Bombs into wine?

Hezbollah is shelling Mount Carmel, where the prophet Elijah (the prophet Ilyas in the Qu'ran) walked. Mount Carmel is also where some of the very earliest human beings are found, and the one and only place in the world where our kind is known to have lived and interacted peacefully with another human species - the Neanderthals.

And then there's Qana (Cana.) 2,000 years ago, the town of Qana was the scene of a wedding, where the Gospel of John records Jesus turning water into wine. The steward famously declares, "Every man at first sets forth the good wine, and when men have drunk much, then the lesser. But you have kept the good wine until now."

Let us hope the good wine is yet to come. I can't, for the moment, shake the mental image of children choking on dust, and fire raining from the sky, which is happening throughout the lands where prophets walked. It is a far cry from wine at the moment.

Since so much of Israel and Lebanon are the places we read about in the Bible, who knows what treasures lie buried in the hills, wadis, and plains? The places that should be most precious to us - the very places where God has approached us and tried to make himself known to us - are the foothills of war, once again.

Who profits from war? Not people. People in every place have so much in common, and war acts as opacity to what would otherwise be so obvious. I am not so simplistic as to think that politicians necessarily profit from war: Churchill aside, many a politician has ruined his or her career in war, or by taking military action. The militaries themselves don't profit from war; although an army may become known as a robust fighting force from how they acquit themselves in war, the military pays dearly in lost men and women, and in the darkening of souls who have seen harrowing horrors they wish they had not seen.

Given the costs of war, why does it surface so often? Why does it always seem to come to this?

The instructor

We got my nephew a guitar for Christmas this past year. I think I had only a vague idea of what I was getting myself into; I've been giving him free guitar lessons every week for the last few months. Not that I mind, really. Family's family, right? And yesterday, he came bearing pizza.

He's learned very fast. In reality, I have no idea how to be a guitar teacher. I've done no research in how to put together lesson plans, and I haven't practiced at communicating musical ideas to the novice guitarist. But somehow, it has worked out - he has progressed faster than anyone I can remember, other than me. Mostly, that's due to the work he put into it, which is what I told him at the outset was how I learned. There's no magic to it, nor is it about being a "natural." It's about putting in the hours, making your fingers bleed as Bryan Adams might say.

Yesterday, we worked on "Sweet Home Alabama." Our family camp is coming up, so we've got to have good campfire songs. Ronnie Van Zant, Lynyrd Skynyrd's singer, always looked like he was fresh from the campfire... Grizzly Adams' campfire that is.

After he left, my wife went to go fetch my daughter at the mall. So I went into the basement and finished an instrumental number I put together as a tribute for a friend of mine. I'd recorded the whole thing the night before, and it sounded terrible. Then my portastudio's card got reformatted on me, and I lost it all.

Last night, everything went down in one take. I played the acoustic guitar, then the electric over top of it, recorded a shuffling bass line, too. Then I looked at my Yamaha organ. It was buried underneath an old computer. Normally laziness kicks in - Oh, I can't be bothered, I say to myself. But I new the song would turn out nicely with organ pads in the background. So I moved the computer, added the organ pads, and then I went up to the computer to mix it. This time, the card did not reformat on me, and it worked out perfectly.

In fact, here it is - a little blues instrumental. If I did this regularly, would it qualify as blues blogging?

What surprised me is how naturally this came. When I do the pop songs, which in many respects are easier to play since there are no dynamics or subtleties, I have to work at getting a good recording of the parts. But for the blues... I don't have to worry about the metronome. I have the beat, and I'm right on it. And I'm usually happy with what I get, such that I don't have to re-record or punch in little repair parts to the song.

Maybe that's why I still like playing the blues. It fits like an old shoe.

Freds

I learned a new term today for a kind of person I run across at least once a week, usually more. These people are called "Freds" -- lycra-clad, bike shorted riders of carbon fiber touring bicycles who, for all their gear and wardrobe, are doing no more than I am doing: biking to work. These poseurs love to dress up in numbered jerseys as if they are gatorade powered tri-athletes, and not just commuters; particularly pretentious, of course, are the yellow jerseys.

