Birmingham, Alabama
It is rather interesting to return to a city I lived in for many years, after a lapse of twenty years, not even visiting here in a decade. In the intervening epoch the city has changed radically. To the south, regions that were once pristine unbroken rural vistas have become victims of urban sprawl. Infected with the fungus of commercial blight with its attendant chaos of billboards, LED message boards, and unremitting traffic, memories of verdant countryside fade a bit further into obscurity. I see no evidence of working farms or ranches. Myriad little housing developments are excreted onto former pastureland.
While helping friends look for another house, I had reason to visit a lot of these little urban metastases. They were devoid of people and had a powerful sense of being shop-worn, despite being built in the time since I moved from here twenty years ago. Houses were open to the weather and rotting. Even high end developments feel empty and barren. I wonder what it is people are looking for in these places. It certainly doesn’t seem to be community. They all seem to be looking for something somewhere else. It’s all for sale. Garage doors were closed and no one was out walking in the afternoon or evening on cerulean spring days.
So very strange is the city itself. From the time I first moved to Birmingham in 1979, I was struck by how afraid people were of the downtown region, evidenced by a sense of desertion even on weekdays at lunch time. I was downtown on Sunday night and was appalled at the utter absence of people. It was as if the city had been evacuated, miles of it. Returning there on Monday at mid day on a brilliant spring day, the imagery was even more startling. There simply were no people out and about. No hot dog vendors, no guys dispensing therapy with their coffees, no sidewalk kiosks. Apparently, fear has only increased during the past decade. Imagery of vibrant European cities with their millions of pedestrians could not be further from this present reality.
While attending a rather splendid service in the Advent Cathedral it was unsettling that uniformed armed policemen were hovering around the church entrance and the worship hall for the whole of our time there. I have no recollection of previously being protected in a church by police, not even in Papa Doc’s Haiti or post-Sukarno Indonesia. The police officers were well known to those present and obviously this was regular duty for them. Happily, these men were well trained and most polite to all of us. But somehow having men wearing 9 mm Glocks and tazers does something to the equanimity of one’s worship experience.
On Saturday on one of those first glorious days of spring when winter’s frustration are relieved by flowering plants and trees in bountiful colorful fashion, we went to a vast state park fifteen minutes south of the city. Amazingly, it was essentially deserted. What are all of the million plus people living here doing on a glorious Saturday? A friend of mine here did not want to see me. She described sleeping through the entirety of a magnificent Saturday. Lots of people are on anti-depressants. The chicken and egg scenario comes to mind. Do urban dwellers stay inside because they are depressed or do they get depressed because they stay inside?
Perhaps it stems from living in a very small semi-rural context for twenty years, but there is a powerful absence of spatial focus to this place. All these small housing developments and commercial strip malls along country roads seem so visually and physically disconnected and unfocused. I am reminded of David Kunstler’s thought provoking Geography of Nowhere, a poignant look at American city life and the complete lack of scale and context in which to live meaningful connected lives with each other. Here in the city one can be completely anonymous without effort. I think of the context I am presently living in, how I can hardly go anywhere at all and not encounter countless people I know; many of them very dear, how even going for a morning bike ride at sunrise will often yield a fine companion. Where I exercise, worship, read, volunteer, learn, play, work, get entertained; all are walking distance from where I sleep. Perhaps it really is true – there is no place like home. Perhaps more of us need to think about what home really is. Suddenly, I wonder why I have embarked on this journey that is going to take me over eight time zones, perhaps a couple of credit limits, and a few months.
I am reminded of the inspiration motivational story called “Acres of Diamonds”, depicting an African diamond miner who spends decades rutting in the mud and rock of South Africa, hunting for those brilliant orbs that promise liberation from his misery. Exhausted, penniless, and without hope, he go backs to his little hut on the river, only to see a glint in the morning light. There he finds underfoot that which he had ranged far and wide to find.
