helmet, James Earle Jones' voicebox, and a shiny sword to boot.)

When I was a teenager I was always trying to find just the right piece of tupperware that would make me sound just like that. And I still can't get it right, to this day. :-)

We finished the kitchen... sort of

On Friday night, we stopped to eat (en route to the cottage), and yet another one of those awesome sunsets was taking place. As we were leaving the house, I kept saying to my wife, "You've gotta see this!" and busy as she was, she just ignored me. But then, when we got out of the private lane we live on and pulled onto the road, the colours in all their immense glory flooded into the windows of the car, and she said, "Ohhhhh...." :-)

This weekend, we installed the kick plates, the drawer fronts for the pot drawers, and the tile trim. That finishes everything for which we built plans, but my brother in law pointed out that it did not finish everything my sister in law had written down on her to do list (remaining are trim for the top, and the island corner.)

Nevertheless, he said quietly, "I hope you like it, dear," and then wandered away to do chores. I was near tears. Why?

Because the understated way he asked her if she liked it was exactly the way he would have said it if she were still alive and standing there. And his quiet confidence that she still is standing there, in the care of a God whom he trusts so completely, is a true inspiration.

My wife remarked on the way home that he has more faith than any church-goer we know.

"You're such a nerd"

My youngest daughter says this to me all the time. Every time I wax poetic about light-sabers, which is often. :-)

I am very excited. The original Star Wars films are coming out on DVD in a week's time. Guess what nerd will be in line at midnight to get them? I promise not to wear a Darth Vader suit...

Hannah gives thanks

From 1 Samuel 2:8 - as Hannah thanks God for the gift of her son, Samuel:

He raises the needy from the dust;
from the ash heap he lifts up the poor,
To seat them with nobles
and make a glorious throne their heritage.
He gives to the vower his vow,
and blesses the sleep of the just.
"For the pillars of the earth are the LORD'S,
and he has set the world upon them.

What wonderful gifts God gives us; even the chance to live is a marvelous opportunity. My blog has been grumpy today. So maybe Hannah can cheer you up. :-)

Satan not on the Fortune 500

This CNN article is exactly what I mean. It refers, towards the end of the article, to a 1980s rumour that Proctor & Gamble are connected to Satan.

In what way? Is he a shareholder? Short seller? Market analyst? Does he have stock options?

Christians need to do a much, much better job at understanding their own religion's theology. Satan is at most a fallen angel. Certainly not a Manichean antigod.

There are many corporations that do many bad things - you have to look at the dot com bust and see how many filthy rich CEOs lined their pockets with overhyped stock options, and let tens of thousands of their workers break their 401Ks - people who can now never retire. That is evil - not because Satan did it - but because people overlooked the common good and saw only to their own good.

Now that is real evil. The kind we have to purge, each one of us, from our own selves.

God, the devil, and Bob

Modern culture casts evil as the flip side to good – as though the two forces struggle with one another in near parity. You see this even in the titles of TV shows, such as “God the Devil and Bob.” bad horror movies show apocalyptic struggles where only Arnold Shwarzenegger can prevent Satan from conquering the world. From the pulpits we hear this constantly as well, where evil is personified somehow, or in more fervently emotional congregations, Satan is elevated to a kind of parallel god, and not the very mortal (but beastly) anti-Christ as per St. John, but an antigod.

No more important thing is there to understand about the nature of evil; evil is not yin to good's yang, and it is not the equal of good.

In Roman times, a religious sect from Persia drew on the religious traditions of Judaism and Christianity, but refashioned them as agents in an epic struggle of substances – good substance and bad substance. Through careful eating and piety, they hoped to not be infected with the bad substance. This sect was called the Manichees, and the great Christian saint, St. Augustine was for ten years in their number.

It is probably for this reason that St. Augustine became probably the foremost expert on the problem of evil in Christian theology. He had been a part of a religious group that saw the world as a good vs. evil pie chart, and seen the logical flaws inherent in the very idea that a perfect God would create evil.

Augustine says, “Evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name 'evil.'” In his opinion, evil was the absence of good. And where good is absent, God absents Himself as well. We have been given, as intelligent beings, the ability to decide what to do, deliberately: the so-called “free will.” When we use that will to serve our ends at the expense of others, it is then that evil is at hand.

In other words, we don't struggle with some malign universal force called “evil.” We struggle, in fact, with ourselves.

If Manicheism was an errant, but harmless, philosophy, we could let people retain their good/evil dichotomy unchallenged. But the Manichean view has caused a lot of harm in this world. When we see others as “infidels”, “axii of evil”, or some other servants of an antigod, we depersonalize them; and this does not even help us! For we cannot anticipate the actions of those who wish to harm us if we see them as no more than malign demons.

