Secret Life of Germs

“The number of these animalcules in the scurf of a man’s teeth are so many, that I believe they exceed the number of men in a kingdom.”
–Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, 1684
Quoted in Philip Tierno, The Secret Life of Germs

Anyone in their right mind would know Leeuwenhoek had to have been wrong. How could he know? He was probably guessing.

Whereas Tierno, highly acclaimed and respected microbiologists, will update us with modern science, the humorous poet, Ogden Nash, has his own take on germs.

A mighty creature is the germ,
Though smaller than a pachyderm.
His customary dwelling place
Is deep inside the human race.
His childish pride he often pleases
By giving people strange diseases.
Do you, my poppet, feel infirm?
You probably contain a germ.

Tierno tells us:

There are more germs in our intestines than there are stars in the sky, some thousand billion germs per gram of matter. The number of germ cells in the human body actually exceeds the number of body cells by a factor of ten. And the combined weight of microscopic germs exceeds the combined weight of all living animals and plants.

He continues, saying: “Germs are so important in the ecology of the world that alien observers might conclude that they are the dominant life form on our planet.” And again, “In fact, there are more germs in the intestinal tract of a human being than the number of people who have ever lived.”

And yet, we are able to coexist with this unimaginable mass of microbes. You would think they would do us in, and, worldwide, they are the number-one killer ( In the U.S. they are number three). But, as most of us already know, there are good germs and bad germs and we could not survive without the good ones. But the bad ones are always at the gate, attempting to get in.

Ordinarily germs, good and bad, coexist in a system of checks and balances, with only a fine line between, and the bad guys cross that line every chance they get.

So what? Two suggestions, and maybe more. First, Mother was right. Wash your hands often, especially after using the bathroom. This may sound so commonplace that you dismiss me as if I were kind of kindergarten teacher speaking to mature adults in kindergarten platitudes. Maybe so, but research indicates that more than 60 percent of people fail to wash their hands after using public restrooms, and less than 10 percent wash them very well. At the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, they have a slogan: “The ten worst sources of contagion are our fingers.”

I suggest, in the second place, that you either obtain a copy of the book, or check it out from your public library (if they don’t have it, they can get it for you on interlibrary loan). It is a very well-written, easy and enjoyable reading.

[I’ll come back and write a little more after lunch. I’ve just been told I have five minutes. I’ve got to wash my hands.]
______________

The eighth chapter of the biblical book of Psalms raises a question that goes something like this:

O Lord, when I look at the night sky and the work of your fingers–
the moon and stars you put in place–
what are people that you should think about them,
mere mortals that you should care for them?

The great philosopher, Immanuel Kant said there were two things that filled him with awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.

The old cowboy, at “home on the range,” sang his wonder:

How often at night, ‘neath the heavens so bright,
by the light of the glittering stars
have I stood there amazed, and asked as I gazed
if their glory exceeds that of ours.

The great philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal, felt “engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me. I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me.”

I live “deep in the heart of Texas” where “the stars at night are big and bright.” On dark nights, away from city lights, I’ve looked at the stars with wonder; I am a kinsman to the psalm writer, the cowboys, and the philosophers.

But when I learn from Tierno about the world of microorganisms, a world those in prior centuries did not know, I can be terrified, alarmed, filled with awe, and wonder about the place of us humans in this world of incredible biodiversity. I am certain that God loves diversity, that in his creation he has been extravagant, and that our appropriate response to it all is wonder, awe, humility, modesty, and grateful for having a place amid these riches. These risky, dangerous, adventurous, challenging, and exciting riches.

It is with great risk that we ever tamper with it. We put ourselves in peril every time we modify God’s creations for our real or supposed benefit. The good germs and the bad germs live within us always in tension, always facing the possibility that the bad will cross that fine line. Sometimes the good germs are unprepared for an attack. Sometimes the bad germs win and we go down in hopeless defeat.

The “balance” of nature is a dynamic, ever-changing balance. As the 21st Century begins, the balance of cultures, societies, and nations is tilting dangerously. To use Tierno’s term, the threat is pandemic. Some us, perhaps many of us will go down before the tensions can be balanced. We’ve known dark ages before. Sometimes centuries have to pass.

Wash your hands, be aware, and try to be good to a stranger.

