"Winter is icummen in"

The low tonight is predicted to be 28F.

The record low for this area for this date is:  28F

Lhude sing goddam!

The War on Christmas started early this year....

Bill O'Reilly is gonna plotz:

The Montgomery County school board voted Tuesday to eliminate all references to religious holidays on school calendars, beginning in the 2015-16 school year. That includes Christmas and Easter, as well as Jewish holidays like Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.

The vote came after a recommendation by schools Superintendent Joshua Starr that the board consider removing the names of religious holidays from the calendar in response to a request from Muslim community leaders to give equal billing to their holy day of Eid al-Adha. Starr told MyFoxDC that the county's public schools would still be closed on Christian and Jewish holidays due to the significant number of staff and student absences on those days, but technically not due to any religious observance.

 ....

 Future school calendars will now list the students' Christmas vacation as "winter break", the Easter vacation as "spring break." Days like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur would simply be marked "no school for students and teachers."

Well, after all, it only stands to reason.  I mean, the next step would have been Sharia law...

What is "religion"?

I ask the question because atheists from Richard Dawkins to the commenters at Salon are quite sure they know the answer; so sure, they never bother to raise the question.  And if you do raise the question, it will be dismissed with a glib rejoinder, or a simplistic definition, a stereotype that usually involves Christianity, right-wing politics, and outright fiction.  Then you scrape down to the handful who dismiss all such examinations of thought as "mental masturbation."  Of the latter the less said, the better.

One attack on Christianity that was quite popular for awhile was the complaint that Christianity was what people said and did, not what other people said Christianity was supposed to be.  So Christianity is the ravings of Pat Robertson, or the bourgeois morality of Rick Warren, or the snake-oil of Joel Osteen.  How could  it not be?  Theory is grand, but lived reality is determinative.

So what is religion?  What people aspire to?  Or what they actually achieve?

What if we classified religion, at least for public policy purposes, as "official religion,"  "governed religion," and "lived religion"?  I don't know precisely what those categories include, but Elizabeth Shakman Hurd has a good idea.  I can venture a reasonable guess from the labels themselves.  "Official religion" is one recognized by government:  that can be the state church (as in Germany and England); or simply churches acknowledged to be eleemosynary institutions by the federal government of the United States:  the "mainline" denominations of Christianity; Islamic mosques; Jewish synagogues; Buddhist temples; etc.  "Governed religion" is, I suspect, the much maligned "organized religion," despised for a multitude of sins by people who, without organized religion, would have no religious feelings at all.  "Governed religion" is either the organizing principle that keeps religious beliefs active, or the dead hand of authority that all but destroys true religious belief; or something in the middle of those two extremes.  It's a good designation, because it's a useful one, even I misuse Ms. Hurd's original intent.

"Lived religion" is the most interesting.  That covers everything from the devout churchgoer who strives to implement the teachings of her/his religion in daily life, to the occasional attendee who is little moved by exhortations from the "governed religion" yet still considers themselves a follower, however faithful or faithless, of that governed belief system (assuming arguendo that religion is a belief system).   "Lived religion" can be the person who quietly but stubbornly insists on how the sanctuary is decorated at Christmas and Easter, to the person who insists the Bible needn't be read so often in worship (I've met that person) to the person who is practically a "religious" in the Catholic sense of the word (i.e., a monk, a nun, an oblate).

Which of these is "religion"?

And how do they apply to the question of government and religion.  Ms. Hurd's article focusses on the question of religious freedom, a freedom presumably allowed by governments, or which should be allowed (the Jeffersonian debate on that point is another matter; already we seem largely to allow that our freedom comes from our military power, not our military power from our freedom.  It's a short step from there to religious freedom being allowed by government, rather than government allowed around religious freedom.  That's yet another philosophical issue.).  But the question of religious freedom is, as she points out, bound up with the definition of "religion," and the rather recent (really since the 1960's Supreme Court decisions on the "wall of separation") argument that religion and politics (i.e., conduct in the polis) must never overlap.

It's a concept of religion that is not only unexamined, but unwarranted; and probably unsustainable.

But that conclusion depends on what you mean by "religion."

"Yet for the powerful to pretend to interpret God's will qualifies as presumptuous."