I do not outright dismiss the idea that there is a Satan. If we believe that human beings can have their own mind on what to do with their lives, it is not impossible to accept this to be true of angels.

But when Jesus talks about Satan being the “prince of this world,” Jesus tosses that barb not at Satan, but at us. This “angel of light,” as St. Paul puts it, decided of his own free will to seek glory for himself. When we do the very same thing, it is in this that we make Satan our prince – and not because Satan is some sort of antigod. We make our choices – we do. It is ourselves we struggle with, not some entity. We should have the humility that being a city on a hill calls for, and accept the challenge of improving ourselves first.

So lets not rave about demons. To do so is to give them glory they do not deserve.

Does God talk to you? YES!

Does God talk to people during the course of their lives? Absolutely, he does!

I have to temper my enthusiasm with a certain degree of caution. He does not whisper in the ears of postal workers, telling them to go postal. (Just kidding - my wife was a postal worker ;-) He is not carefully instructing world leaders to drop bombs on poor people. In fact, the minute you start telling people in any self-exalting way about what God has said to you, the more you can be sure He never said it.

Nonetheless, God does have a lot to say to you. You simply have to learn how to pick up on it. As Pope John Paul once said, "And if His word is not heard, perhaps it is because the ears of our hearts are not open to it."

I think I first realized just how plainly God communicates with us when I made my Cursillo weekend - just through a lot of strange and improbable coincidences. And at my team meeting last night, I got a fresh reminder of just how in your face God can be about what he wants for you and from you. And who hasn't randomly flipped open the Bible and found exactly the words of wisdom he or she needed?

Open the ears of your heart. He has much to tell you.

You can be friends with anyone

I've heard so many people say this - "that's not the kind of person I would normally be friends with." My wife even says this from time to time, although to her great credit, it has never once stopped her. :-)

I am kind of an expert on this. As an introvert by nature who was once bullied by, well, just about every kid at school (until I turned fifteen and shot up to six feet two), I was once the kind of person who did not make friends with anyone. I was painfully shy.

But you can make friends with anyone. Granted, it is not advisable in the case of tyrannical despots or serial killers, but as far as everyone else goes, we are all a lot alike. Sure our hobbies, activities, and bad habits are all different. But we all have hobbies, activities, and bad habits! ;-)

Other than my wife, I think my closest pal right now is my brother in law. Our natural interests are quite different by and by. I read lots of books about science, computers, philosophy, and theology. He reads fantasy pulp novels, product manuals and cottage journals. The outdoors for me was always about skiing. For him, he goes outdoors to get work done, and to see the world by snowmobile.

But we spend a lot of time together – working on the kitchen for my departed sister in law, cutting and splitting wood, lots of outdoor chores. None of these are activities that I would normally choose to do, but that is not important. What is important is being there in those few passing moments when a person becomes fully alive – the flash of wonder that crosses my brother in law's eyes when a snowshoe rabbit comes out of the woods right in front of us, or the way my wife's jaw drops as we see the first towering cliff on the Cabot trail.

It doesn't matter if you macrame, and your friend makes model airplanes. We have our humanity in common. And quite truly, that, I tell you, is enough.

Come Holy Spirit

Heavenly King, Consoler Spirit, Spirit of Truth, present everywhere and filling all things, treasure of all good and source of all life, come dwell in us, cleanse and save us, you who are All-Good.

(Byzantine Vespers ar Pentecost)

CBS and the document crisis

I have tried to stay out of the political stuff. Since religion and politics are the two things you are not supposed to discuss, I am already treading on thin ice to discuss religion as frequently as I do.

But I cannot stay out of this one. I have no idea if the CBS documents are real or not. We've had so many journalists in the last two years just make stuff up, that anything is possible.

But this is why I have to discuss this - by profession I am a computer programmer. I once specialized in the PostScript page description language, and was one of the first people on the web to publish information on that topic - I have a great deal of expertise in it, as I once worked for a typesetter that had to do lots of innovative things to typeset non-latin languages for embassies and Canadian government agencies.

The overlay that shows that the Killian document was created in Microsoft Word is particularly disingenuous. Modern typesetting systems that continue today in apps such as Word had their public debut with the arrival in 1984 of laser printers and Aldus PageMaker - these, combined with PostScript, were the killer apps that took documents out of the secretarial pool and put them on peoples' desktops.

These systems were designed to produce documents that looked like those produced by higher end document creation tools that preceeded them, things such as phototypesetters and the IBM selectronic. Nobody would have bought PageMaker, Apple Lisas or Macs, etc. if these programs could not do what was already being done.