Perhaps it is time to go home.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
The Scrapping of America 4-4-10
Riverchase, Alabama
An important painting from the mid-nineteenth century is “The Gleaners” by Jean-Francois Millet, unveiled at the Salon in Paris in 1857. It depicts three peasant women gleaning grains of wheat from a harvested field. The women are shown picking up nearly invisible grains while sunlit mountains of wheat are in the background. The painting almost immediately came under derision by the middle and upper classes in France. “The bit dog hollers.” The upper classes did not want to be reminded of what happened in the French Revolution a decade earlier. That revolution was fueled in part by gross inequities of wealth distribution.
As one observer put it, “Having recently come out of the French Revolution of 1848, these prosperous classes saw the painting as glorifying the lower-class worker. To them, it was a reminder that French society was built upon the labor of the working masses, and landowners linked this working class with the growing movement of Socialism and the dangerous voices of Karl Marx and Émile Zola.”
The Old Testament Book of Ruth presents a profoundly emotive image of compassion and endearment with its image of gleaning. Boaz, a wealthy landholder instructed his field workers to deliberately leave an extra amount of grain for the homeless and stateless Ruth to glean. He also gave instruction that would insure her safety from restive young men working the fields. The story of Ruth and Boaz is the most endearing romance in all of Christian scripture.
Millet’s painting was considered a strong statement on the harsh realities of rural poverty in France rather than a new interpretation of the endearing image of the Moabite woman being taken under wing by Boaz. “The Gleaners” received little attention in Millet’s lifetime, having been sold by him for a pittance to an Englishmen who would not budge from his counter offer. Fourteen years after his death, the painting sold for nearly a king’s ransom, 300,000 francs. It eventually was given to the Louvre by Champagne heiress Jeanne-Alexandrine Pommery. I last saw it in the splendid Musee D’Orsay in Paris, where it presently hangs.
About three miles south of here in a long-neglected part of town is a scrap yard that looks akin to something out of Dante’s inferno. A lifeless barren landscape contains mountains of the rusting detritus of a consumer culture gone amok. Occasionally, in the distant past I went there and sold small accretions of metals that found their way into my life, never waiting to pull up to the scales and get paid for my small lode. A journey to the yard now can consume hours. On a typical day three hundred and fifty trucks show up at the yard to sell an avalanche of anything metallic. The small side street giving access to the yard becomes grid-locked daily.
Suddenly, a vivid image emerged of three hundred and fifty gleaners fanning out across our small county every day to ‘harvest’ anything that can be converted to cash. Complaints from contractor friends about air conditioners being stolen out of their new construction, of copper wiring being stripped out of walls, of bronze vases being torn off of grave markers brought stark clarity to our present cultural reality. Catalytic converters are being ripped out of cars for the platinum that sells for nearly $1,700 an ounce. Whole cars are now being sold by the pound for the scrap iron contained in them. A car sold new for $25,000 is fetching about $300 at this yard, about ten cents a pound.
We are in such desperate condition economic condition because of decades of unbounded consumption, much of it financed by unsustainable personal and public debt. Most observers agree that our national and personal financial crises were precipitated by spending and leveraging ourselves into unsustainable circumstances.
As a kid I went around town gleaning soft drink bottles from the roadside where they were tossed from passing cars. This provided a reliable source of funding for the glue, balsa wood, and paint I purchased to build models. It is a very different world we live in where hundreds of grown men are out gleaning along the roadside in order to buy snack food, gasoline, cable TV service, cell phone links, Internet access, cigarettes at $5 a pack, beer, and wine. Others are scrapping in order to buy crack cocaine, methamphetamine, heroine, Oxycotin, and tranquilizers to blunt the harsh realities of modern life.
Ruth was gleaning to feed herself. Millet’s peasants were gleaning to feed themselves and their families. Is the metallic gleaning going on all around me nothing more than consumers scrapping our nation’s future to pay for the addictions of the moment? Where but in America would it make any sense to destroy a new $6000 air compressor to glean its copper that will bring a mere $30 at the scrap yard? To keep the cable TV connected while one’s mother takes cold showers because the heat was shut off for non-payment?