God Indescribable

Morning worship service, September, 16, 2007; new song: “Indescribable.” I learn it was written by Laura Story

From the highest of heights to the depths of the sea
Creation’s revealing Your majesty
From the colors of Fall the the fragrance of Spring
Ev’ry creature unique in the song that it sings
All Exclaiming

Indescribable uncontainable
You placed the stars in the sky and you know them by name
You are an amazing God
All powerful untamable
Awestruck, we fall to our knees as we humbly proclaim
You are amazing, God

Who has told ev’ry lightning bolt where it should go
Or seen heavenly storehouses laden with snow?
Who imagined the sun and gives source to its light
Yet conceals it to bring us the coolness of night?
None can fathom
________________

From the highest of heights to the depths of the sea
Creation’s revealing Your majesty
From the colors of Fall the the fragrance of Spring
Ev’ry creature unique in the song that it sings
All Exclaiming

This rings out from Genesis 1, Psalm 19, Psalm 150, and indeed the entirety of the biblical story.
________________

Indescribable uncontainable
You placed the stars in the sky and you know them by name
You are an amazing God
All powerful untamable
Awestruck, we fall to our knees as we humbly proclaim
You are amazing, God

“Indescribable.”
On one hand the via negativa. The way of speaking of God by speaking only of what he is not. This kind of theology, spoken of by theological sophisticates as apophatic theology, has a history almost as long as Christianity. How can human words, music, painting or any other medium describe the holy God? We have only to begin the attempt to be challenged by others or to give up the effort on our own.

The indescribable God.

On the other hand is the long history of describing God by analogy; the Bible does this: Father, Creator Judge, Almighty, King, Lord; jealous, angry, like a mother, hate, love, pleasure. God described by analogy, yet all analogy fails to comprehend the incomprehensible, undescribable God.

Yet. Yet John 1:18: “. . . the only son . . . has made him known.” Yet Colossians 1:15: “He is the image of the invisible God.” Yet, Hebrews 1:1-3: “In many and various ways God spoke to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a son . . . [who] reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature.”

God has revealed himself to us by his Word, Jesus, Son of God. Jesus is the description of the indescribable God.

But can Jesus be described?

“Indescribable.”
__________________

“Uncontainable.”
Solomon knew this. When he dedicated his temple to God, in public prayer Solomon acknowledged that eternal and holy God could not be contained by the entire created universe, yet he prays that, in some special way, God would be found in this temple by those who diligently seek and call upon him.

“Uncontainable”
__________________

“You placed the stars in the sky and you know them by name”
Job 38 quickly comes to mind, and Isaiah 40.
__________________

“You are an amazing God
All powerful”

Yes, God is amazing, like a maze, we are overwhelmed by the sense that we can never find our way through the dimensions of the divine heart. We live in a world and among events that constantly cause me to be, and say, “I am amazed.” Ask my wife; she hears it all the time.

But I am bothered by what, all through the history of Christian song, has amazed song writers. Read/sing them all, all of them, and find as the dominant note this same emphasis: “All powerful.”

Consistently we sing of and worship the God who is omnipotent. There are exceptions to this emphasis on power. There are exceptions that properly catch the dominant biblical note: “Amazing Grace;” “I stand amazed in the presence of Jesus the Nazarene, and wonder how he could love me, a sinner, condemned, unclean;” Twila Paris’ “Lamb of God.”

Songwriters, help us to sing our “hallelu” to “Yah” for his love, grace, mercy, loving-kindness toward wretches such as John Newton was and some of us are. “Amazing Love, How Sweet the Sound.”
Yes, God is the God of power, but his power is subordinate to his love, serves his love, and is exercised only in love.
__________________

“Untamable”
Yet, to an extent we are better off not knowing (or would we be better off knowing?), our theologians (both lay and professional), our culturally conditioned Bible study groups, and Sunday School classes present to us a God they seem to have tamed. God remains untamable.

Even heretical trinitarian theology can remind of us that God is untamable:
“God the Father is the transcendent Judge who is going to get us if we don’t watch out. God the Son is our friend in court and will get us off the hook of God’s condemnation. Jesus is the “good guy.” And God the Spirit? The Spirit is the one responsible for all the weird and wild stuff.”

This seriously flawed attempt to describe the indescribable trinitarian God at least recognizes that the Holy Spirit is untamable. The Spirit blows wherever he wants to.

“Untamable” I like that new and needed note.
__________________

“Awestruck, we fall to our knees” Job, finally; Simon Peter in the boat.
__________________

“Amazing God”
Good. Not, “an amazing God,” not a comparison among the gods. Merely, truly anarthrous.