So yes, it isn't particularly amazing that the variable pitched Times (or other serifed typeface) of a 1973 device can be overlaid with a 2004 Times-New-Roman Word document of today, and look similar. The people who first worked on Word and PageMaker aimed to do exactly this.

This does not prove the documents real. But it does show that all of this hullabaloo about fonts and low-resolution overlays that purport to show non-existent identicalness is the work of a bunch of blogging amateurs.

So it is not about politics, is it? No, professional pride. ;-)

God I love sunsets

I have a balcony that faces into summer and fall sunsets. Tonight the clouds were dappled with pink, and the sky was a kind of deep blue green. Unfortunately, I can never really find the words that do it justice.

In the summer, driving up to the sandbanks one night at 10:30, I looked out the passenger window, and the afterglow was much like tonight's. Above stars twinkled, and Jupiter blazed in its characteristically bright way.

I wish I could get back to the Sandbanks (where my folks live.) I have not been to see them since my vacation. I love sitting by the waves, watching the ships traveling to Toronto, past the lighthouse at Salmon Point. Sunsets are not the same there in the fall, and it will be well into fall before I can get back. But the sun does set over the water in the fall. That is nice.

Saturday nights sometimes, my wife and I go down to a long rock that sticks out into (but above the waves.) We sit under the blue/black skies full of stars and talk about little nothings. It seems a shame that, since that is a summer pastime, I have to wait nearly a year to do it.

Excuse me - is this your bomb?

I am glad I have never heard about this before. How exactly do you misplace a nuclear weapon?

Viral

Some entrepreneurial fellows apparently decided to write a computer virus to spread their resume. One has to wonder what job they thought they would get - head cook for cell block D?

I made the A-list!

And A, I am sorry it took so long, but I have been about this slow in coming up with that pun, and it is not even a particularly good pun. A has recommended my blog, over at http://hopefuldepressive.blogspot.com/ and I am very grateful for that. Her own blog is well worth reading, particularly the most recent entry Monday Monday, which seems so... familiar, is the best way I can put it.

Anyway, thanks! I feel like Jim Carey pretending to be Sally Field at the Oscars! :-)

On a completely unrelated note, I forgot to mention earlier that last night we went out and had seafood by way of celebration. My brother-in-law had finished his first day of his cabinetry program. He is delighted with it, and it is giving him a real focus. He says that he is the oldest one there - older than even the profs. We are all very proud of him.

My daughter spent a lot of time looking at the lobsters in the tank. She wanted to take one home as a pet. I pointed out to her that the lobster is descended, as are all related arthropods including spiders, from scorpions that lived in ancient ordovician seas. If you look really closely, you can see all the same parts...

"Do you love me?"

It in many ways is the most touching vignette in the Gospel of John, which is my favourite book of the Bible. The apostles are in a boat fishing, and Jesus turns up on the shore, telling them to pull in their nets, and row in. When they return to shore, they find that he is cooking them breakfast.

For the first time since Peter's threefold denial in Annas' courtyard, he has a chance to talk to Jesus privately. And the words that Jesus uses no doubt seem like a rebuke to Peter, but they are not.

When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?"

He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you." Jesus said to him, "Feed my lambs."

A second time he said to him, "Simon son of John, do you love me?"

He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you."

Jesus said to him, "Tend my sheep."

He said to him the third time, "Simon son of John, do you love me?"

Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, "Do you love me?" And he said to him, "Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you."

Jesus said to him, "Feed my sheep." (John 21:15-17)

No, what Jesus offers Peter is a threefold opportunity to affirm, to reverse Peter's denials; his fear for his own safety, his uncertainty about the future in the court of Annas. Don't let your last words of me be denial, Peter, he might say. Let your last words to me while I am here be of love, it serves us both. Because each time, Jesus responds to Peter, who is retaking his discipleship by the power and grace that come from love.

Jesus asks Peter to take up the shepherd's staff – if Peter loves much, much will be forgiven. And much would be – through Peter's ministry the whole church spread, taking God's message of forgiveness outside of Jerusalem, and off to Antioch, even to the very heart of the Roman Empire in Rome.

For Jesus continues:

Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go." (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.)

After this he said to him, "Follow me." (John 21:18-19)

Yes, Jesus tells Peter how his life will finish. Is this cruel? It might seem that way at first, but no, no, it is not. Very few of us know the way, place, and time at which we are going to check out. And yet we all have that certainty – it will happen. Jesus gives a gift to Peter; he tells him exactly where he is going, but then says, "Follow me" – trust me! I await you – as he says earlier in John, I go to prepare a place for you.

