Christmas choices

Eddie stumped along the dark sidewalk in his jeans and work boots, his hands jammed deep into the pockets of his jacket against the December night. He had been working outside all day and the chill had settled into the soles of his feet. His foreman had just paid him for the week and he had three hundred seven dollars cash in his left front pocket. It was five days to Christmas.

Passing a house with a lighted tree in the front window he caught a whiff of wood smoke. That and the cold night made him think of warmth. Warmth made him think of heat, and heat made him remember the 2-day notice from the power company lying on the card table in his rented dining room. The dining room that doubled as his kitchen, living room, and bedroom. Keeping the lights and heat on would take all but twenty-six dollars of his pay.

But twenty-six dollars is more than nothing, and as he walked on past Smokie’s and heard the laughter and smelled the blend of stale beer and cigarette smoke, he wanted to drop inside, just to say hi, and to warm up. But it was five days to Christmas.

Instead he warmed up at the corner market. He had made a complete tour of the three short aisles before he started to thaw. He then set about gathering some supplies for the next week. The cheapest cut of meat is still too rich for twenty-six dollars and so he settled for beans and rice, a half gallon of milk, half a dozen eggs, a few other staples and some red apples for Buddy when he would come from his mother’s on Sunday. On the way to the checkout he weakened and threw in a chocolate bar. What’s Christmas without something sweet to share with your kid?

He chatted up the sales clerk for as long as he thought he could get by, then headed back out to the dark street. There were now two dollars in his jeans that didn’t already belong to somebody else. How was guy supposed to make Christmas happen on two dollars and change? He liked his job ok, but he hated never having enough to make it. He hated the cold. As he walked past a bell ringer he looked the other way. Charity wouldn’t be so bad if he could just once be on the other end of it.

Reaching the corner where he should turn down to his apartment, he stopped in a pool of light under the street lamp. He brushed the smeared mud off the toes of his boots while he debated with himself. Finally he straightened up and turned away from his street down toward the Fire House.

In one empty bay of the garage the Marine Reserves had set up a “Toys for Tots” distribution center. Long tables were piled with new unwrapped toys people had donated. When Eddie stepped inside it was bright and warm. He signed in and then took his time picking out something for Buddy.

Once he looked up across the table and recognized another man from the site. The big man with rough weathered hands was evaluating a bright pink box with a fashion doll inside. The man looked up and Eddie didn’t grin, but tossed him a nod of recognition. The little girl had a father that cared. That’s all Eddie saw.
Eddie passed up the toy cap pistol and chose a chubby teddy bear. He didn’t get to spend near enough time with his son, but the bear would. As he was making his way quietly back to the door, someone spoke and he turned.

“Do you want to wrap that?”

“Excuse me?”

“The bear, do you want to wrap it?”

One table was spread out with rolls of bright wrapping paper, tape and scissors. A woman ahead of him finished wrapping up an Elmo, and then it was his turn. Eddie chose the gaudiest paper he could find and using a good deal more than was needed managed to get all the corners taped down tight.

“How much?” Eddie ventured, praying under his breath that two dollars would cover it.

“All the paper was donated to us, sir. We couldn’t charge. God bless you.”

Eddie handed off the scissors to the big man with the pink doll and said, “Merry Christmas!”

May you know the joys of giving
and of receiving this Christmas.
We have all been given so very much
from God and from our fellow man.
Christmas is to share.
God bless you.

Happy New Year, Nancy!

The silver lining to all of this is that the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, and she might not have considered this, but the Speaker doesn’t really get to say that much.

St. Catherine's at the Getty

This winter the Getty is hosting an exhibit of icons and manuscripts from the ancient monastery of St. Catherine’s at the foot of Sinai. Part of the exhibit will reconstruct some of the ambiance of that sacred ground. I am curious to know if the most important piece of furniture from St. Catherine’s will make the trip. I refer, of course, to the famous holy wastebasket.

St. Catherine’s was built in the sixth century and is the oldest monastic site in continuous operation to the present day. Their collection of icons and manuscripts is the stuff of legend.