I was daydreaming and coasting my first block two days ago, thinking about some work homework I had, when one such yellow-jerseyed Lance-a-like blew by me the other day. Curious, I upgraded my speed to my normal cruising speed, and I was mildly amused by the fact that, without really trying, I seemed to be gaining on this guy. Three blocks later, I blew by him.

This seems to happen a lot - guys fresh out of their driveway, confidently blowing past you in their first half kilometer only to find they can't keep the speed 250 meters down the road. Now I bike everyday - I only skipped December, January, and February this year. I can be a little slow coming out of intersections, but I cruise at a sustained speed of about 30 kph on a department store bike. I end up having to pass these out of shape show-offs as soon as they become winded and wobbly lane obstructions, and I have to pull out into the vehicular lane to do it.

These are the guys who give cycling a bad name - they blow red lights, or cross just before the light goes green. They cross onto sidewalks and back into the roadway randomly. They try to pass you on the left in a bike lane - a bike lane! And usually it is their machismo, not their actual ability to ride at a sustained speed, that has them passing.

I ride to get to work. I ride within my abilities, and I obey the law. I don't blow lights. When I cross at the crosswalk, I dismount and walk. I do this because bicycles are vehicles, and they are required to obey the law. I've heard cyclists give excuses for blowing lights like, "I couldn't unlock my shoes." (Many cyclists ride with shoes that lock into the pedals: I have a set, but I don't like them.) But the nice police officer isn't going to care about your shoes. If you're lucky, he just ignores your shoes as he writes your ticket. And if you are less lucky, he may not even see the shoes that happen to be 30 meters away from the rest of you.

While I am most afraid of big trucks, next on my list are "Freds" -- too many of them drive like idiots.

My favourite psalm

There is a strange surge of anarchic and violent thought at the end of psalm 139. But the first eighteen lines are the most sublime expressions of trust and hope I know.

O LORD, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue, O LORD, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.
Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.

If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,"
even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.
My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.

How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!
I try to count them--they are more than the sand; I come to the end--I am still with you.

(Psalm 139:1-18)

Heavy metal thunder

When I was in Toronto last week, I tried out a fancy guitar in the music store that had a certain sound I wanted. In particular, what I wanted to achieve was the sound a guitar has when you take two pickups and coil them together, making a heavier more solid sound. Such pickups are called "humbuckers."

When I got home, I remembered that I actually have a loud, obnoxious guitar with a humbucker. In the 1980s, I bought one of those hairband guitars, a Kramer - a guitar popularized by Eddie Van Halen.

I don't know why I bought it to tell you the truth. I tried it in the store, and it could achieve a wide variety of sounds - from the mellow pop rock that dominated the era, all the way to the cheesy hair band rock that came in a close second. But I was in a blues band - I didn't really have a use for such a modern sounding instrument, did I?

I guess I liked the look of it - the sleek lines, the dark aqua-blue finish. It looked like a sports car more than a guitar.

Anyway, this guitar has been sitting unused in my basement for ten years. So last night, I thought, "What the heck", got it out, and spent a couple of hours dusting it off, screwing in all the loose screws, changing all the strings, and polishing it up.

Then the moment of truth - I plugged it into my recording machine. After I engaged the humbucker, the first chord I struck sounded like eighties hairband rock. So I struck another chord... and another... I tried to resist... I really did... but I ended up recording a bunch of hairband rock last night!!

I'm so ashamed!

Hope in the dark

In most wars, the innocent usually bear the brunt of it, even though they usually have little to do with the disagreement that led to war. However what is always surprising is the resilience of the human spirit, and the ability for people to have hope in their hearts, and the readiness to forgive in their souls.

Asked if they can ever live in peace with Israel, especially after the toll from the recent air strikes, she is surprisingly conciliatory.

"If they stop bombing the women and children, if they let us live in freedom," she says, "then we can live with them like family, like brothers and sisters."

Collateral Damage - Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone From Yahoo! News

And I'm not even that good at flying kites!

"Is this **** the daughter of Kenneth and Dorothy *****?"

"Yes," my mother answered the strange caller.

"I'm your cousin," the woman replied, "A few times removed."