Give your life in service to him. When the day starts, you do not know how it will end. I certainly did not expect my early morning insomnia to be used this way, when I started writing. ;-) But at the end of every day, he waits for you on the other side. He is the Prince of Peace, and his response to your love is peace, peace that the world cannot give. It was certainly thus for an oft-frightened fisherman that day.

And just as Peter would never show any timidity again, but boldly proclaim the gospel from everywhere, even the inside of jails from Jerusalem to Rome, give over your trust. Be bold.

Be not afraid.

Split a piece of wood

I've got to invent letters for my various family members, like other bloggers. I have not been able to bring myself to it though. It just seems to be a step closer to invasiveness. Don't ask me why.

One of the jobs that my brother-in-law, my wife, her sister, and I have enjoyed the most of all our routine jobs is gathering firewood for the winter. There is not only a wood stove to keep the cottage warm, but in true Finnish tradition, there is a cedar sauna by the water. It is powered by a woodstove, and eats up so much wood that it has to have a woodpile too. So the four of us would go out into the peaceful woods and turn old oaks ravaged by gyspy moths into firewood. (Sometimes the kids would come too, riding the snowmobile is often inspiration enough)

Yesterday, we went scouting for wood. While we were out looking, my brother-in-law mentioned that he and his wife had been out for a walk, and seen a stand of dead oaks that would be perfect. He said it fairly matter of factly, but I know he hurts to take any walk now where she cannot follow.

Back at the cottage, it occured to me that although the place still looks like hers - she would still find everything right where she expected to - only a few things are still where she put them. The hummingbird feeders have all been brought down and refilled. The dishes have all been washed and put back many times. Piles of magazines have been read and restacked. The firewood in the woodbox has been burnt, and replaced. The green chair, the last place she sat, has been pulled in and pulled out many times since that Friday night.

We are slowly losing all her physical traces. We're preserving certain key things, of course. Her archway with the painted hummingbirds is something we'll keep as long as we can. But the casual traces of her presence are fading.

She has gone to where nothing fades any more, where "neither moth nor rust consumes" (as Jesus would say.) For her, everything of us she took with her is already everlasting. But for we still here, there is some sadness in the fading of the temporary things...

Gmail - anyone need invites?

I still have gmail invites languishing in the ether. I am more than happy to hand out a couple of them to anyone who asks, so anyone who wants an invite, just say so. It may be that the entire Internet has already been invited, I don't know...

Inventors who think they can stop storms.

Ivan, a category five hurricane, is destroying his way through the Carribean. A Canadian medical student named Myriam Taylor told CFTO news that the island of Grenada, is "basically destroyed." Tragically, 65 people have already lost their lives. Still unknown is whether the hurricane will still have force when and if it hits landfall. The power which nature is capable of gathering in something as superfluous as the wind makes me think that we are lucky to not get a demonstration too often.

A number of inventors think progress has armed them for a fight with Mother Nature however. There are schemes afoot to suck up hurricanes with absorbent gel (the one I linked to) or build giant fans to blow hurricanes away.

The nuttiest idea I have heard is to try and "blow them up" with nuclear weapons. Now let's stop and break this one down.

A category 5 hurricane releases as much power in three seconds as a many megaton H-bomb. So if you dropped a bomb into a storm, and ignited it, you'd stop or disrupt the storm for at best all of three seconds. And then your friendly neighbourhood hurricane would proceed on its merry way, blowing all the radiation and irradiated debris along every arm of the storm.

Sounds like a plan. :-)

Sunday Night's disjointed post-it note

We went up to the cottage this weekend, to try and finish off the kitchen (my wife's sister passed away in August, and my August archives chronicle how their kitchen became the focus and balm of our grief.)

We nearly have it finished. All the doors are mounted, the handles are all on. The drawer fronts for the utensil drawers are all mounted, and we built the drawer fronts for the pan drawers. In fact, since we ran out of barn board, we planed down parts of my niece's old bed slats, and used those for the field boards. We're leaving hidden notes detailing these little secrets inside the construction, so that someday, when they inherit the place and gut it, they will see the love and care we put into that which they are destroying. ;-)

At church tonight, our folk group (yes, 'folk group' - our leader hates the term 'choir') sang a rather unusual hymn. Our folk group leader heard Kenny Rogers sing this song on 'The Muppets' and it is called 'Love Lifted Me.'

The song certainly lifted me. Do you notice how songs do that? I think there is something profound to be had there.