“Amazing God.”
__________________

“Who has told ev’ry lightning bolt where it should go
Or seen heavenly storehouses laden with snow?
Who imagined the sun and gives source to its light
Yet conceals it to bring us the coolness of night?”

Job 38
__________________

“None can fathom”

Fathom . . . verb 1) understand after much thought: I can't fathom him out. 2) measure the depth of.
-ORIGIN Old English, 'something which embraces' (the original measurement was based on the span of a person's outstretched arms).

Not even “after much thought,” (and many of us have given much thought across many years) can we “measure the depth of” the amazing, awe-inspiring holy and loving God. Our arms aren’t long enough to completely reach around, to completely embrace the One who graciously wraps his arms of love around us.
__________________

This was my immediate response as, yesterday morning, we sang our “Laura’s song,” about God: “Indescribable.”

Far too much of the music I hear Christians sing these days is, if not fluff (which a lot of it is), at least light weight. “Indescribable” joins “Lamb of God” at the head of the heavyweights.

Limited Knowledge

Jan Zwicky, elliptical and provocative Canadian philosopher, is one of my favorite thinkers. The following quotations are from her book, Wisdom & Metaphor.

“Coming to experience the fit of human thought to the world is a way of finding ourselves at home.”

A major reason most of us find ourselves somewhat less than comfortable, less than “at home” in the world is that we mistake our ideas of things as the sum total of what they are. We get married, having in our mind a clear idea of who this other person is and what they are like.

Disappointment, frustration, disillusionment, and anger follow when our spouse insists on, at some points, being quite different from our idea of who they are. Much of the friction in marriage comes from our efforts to remake the other into who we have thought them to be. “Coming to experience the fit of [our] thought to [the actuality of our mate] is a way of finding ourselves [and making themselves] at home.”

The cook bakes an apple pie, but it does not come out as she thought it should. Yet all who taste it smile broadly and say, “Now that is what an apple pie is all about. That is the real thing.” The cook, however is disappointed and modifies the recipe, the oven temperature, and the cooking time. Never, however, is it quite what she had in her mind, yet always she is praised as the best at baking apple pies. “Coming to experience the fit of [her apple pie] thought to [the actual pies and guests] is a way of finding [herself] at home.”

Zwicky quotes Rudolf Arnheim: “The function of language is essentially conservative and stabilizing, and therefore it also tends, negatively, to make cognition static and immobile.” Coming to a recognition of the limits of language is a way of finding ourselves at home. Our words, sentences, and paragraphs are always somewhat inadequate in what they seek to communicate. We are never wrong when we say, “I don’t know how to put it into words.”

She quotes Konrad Lorenz who, on the one hand says: “I am unshakeably convinced that all the information conveyed to us by our cognitive apparatus corresponds to actual realities,” then, later modifies and clarifies what he means. “What we experience is indeed a real image of reality–albeit an extremely simple one, only just sufficing for our own practical purposes; we have developed ‘organs’ only for those aspects of reality of which, in the interest of survival, it was imperative for our species to take account.”

He continues with, “. . . what little our sense organs and nervous system have permitted us to learn has proved its value over endless years of experience, and we may trust it–as far as it goes [italics mine]. Much of the time our mental, rational understanding of things is adequate for immediate and practical purposes, but if we are to be wise, we will realize that, always, our “image of reality [whatever ‘reality’ we may be dealing with’] is “an extremely simple one.”

Always there is much more, and if we realize this, our thought will have a much closer fit to the complexities and mystery of actuality, and we are more likely to find “ourselves at home” [in the world, in our lives].

I turn finally, to Tom Lilburn, whom she quotes: “Everything exceeds its name.” As Paul of Tarsus wrote, “Now we know in part.” Everything we know, everything we name, every idea and all our use of language (or painting or any other re-presentation of reality) is a limited realization of that which always exceeds our representation.

Lilburn calls all this human thought, “reason’s caricatures.” Always a degree of distortion, a degree of overemphasis on certain aspects, and, inescapably, the neglect of much that is beyond the reach of thought and language.

We are to be grateful that [Roark says, ‘God has created us such that’] we can somehow, to some degree, “participate in what is beyond us, enjoy a brief contiguity with that uncontainability.” Lilburn concludes: “There is praise and then there is sorrow.”

We are graced.