At the root of Niebuhr's thinking lies an appreciation of original sin, which he views as indelible and omnipresent. In a fallen world, power is necessary, otherwise we lie open to the assaults of the predatory. Yet since we too number among the fallen, our own professions of innocence and altruism are necessarily suspect. Power, wrote Niebuhr, "cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest." Therefore, any nation wielding great power but lacking self-awareness - never an American strong suit - poses an imminent risk not only to others but to itself. Here lies the statesman's dilemma: You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. To refrain from resisting evil for fear of violating God's laws is irresponsible. Yet for the powerful to pretend to interpret God's will qualifies as presumptuous. To avert evil, action is imperative; so too is self-restraint. Even worthy causes pursued blindly yield morally problematic results.

--Andrew Bacevich

The Brits do this better than we do.  Niebuhr was thoroughly American, and thoroughly Midwestern, but American literature doesn't do moral ambiguity and the problems of power and guilt and self-awareness of the national character nearly as well as the British do.

Maybe it's that legacy of Shakespeare; sometimes I seriously think it is.  That and the legacy of power, stretching back to the Tudors and through Cromwell and the Restoration and the rise and fall of the largest empire the world has ever seen.  We embrace Roman thinking without realizing our historical debt at all; the British still understand they are an Anglo-Saxon society shaped, down to their Piccadilly Circus and their legal system, by being a far-flung outpost of Rome.

John LeCarre got at this first; the moral ambiguity of spies telling lies in order to serve a greater good.  Reality eventually outran LeCarre's moral imagination.  The Constant Gardener imagined a scandal among multi-national corporations that would erupt if it was revealed how they were treating the sick in Africa, a scandal so worrisome they would kill to keep it quiet; when in reality the truth of such malfeasance was plain for all to see; but the world simply didn't care.

Consider that we are coming up on the 34th anniversary of the deaths of Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, Jean Donovan, and Maura Clark. (Corrected per a comment below; I should have had that right the first time!)  I mention it because I heard a promo for a story about it on NPR.  Now that we are nearly 35 years away from the foul deed, it is safe to probe it and consider the outrage of it; safe because nothing can be done about it, no one prosecuted for it, no public figure called to account over it.  Not that anyone has been called to account for it in nearly 35 years, anyway.  A sign of American innocence and wielding power without guilt or self-awareness?  Or just another indication that what happens can always be overlooked, ignored, disregarded, if it suits us to do so?  Especially since, as Marlowe observed, "that was in a foreign country and, besides, the wench is dead."

We don't do moral imagination in our literature, or our TV shows.  The quintessential response to 9/11 was "24," the show that made torture not only palatable but necessary to our security.  The quintessential response of the British, a show that ran for 10 seasons (take that, "24"!), was "MI-5."

I've been binge-watching it on Netflix, running through all 10 seasons, roughly 100 episodes.  The plots are often better than Daniel Craig's "Casino Royale" (still the best Bond movie ever made, for my money), and make you wish the writers of "Skyfall" had instead hired the writers from "MI-5," at least as consultants.  "Casino Royale" made Bond deal with the human cost of being a professional spy/assassin ("licensed to kill"); "MI-5" made its characters deal with the moral cost of telling lies for a living, and manipulating people with lies.  When the wife of a villain has been killed in Bond's hotel room in "Casino," he is entirely indifferent to her fate, even though his use of her led both to Bond finding the villain, and her death.  In "MI-5" agents struggle with their willingness to use innocents as resources, and more often than not the people they "handle" wind up dead, or losing a great deal, while the spies retire to their world of government protection of their identities and government sanction of their lies and manipulations.  They do not go gentle into that good night, however.  The strain of the job makes them neurotic; or they quit; or they are forcibly retired.  The human costs are a constant theme of the show.  Indeed, in the final two season, two of the major characters are revealed to have lead mirror lives of lies and indiscretions, one set far worse than the other so that the latter is just an echo of the former.  Still, in a profession of lies and manipulation, the spies on the same side manipulate each other because sometimes three can only keep a secret if two of them are dead; or never knew there was a secret.