I read a while ago that scientists found a bass note pulsing from a distant black hole. I forget which note it was. And I learned of another tonal discovery of note around the same time - some physicist had discovered the big bang (the cosmic explosion that brought creation into existence) had made a sound. He had found the echoes of that sound, and plotted a WAV file that emulated that sound. I went and found it, and if you want to listen to the moments of creation, here you go!

I remember reading St. Augustine's musings on Genesis - he wondered at how God could speak, and the world be created from that, and thought that it must be sustained because God's Word is eternal and unfading. In a respect, Augustine was not far off what is believed today. Cosmologists think the key to that holy grail, the Unified Theory is to be found in the superstring theory, in which it is posited that creation is a kind of 20 dimensional quantum vibration. Now as any musician knows, music is a vibration, and most musical instruments themselves vibrate to create music.

This further reminds me, as I muse, that in Tolkien's middle earth creation mythology, the Silmarilion, he has that world's analogies to God and His angels sing the world into creation.

I wonder sometimes if Tolkien might have been on to something. Does God sustain the world with something not unlike music? What a pleasant thought...

Blogging rules

I read somewhere once that it is a rule of blogging that you must never change the content of your posts after you have written and posted them. Supposedly, this is a huge breach of blogger etiquette.

Screw it. I hate the thought of grammar and spelling mistakes lingering forever. When I do find spelling mistakes in prior posts, I fix them. :-)

Were you there

I won't be around tomorrow, so any 9/11 ruminations I've got to do, I've got to do now.

Like all events of this kind, we remember where we were when they happened. I was at work, and it was a beautiful sunny day. Ottawa is not too far from New York City, so I imagine they had a sunny warm day like ours.

We first got wind of it when somebody pulled up CNN. At first it seemed like one of those freakish accidents that are terribly unfortunate, but which are not the work of ghoulish and diabolical extremists. But when another plane, and another struck within 45 minutes, and the towers collapsed, and finally the plane over Pennsylvania went down, it seemed – no it felt, because you live a day like this in your heart, not your mind – like the world was coming to its fiery end. And in true world's end form, somebody rushed home and fetched their television. Armageddon, should it ever come for real, won't arrive without an exclusive broadcasting rights contract.

I had just signed myself up for a year-long religion class/journey of sorts when this happened. I had been moved to do so by the loss of my mother in law. As the days, weeks, and months passed, the shadow of 9/11 would cast itself over the entire journey.

At first, like all of you, I didn't have a reaction, other than numbness and fear. When I did start to react, I think I felt a visceral anger at Islam. I knew from the moment I felt it that it was not a fair reaction – 19 very bad men who chose the path of terror do not represent the feelings or morals of a billion people, and I knew that.

I decided instead that I would learn a little about Islam. I read online translations of the Quran. I read apologetics in defense of, and in opposition to, Islam. I read the serene meditations of Sufi mystics, and also the hate-filled screeds of anti-Israeli fanatics. I came to the conclusion that Islam's ecosystem was quite familiar. There was beauty, there was profanity. There were those who concerned themselves only with the divine, and there were others who practised a kind of obscene politics, and considered their obscene politics to be Islam itself. I am sympathetic to those muslims who say that "believers" like that are not muslims. I made a friend of one newsgroup muslim, and I still write him to wish him a happy Eid, just as he always writes me to wish me a merry Christmas!

It was at this time that I began to meditate on the issue of suffering, and realized the great beauty of my own Christian faith. Christianity posits that yes, we suffer. But God Himself came down here and joined us in our suffering. He came poor. He lived an itinerant. He died a martyr. He rose back to life renewed. Christianity proposes that he joined us in the bad stuff, and consequently, we will join him in the good stuff. We will follow Him renewed, should we chose to.

In the wreckage of the twin towers, the firemen found a cruciform shape that they heralded as a sign. In my opinion, it does not matter if this was a direct signal from Heaven, or one of those God-winks – the ways in which Earthly life just happens to hint at divine life. Ultimately, all despair leads to hope, if we choose to follow the road laid out between them.

On that road, we may be struck blind, like St. Paul on His way to Damascus. But like that hymn goes, where we once were blind, now we see. I can see the world now for what it is, the polish and the tarnish. I no longer despair at the latter, and put my trust in the former.

The difference between devout and fundamentalist

Rick Salutin writes a very insightful article in today's Globe and Mail about how fundamentalism is a form of secularization.

I tend to agree. I do consider myself to be, in my own flawed way, quite devout, because I think about faith all the time and devote myself to understanding what life is about from the religious perspective.

But I am not a fundamentalist. And I do not use the word fundamentalist in the pejorative sense necessarily. When I assert that I am not a fundamentalist, I mean simply that I think some important religious truths reveal themselves in our lives outside the canons of scripture, and even outside of church buildings.