Turns out the person on the phone was a hobby genealogist doing research on her family's history. And she revealed something else to my mother, and sent her the family tree by email to prove it. You may remember I posted about discovering that I had an ancestor who is in a Beach Boys song. It turns out I am also directly descended from Benjamin Franklin. Yes, that Benjamin Franklin. He's my great, great, great (a few of them) grandfather.

Sure beats the rum-runner lineage. :-)

Why do you blog?

According to the Pew Internet and and American Life project, "self expression" is the reason most of us are out here.

Mac News: Internet: Pew Study Unmasks US Bloggers

Why do you blog?

You don't need to die for me

You don't need to die for me to survive. I do not need your blood in order to make my way in this world. I do not need to scream in houses of religion that you are pigs and apes. I need to see in you, and you need to learn to see in me, that we each have the potential to be much more than we are. Under long ago stars, your ancestors sat at the same fires mine did, and feared the same elements. You needed me then, and I you. How could we have forgotten?

You are all the handprints on the wall, the hundred year old names carved in the old barn behind the house. I am too. You have walked many of the same roads. You are my brother, my sister, father, mother, grandfather, daughter, and son, for every shadow you cast is just like each of theirs. I do not need anger, and neither do you, although we each have much to be angry about. We have only eighty years to walk our way in this world, and then our shadows yield to those who will in turn be us. It is a long road. A short road.

Won't you walk it with me?

On my way home today

(I actually am home - I tried to post this with the mail gateway, but I guess it did not work.)

I bought my daughter a pennywhistle last night. We went to two of the local music stores, since all of us visiting are musicians. I tried out an Epiphone SG (a lower end version of a Gibson SG) because I wanted to see if it might help me achieve some seventies Beatles/Badfinger style sounds in my recordings. It didn't - I ended up sounding like Albert Collins on a telecaster, because of the way I play. Oh well.

I sent my daughter an email last night saying, "I miss you, and I love you. Tell Mom I miss her too." All I got back was "OK." Apparently, I've raised a vulcan!

What the bleep?

I'm in Toronto, staying at a hotel downtown. This is a business trip, so I have no family with me. I love traveling with family, but I am nowhere near so fond of traveling on business.

Fortunately, I have a book. I went to the library Tuesday night and took out three of them - one about visiting Buddhist monks, another about Thomas Aquinas' arguments for the coexistence of faith and reason, and What the BLEEP do We Know? (the book version of the film, by the same auteurs. Now I have not seen that film, which everyone has recommended to me. But some of what I've read in the book resonates very heavily with me, even though I was aware of most of the science.

In fact the book synthesizes a lot of what I'd been thinking about these last few words into an organic whole. I read Roger Penrose's The Emperors New Mind a few years ago. Although the purpose of the book is to debunk the idea that artificial intelligence can mimic conciousness simply by throwing processors and clever code at the problem, he accomplishes much, much more. To make his he posits a convincing argument, using the physiology of vertebrate neurons, that thought is quantum mechanical... and that this is the reason conciousness is as intuitive as it is. When we see a problem's solution, we don't roll the thought over in our mind and calculate that it has a 72.3% probability. We see that it is the problem's resolution - we have a eureka moment.

Of course, What the Bleep do We Know takes quantum mechanics much further into a spiritual realm than a pure scientist would. But it is interesting to note that even cosmologists who study subatomic physics in a more sober and narrow way are prone to the very same note of spirituality when they draw conclusions from their study. I've read more than a few Discover articles where scientists matter of factly describe the self-realizing nature of the quantum mechanical universe.

Hope this guy is on good terms with the Energizer bunny

battery powered planes - what will they think of next? No offense - but my flight tomorrow better be running on jet fuel. :-)

Heat wave

We have had an extended heatwave here in Eastern Ontario since the weekend. We don't have air conditioning for a few reasons, so we have dealt with it in the usual ways.

On the weekend, we went to the cottage. On Saturday, we worked in the garage, which stays cool until mid-day, and then spent the rest of the day in the water. My brother in law's crazy dog (the puppy from my Christmas odyssey story) likes to swim. Every time I swim out to the rocks, the dog follows me, and then tries to lead me out to deeper water. She's smart and safety conscious, I guess – always take a swimming buddy. So I swam with the dog, who doesn't try to climb on my back as often as the kids do.