It's a British show, so not surprisingly the British come off better than any other nationality.  The Americans, though, come in for special condemnation.  The series started in 2001, so the CIA represents America as cowboys astride the planet backed by money and arrogance, and getting what they want through torture and extraordinary rendition (illegal and immoral acts, in other words).  More than once the operational head of MI-5 has to remind a CIA agent that the latter is on British soil, and subject to British law, that working for the American government does not make one a law unto oneself.  But the agents run contrary to their own government, a government of politicians willing to make deals or shirk promises made to "assets" (the innocents I mentioned above) as it suits them, or as they (more often than note) feel the need, like all politicians, to be liked and to avoid conflict (conflict, as in any action show, often being the best way to resolve a situation).  But the strongest theme in the show is the question of morality, of the ethics of spying and lying and manipulation for Queen and Country.

The last season is the best encapsulation:  the head of MI-5 was, in the past, in Berlin before the wall came down.  He "turned" a Russian, a woman he loved, and with whom he fathered a child.  The plot for the season, the running plot for the entire season, is convoluted and complicated, but in the end our British hero who has blamed himself for what he has done, who has sacrificed almost everything, including his own morality, for the sake of national security, finally unravels the truth.  And the truth is, the woman he loved in Germany, the Russian, was herself a spy, not for him, but for the KGB.  Her husband is a former KGB agent, her son is an FSB (successor to the KGB) agent, who has killed to protect her without knowing she was a triple agent.  It turns out she's working, not for Moscow but for a consortium of former KGB agents.  She has lied to her husband about her status (he thinks she was recruited by MI-5 as a spy; it turns out she was a KGB spy before that, pretending to spy for MI-5, but he never knew).  It is a long untangling of skeins regarding who lies to whom, for what reason, and at what cost.  Ultimately, of course, the British agent is exonerated for his decisions; but his decisions have a cost, not unlike the cost to Bond at the end of "Casino Royale."  But for Bond those costs reflect decisions and actions taken during the course of the movie; for "MI-5," the costs echo down through three decades.

"Make one mistake, you pay for it the rest of your life."  Not in terms of eternal cosmic punishment; but in terms of responsibility; of guilt; of regrets.  No character on "MI-5" wields power:  by lying to manipulate someone; or to protect them; or even using a gun to do either of those, even the power is wielded in the interests of national security or anti-terrorism or simply arresting criminals; without paying a price for that power.  "Power, wrote Niebuhr, 'cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest.' "  The British, at least, understand that.  It doesn't make them superior, or wiser, or more authorized to wield power; but it does make them more self-aware.

It's a trait singularly lacking in the CIA agents portrayed in the series.

"It's about commemoration and it's about the beauty of human life and the fragility of human life."

"The ceremony of innocence is drowned...."

"The blood swept lands and seas of red...."

Kurt Vonnegut, b. November 11, 1922, d. April 11, 2007.

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

"The sudden silence was the Voice of God."

 Precisely so.

On the coming 10th anniversary: A Common Place Reader; selections from past Novembers

"The Lord has plucked up proud men by their roots, and planted the lowly peoples." "He hath put down the mighty." - from the daily office in May, 1965.

If I were more fully attentive to the word of God I would be much less troubled and disturbed by the events of our time; not that I would be indifferent or passive, but I could gain strength of union with the deepest currents of history, the sacred currents, which run opposite to those on the surface a great deal of the time!

--Thomas Merton

The Roman Empire was based on the common principle of peace through victory, or, more fully, on a faith in the sequence of piety, war, victory, and peace. Paul was a Jewish visionary following in Jesus' footsteps, and they both claimed that the Kingdom of God was already present and operative in this world. He opposed the mantras of Roman normalcy with a vision of peace through justice, or, more fully, with a faith in the sequence of covenant, nonviolence, justice, and peace. 

In Search of Paul, John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, (New York: HarperCollins 2004), xi. 

World War I ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, yet an irresistible current of nihilism had been set loose. Fought in the name of democracy, that war was in fact a triumph of militarism and imperialism - on all sides. It led to the punitive imposition of artificial borders in Europe, which were the immediate cause of World War II; in the Middle East, the remote cause of today's most dangerous conflicts; and in Africa, where consequent genocide has found its niche. Perhaps most damaging was the 1914 legitimizing of mass violence, with the trenches anticipating both gas chambers and the unleashed atom. Hitler and Stalin were empowered by the so-called Great War, which is why both World War II and the Cold War should always be considered in its context. To regard all three conflicts as a single War of the 20th Century obliterates any notion that categories of "just war" apply.