In 1844 Tischendorf was scouring the Near East for anything of value when he stopped by St. Catherine’s and happened to glance in the trash. Dumpster diving is not a new practice. What he saw there evidently made his voice tighten a little and his hands shake, because the monks in charge of the trash wouldn’t let him have all of it. He later dated the 43 leaves he was able to rescue as mid-fourth century copies of one of the oldest Bibles he had ever seen.

In the end, after twenty years of trying, out of St. Catherine’s at Mt. Sinai (though not out of the trash, out of the collection) came one of the oldest and most complete copies of the Scriptures still in existence, Codex Sinaiticus, now in the British Museum.

So, what’s in your wastebasket?

This Just In

This Just In …
============ ========Tourism officials in Israel did little to sell the city of Jerusalem as a must-see for visitors when a brochure suggested it did not exist. The sightseeing pamphlet was translated from Hebrew and should have read: "Jerusalem - there's no city like it!". But instead the slogan in English read: "Jerusalem - there's no such city!", reported the Israeli newspaper Maariv.

Tens of thousands of the leaflets were distributed before the Jerusalem municipality realised its mistake. ============ ========The link: http://news. bbc.co.uk/ 2/hi/middle_ east/5364192. stm

NY Times and Terror

OK, I thought I wouldn't have to weigh in on this, but...

Everyone is all over the NY Times for publishing information damaging to the efforts of our government to track finances of terrorist cells. But it isn't the Times at fault here.

The issue lies with the Bush administration source that leaked sensitive information to the Times. Once that data was in the files of the Times, I would rather they publish. Then at least we all know what the terrorists know.

Does anyone think the system security at the Times is anywhere near as tight as that at the DOT? Does anyone doubt that Al Queso has eyes and ears at the Times?

The fault is in loose cannon at the Dept of the Treasury. Prosecution and prison should start there.

Mountain of Evidence

There is another part of the whole DaVinci Code controversy that puzzles me. It is a new approach to documentary evidence. People examining the book often wonder how such theories can be taken so seriously. It is so far out of the main stream. Why is this story getting such play? Brown is sloppy, but he is a novelist, not an historian. There are other professional historians utilizing the same technique, however. On the premise that the victor writes the prevailing history, they weight alternate and contradictory evidence heavier in an attempt to ferret out the fuller truth. These alternate documents have previously been marginalized because they contradict the prevailing history.

The traditional approach to history is much like the prospector in Jack London’s short story “The All Gold Canyon.” The miner assays back and forth up a slope, panning out individual shovels of dirt, locating the pocket by the number of flakes of gold revealed in each pan. Moving up the slope he narrows the pattern and closes in on the pocket, which he then mines out. In historical studies we likewise collect sources, compare, evaluate, locate the center based on the weight of evidence, and marginalize conflicting documents to the periphery. We call the center “truth,” and we publish a book.

The new approach resembles more a tent. Competing views stake out their extreme positions, establishing a space between them where we can pitch a tent of truth. Think about the classic Arminian-Calvinist debate about free will versus predestination. Positions on each side are firm, but truth lies somewhere between, maybe everywhere between. In this model it is possible that no data is actually reported from within the tent. We locate the tent from the hard data at the staking points. This is a black hole model of history. Astrophysicists don’t have any data from black holes, but they infer their existence from surrounding peripheral phenomena.

It is like a high mountain covered in ice and shrouded in mist. We infer the character of the mountain based on reports from the foothill villages, but no one actually lives up there, or has ever returned from an expedition to go there. Like our tent, the mountain covers considerable territory. This method establishes a region of truth, not a point of truth. Let that sink in.

This method does not abolish truth. The tent has an inside and an outside. The mountain stands in the midst of plains and valleys that are not the mountain. But truth in this model is not pointillism; it is not reductionistic truth. It sets out space enough to have a civil conversation where all parties can lay claim to truth without denigrating the other conversants.

The traditional point-of-truth approach has always suffered from the illusion that once properly stated, truth was in fact established and static. The new region-of-truth model likewise suffers from some staking points that are in reality weaker than others, or set in thin air. The burden of the historian remains validation, evaluation and interpretation of the evidence available.