God and Cain

Open Notes on Genesis 4

• Is Eve arrogant, gloating? She remarks how she made this child, Cain, with some help from God.
• Cain must have been, to some extent, a good man. It seems that he took the initiative to bring his sacrifices to God. He initiated the first worship service on record.
• The reason for God’s response is not completely clear. What is clear is that he gave preference to Abel’s worship over that of Cain.
Is this where differences in “worship styles” began? I think not. The difference seems to have been more substantive than mere style.
• This is definitely the first “worship war.”
• Cain’s emotional response to God’s choice are understandable. We have all known envy and jealousy when someone else was chosen over us, and we, in fact, were rejected.
• God questions Cain, “What is the problem? Why are you so downcast?” This is a relational God. He seeks to restore a good relationship with this man.
• When God asks, are we to assume it is a rhetorical question? If we bring no theological presuppositions, on the face of it the question might be real. Is it possible that God does not know?
• The first death in the Bible is a death by violence. The murder grows out of religion, worship, and the first full-blown expression of human emotion.
• Abel seems to have been and done right in God’s eyes, but God does not protect him from violence. Being good and doing right obviously is not enough. Why did not God intervene on behalf of the man whose worship he was pleased by?
• After the death of Abel, God again appears and questions Cain for his brother’s whereabouts. Rhetorical or substantive question? Is your answer based on a theology established much later, and accepted by you based on some authority?
• Cain is given the opportunity to tell the truth. God does not hold a “kangaroo court.” He is allowed to testify on his behalf. Evidence is presented.
• The evidence against Cain is the blood of his brother that cries out against him–the testimony of the only witness.
• Cain is given a way out, an escape from the sin that crouches at his door. His future is open if he does well. If. That indicates choice, possibility.
• Even in his punishment, God is gracious and merciful. The “Mark of Cain,” is given for his protection.
• From Cain’s descendants the first city is built. Is there any possible link–indirectly--between religious conflict, envy, jealousy, and murder and the building of a city?
• Is this whole creation, especially the image of God creation, working out as God intended it to?
• Is God in control? What does that mean? What kind and what degree of “control,” whatever that is.
• When the United States Senate held hearings about the Watergate Scandal in the early 1970s, Senator Baker from Tennessee asked each involved party, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” That is an appropriate question to ask in this, one of the earliest narratives of an encounter between God and his human: What did God know, and when did he know it?
• Does Cain have a real choice about doing well and avoiding the sin that crouches at his door?
______________________

I don’t know the answers. I do know the theologically correct answers. I do know what the conventional wisdom has to say. I don’t know the answers. I don’t think we can find easy answers.

Maybe you can. Maybe you have. Maybe you know the answers.

Reread Genesis 4. It gives us things to think on, to meditate on, to pray about, to discuss with each other.

A Free Christian

Daddy left the farm and became a Baptist minister when I was not yet two-years-old. Baptist church life has been one of the few constants in my life ever since, Baptist in the sense of “Southern Baptist.” In those early years, one part of Baptist indoctrination was the witticism: “What would you be if you weren’t a Baptist?” The proper answer was: “I’d be a-shamed.” More than sixty years later, I’m still a Baptist, but these days I am too ashamed of Southern Baptists to let many people know of my Baptistity.

So my foundational Christian experience and my theological education developed in the milieu of the “conservative” (occasionally bordering on “fundamentalist”) branch of the Christian church. When, more than two decades ago, Southern Baptists splintered, one group called themselves “conservatives,” and their opposition chose to call themselves “moderates.” Nonetheless, the moderates insisted that they too were conservative. I’ve lived in a world where it seemed that “conservative” was an essential modifier.

When, decades ago, sitting in a Sunday morning worship service at the Southwayside Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, I wrote my personal declaration of independence, two components of that document were: Southern Baptist, and Conservative. I didn’t declare myself a “Liberal.” I felt no need of any sort of label other than “Christ-ian.” At least, that is who I have intended and committed myself to be.

The late Jan Kiwiet, a Dutchman “in whom there was no guile,” gave cogent expression to my self-understanding. Kiwiet was a new professor at our seminary. I was a doctoral student in his first seminar. At times, Dr. Kiwiet talked like a rank fundamentalist, only to sound, thirty minutes later, like a wild-eyed liberal. One day, Charles Fox probed this apparent inconsistency. “Dr. Kiwiet,” he asked, “Are you a conservative, or a liberal.” In his thick Dutch accent, our new professor responded with: “Conservative? Liberal? I don’t know dese tings. I’m a free Christian.”

Why do we add modifiers? Nowhere in the Christian Scriptures is there a commandment that God’s people be conservative. Rather, I suspect that, in the synagogues of his time, Jesus was thought of as quite liberal.