What are we to make of these three anniversaries? First, while honoring the memory of veterans tomorrow, we should also acknowledge that the Great War was a mistake. America should never have joined. Second, in properly recalling the demonic Hitler's antisemitism, we can also reckon with the complicity of a larger culture. What crimes make us bystanders today? And third, trumping the horrors of the 20th century, its most important event was the nonviolent resolution of the nuclear-armed Cold War. "Power to the people" proved true, and what they used their power for was peace. Three anniversaries, with emphasis given to hope.

--James Carroll

At the root of Niebuhr's thinking lies an appreciation of original sin, which he views as indelible and omnipresent. In a fallen world, power is necessary, otherwise we lie open to the assaults of the predatory. Yet since we too number among the fallen, our own professions of innocence and altruism are necessarily suspect. Power, wrote Niebuhr, "cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never transcendent over interest." Therefore, any nation wielding great power but lacking self-awareness - never an American strong suit - poses an imminent risk not only to others but to itself. Here lies the statesman's dilemma: You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. To refrain from resisting evil for fear of violating God's laws is irresponsible. Yet for the powerful to pretend to interpret God's will qualifies as presumptuous. To avert evil, action is imperative; so too is self-restraint. Even worthy causes pursued blindly yield morally problematic results.

--Andrew Bacevich

Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock! You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth

before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh. Stir up your might, and come to save us!

Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

O LORD God of hosts, how long will you be angry with your people's prayers?

You have fed them with the bread of tears, and given them tears to drink in full measure.

You make us the scorn of our neighbors; our enemies laugh among themselves.

Restore us, O God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

But let your hand be upon the one at your right hand, the one whom you made strong for yourself.

Then we will never turn back from you; give us life, and we will call on your name.

Restore us, O LORD God of hosts; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

You are, of course, free to ignore this....

I'm not sure what free will has to do with the urge to urinate, except that bladder control is an exertion of free will.*

Sure, you may not be able to choose when you need to pee; but you can control how you pee.  It's training, going back to your childhood, reinforced on a daily basis all those days and years after.  The fact that you don't pee wherever you are sitting or standing, that you feel a discomfort you need to relieve but don't without an act of will to do so, is the very definition, it seems to me, of "free will."  Absent medical conditions, you choose when and where you urinate.

More interesting is this idea of "embodied cognition," which is supposedly new.  I first learned about it in Walter Kauffman's Irrational Man, his study of existentialism.  Kauffman drew a distinction between the dualism of Hellenism and the embodiment of self of Hebraism.  Per Kauffman, the Greeks saw the self as a soul incarnate (even Plato understood the importance of the physical world to the soul as it moved toward rejoining the Good); but the Hebrews drew no distinction between soul and body, because they didn't really believe in the soul the Greeks did.  It's a little hard to grasp in this post-Augustinian era without thinking the body somehow corrupts the soul, but for the Hebrews there was no mind/body split because there was no mind v. body:  it was all a unity, we were ourselves down to our fingertips.  They couldn't conceive of a disembodied pilot embodied only by accident, somewhere behind the eyes peering out through those "windows" upon a world accessible only through the flesh.  We were our flesh as we were ourselves.

And now we call that "embodied cognition," and declare it a new thing.

Of course, we used to say it was soul that animated body ("An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick, /unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing/ For every tatter in its mortal dress") until soul was replaced by mind, and now it is a computer wrapped in meat.

Thus is progress made......

*Besides I'm not sure what people think they experience as "free will" is quite the same issue as what philosophers debate is the concept of "free will."  What, after all, do they think they are experiencing?  How do they define the concept?  Aye, there's the rub.....

Nobody know the trouble I've seen, nobody knows but the fleaflies!

Because now everyday feels like Ash Wednesday.  I mean, why not?

So, the Supreme Court wants another chance to gut Obamacare.