But Pliny said...

There is something bothering me about the DaVinci Code. The book claims two things. First, that Jesus was voted divine at Nicea, 300 years after his death. Prior to this no one, including Jesus, thought he was God. The second point is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child that founded a royal line of French kings. Here is my problem. If Jesus wasn’t God, then what made his kid so special? Why does anyone care about the offspring of a crazy itinerant preacher who was condemned a heretic?

I should have read the book instead of waiting for the movie. But it irked me to deal with Brown’s Nicene premise when history tells us the controversy dates back to the earliest decades of the church. Pliny, a ruler not sympathetic to the Christian movement, wrote the Roman Emperor Trajan in AD 110 how adherents of the “superstition” met before daybreak and recited “a hymn to Christ, as God.” One of these hymns is quoted in Paul’s Philippian letter and shows how very early on the church had a very high view of Jesus’ divine nature.

Even early heretics like the Docetists made divine claims for Christ. They believed the divinity of Christ was a settled point. Where they had difficulties was with his humanity, which they believed was a put on. Ignatius refuted these ideas about the same year.

I would mention biblical witnesses like Isaiah, the Four gospels, Paul’s letters, Jesus many claims, and the charges of blasphemy for his claims. But these sources are under suspicion for the very fact they made it into the Bible. What do we believe though, that the documents preserved by the early church were the ones they found to be true, or that the Church Fathers concocted them to squash the truth? I know conspiracies happen, but I also know they fall apart on closer examination.

So I guess I’m going to the movie, examining both, and keeping the one that stands up. Why do I think I already know which one that will be?

Los Illegales

Some people are blaming the migrants. If they would only use the proper channels to come to America then we wouldn't have an immigration problem. Ask anyone who's tried it. The system is broke. It can take years to get a legitimate work permit if you get it at all.Some people blame the farmers who hire the migrants. If they would only follow the labor laws and check people's documents. So, what, a guy named De La Cruz applies for a job and you call the FBI? That's harrassment. Chances are his family has been here longer than mine.Some blame the grocery chains that don't pay the farmers enough to hire legitimate labor to pick the food.Tell me something. Would you change grocery stores if you found out a head of lettuce was a nickel cheaper down the street? Sure. So would I. And as long as my nickel is more important than their justice, I'm the problem with immigration.

Life, Liberty, and Gratuitous Violence?

Let’s be clear about two things. Video games are not speech, and they are not free. Judge Steeh’s ruling strikes down Michigan law restricting sale of violent video games to minors. The US military is using video games to train our troops how to conduct urban battle; do we not see a disconnect when commercial video games aimed at 15-year-olds train on drifting, street racing and police evasion tactics?

The speech declared free by the Constitution is speech suppressed. It is the speech of the town hall meeting. It is the broadside sheet on the street corner. It is the blues lyric. It is the blog. It might face suppression by political authority, by socially correct authority, or by editorial authority. No one who has ever sent a conservative letter to the San Francisco Dailies believes the newspapers represent a “free press.” They are in business to sell a product to a market, just like the pornographers, the distillers, and the video game houses. If the shelves are full of your games and all kids have to do is have Mom buy it for them, guess what, it’s not suppressed. It’s controlled.

Here's a thought, if you really think your First Amendment rights to Free Speech are being impinged, reduce the price to zero and give your product away. That will get the word out. What? Not willing to go that far? Then you're not concerned about Free Speech, but about Commerce. That's another section of the law. Please don't wrap yourself in the Constitution, the seams are under enough strain as it is.

And if the game makers don’t think they can profit from games bought by parents for kids, what needs to change?

The New Democracy and HR4437

All this week protests against HR4437, a malformed immigration bill, sprouted across California with no visible means of support. Students emptied high school and junior high campuses to march in the streets. No one organized these protests in the traditional activist manner. They were spontaneous real time grass roots events driven by cell phones, instant messaging, and Internet blogs. Let the reader understand.