On Sunday, after going to hang some cabinets my brother in law has been working on for his sister, we got in the boat, and headed for a small island. We spent the day eating the contents of the cooler and swimming. Cya (the dog, pronounced see-ya) didn't know who to swim with – she went from person to person in the water, occasionally heading out into the middle of the lake to just... see the sights I suppose. I've never seen a dog that just swims for the sake of swimming before.

Back in town, managing the heat is harder. But we have a system for that too: we went to see Pirates of the Caribbean again last night. I slept in the basement, throwing a mattress down on the cement. It is the biking to work that is the hardest part. I nearly had a heat stroke yesterday, and maybe there's no nearly about it. I was dizzy all day. When I ride, I pour water on my head at every light.

I am in Toronto the rest of the week, and the heat won't ease up until the weekend. Then we are off to the Sandbanks on Quinte's Isle (where my folks live.) By Lake Ontario's shores, it is always cool, and it will be a relief to enjoy the weather, instead of managing it.

Ruined countries breed terror

I've been reading more about how the attacks on Lebanon are hitting infrastructure, even gas stations, to reduce mobility within the country. This is extremely short sighted on Israel's part, and it should be smarter than this. I understand that the idea is to reduce the mobility of the terrorists who have the hostage soldiers, but Israel is a longtime player in the anti-terrorist game, and should know better. The examples of Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq are unequivocal - failed states breed terror.

If Lebanon is left without infrastructure, and without the means to obtain a prosperous economy and pluralist polity (which it seemed slowly to be moving to with the Cedar revolution), then Israel will have a failed state right on its border. Aside from the human catastrophe of making Lebanon miserable again, this is worse than having an authoritarian tyranny like Syria for a neighbour. A strongman can be controlled. There can be detente with dictators. There is no detente with the wild west, and there is no controlling a wasteland.

If Iraq isn't evidence enough of that, I don't know what is.

Pray without ceasing

In popular portrayals of catholics, contemplative orders are often portrayed as kind of selfish. Although I really enjoyed "Sister Act", I remember the nuns seemed to think it was actually something of a revelation that they could go out and help people. But in fact, the people devoted to orders are usually well aware of the kinds of service they are called to perform. Some services are rendered to people by feeding and caring for them. And some services are rendered to people by praying constantly on their behalf.

"Pray without ceasing," St. Paul said. By observing the hours, I imagine that contemplative monks and nuns obey this more faithfully than anyone.

When St. Peter established the order of deacons, the type of clergy who are ordained specifically to serve others, he said, "It is not right for us to neglect the word of God to serve at table. Brothers, select from among you seven reputable men, filled with the Spirit and wisdom, whom we shall appoint to this task, whereas we shall devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word." And so it is that some peoples' role is to go out into the world in roles of service and healing. That is the purpose of the diaconate, and that is even the role of many monastic orders that are not contemplative, such as Mother Theresa's Sisters of Charity.

But not all role are the same. Some are consecrated to service. Some are consecrated to praise and contemplation, a less visible but just as important function of the church.

This may be the point of St. Paul's essay in 1 Corinthians on the Spiritual Gifts - "Indeed, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are all the more necessary," he says, speaking of the need for different roles in the church.

The solitary monk Thomas Merton once wrote, "Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity." He found that he could deepen his solidarity with his fellow men - develop true charity for them - by focusing on his aloneness as a monk. The contrast allowed him to see his true unity to all men.

Hurray!

A safe landing.

Shuttle Discovery makes safe landing in Florida | Top News | Reuters.co.uk

Lebanon - a way out?

I've been in something of a state of despair over the readily collapsing stability of the middle east. Iran and Syria have been using proxy forces in Southern Lebanon to destabilize the region and deflect attention from Syria's tyranny and Iran's nuclear development conflict with the west.

But knowing why it is happening does not help - it feels like an abyss, things are falling off the edge into it, and it can't be stopped. Innocent people will suffer, and nobody can help them or save them.

But does it need to be so? In the NYT today, the first column I've seen that actually proposes a way out - from the opinion editor of Lebanon's Daily Star.