I don't care anymore.  If Obamacare dies, it might mean I get some work back.  A little, but even a little is good.  Otherwise, Obamacare did nothing for me, and it's such a Rube Goldberg machine I'd almost be glad to see it dissolved.  And while the GOP will dance on its bones and howl at the moon in victory, I don't care about that, either.  Will the vast majority who don't bother to vote decide this is the issue upon which they will stand up and be counted?

Nope.  And unlike the characters in The Stars My Destination, I've never felt compelled to lead those people, and I don't feel compelled to feel anything for their refusal to take up the challenge of democracy and lead themselves.

I'm tired.  And I'm tired of politics.

Oh, I say that every two or four years, but I'm beginning to feel like I mean it.  Dispirited Democrats stayed home because Democrats across the nation decided their best recourse was to be GOP-lite, in the mold of their President whom nobody loves anymore.  It was a stroke of political genius.  Battleground Texas came to the state and apparently decided Wendy Davis should campaign like Ann Richards did:  i.e., hiding the very thing that made her famous and popular.  Ann Richards won the governorship once, because she was fortunate in her opponent the first time around.  She won in spite of hiding the character that made her a media darling at the Democratic convention when she skewered Bush pere, left him pinned and wriggling on the wall.  She never tried that again, not in her campaign, not as Governor.

But mostly never in her campaigns.  So I'm tired of political consultants who only know how to advise candidates to lose, and the money that backs them wanting only a choice between Tweeldedum and Tweedledumber.  That's the real scandal of money on politics; that we get a choice between McDonald's and Burger King, because that's the only choice the money will allow.

This is not because I've been writing about death lately.  I have not death wish, myself; none that I am aware of.  My death is just as unimaginable as it has ever been.  I despair of the glibness that responds to the Catholic church on the issues with jeers and raspberries and outright anti-Papist statements that would have shamed hard-core Protestants in 19th century America.  I despair of the shallowness that treats the question of death and suicide as simple issues best left to individuals to sort out.  It's the same kind of materialist thinking that makes Christmas a season when the poorest among us must go shopping in Thanksgiving because unless the tree is piled with stuff taller than the oldest child in the house, the holiday is ruined, its only point being to reinforce how important stuff is to human existence (and how important suicide is to how "I" keep my "mind" (dualism runs deep) in "my" control).

Advent is coming.  Xmas decorations are already out around town.  I expect to hear non-stop carols soon.  Maybe that'll life my spirits.

Yeah; right.

Whose death is it, anyway?

"About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters..."

I am intrigued by the modern idea of suffering; because it has, inevitably, taken on a socio-economic aspect.  White people fear suffering.  White middle-class and upper middle class people, especially, fear suffering.  They aren't supposed to suffer.  Ever.  I mean, what's the point of being white and middle class (at least) if you still have to suffer?

"Man is born to suffer as surely as sparks shoot upward."

We don't allow, legally or morally, poor people to end their suffering with assisted suicide.  We don't allow them any assistance in death at all.  They can't use public funds to move to a state friendly to assisted suicide.  The poor can't get public aid to buy the drugs necessary for death, or to hire the people trained in their delivery so that death is as painless as possible, so that their suffering is kept to a minimum.  Their suffering is not privileged.  It is not noticed.  It is not empathized with as they say the cannot bear the thought of facing it one day, and so they are allowed to end it before it begins.  Suffering has become very particular, and very peculiar in who bears it, and who is allowed to sidestep it.

The only suffering we alleviate is that caused physical pain, and then only that caused by disease or injury.  Emotional suffering doesn't count; suffering caused by deprivation, strife, struggle, poverty, doesn't count.  Emotional suffering, from depression or other psychological problems, is self-inflicted; you are supposed to "get over it," ultimately.  Suffering from deprivation is your own damned fault.  Poverty and homelessness are not a failure of society, but of the individual.  Only physical pain produces suffering no one should have to endure; and then only the people who can afford medical care are entitled to be relieved of such suffering.  Back when the ACA was being debated MSNBC ran several stories from clinics set up to tend to those who had no health insurance.  People came in with abscessed teeth, with untreated cancers that proved untreatable, they had been untreated for so long.  Were those people allowed to end their suffering with suicide?  Was any provision made for them to do so?  Some of those people were told their cancers were beyond treatment, that death was al that waited for them.  Had those clinics offered assisted suicide to such persons, would we have made them media heroes?  Or would we have resented the charities that raised money to help pay for them to die?  Wouldn't we, in fact, have thought it was a cruel way of disposing of an "excess population"?  Would we consider it a good thing, to help the poor die more rapidly, more readily?  Do we want to?