Anthropologist Helena Norberg-Hodge in her profoundly moving account, Ancient Futures, describes the disintegration that occurs when a sustainable cashless culture is exposed to dynamics found in Western industrial consumer monoculture. She describes how in the span of twenty years the Ladakh people in the Himalayan Mountains of Northern Kashmir transitioned from being among the emotionally healthiest and happiest people on earth, to being severely stressed, filled with profound self-doubt; contemptuous of the traditional ways of living which provided an abiding sense of place, belonging and community to being. One now finds loneliness, depression, pollution, violence, and conflict in a place where such was virtually unknown for millennia.
As I watch hundreds of trucks filled with cars, washing machines, closet shelving, bicycles, anything metallic, being weighed, I can’t but wonder if we are not selling our very souls to satisfy some kind of craving that will only leave us wanting. Are we little more than addicts caught up in cravings that are destroying the foundations of our culture? Awash in cash, our culture teeters on the edge of bankruptcy.
Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.
An important painting from the mid-nineteenth century is “The Gleaners” by Jean-Francois Millet, unveiled at the Salon in Paris in 1857. It depicts three peasant women gleaning grains of wheat from a harvested field. The women are shown picking up nearly invisible grains while sunlit mountains of wheat are in the background. The painting almost immediately came under derision by the middle and upper classes in France. “The bit dog hollers.” The upper classes did not want to be reminded of what happened in the French Revolution a decade earlier. That revolution was fueled in part by gross inequities of wealth distribution.
As one observer put it, “Having recently come out of the French Revolution of 1848, these prosperous classes saw the painting as glorifying the lower-class worker. To them, it was a reminder that French society was built upon the labor of the working masses, and landowners linked this working class with the growing movement of Socialism and the dangerous voices of Karl Marx and Émile Zola.”
The Old Testament Book of Ruth presents a profoundly emotive image of compassion and endearment with its image of gleaning. Boaz, a wealthy landholder instructed his field workers to deliberately leave an extra amount of grain for the homeless and stateless Ruth to glean. He also gave instruction that would insure her safety from restive young men working the fields. The story of Ruth and Boaz is the most endearing romance in all of Christian scripture.
Millet’s painting was considered a strong statement on the harsh realities of rural poverty in France rather than a new interpretation of the endearing image of the Moabite woman being taken under wing by Boaz. “The Gleaners” received little attention in Millet’s lifetime, having been sold by him for a pittance to an Englishmen who would not budge from his counter offer. Fourteen years after his death, the painting sold for nearly a king’s ransom, 300,000 francs. It eventually was given to the Louvre by Champagne heiress Jeanne-Alexandrine Pommery. I last saw it in the splendid Musee D’Orsay in Paris, where it presently hangs.
About three miles south of here in a long-neglected part of town is a scrap yard that looks akin to something out of Dante’s inferno. A lifeless barren landscape contains mountains of the rusting detritus of a consumer culture gone amok. Occasionally, in the distant past I went there and sold small accretions of metals that found their way into my life, never waiting to pull up to the scales and get paid for my small lode. A journey to the yard now can consume hours. On a typical day three hundred and fifty trucks show up at the yard to sell an avalanche of anything metallic. The small side street giving access to the yard becomes grid-locked daily.
Suddenly, a vivid image emerged of three hundred and fifty gleaners fanning out across our small county every day to ‘harvest’ anything that can be converted to cash. Complaints from contractor friends about air conditioners being stolen out of their new construction, of copper wiring being stripped out of walls, of bronze vases being torn off of grave markers brought stark clarity to our present cultural reality. Catalytic converters are being ripped out of cars for the platinum that sells for nearly $1,700 an ounce. Whole cars are now being sold by the pound for the scrap iron contained in them. A car sold new for $25,000 is fetching about $300 at this yard, about ten cents a pound.
We are in such desperate condition economic condition because of decades of unbounded consumption, much of it financed by unsustainable personal and public debt. Most observers agree that our national and personal financial crises were precipitated by spending and leveraging ourselves into unsustainable circumstances.