Middle East II: Israel's invasion, Syria's war - Editorials & Commentary - International Herald Tribune

I wonder if dinosaurs bought ferraris and got hair transplants?

T-Rexes did well in the blush of youth, too. But did they hit the road to find themselves when they hit their mid thirties, I wonder?

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Tyrannosaurs faced midlife crisis too

Pink guitarman

While commenting somewhere today, I reminded myself that I have a pink guitar. I'm currently favouring a blue one, though.

Monkey business

Bad enough we have our own kind hooked on video games. Now we have to addict another species. ;-)

Take the blue pill

An atheist asked if I would take "the blue pill." Would I take a pill that would reveal to me the "truth of the universe?"

I answered that one of the most profound things ever uttered came courtesy of one of history's famous bad guys, Pontius Pilate, when he asked, "What is truth?"

Too many people have taken socratic dialogue and platonic argument to an excessive extreme - the idea that if you simply go far enough down the deductive road, there is some master truth, the "theory of everything" as Einstein once called it (although he was speaking of a more limited theory in scope by which he hoped to unite quantum mechanics and relativity-based physics.)

However, one possibility my questioner did not consider is that there simply may not be a "theory of everything" - a one definitive truth of the universe in which all can be understood and comprehended in a few simple words or formulas.

I'd take this theoretical matrix pill - but I'd take it with the expectation, really, of knowing no more coming out of it than I did going in. Any wise person knows that the more you know, the more you realize you don't know. Knowing the "truth about the universe" would likely do no more than give you a vast but still limited knowledge; one raising an infinite number of questions about all the strange things and wonders you perceived at the edge of your new knowledge....

Shortcuts to God

Neuroscientists find God in mushrooms - 12 Jul 2006 - Technology & Science

Laurance writes:

A universal mystical experience with life-changing effects can be produced by the hallucinogen contained in magic mushrooms, scientists claimed yesterday.

Forty years after Timothy Leary, the apostle of drug-induced mysticism, urged his 1960s hippie followers to "tune in, turn on, and drop out", researchers at Johns Hopkins University in the US have for the first time demonstrated that mystical experiences can be produced safely in the laboratory.

They say that there is no difference between drug-induced mystical experiences and the spontaneous religious ones that believers have reported for centuries. They are "descriptively identical."

As a Catholic mystic, this irritates me - not just because mysticism is the fruit of hard work, and someone has found a shortcuit. I think to say this is not only to shortchange religion, but to fundamentally misunderstand what religion is about. Religion - even mystical religion - is not supposed to be getting "high on God." Mysticism, in my view, is about culturing a feeling of trust. Trust in the mystery that is beyond knowing. When Saint Faustina, the great Catholic mystic, had a vision of Jesus, she reported this as being the purpose of the visitation - and as a result,"Jesus I Trust in You" is the emblem of the Divine Mercy chaplet. When Abraham heard a voice calling "Abraham, Abraham!", his reaction was not to check his meds. It was trust - "Here I am."

Sometimes mysticism comes with experiences that may superficially resemble hallucinations, and may even result in neural activity that is patterned in the same way. But what is important, as St. Faustina testifies, is not the vision, because not everyone gets a vision. What is important is the trust.

Sometimes mysticism does not involve images or visions at all. Sometimes it does not even come with a warm fuzzy feeling of any kind. In fact, many a mystic is more like Jonah, taking shelter under a bush, only to have a worm eat it. Sometimes mystics dwell on the absence of any sense of God, like St. John of the Cross did, in the Spiritual Canticle:

Whither hast vanished
Beloved, and hast left me full of woe, And like the hart hast sped,
Wounding, ere thou didst go,
Thy love, who follow'd, crying high and low? ...
Oh that my griefs would end!

Come, grant me thy fruition full and free!
And henceforth do thou send
No messenger to me,
For none but thou my comforter can be. ...

My love is as the hills,
The lonely valleys clad with forest-trees,
The rushing, sounding rills,
Strange isles in distant seas,
Lover-like whisperings, murmurs of the breeze.
My love is hush-of-night...

So no, mysticism isn't magic mushrooms. Mysticism is nothing more than learning to trust what now we only see in a glass darkly...