"The poor will be with you always."

And they deserve their suffering, even if it's to injury or disease?  We don't even fear psychological suffering.  That, we seem to say, is a failure of will.  What we mean is, it's a failure of mind, and mind is what is most precious, unless mind lets itself down.  It is only that which can kill the body which prompts us to end the struggle earlier and declare ourselves victors.

The suffering we fear is very specific, and the ones who fear it seem to be very specific, too.  It is physical pain which can harm the mind that terrorizes us, perhaps because we no longer believe in souls, now we believe in minds.  No one can harm our souls, but we are all the spiritual heirs of Samuel Johnson, who spent his life fearing the loss of his reason to disease or just "old age."  Material want will not harm us (indeed, we can't imagine it); but physical pain could affect our mind, and then what?

And thus is dualism perpetuated, because while our soul is not encapsulated in our bodies, our mind still is, and our body can destroy it.  We cannot imagine poverty, but we can imagine physical pain, and physical pain means we stop being who we are.  And we would rather die than let that happen, and death is our only source of salvation.  So in the end we will be our own saviors, and death will be the tool of our salvation.

"Death is the only experience of life that is not lived through."

Suffering is lived through; and we have decided it is a fate worse than death.  Having grown up under the shadow of the Bomb, having heard over and over again of a post-apocalyptic, post-nuclear war world in which "the living envy the dead," we have decided we will not be of that class, we will not be the survivors longing to die, aware only of what we have lost.  But in thinking these are the only options, we have lost already.

"My death; is it possible?"

It is not death we fear; it is life.  Aye, there's the irony.  For all our material and technological accomplishments we do not fear death, we fear the possibilities of life.  And we think we will gain the upper hand against those possibilities, by embracing death.

"Whose life is it anyway?"

I'm not a fan of either euthanasia or assisted suicide, because I don't think the title question is correctly answered by advocates of either when they say "It is the individual's life!"

That was Ilyich's problem, according to Tolstoy; only in the extremis of death did Ilyich realize the importance of this family, and the importance of life, and the simple fact that we are not in charge, not in control, not in the position to make last determinations; that only in losing what is most important to us, do we finally understand what is most important.  Or:

"Brittany Maynard's gesture is in itself to be condemned, but what happened in her conscience is not for us to know," Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, told ANSA.

"We always choose by seeking what is good, the problem is when we get it wrong," he continued "Conscience is like a sanctuary that cannot be entered. But let's reflect on the fact that if one day the project according to which all patients take their own life were to be fully realised they would be totally abandoned," Carrasco de Paula said.

"Society does not want to shoulder the cost of disease and this risks becoming the solution," he continued. "This woman (took her own life) thinking she would die with dignity, but this is the error, suicide is not a good thing, it is a bad thing because it is saying no to life and to everything it means with respect to our mission in the world and towards those around us," he said, describing assisted suicide as "an absurdity".

"...because it is saying 'no' to life and to everything it means with respect to our mission in the world and towards those around us."  In some environs, that statement is being taken as an arrogant assertion of dominion over others.  I see it as an assertion of life over selfishness, of community over individuality, of love over death.  What is the mission of the individual in the world, according to American secular thinking?  To pursue happiness?  And when you cannot do that any longer, to die with dignity?  Should the chronically poor, then, be assisted in killing themselves so their suffering will end?  No?  Why not?  Why is Brittany Murphy privileged to end her suffering, but the poor are not?  "Tell me, if you know and understand."  The poor are denied life with dignity; why do we deny them death with dignity?  Because death should be denied until it is inevitable, but before it is irreversible?  Or before it is uncomfortable?  Uncomfortable for who?

Whose death is it, anyway?