As a kid I went around town gleaning soft drink bottles from the roadside where they were tossed from passing cars. This provided a reliable source of funding for the glue, balsa wood, and paint I purchased to build models. It is a very different world we live in where hundreds of grown men are out gleaning along the roadside in order to buy snack food, gasoline, cable TV service, cell phone links, Internet access, cigarettes at $5 a pack, beer, and wine. Others are scrapping in order to buy crack cocaine, methamphetamine, heroine, Oxycotin, and tranquilizers to blunt the harsh realities of modern life.
Ruth was gleaning to feed herself. Millet’s peasants were gleaning to feed themselves and their families. Is the metallic gleaning going on all around me nothing more than consumers scrapping our nation’s future to pay for the addictions of the moment? Where but in America would it make any sense to destroy a new $6000 air compressor to glean its copper that will bring a mere $30 at the scrap yard? To keep the cable TV connected while one’s mother takes cold showers because the heat was shut off for non-payment?
Anthropologist Helena Norberg-Hodge in her profoundly moving account, Ancient Futures, describes the disintegration that occurs when a sustainable cashless culture is exposed to dynamics found in Western industrial consumer monoculture. She describes how in the span of twenty years the Ladakh people in the Himalayan Mountains of Northern Kashmir transitioned from being among the emotionally healthiest and happiest people on earth, to being severely stressed, filled with profound self-doubt; contemptuous of the traditional ways of living which provided an abiding sense of place, belonging and community to being. One now finds loneliness, depression, pollution, violence, and conflict in a place where such was virtually unknown for millennia.
As I watch hundreds of trucks filled with cars, washing machines, closet shelving, bicycles, anything metallic, being weighed, I can’t but wonder if we are not selling our very souls to satisfy some kind of craving that will only leave us wanting. Are we little more than addicts caught up in cravings that are destroying the foundations of our culture? Awash in cash, our culture teeters on the edge of bankruptcy.
Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Beauty – Victorious Over Death 4-3-10
Birmingham, Alabama
On journeys to Europe I’ve always been intrigued by magnificent gilded boxes found on high altars in great Gothic cathedrals. Studded with precious stones and images of Jesus, these reliquaries are reputed to contain fragments of the True Cross, bones of our Savior, or other relics of great ecclesiastical value. I have often wondered how large the True Cross must be if all the wood fragments attributed to it were authenticated. Often I have thought about the idea of a sinless being actually being put to death willingly on a couple of Roman beams, on my account.
In the 1950s, Hollywood produced spectacular films depicting sagas of Biblical times. The Ten Commandments, Quo Vadis, King of Kings, and The Robe were produced in an era when Americans had great thirst for epic visions of biblical events. Perhaps the most expansive of these was William Wyler’s 1959 rendition of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The chariot race scene is one of the most dramatic pieces of cinematography of all time, contributing to the film’s record eleven academy awards.
In some respects another scene is more compelling. As torrential rains wash down upon Jesus on a splintery Roman cross, his blood is depicted running in crimson rivulets across the earth. Another concurrent scene change depicts Judah Ben Hur’s sister and mother being healed from the disfigurement of leprosy. The portrayal of Jesus’ death bringing immediate healing and beauty to Miriam and Tirzah is evocative in the extreme. Every time I’ve seen this film, this proves a riveting turning point for me.
The most glorious place on earth must be found in a botanical garden beneath a canopy of Yoshina cherry trees in full blossom. A gentle breeze creating a blizzard of pale petals beneath spring’s cerulean sky gives cause for near epiphany. Next best must be the wonder of perfectly manicured gardens containing a universe of every spectral marvel known to botany.
On Good Friday I was strolling in a magnificent Japanese garden, well appointed with a traditional torii gate, formal tea house, sculpted benches, raked meditation garden, several bridges, and reflection ponds filled with koi. In my wanderings an astounding small cherry tree on the far side of a reflection pool came to my attention.