Dance monkeyboy

If anyone is familiar with the video antics of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the start of this little flash animation is funny.

Will work for Ramen

I am Stockwell Day!

That's a Canadian in-joke I'm using to segue (badly) into yesterday's little bit of fun. We all took my brother in law's Seadoo out onto the lake - my twelve year old daughter included!

When my brother in law tore out onto the lake (he went first), I turned to my wife and said, "He's like a little kid." She smiled back at me. Earlier, we'd been working, landscaping the yard, and finishing some kitchen cabinets my brother in law had promised to build for his sister. And the day before, we went to Kingston to see Pirates of the Carribean. My brother in law drove my daughter there on his Harley, and my wife and I followed in the car. It had been a weekend of doing just what we wanted, so far, and it would continue. I drove all over the bay - visiting all the little cottages I've walked to in winter, but never seen in summer. I rode my wake, turned into the various inlets, and stopped to let another Jet Ski blow by me.

When we were done, I went back up to the phone, and checked our message service in Ottawa to see if I was leading the music by myself. Sure enough I was. I had enough time to find a song I've always wanted to do, and print it out. It turned out beautifully in church.

It was a simple weekend, one wonderful only because it ran at a languid pace and we did just what we wanted. There are too few days like this in life.

Not the sharpest terrorists in the drawer

I read this morning that the terrorists were foiled in a plan to attack New York. As my eyes glanced over the listings of news articles, I happened to notice this little gem:

New York Daily News - City News - Good plan, experts say, except it wouldn't work

The Daily News is a tad more charitable than I would be. What were these guys smoking? You can't destroy infrastructure in order to flood a place with seawater, unless that place (Manhattan in this case) is below sea level!

Idiots. Terrorists like these are almost an embarassing opponent for the west to have. I mean, not that we want Dr. No or Darth Vader, really.... but to have to go up against Inspector Clouseau?

The clothing magnate

Somehow my brother has become a tycoon. Along with his (more organized) wife parlayed a wacky and marginal vintage clothing business into one of London's most fashionable shops.

I am glad I can be happy for him. When we were young, I jealously watched for any advantage my brother might be given, and zealously ensured I was never left out. But my brother has what he has through ingenuity and hard work. I can't begrudge him that!

The interesting thing about their store is that they operate it from here in Canada. In this Internet age, they can review their sales and hold meetings with staff from anywhere in the world. They have to travel to London a lot, but they do not have to live there. I do envy this sometimes - getting to travel to exotic places for work - but I have seen it wear them out. I have few romantic illusions about it anymore.

I have to spend a week in Toronto, in another week or so. Now there's a place I don't have any romantic illusions about!

Fireworks

Lane's got a video of his local fireworks on his blog. I was out in the country visiting my folks; out over the lake, I briefly saw fireworks coming from somewhere over in the direction of Bloomfield, but they were too far away to make videos of.

Its hard to think of Lake Ontario as a lake, actually. More of a giant freshwater sea. Here's what I mean. I took this photo off of the limestone rocks just beneath the house.

Obituary: Ken Lay

The recently convicted Ken Lay, former chief executive of Enron, died this morning of a heart attack. I imagine it is no small strain enduring a huge fraud and conspiracy trial with all eyes upon you, and I imagine that took a toll on Mr. Lay's health.

Kenneth L. Lay, Ex-Chairman of Enron, Dies - New York Times

Police seek 'despicable' men who urinated on war monument

This goes into the weird category, for sure. Someone peed on the tomb of the unknown soldier.

Police seek 'despicable' men who urinated on war monument

Here's hoping that for any American readers, the fourth of July is a somewhat more dignified celebration! :-)

Happy birthday, America.

The road sign

Always be prepared to learn. Keep your eyes, ears, nose, and touch ready for a new way to know new things. Learn to love without restraint. Love the people you love today - don't wait to show them your love tomorrow, as tomorrow may not come. Don't make an idol of your own knowledge, for if you do you bow to the learning of a fool - instead set an altar in your heart for the great mystery that is the everpresent and never absent love of a magnificent God who gives us sunsets and small babies.