This is part of Salutin's point. He writes, "The point of most religion is not to shift all meaning to a heavenly realm, but to sanctify aspects of life on our level while remaining connected to a 'higher' realm. That is what most ritual, prayer and acts of goodness intend. They happen here but have meaning on that other level."

And this is where I agree. I love the beautiful passages of the Gospel of John where Jesus is speaking to his disciples after the last supper, and en route to Gethsemane. In the 17th chapter, He says, "And now I will no longer be in the world, but they are in the world, while I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one just as we are... They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world."

As Christians, we are both here and not here. We are saved by Jesus, and thus do not belong to this world, but are destined to and property of the next world. But we are in this world, and must do our good in this world.

Anyway, not to rant on too much, but Salutin's article was very insightful. :-)

Usenet debaters who take on God

Usenet is a very grumpy place. Cantankerous people gather there, ready to be irritated at the first sight of a statement that bothers them. I admit to frequently having been among their number. :-)

One thing I observe frequently is the debate about God. Someone makes an offhand remark that reflects his or her status as a believer, and some angry person jumps on them, challenges their theistic assumption, usually demanding Socratic proof that God exists.

Aside from the fact that the idea of God is actually not without some fairly substantive circumstantial evidence (the cosmological origin problem that most cosmologists are honest enough to admit troubles them, the anthropic principle) - we have to be careful not to make an idol of didactic reasoning; it is a useful tool, but not itself a god, or even a fundamental property of the universe. It is an analytical framework necessary to the conduct of good science and philosophy, and little more.

The great theoretician Roger Penrose, in his book that dismantles the concept of AI, "The Emperor's New Mind", posits that we are still largely driven by that flash of insight, the one that says, "That's it!" This is our base cognitive skill, and why computers, which can work out probabilities, will perhaps never be our equal.

Trailing Clouds of Glory do we come

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;

From Intimations of Immortality from Recollections, 1807, William Wordsworth

The poem above struck me so much when I first read it, that two songs I have written contain it. In one of those songs, Daughter, the line from Wordsworth is in a verse where I recall the loneliness I perceived in my infant daughter.

When she was six months old, I noticed it clearly one day. At that age, she had learned enough through observation and the use of her muscles how to see the world, and how to interact with it. When I carried her past the roses from our wedding, which my wife had hung on the wall, she would reach out with her hand and smack them back and forth - how she loved to do that!

But I could not help but notice how alone she seemed. One day at the park, I sat her on a picnic table under the open gazebo, and as a breeze began to blow, she smiled. And it struck me - she did not yet understand language. She was alone in her mind - unable to communicate to anyone else what she thought, other than by smiling or crying. And I was alone - unable to truly reach her without language. I could reassure her with the physical signs of parental love - cooing, kissing her cheek, carrying her - but I could not share with her what she meant to me, how instantly we came to adore her when she joined us in this world.

Wordsworth I admire because he sees it more optimistically than I did at the time. In these verses I quote above, Wordsworth suggests that the child who does not yet speak is still bathed in heaven, closer to God than we older ones who have forgotten coming from Him.

Maybe that is why my daughter smiled at the breeze. She was still young enough to realize what a joy this new sensation is, what a wonder to the senses. How lucky then a baby is!

Ultreya

Tonight I go to ultreya (a church thing, related to Cursillo which is an evangelical lay movement of the Catholic church, that has since spread to the Anglicans, Lutherans, and Methodists.)

I have been asked to be the music director of a men's weekend coming up in a few months. If you can think of any good hymns let me know. ;-)

Why do we hurt each other?

It isn't just war and terrorism. Right now, somewhere out there, someone is robbing a bank. Or beating an elderly lady just to steal a few dollars from her purse.

How is it that we as individuals cannot see that our common destiny is with each other? Every woman we strike, every child left broken at the side of the road, every hungry person not fed - every single one is our sister and our brother. We are individuals, yes. But we are individuals with a common cause, and a common purpose. To love one another, and to live in awe and wonder of what we have been given. Not to steal it like a thief in the night.

In one of my favourite books, about which I blogged earlier, "Life of Pi" - two men who have the same name go to a zoo. One is a muslim, the other an atheist. The atheist looks in awe at the zebra and recites its latin species name. The muslim, who has the same name, looks at the zebra, which he has never seen before, and says Allahu Akhbar (God is great.)

That passage is so lovely - because these two diametrically opposed men still essentially have the same reaction when confronted with the beauty before them. Yes, they each see this beauty through their individual theological (or atheological) prisms. But underneath it all, their communion is near perfect.