Kathleen Norris, in her book, The Quotidian Mysteries, reminds us that “Christian faith is a way of life, not an impregnable fortress made up of ideas; not a philosophy; not a grocery list of beliefs.” She adds, “The Christian religion asks us to put our faith not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God who was vulnerable enough to become human and die, and who desires to be with us in our everyday circumstances.”

It is enough just to be a follower of Jesus the Christ.

Love Contradicted

In his book, The Classic Baptist Heritage of Personal Truth, Louis Mauldin quotes the 17th Century Baptist, Richard Claridge:

Holiness which is against Love, is a Contradiction . . .All Church Principles which are against Universal Love, are against God, and Holiness, and the Churche. . . .
‘Tis a manifest Argument we have lost our first Love, when we thus inveigh against those that dissent from us.
________________

I am a recovering Southern Baptist. As early as 1968, long before the so-called “Conservative Resurgence” crusade tore apart the fabric of the Southern Baptist Convention, I sat in the Southwayside Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, and wrote out a personal declaration of independence. Among other things I would no longer be committed to, I declared my independence of the Southern Baptist Convention.

I continue to be a Baptist in the South, a Baptist in the historical sense, or, as Mauldin notes in his title, a Classic Baptist. This is not a Baptist blog–hasn’t been, isn’t going to be. But there are elements of recent Southern Baptist history that are worthy of consideration by any and all Christians. Even nonbelievers, ideally, would take note of today’s emphasis, in order to better understand what Christians are truly about.

Since 1979, the bitterness of the Baptist battles has made front-page news in the secular press. The leaders of the highly successful conservative takeover expressed their strong aversion to the “liberals” in vicious, foul, and intemperate language. The so-called liberals were called skunks and worse. The takeover leaders announced their intent to “go for the jugular.” They had neither read nor considered any ideas like those of Richard Claridge.

Although the “liberals,” who called themselves “moderates,” did not use such vile language, they made up for it with crude jokes and mockery. Many of us Baptists in the South were appalled by the vile, hostile, uncongenial, and aggressive language each side used against the other.

The war has been won by the “neo-conservatives,” but mop-up battles continue, as does the attendant language and attitudes.

Baptists and other battling “Christians” need to ponder the words of Richard Claridge, and think them over in the light of their Holy Scriptures, particularly that part called, The Four Gospels.

Mauldin’s book contains the antidote for the poison that has been, rapidly, debilitating the Baptist life and soiling the Baptist public image..

"It's our most common landscaping feature and a source of pride for many of us. The ultimate goal is a perfect weed free lawn. A dandelion or two is an indication the owner is negligent and lazy."
:A recent issue of Newsweek brought the news, indirectly conveyed, that this cult remains vividly alive. In April, Pete Barthelme wrote one of those self-celebrating stories about moving away from the pressures of urban civilization to an isolated place in the country, in his case a coastal fishing area in Texas. He told us he's now isolated from movie houses, he gets one TV channel intermittently, the grocery store is four miles away, there are no neighbours for half a mile, and he's happy. But then, inadvertently, he slips in the fact that he has a lawn. In his old life he employed a lawn crew, but he's now replaced them with "a very fine riding lawn mower with a full 11.5 horsepower, which happens to be fun to use." He doesn't tell us why, in the middle of nowhere, he maintains a lawn. He doesn't imagine that the question would occur to us. He knows that even among those who abandon urbanism and "go back" to nature, the lawn remains a necessity. Without it, they would feel incomplete."

"But what is a lawn really?"



"In most cases it is a uniform growth of non-native grasses. Its a source of pollution, (fertilizers, pesticides, lawnmower exhaust....) and represents habitat that has been lost.”
–Robert Fulford
--http://forums.techguy.org/random-discussion/129884-lawn
-north-americas-magnificent-obsession.html

Perhaps nothing illustrates more universally our need to conform, to be socially correct, to fit in–nothing illustrates it more than our deliberately cloned lawns. Vermont, Oklahoma, Florida, Arizona, Minnesota: all lawns look the same, slight variations on a theme, a theme composed by someone in England, centuries ago.

In this land of “individualism” our lawns belie our proud claim; we dare not do anything different. Not even Sinatra, Presley, or Paul Anka (who originally wrote the lyrics) “did it [his] way.” They each had a team of hired lawn-keepers who did it the American Way, which is the English Way.