Walking the Bible Again

A while back, I read Bruce Feiler's Walking the Bible (my wife got it for me for Christmas, actually.) He tells his story of discovery – a fifth generation secularized Jew from America's south who undertakes a journalist's mission to visit the geographic locales of the five books of Moses with Israeli archaeologist Avner Goren, and instead finds himself on the spiritual pilgrimage of a lifetime. He learns that the Bible and geography are inextricably intertwined, the Bible a thing fully alive in every place he visits.

A few weeks ago, the city library opened a new branch right near where I live. On my first visit, I saw the last book in Feiler's trilogy, “Where God was Born.”

It is a tremendous work that takes the reader into Iraq, Iran, and into the underbelly of Jerusalem and the temple mount, reaching astonishing conclusions. Feiler becomes increasingly conscious that in fact the last half of the Bible – the prophets, the psalms, and Esther's story – tells a very different story. Faith is not the land – faith is more important than the land, much moreso.

First there is the litany of kings who are disappointments – David, a turbulent man who went to war with his own usurping son and stole another man's wife; Solomon, an exceedingly wise king who sank into depravity and tyranny as his grandiose buildings took wing – and then a nameless sequence of kings who follow (save Hezekiah and Josiah.)

What arises instead are the prophets, the exile, and the righteous foreign kings – the faith is forever divorced from the body politic. The prophets – from Elijah to Isaiah - speak for the disenfranchised, and lobby for the ethical conduct of the people – they are not political figures in the same way Moses or even the Judges were. And it is in the Exile that Judaism is truly born – where concepts like the omnipresence of God, personal prayer and personal connection to God – are born, along with the Talmud, the Psalms, and the Book of Lamentations. There is God's use of foreign kings such as Cyrus and Darius as righteous liberators of the Exiled, many of whom decide they can serve God in exile.

It is particularly in the ironically harsh land of Iran that Feiler learns that dialogs between religions, between cultures are at the very heart of the beatific vision he is seeking. He finds it in the ruins of Persepolis, where images of the fertile crescent's many peoples are intermixed in the crowds visiting the king peacefully, a king willing to pay tributes to Gods he does not know and build them temples.

“Religion can be saved only by religion,” He writes. Abolishing it, fundamentalizing it – none of these can save it. “The only force strong enough to take on religious extremism is religious moderation.”

Small town Canada day

I live in Ottawa. Before this weekend, I really had little idea what a Canada Day on a smaller scale was even like - I'd really never seen one with a crowd of less than half a million people.

We went to see my parents this weekend, and went to Picton's festivities in Delhi park. The event was certainly on a smaller scale, but the spirit wasn't. The same crazy teenagers dressed up as Captain Canada flew by in their maple-leafed top hats.

The local Bergeron Zoo had a small cage - in it were two small cougar cubs. I don't think you'll find THESE guys hanging out with the cats on Parliament Hill!

No popes in the mosh pit

At a church party last night, a couple of people mentioned to me (since I am a guitar accompanist) that the Pope had "banned guitars" at Mass. In a kind of panic, I examined Zenit, the Vatican news source, this morning. Then I examined the newspaper headlines. In fact he'd done no such thing.

What he did do was go to a concert, and then wistfully insist that the church needed to restore plainsong to its pride of place. Now that's a different thing altogether - and something I absolutely agree with. Vatican II's Sacrosanctum Concillium said, "The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given pride of place in liturgical services" and then went on to explicitly permit other forms of polyphony, and explicitly permit the use of musical instruments, with a note of caution.

But other instruments also may be admitted for use in divine worship, with the knowledge and consent of the competent territorial authority, as laid down in Art. 22, 52, 37, and 40. This may be done, however, only on condition that the instruments are suitable, or can be made suitable, for sacred use, accord with the dignity of the temple, and truly contribute to the edification of the faithful.

A heavy metal band in the choir loft probably cannot be made suitable. A guitarist and choral group singing "Panis Angelicus" probably can. And it wouldn't kill us to inject some plainsong, like the Pope wants, in a few high holy days, like Sundays in Lent or in Holy Week.

I just find it funny. You'll have the Pope say something to the effect of, "I like butter," and the newspaper headline will be "POPE BANS MARGARINE."