Curious, climbing across rocks carefully to avoid falling in the water, getting close to the tree, my eyes told me I was seeing something impossible. This cherry tree was in radiant bloom, laden down with a canopy of brilliant crimson blooms. Closer inspection revealed its trunk to be completely hollow. Looking down through it gave clear view of the ground. Looking sideways through it gave clear view of the pond. Most of the tree was gone top to bottom. Visual observation revealed no cambium, heartwood, sapwood, or any other possible way for dry splinters of bark-free wood to be providing nutrients or vascular support to that canopy of glorious blooms.
I suddenly thought of Old Testament accounts of the miracle of Aaron’s rod that gave sprout. Here I was looking at the most glorious fragrant cloud of crimson petals around my head, newly bloomed from the driest of splinters. It made no sense to me. To convince myself I was seeing clearly, I carefully photographed the canopy and disintegrated trunk with two cameras. Later evaluation of the images indicated this tree should not be happening.
Is it possible that love and beauty are so powerful that they can erupt out of dry dead splinters? Could God’s love really erupt from a Roman Cross? Could life come forth from death? Was this single oddity of a crimson tree a metaphor for me? Was this scarlet beauty a reminder of the blood running in rivulets that could deliver women from the scourge of leprosy? Does blood running in rivulets from Roman splinters have power to clothe me in a redemption that makes me white as snow? Did a being without fault take upon Himself all death so we could be found without blemish, without fault, white as snow, as fragrant and pure as the cherry blossoms on dozens of trees all around me? To never be victimized by death?
The cherry tree defied death to tell me of another ancient tree, one perhaps enshrined in reliquaries, where death was embraced so that I don’t have to. Perhaps this tree cherry is proclaiming the wonder of the Easter message.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: 'He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’
On journeys to Europe I’ve always been intrigued by magnificent gilded boxes found on high altars in great Gothic cathedrals. Studded with precious stones and images of Jesus, these reliquaries are reputed to contain fragments of the True Cross, bones of our Savior, or other relics of great ecclesiastical value. I have often wondered how large the True Cross must be if all the wood fragments attributed to it were authenticated. Often I have thought about the idea of a sinless being actually being put to death willingly on a couple of Roman beams, on my account.
In the 1950s, Hollywood produced spectacular films depicting sagas of Biblical times. The Ten Commandments, Quo Vadis, King of Kings, and The Robe were produced in an era when Americans had great thirst for epic visions of biblical events. Perhaps the most expansive of these was William Wyler’s 1959 rendition of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The chariot race scene is one of the most dramatic pieces of cinematography of all time, contributing to the film’s record eleven academy awards.
In some respects another scene is more compelling. As torrential rains wash down upon Jesus on a splintery Roman cross, his blood is depicted running in crimson rivulets across the earth. Another concurrent scene change depicts Judah Ben Hur’s sister and mother being healed from the disfigurement of leprosy. The portrayal of Jesus’ death bringing immediate healing and beauty to Miriam and Tirzah is evocative in the extreme. Every time I’ve seen this film, this proves a riveting turning point for me.
The most glorious place on earth must be found in a botanical garden beneath a canopy of Yoshina cherry trees in full blossom. A gentle breeze creating a blizzard of pale petals beneath spring’s cerulean sky gives cause for near epiphany. Next best must be the wonder of perfectly manicured gardens containing a universe of every spectral marvel known to botany.
On Good Friday I was strolling in a magnificent Japanese garden, well appointed with a traditional torii gate, formal tea house, sculpted benches, raked meditation garden, several bridges, and reflection ponds filled with koi. In my wanderings an astounding small cherry tree on the far side of a reflection pool came to my attention.
Curious, climbing across rocks carefully to avoid falling in the water, getting close to the tree, my eyes told me I was seeing something impossible. This cherry tree was in radiant bloom, laden down with a canopy of brilliant crimson blooms. Closer inspection revealed its trunk to be completely hollow. Looking down through it gave clear view of the ground. Looking sideways through it gave clear view of the pond. Most of the tree was gone top to bottom. Visual observation revealed no cambium, heartwood, sapwood, or any other possible way for dry splinters of bark-free wood to be providing nutrients or vascular support to that canopy of glorious blooms.