School administrators pleaded with students to remain on campus and set up stations in school libraries for writing letters to congressmen. Meanwhile the communication savvy students have bypassed these traditional channels and published mountains of data on the Internet in a publication cycle measured in minutes. Legacy media droned on about the students getting an ad hoc civics lesson. The media have not yet come to grips with the fact that democracy has undergone an evolutionary sea change while we were gawking at the marchers. It will be weeks before they get it.

Tension is good

We were awakened at two a.m. as a creek came gushing through the tent. The cozy little campsite we had chosen in the daylight turned out to be a torrent with the nightly rains. That would have been bad enough, but neither had I properly staked the lines, and when the wind picked up so did the tent. Repitching a tent in the dark, wind and rain can produce its own teachable moment. We learned the hard way (is there any other way?) the importance of tent siting to a pleasurable camp.

You can’t read very far in the Bible before you find that there are some challenging things written there, and how Scripture is the best interpreter of Scripture. Recently our little group strove to reconcile Matthew 12:36 “But I tell you that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken” against Romans 8:1 “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” In the heat of discussion I incautiously let go of one position and cleaved to the other, and was found flapping in the wind.

Too often I sweat to resolve issues best left in tension. The resulting theology becomes quickly convoluted and takes on a plastic man-made feel. If I could only learn to live with the tension, the mystery, I would find myself staked securely in the sweet spot, holding tightly to all the truth available to me, safe, dry and in a spacious place.

The Treachery of Plumages

If it floats like a duck...

with apologies to Rene Magritte, Ducks Unlimited, and the citizens of St. Claude, France.

This is only a test

Active Noise Cancellation is the new watchword in personal audio technology, and is just the latest in a long line of personal protective equipment. See if you can detect a theme in the following list: spam filters, mailbox rules, block lists, allow lists, internet filters, adware scrubbers, popup blockers, message machines, call screening, the national don’t-even-think-of-calling-me list, the V-chip, Personal video recorders, pay per view. There is a whole sector of new industries that exist, not to supply product, but to block it from your life.

We just came through a Christmas season (there’s that word again) where a major debate was waged on the issue of individuals desiring to have freedom from religion. Maybe we could apply that same logic to other constitutionally guaranteed “rights.” What about freedom from speech, or from the press, or from the press of speech? I mean, you can say whatever you want, but why do I have to listen? And if I don’t happen to catch the original quote, what benefit can anyone see in replaying a solid week of misrepresented sound bites?

Here’s a question. How many of the rights guaranteed in the US Constitution are we now actively and purposefully filtering out of our lives?
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Chocolate?

Mayor Ray Nagin does have a way with words. His speech in New Orleans on the celebration of the King holiday raised both spirits and eyebrows when he advocated, nay promised, that his recently deluged city would once again be predominantly black. Immediately the pundits went to their microphones and the networks started cutting sound bites. He is a master at getting the word out, and the word is “chocolate.”

But I think I get it, at least in part. The challenge before Mayor Nagin is not only to rebuild New Orleans, but to remake it as it was. Gentrification is defined as what happens when a lot of money comes pouring into a poor area, making it no longer suitable for the poor. Without careful planning there will be a city rebuilt on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, but it won’t be New Orleans.

The mayor is not so much the governor of a city as the guardian of an attitude. We saw the same kind of mantle fall on Mayor Giuliani after the Towers. It is a prophetic calling to stand and lead.

As to the Mayor channeling God and Dr. King, I am not certain he speaks for either one. But his comments in total were more pertinent than the sound bites give him credit. Is God mad at America? Quite possibly. If God is true to His word, then yes, we are not where we ought to be. Is it because of Iraq, though, or because of New Orleans? One of the big issues on God’s to do list appears to be defending the cause of the poor and powerless. I think of the video footage of Iraqi citizens with blue fingerprints after voting. Then I think of the footage of those left behind at the Superdome. Who was more powerless and neglected?

The Mayor’s address was incendiary. I’m sure he meant every word of it. But was it racist? If there is real racism in Mayor Nagin’s speech, it will show on the news the next time New Orleans floods and the people standing chest deep in sewage are mostly black and all poor. Again.