Artificial, heavy consumer of our rapidly depleting aquifers, repository of fertilizer and pesticide chemicals that run off into and pollute our water systems, Saturday sound polluter and air polluter, by many it is a dreaded “necessary” Saturday chore: the lawn.

But why do I waste blog space on this? Such knowledge is widespread, and has been since Silent Spring, and Sand County Almanac, yet less than .01 percent of us have made any change at all. I am Don Quixote, tilting at windmills; our society will never change. Or is that too cynical?

Our society has changed radically, dramatically, traumatically, since 1960. Prior to the election of JFK, ninety-percent of all adult men wore hats when out-of-doors. Now, maybe 5 percent do. Nuns wore habits, business men were clean-shaven, wore white shirts and neckties, hair trimmed neatly short, and shoes polished. Now, even ministers may be found in blue jeans, sandals, and T-shirts, faces bewhiskered and hair cut to every length or perhaps shaven. Societies can change. The traditional lawn could shrink to a relatively small total acreage nationally. At present, lawns occupy 25,600,000 acres of national landscape.

Do I think this blog is going to change things? No, not really. Yes, significantly. Something changed me and caused me to shrink the area that I mow by 85 percent, and I don’t water that. And yes, I’ve been told that my yard is a disgrace to the neighborhood. The point is, I changed, and I believe that one of you readers will begin to consider the same. One by one until someday a critical mass is formed. Read The Tipping Point, and see how it happens.

Meanwhile, back in the real world and Robert Fulford:

"What I mean by the lawn as moral issue is its place in human relations and its role in public shaming. In North America today, a lawn is the quickest, surest indicator that the deadliest of the seven deadly sins has attacked from within. As the death of a canary announces the presence of gas in a mine, so a dandelion's appearance on a lawn indicates that Sloth has taken up residence in paradise and is about to spread evil in every direction. And when a whole lawn comes alive with dandelions--it can happen overnight, as many know to our sorrow--then that property instantly becomes an affront to the street and to the middle-class world of which the street is a part. Pretty as they might look to some, dandelions demonstrate a weakness of the soul. They announce that the owner of the house refuses to respect the neighbourhood's right to peace, order, good government, and the absence of airborne dandelion seeds.

Perhaps nothing illustrates more universally our need to conform, to be socially correct, to fit in–nothing illustrates it more than our deliberately cloned lawns. Vermont, Oklahoma, Florida, Arizona, Minnesota: all lawns look the same, slight variations on a theme, a theme composed by someone in England, centuries ago.

In this land of “individualism” our lawns belie our proud claim; we dare not do anything different. Not even Sinatra, Presley, or Paul Anka (who originally wrote the lyrics) “did it [his] way.” They each had a team of hired lawn-keepers who did it the American Way, which is the English Way.

Artificial, heavy consumer of our rapidly depleting aquifers, repository of fertilizer and pesticide chemicals that run off into and pollute our water systems, Saturday sound polluter and air polluter, by many it is a dreaded “necessary” Saturday chore: the lawn.

But why do I waste blog space on this? Such knowledge is widespread, and has been since Silent Spring, and Sand County Almanac, yet less than .01 percent of us have made any change at all. I am Don Quixote, tilting at windmills; our society will never change. Or is that too cynical?

Our society has changed radically, dramatically, traumatically, since 1960. Prior to the election of JFK, ninety-percent of all adult men wore hats when out-of-doors. Now, maybe five percent do. Nuns wore habits, business men were clean-shaven, wore white shirts and neckties, hair trimmed neatly short, and shoes polished. Now, even ministers may be found in blue jeans, sandals, and t-shirts, faces bewhiskered and hair cut to every length or perhaps shaven. Societies can change. The traditional lawn could shrink to a relatively small total acreage nationally. At present, lawns occupy 25,600,000 acres of national landscape.

Do I think this blog is going to change things? No, not really. Yes, significantly. Something changed me and caused me to shrink the area that I mow by eighty-five percent, and I don’t water that. And yes, I’ve been told that my yard is a disgrace to the neighborhood. The point is, I changed, and I believe that one of you readers will begin to consider the same. One by one until someday a critical mass is formed. Read The Tipping Point, and see how it happens.