I suddenly thought of Old Testament accounts of the miracle of Aaron’s rod that gave sprout. Here I was looking at the most glorious fragrant cloud of crimson petals around my head, newly bloomed from the driest of splinters. It made no sense to me. To convince myself I was seeing clearly, I carefully photographed the canopy and disintegrated trunk with two cameras. Later evaluation of the images indicated this tree should not be happening.
Is it possible that love and beauty are so powerful that they can erupt out of dry dead splinters? Could God’s love really erupt from a Roman Cross? Could life come forth from death? Was this single oddity of a crimson tree a metaphor for me? Was this scarlet beauty a reminder of the blood running in rivulets that could deliver women from the scourge of leprosy? Does blood running in rivulets from Roman splinters have power to clothe me in a redemption that makes me white as snow? Did a being without fault take upon Himself all death so we could be found without blemish, without fault, white as snow, as fragrant and pure as the cherry blossoms on dozens of trees all around me? To never be victimized by death?
The cherry tree defied death to tell me of another ancient tree, one perhaps enshrined in reliquaries, where death was embraced so that I don’t have to. Perhaps this tree cherry is proclaiming the wonder of the Easter message.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: 'He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’
Input 4-1-10
Anderson, South Carolina
The films “Short Circuit” and “Short Circuit2” describe the playful antics of a highly intelligent robot that is addicted to input. Viewers are filled with laughter as they watch the urbane mechanical capers of this ferrous critter seeking input of all kinds. Alas, we space-age viewers are getting our lives filled with input that does not create happy gales of laughter; rather we are experiencing an angst of a type we have not seen before in human history. Throughout history people really did experience ignorance as bliss. Imagine if hapless villages in northern Europe had been given days and weeks of warning that their small peaceable worlds were about to be destroyed by marauding Goths or Vikings. Imagine if we knew, as Jesus did, the nature and timing of our deaths. The growing horror would be beyond comprehension. The element of surprise has the ability of deferring anxiety and dread, especially in the weak and powerless.
I recall being in the position years ago of having to tell a mother of the death of a child. I followed this happy mother in my car on the Interstate for about sixty miles, knowing that at the other end of our journey I was going to have to provide her a kind of input that would shatter her equanimity. It did. It was hideous to drive along behind her looking at the back of her head knowing that I was the one appointed to shatter her peace. Knowledge can be a horrible thing.
It is in the nature of my life to be on the Internet regularly as I now maintain my correspondence almost exclusively in this manner and manage my investments on-line. A dark side of the Internet is the ability to get more input than even our mechanized friend could have wanted. For the first time in human history we face a geo-political crisis with the ability to watch every development with a level of detail that would have been unthinkable five or ten years ago. The real time viewing of the destruction of the World Trade Centers made the horrors of the progressive structural collapse of those granite spires more than holographic. I have not been the same since. I was supposed to have been in those towers that fateful week. We were nearly real-time witnesses to the incineration of the Columbia as it fell from the heavens over Texas.
As is my usual practice, I logged on first thing today to check e-mail, hoping to find those touches from dear friends that thicken the veneer of civility just a bit in an ever more hostile world. Amidst birthday greetings I found many group forwards of crass jokes and a couple of spam from bankrupt airlines offering virtually free travel, desperate for any cash flow whatever. The airline industry is under siege of terrorism and much of it has filed for bankruptcy protection.
While connected to the planet I checked on financial markets in thirty countries, only to find that some world markets continue to experience progressive economic collapse, financial metaphors of what happened to the World Trade Center on that fateful Tuesday. I didn’t have the courage to check my own positions. On a daily basis I encounter people who are falling victim to the progressive failure of their life savings and retirements. A neighbor works the cash register at Wal-Mart and tells me she can see business slowing down. The owner of the local BP service station tells me he has seen a big drop off in his commercial accounts. More and more, bus boys and waiters in fast food establishments are silver-haired senior citizens. Japan has seen the complete loss of all the wealth generated in the past generation. Warren Buffet, the greatest investor of all time, once stated publicly that he believes derivatives trading will have the effect of being a weapon of economic mass destruction. It destroyed Orange County, the venerable Barings Bank, and nearly took out the US banking system and currency years ago. We had another bigger near miss in the melt-down of early 2009. One almost feels like he is dodging asteroids.