This - awe and wonder - is perhaps the true state of Adam and Eve (whether you accept it literally, or see it as a mythological foundation.) We have lost something, because nothing amazes us anymore, nothing surprises us, and nothing impresses us. Instead we rage in anger against the wind, and shake our empty scabbards at the heavens.

It is not the fault of God that we have lost our awe and wonder. He gave us this sense so that we might appreciate Him, and appreciate each other. We will not stop wanting more, wanting what is not ours, and hurting each other, until we re-learn how to be stunned and in awe of what He has already given us!

"Suffer the little children to come unto me, for they are of the Kingdom of God"

The horrifying picture on the front of Monday's Globe and Mail was not stomach turning because it was gross or bloody. It was a picture of a young mother bent tearfully over the body of her young daughter. Because of the woman's appearance, I was immediately struck by how much she looked like Maia Morgenstern's Mary over Jesus' body. If Mary is the Mother of Sorrows, how many other mothers have followed in her wake, wailing over their precious children like the biblical Rachel?

What is more insulting to the soul is that the terrorists who did this awful thing were motivated by their Islamist religious beliefs. How can anybody - anybody who still has a working conscience - believe that they are doing anything God could possibly be pleased with when they bring such awful violence upon children, the most innocent among us?

I've heard the excuses - the apologists for acts like this we'll tell you that, well, the Russians are responsible for the deaths of Chechen children.

But what kind of a monstrous excuse is that for what the Beslan terrorists did? Do they think killing more children is a solution to anything? Do they think Chechen children want other children blown up for them? What kind of monster even dares to present such an excuse?

I still remember what it was to be a child. The world is new - the skies are blue, or they are grey, but there is always something to see. You come alive with every new experience - your first trip to the ocean, your first view in a telescope, the first time you meet a new friend. And in a way that does not seem to happen as intuitively for us adults, you know God is with you. He is your playmate - the secret other who also takes delight in watching the tadpoles in the creek, watching the sparkle of tiny crystals in the sand, and imagining what the clouds are shaped like.

That is why as a Christian, I can't see how God has anything to do with what happened at Beslan. Jesus always used children as an example of how you had to be. They are of the kingdom of God; you have to be like a child to come unto Him. And for anyone who harms a child, "it would be better for him to have a millstone hung around his neck and for him to be cast into the sea."

Children are our legacy, not just as parent, but as human beings. All children everywhere are under our protection. They count on us, and trust us. We must not, must not let them down.

Anyone thinking of hurting any child for God better go find themselves a good millstone. Do all of us a favour!

Healing humanity

A month passes, another comes. But it is not time that heals all wounds. No - it is God who does this.

And he came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, who came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all the crowd sought to touch him, for power came forth from him and healed them all.

Luke 6:17-19

1,000 military casualties in Iraq

I've made no secret of the fact that I am no fan of war in general or this war in particular. And while I have focused on the civilian deaths in the past, the very reason that there have not been many more deaths (on the scale of the Congo) is because of the professionalism of the US forces - these are not the meandering barbarians of ages past, but a well trained army of principled men and women who attempt to obtain the political objectives of their civilian leaders with as little spilling of civilian blood as possible. They do their country proud.

We should mourn them as well. They have given their lives in the service of others, doing the work others have tasked them without complaint, with many other wounded and crippled vets giving up the ability to have normal lives when they return. The grief of their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters should be our grief as well.

Another year begins

"What's that," You ask? Well, if you are a parent, student, teacher, or some combination thereof, you know what I mean. New Years is for watching Times Square on TV, drinking eggnog, and making fruitless resolutions. The real year begins in September. :-)

The bags are packed, lunches made, new school clothes bought, and tomorrow, it begins. And on that renewing note...

For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Romans 8:24-25

Hope is all we can have. It is neither half empty nor half full - it is full; it is just that we only see half the glass.

Summer passes again

Last night I dreampt that we were at the cottage, and after a blisteringly hot day, it had snowed heavily. The ground was covered with snow, and the lake was covered with snow and slush, but powerboats were still driving merrily up and down the lake; noone was willing to give up summer. So I went out and threw myself off the dock into the water. The water was warm, but I could not get back out of the water, because of all the snow, and the fact that I was wearing my winter clothes. Then I woke up.

I'm sure Freud would have a field day. Am I truly fearing the onset of winter that much? In Ottawa at least, we tend to think of summer as starting with Victoria Day and ending on Labour Day. The weather shows no sign of change yet, and the forecast for the next seven days is for more normal summer weather.