Meanwhile, back in the real world and Robert Fulford:

"What I mean by the lawn as moral issue is its place in human relations and its role in public shaming. In North America today, a lawn is the quickest, surest indicator that the deadliest of the seven deadly sins has attacked from within. As the death of a canary announces the presence of gas in a mine, so a dandelion's appearance on a lawn indicates that Sloth has taken up residence in paradise and is about to spread evil in every direction. And when a whole lawn comes alive with dandelions--it can happen overnight, as many know to our sorrow--then that property instantly becomes an affront to the street and to the middle-class world of which the street is a part. Pretty as they might look to some, dandelions demonstrate a weakness of the soul. They announce that the owner of the house refuses to respect the neighbourhood's right to peace, order, good government, and the absence of airborne dandelion seeds."

Love's Dialectic, 1

The Winslow Boy, a movie, closing scene:

[Young man and young lady, apparently quite “taken” with each other.]

“You continue with your suffragette work, Miss Winslow. Don’t you know it is a lost cause?”

“So little do you know about women, Sir Robert.”
(then)
“I don’t expect I shall ever see you again.”

Robert, with a knowing smile, responds:

“So little, you know, Miss Winslow, about men.”

And the sunshine of a slight smile slowly lights her face.
_______________________________

It isn’t over until it’s over--and it is not over yet.

When love is afield, the dialectic stays active. If love is to continue, a necessary condition is to consider, always, the other.

Actually, the same is true in any kind of continuing relationship, from international diplomacy to the business place to the classroom to a hospital stay. It is necessary, perhaps even sufficient, that we consider the other.

No Regrets? Not Me!

“In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself”

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn’t understand remorse.
Lions and lice don’t waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they’re right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they’re light.

On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscience is Number One.
--Wislawa Szymborska

That makes me feel better. Sometimes my head is clear, my sinuses are clear, my goal is clear, but my conscience is never clear. I’ve never understood people who tell me they have no regrets, that if they could live their life over, they would change nothing.

I am good at understanding. I have a very strong imagination. But I cannot understand, I cannot imagine living with no regrets, for “there is none good, no not one.” All have sinned and come short, not only of the glory of God, but of most any set of human standards of conduct. That implicates me. Much that bothers my conscience is irreversible. The damage has been done and cannot be undone.

Although I don’t have a clear conscience, I have found that I can, nonetheless, live with peace in my heart, peace like a river. In Christ forgiven, I am accepted and set on the road to wholeness. My regrets are real, they are strong, but in Christ I do not allow them to haunt me. I don’t know how all of those wrongs and all that pain was made right, redeemed in an incarnate God/Man; I do not understand with clarity how his death, raised--by the purpose and power of God--in newness of life, has reconciled all alienation and estrangement and has transformed suffering into joy and peace. I don’t understand, but I accept and can lie down in peaceful sleep, because my conscience has been cleared through no doing of my own.

But to say I have no regrets would add insult to injury to so many I have wronged. Are there actually humans who like the jackal do not understand remorse? If so, I ask and Szymborska asks if they are indeed human? Perhaps, apart from Jesus, called Christ, there are not true humans.

Starbucks Quote #192

What is a celebrity? Until a few years ago, I thought I knew. Babe Ruth was a celebrity, as was Sergeant York, John Wayne, Martin Luther King, Charles Lindbergh, Michael Jordan, Tom Landry, Sam Walton, Lincoln, Hemingway, Billy Graham, Johnny Cash, Luciano Pavarotti, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Sam Houston, and Robert E. Lee--and the list could go on and on. When it comes to names like, Van Gogh, Picasso, Beethoven, Mozart, Rembrandt, Eisenhower, Bogart and Bacall, Tracy and Hepburn, we don’t even need first names.

It seems that a new definition of "celebrity" has emerged from somewhere, perhaps out of some garbage truck. According to most dictionaries, celebrity refers to someone famous, and famous means "well known." Famous is a first cousin to "family," folks with whom we are familiar. I guess this means that fame has mutated. I know why the names listed above are familiar, but I am not quite sure how nor why we have become familiar with our current crop of celebrities. I do have my suspicions.

We are familiar with the listed names because of their accomplishments. The new breed–mutants of historical celebrities–has managed to accomplish the gaining of our attention by getting our attention. That is about all they have accomplished, but for those who find nothing else to transcend their own barren existence, this may be enough. But where does this lead?

Quote #192 on a Starbucks cup gives us the answer. According to Donna Phillips of Claremont, California:

Many people lack a spiritual belief system and fill that void with obsessions about celebrities. The celebrities are raised to the rank of gods, and these earthly gods will always fail the expectations the masses have set for them. The cycle runs thusly: adoration turns to obsession, obsession turns to disappointment, and from disappointment it is just a short emotional jump to contempt.