We live in an era when we have ability to see the six-pound hammer coming down in slow motion on our own personal financial lives and now we have the ability to see holographic images of the latest hi-tech hammers of the military. One is but three clicks away from viewing the wanton destruction of many of the world’s great cities and cultural treasures. The great Buddhas of Afghanistan are now but jpg files in my hard drive. This morning I saw a video clip of an actual blast perpetrated by a suicide bomber in Southern Russia which took out dozens of lives. How strange to be sitting in my basement sending out images of the most beautiful places to find myself receiving live images of annihilation.
For us mere mortals, input of this kind incinerates peace of mind and causes sleep to flee from us. We were never created to handle this kind of thing. We were created to live simple peaceable lives with those we love and care about, to simply enjoy a good meal and conversation within our communities. Less and less this is proving to be the daily reality for uncounted billions.
Quantum physicists have long since determined that time is not really as we think it to be: a straight linear flow. It can be circular, a point, a line, bi-directional, and all at the same time. We simply don’t have the sensory capacity to comprehend this non-Newtonian view of the universe. Fortunately, the One who created the universe does understand and comprehends perfectly the nature of not only the universe but also time/space and human behavior. Being outside the bounds of linear time He knew before we lived it out, that the history of humanity would be tortured and troubled. It is for this reason, that the Creator created the ultimate Input into His-story. It is the Input of the Christmas and Easter message that allows me to sleep at night while others celebrate dropping bombs and yet others wipe out economies with derivatives trading. It is that message that allows a mother to keep getting out of bed after the death of a child. It is that message that allows a dear friend with catastrophic disease to experience God’s grace as “being able to do the next thing.” It is that message that allows a mother to make some sort of sense of the world and to keep a faint flicker of hope alive when she finds out her boys are mentally handicapped and face radical brain surgery just to stay alive.
On that fateful Friday centuries ago the most profound Input of all time was nailed to a Roman cross and erased from the hard drive of humanity, or so the Romans and Jewish leaders thought. On Sunday morning a couple of women arose to find the Creator of it all had another plan – he had an un-erase program that gives little girls in new dresses a reason to celebrate the glory of Easter. The Input had been restored to our troubled world with a promise.
“They will hunger no longer, nor thirst anymore; nor will the sun beat down on them, nor any heat; for the Lamb in the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and will guide them to springs of the water of life; and God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”
Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”
The films “Short Circuit” and “Short Circuit2” describe the playful antics of a highly intelligent robot that is addicted to input. Viewers are filled with laughter as they watch the urbane mechanical capers of this ferrous critter seeking input of all kinds. Alas, we space-age viewers are getting our lives filled with input that does not create happy gales of laughter; rather we are experiencing an angst of a type we have not seen before in human history. Throughout history people really did experience ignorance as bliss. Imagine if hapless villages in northern Europe had been given days and weeks of warning that their small peaceable worlds were about to be destroyed by marauding Goths or Vikings. Imagine if we knew, as Jesus did, the nature and timing of our deaths. The growing horror would be beyond comprehension. The element of surprise has the ability of deferring anxiety and dread, especially in the weak and powerless.
I recall being in the position years ago of having to tell a mother of the death of a child. I followed this happy mother in my car on the Interstate for about sixty miles, knowing that at the other end of our journey I was going to have to provide her a kind of input that would shatter her equanimity. It did. It was hideous to drive along behind her looking at the back of her head knowing that I was the one appointed to shatter her peace. Knowledge can be a horrible thing.