But the geese are gathering, and practicing v-formation flight. Some of the maples have a hint of red in their leaves. The sunsets are taking on that particular golden colour that comes with fall. And of course, the kids are back in school - my youngest starting tomorrow, and my eldest, at college since a week ago today.

Fall is a wonderful season - the bugs go away, and the colours are spectacular. My only complaint is that it is followed by winter. And while winter is nice Christmas weather, it has worn out its welcome by March. :-)

Labour day weekend

We have developed a tradition that we do every Labour Day weekend. We drive to my sister in law's to Ajax, and Saturday we go to Wonderland, Sunday we go to the zoo.

At Wonderland yesterday I actually rode three roller-coasters. I may be conquering one of my biggest fears!

When I began this blog...

I put in the description of my blog that I would be examining joy and suffering, and the transition between them. I had recently finished a book entitled "Transforming Suffering" that had been written during a conference on suffering run by monks at Gethsemane. The book had a big impact on me, and somehow I knew I would take some of the philosophies expressed in the book, and make them my own. I had no idea how much I would end up dwelling on these matters. But it seems to me that we spend a lot more of our time facing trials that can and sometimes do lead to suffering.

I take the bus to work. I live near my work, and it is very convenient to do. This week, I have been eavesdropping on conversations, not so much intentionally as due to the fact that on a bus, you cannot really avoid it. I normally filter it all out and continue on in the mental haze that a bus ride usually is for me. But this week I listened.

One woman, two days ago, was talking to a friend, and it was apparent from some of the things that she said that she had had a loss. It sounded like it might have been a child. She told her friend that, "with my luck, I'm going to make it to ninety two." Her friend asked what she meant, not quite grasping it, and the woman indicated she meant her lifespan. She then said, "I'd rather check out at sixty." Her friend was aghast - so was I. But she made it clear that she could not bear to go on longer than that. She said she was prone to depression, and said that it is probably all downhill from sixty. Today there was more. Another woman was talking about a friend who was battling cancer.

One other day this week, a bus I was on passed a sign in front of a church that said, "Don't pray for a lighter load; pray for a stronger back." From what I see around me, I think that whoever thought that up understands how life truly is.

We are not immune to suffering. In the early days of humanity, people did a lot of praying for miserable conditions to change, for deliverance from enemies, for food, shelter, and rain. With Jesus came a somewhat new teaching. He gave us a prayer for all times, a simple prayer of trust and deliverance, and about it he said, "Your Father knows what you need before you ask for it."

He also gave us the beatitudes, which I have touched on before. The beatitudes in some way are a follow up to Solomon's lament about there being a time to laugh, and a time to mourn, everything having a season. Where Solomon says this with a sense of resignation, the beatitudes tell us that we are not adrift in the sea - in the Luke version, those who mourn, will laugh again. In the traditional Matthew formulation, those who mourn will be comforted.

We cannot come to appreciate everything God has given us, if we do not understand that it is temporary, and fleeting. A sunset takes only minutes, and one like it never comes again. Mourning is in that sense a gift of God, not only our way of coping with loss, but the very risk inherent in joy that makes us appreciate joy all the more. We enjoy God's good gifts as much as we do, because we only have a fleeting opportunity to immerse ourselves in them, and thank God in the moment for having them.

Ask for a stronger back. We need to mourn, but mourning does not need to be despair.

"Ask, and you shall receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and it will be opened to you." Matthew 7:7

Messages from space

Reuters reports that scientists may finally have isolated communications signals broadcast by intelligent beings from another planet. The signal has been picked up three times and lasted for a minute. It uses a frequency that scientists think would be the likely choice of alien beings.

Not completely ruled out are other possibilities, like hairdryers or hackers. But if the signal picks up a fourth or fifth time, scientists say the prospects will get quite exciting.

My brother in law bought us a TV yesterday

My brother in law was over for dinner yesterday, and my wife asked him to take a look at the television, because he is very intuitive and can see what is wrong with things with little more than a quick glance. He told us the tuner was broken. It had been frustrating my daughter and my niece all weekend, because they had rented movies, while we were up at the cottage working on the kitchen, and had not been able to watch them.

After determining why our TV was behaving so erratically, he looked as if a lightbulb had gone off. He told my wife he was headed out for smokes, and snuck me out the door and over to the Future Shop. We looked at several models and then he bought us one. My wife and daughter knew what he'd done as soon as we left. His heart is so big that it makes him quite predictable at times.

I was quite touched. My brother in law is a very giving man, and I think this was his way of making sure we knew how important we remain to him. I certainly would have liked him to find a less expensive way to do so, but I am humbled and honoured by the gesture. :-)