Long ago, through the Hebrew prophet, Jeremiah, God says much the same, but much pointedly: ". . . my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water."

Forced to Smile

"Jerome’s [late 4th century] own character was notoriously difficult. . . . . It amuses me greatly to envision Jerome, of all people, shining like a star, and hating every minute of it. As we’re leaving the church, I mention this to one of the monks. ‘Ah, poor Jerome,’ he said, ‘forced to smile and sing for all of eternity. Maybe that’s his punishment’.’‘
--Kathleen Norris

Would heaven be hell if John Piper and Clark Pinnock found they were together for all eternity, or Paige Patterson and Art Allen? How many Christians are there who have no real interest in developing the whole range of Christian virtues or reaping the fruit of the Spirit? We want the forgiveness of sin and the acceptance of God; more to the point, we want to avoid hell, and perhaps, get to go to heaven.

We may even want to become a serious Christian to a degree, on certain points, but might genuinely cringe at even the thought of actually allowing the Spirit to rule and reshape every dimension of our thoughts, feelings, decisions, and actions.

Raw Sewage

[Speaking on why she doesn’t let "the one-eyed monster in her house"] "Having a sieve up on the roof collecting wild beams from everywhere does seem poetic, but the image that strikes me as more realistic is that of a faucet into the house that runs about 5 percent clear water and 95 percent raw sewage."
--Barbara Kingsolver


Except for the weather channel, I stopped watching television near about twenty years ago. It didn’t matter what you view–and hear–it numbs the mind and agitates the nerves. I found that I could not go to sleep for a few hours after tv. It took that long for my nerves to calm. Also, it was almost all pointless.

But my main reason for eliminating the "boob" tube from my life was that it was robbing my life. We have a limited amount of time in which to live, why give time to watching the imaginary life of others rather than spending that time living my own life? I quit because I didn’t have time/life to waste. I certainly would never watch it, or do anything just "to kill time."

"If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds of distance run. . ."

From what I read about the developments on tv over this past twenty years (confirmed by what I have seen in passing on the omnipresent and unavoidable screens) I can’t help but wonder why intelligent and responsible people not only allow raw sewage, much less pipe it into their homes, but also what kind of soap they use to wash the stuff off.

I’m with Kingsolver when she says, "To me, that ubiquitous cable looks an awful lot like the snake that batted its eyes at Eve." There are better things to do than be deceived and taken in my those eyes.

Ostensibly Christian

[In a California radio interview with Kathleen Norris, on Pacifica radio] "‘Do you consider yourself a Christian?’ my host asked. I sighed and said, ‘My problem with that is that so many people who publicly identify themselves as Christians are such jerks about it.’"
--Kathleen Norris

I cringe when I see these jerks with simplistically "Christian" messages on their t-shirts and bumper stickers or when I see them praying over their food in restaurants. I don’t label as jerks everyone who follows these practices; many are not. Many are sincere and unthinking Christians.

I have yet to see a t-shirt sporting the Jesus’ words according to Matthew 6:1, "Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven."

One reason ostensible Christian testimony bothers me is that often I know these people. I know that much of their daily practice--speech, attitude, action--is contrary to clear biblical guidelines. If I were not a Christian, if I were not already "born again", neither they nor their message would attract the least of my interest. Like everyone else I would find myself paying more to the person than to what they were advertizing.

The same holds for so many of the cute "Christian" messages that show up on the marquis in front of churches. They make some of the insiders feel good, but to the outside passerby they may look either innocuous or offensive. Nearly always they see them as childish.

I've lost my source, but somewhere Doris Betts wrote, "Christian spoils into a rancid adjective."

U. S. President Starts a War

"'...the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him [the President]."
. . . .
". . . must have begun the war motivated by a desire for "military glory"--that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood--that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy.' When that aim failed, his mind, "taxed beyond its power," began "running hither and thither, like an ant on a hot stove," and this "bewildered, confounded, and miserable man " could only speak in "the half insane mumbling of a fever-dream."

[Abraham Lincoln, speaking of President James K. Polk]
--David Herbert Donald

The mind moves easily, almost naturally, to think this speaks to another president, long after Polk. It might seem to refer, not to the U. S. invasion that initiated the Mexican war, but a later U. S. invasion that started another ill-begotten war.
Lincoln still speaks, even in the 21st Century.

Although he was labeled "unpatriotic," and a "traitor," and was accused of treason and speaking from political motivation, he nonetheless supported sending supplies and support to the troops, who were in this through no fault of their own.