It is in the nature of my life to be on the Internet regularly as I now maintain my correspondence almost exclusively in this manner and manage my investments on-line. A dark side of the Internet is the ability to get more input than even our mechanized friend could have wanted. For the first time in human history we face a geo-political crisis with the ability to watch every development with a level of detail that would have been unthinkable five or ten years ago. The real time viewing of the destruction of the World Trade Centers made the horrors of the progressive structural collapse of those granite spires more than holographic. I have not been the same since. I was supposed to have been in those towers that fateful week. We were nearly real-time witnesses to the incineration of the Columbia as it fell from the heavens over Texas.
As is my usual practice, I logged on first thing today to check e-mail, hoping to find those touches from dear friends that thicken the veneer of civility just a bit in an ever more hostile world. Amidst birthday greetings I found many group forwards of crass jokes and a couple of spam from bankrupt airlines offering virtually free travel, desperate for any cash flow whatever. The airline industry is under siege of terrorism and much of it has filed for bankruptcy protection.
While connected to the planet I checked on financial markets in thirty countries, only to find that some world markets continue to experience progressive economic collapse, financial metaphors of what happened to the World Trade Center on that fateful Tuesday. I didn’t have the courage to check my own positions. On a daily basis I encounter people who are falling victim to the progressive failure of their life savings and retirements. A neighbor works the cash register at Wal-Mart and tells me she can see business slowing down. The owner of the local BP service station tells me he has seen a big drop off in his commercial accounts. More and more, bus boys and waiters in fast food establishments are silver-haired senior citizens. Japan has seen the complete loss of all the wealth generated in the past generation. Warren Buffet, the greatest investor of all time, once stated publicly that he believes derivatives trading will have the effect of being a weapon of economic mass destruction. It destroyed Orange County, the venerable Barings Bank, and nearly took out the US banking system and currency years ago. We had another bigger near miss in the melt-down of early 2009. One almost feels like he is dodging asteroids.
We live in an era when we have ability to see the six-pound hammer coming down in slow motion on our own personal financial lives and now we have the ability to see holographic images of the latest hi-tech hammers of the military. One is but three clicks away from viewing the wanton destruction of many of the world’s great cities and cultural treasures. The great Buddhas of Afghanistan are now but jpg files in my hard drive. This morning I saw a video clip of an actual blast perpetrated by a suicide bomber in Southern Russia which took out dozens of lives. How strange to be sitting in my basement sending out images of the most beautiful places to find myself receiving live images of annihilation.
For us mere mortals, input of this kind incinerates peace of mind and causes sleep to flee from us. We were never created to handle this kind of thing. We were created to live simple peaceable lives with those we love and care about, to simply enjoy a good meal and conversation within our communities. Less and less this is proving to be the daily reality for uncounted billions.
Quantum physicists have long since determined that time is not really as we think it to be: a straight linear flow. It can be circular, a point, a line, bi-directional, and all at the same time. We simply don’t have the sensory capacity to comprehend this non-Newtonian view of the universe. Fortunately, the One who created the universe does understand and comprehends perfectly the nature of not only the universe but also time/space and human behavior. Being outside the bounds of linear time He knew before we lived it out, that the history of humanity would be tortured and troubled. It is for this reason, that the Creator created the ultimate Input into His-story. It is the Input of the Christmas and Easter message that allows me to sleep at night while others celebrate dropping bombs and yet others wipe out economies with derivatives trading. It is that message that allows a mother to keep getting out of bed after the death of a child. It is that message that allows a dear friend with catastrophic disease to experience God’s grace as “being able to do the next thing.” It is that message that allows a mother to make some sort of sense of the world and to keep a faint flicker of hope alive when she finds out her boys are mentally handicapped and face radical brain surgery just to stay alive.
On that fateful Friday centuries ago the most profound Input of all time was nailed to a Roman cross and erased from the hard drive of humanity, or so the Romans and Jewish leaders thought. On Sunday morning a couple of women arose to find the Creator of it all had another plan – he had an un-erase program that gives little girls in new dresses a reason to celebrate the glory of Easter. The Input had been restored to our troubled world with a promise.
“They will hunger no longer, nor thirst anymore; nor will the sun beat down on them, nor any heat; for the Lamb in the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and will guide them to springs of the water of life; and God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”
Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”
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