Phones for Terrorists

Untraceable cell phones sold over the counter in big box stores may come into the hands of terror cells operating in the US. The troubling thing about this report is only that it comes as news. Are we that stupid? I am trusting that the FBI had a heads-up about these products usefulness in the field, given they appear from the news to be standard issue for the CIA. And thanks to the vigilance of Wal-Mart clerks in Texas we are now all aware that a purchase of large numbers of Tracphones will tip-off local law enforcement. The message to the terrorists is clearly that they may buy their disposable cell phones, but in smaller lots, and they will be put to the trouble of finding an open Wal-Mart. Take that!

I am all for a free and open market, and I am sure the members of the Michigan militia already have their cache of untraceable cell phones, ever prepared for the coming resistance. I am tempted to go out while I still can and get one or two for under the front seat. But there passed a point somewhere in the last decade when I wonder if we are being as smart as we can be about all this.

We are paying more attention to our borders these days, as we should. But more and more it seems that everything the terrorists need to bring us low is sold at the local outlets. Lenin was wrong, America won’t spend herself to death, she will sell it direct to her killers on the street corner for cold cash.

Alito

Once again the United States Senate natters away its sole opportunity to really discover what sort of man has been put forward for the US Supreme Court. During judge Alito’s two days of questioning Republican Senators were fawningly playing softball, while the Democrats were predictably mired in issues that are so last millennium.

Senator Feinstein is reported to have said that Roe was a decision “women all over America have come to depend on.” Write a law- shape a culture. Or in this case overturn a dozen state laws via court order, and then staunchly defend the decision against over-overturning and declare it to be “settled (albeit extra-legislative) law”

Oddly enough, the second big issue for the Senators was Alito’s view on separation of powers.
Selah
Yes, the Senators who are up in arms about over-reaching in the Executive have no thoughts whatever about the courts overstepping into their own province of law making.

What emerges again, as in the hearings for Chief Justice Roberts last fall, is that the Senators are more taken with the daily scandal sheets than with the Constitution, and more interested in giving one another a black eye than in deciding what will work best for the country over the next thirty years.

On second thought, maybe it is for the best they leave lawmaking to the courts.

Epiphany

It is rude, is it not, to just show up on someone’s doorstep empty handed? My Chinese friends are passed masters at this grace of gifting. Most commonly this time of year it would be a bag of clementines (tangerines), always welcome gifts to ward off colds in the region of China south of the Yellow River without winter heat, and bearing the added advantage of being immediately consumable, as the host turns and regifts the visitor with a plate of shared fruit.

But as I remember growing up in central lower Michigan, there was a custom of Sunday afternoon visiting, where friends and relatives dropped-in unannounced on us on a weekly basis, there was no gift required. Their visit was grace enough.

Taking this class on the prophets from Trinity has put me in mind of the eternal struggle between promise and performance. Not the vast gap between my empty promises and my meager performance, but the delicate balance between God’s gracious promise to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and his expectation that we will nevertheless endeavor to do what we can in response.

So I am struck with the story of the Magi from the East (Baghdad?) who packed up their gifts to bring offerings to God. And I know all about the deeper meaning of the gold, frankincense and myrrh. And that the gold was especially handy as Joseph over extended his original trip plans to take in Egypt. But the Magi didn’t know any of that, maybe never knew. They just knew, with their oriental sensibilities, that they should oughta bring something. After all, you don’t just come to God empty-handed.

You bring your best. You prepare. You save up a lifetime to make this one pilgrimage. You clean up your act. You get straight. You get right. You hedge your bets, pack up your best stuff, put your out-of-office notice on, and hit the road.

And on the road you rehearse “the speech,” you anticipate the look of pleasure on the face of God, you lie awake and look at the stars, too excited to sleep.

And when you arrive, in the wrong place, unanticipated, somehow coolly unwelcome, ‘terribly sorry to intrude,’ redirected, finally meeting an infant God who teethes on the golden bangles, and snuffs at the incense, and tries to eat the white nodules of poisonous resin. This is your epiphany.

And yet the face of God is oddly pleased. Your gift is inappropriate, your preparations inadequate, your maps inaccurate, but your visit is somehow grace enough. He doesn’t really need anything else you have, just you.