What is our mission in the world, and to those around us?  Are we sadistic to insist on pain and suffering before death?  Can we not avoid pain, too, and simply die because death is inevitable, and the knowledge of our mortality taints our pleasures?  Can we not involve others in our death, so we can be in control, so death can be comfortable, so we avoid the horrors of natural death or of the death penalty in Oklahoma?

Whose life is it, anyway?

Do we live for those around us, or for ourselves?  Is life our possession, or is life our gift?  Is death our triumph, or is death our conclusion?  Brittany Murphy wanted to be victorious over death.  Or did she?  Is that issue a matter of conscience, or a matter of interpretation?  When we have lost everything of importance, do we discover what is important; or do we find we have merely lost everything?  And how do we know, until it happens?

"Death is the only experience of life that is not lived through."--Ludwig Wittgenstein

Aye, there's the rub!  That bourn from which no traveler returns!  So does the assisted suicide embrace death?  Or cheat it?  And is the death singular and sole, and the business of the deceased alone?  Or is it the ultimate choice of life, the ultimate decision in which one chooses for all?  And if it is the choice of one for all, does the decision mean no life is valuable, no one else's life matters, because ultimately yours doesn't?  Or does it mean the value of every life is measured against your own, and if yours can be ended so you can claim "dignity," what are you saying about others?  That their deaths are undignified, or don't matter, either?  What about those around us?  What does our choosing death mean not for, but about, them?

Assisted suicide is an absurdity; and not in the way Camus and Beckett and Sartre meant the term, either.

Where all the ladders start

Because Advent is coming, and it is the "little Lent"

I'm parking this for further consideration later (which means, usually, you'll never see me mention it again!).  Good stuff here, especially in this:

These folks have so uncritically embraced modernist body-mind dualism that they blame all of the world’s problems on bad ideas (of which Islam is apparently the “motherlode”). As an ethicist, I am very interested in good and bad ideas, which lead to flourishing or suffering. But for all their love of “facts,” the New Atheists completely ignore history–the messy web of concrete factors like power, land, genetics, weather, hormones, economics, chemistry, and even good old father issues that give rise to ideas.

As postmodern theorists have been telling us for decades, religious “beliefs” do not simply spring up sui generis or ex nihilo. On the contrary, they exist within bodies–messy blobs of blood and bone and nerve endings that need food, shelter, and social ties in order to thrive. A healthy dose of materialism would go a long way toward complicating their oversimplifications. (I can recommend Manuel Vasquez’s More Than Belief as a primer, or perhaps they could enroll in Brent Plate’s introduction to religion class.)

A)  I really appreciate conversations from someone who knows the field (here's another example), like an ethicist who examines these questions critically, rather than a polemicist like Harris, who just shoots his mouth off.  B)  I like seeing the New Atheists taken to task for their complete misrepresentations of history, anthropology, and religion and religious studies, in the name of "rationalism."  C)  I'm very aware, thanks to seminary and ministry, of the fact that religious beliefs exist within bodies, not within arguments about abstractions (which should still mean "drawn out from" the material and concrete, the cosmos we live in.  We've turned abstraction into reality, or tried to, thanks to the dualism mentioned in the opening sentence.)  D)  Dualism--I have a real bug about dualism, and anyone who sees it lurking in the fundament has my undivided attention for their argument.

I'm led by the above to this book.  Although I favor William James' argument, or Wittgenstein's (I've used them both to the point of cliche by now), this looks like an interesting study.  I especially like the admixture of materialism in religion, something that will probably drive the would-be empiricists and logical positivists (who don't seem to realize they are dead!  Maybe it has something to do with Halloween impending) to distraction.  This is a good thing.  But it also returns (our discusccion of) religion to where it (religion) has always been:  in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.  Protestants tried mightily to remove it from that, and got the Pietists and revivals and pentecostals and charismatics for their trouble, not to mention all the arch-conservative Calvinists on the other end.  My personal attraction to liturgical worship is founded fully in the material aspects of spiritual life.  It ain't dualism that drives me there.

I've long thought the most virulent (and least informed) "atheists" at Salon (where atheism and religion are the most reliable click-bait) were mostly anti-modernists who devoutly want religion (especially) to be one thing, the easier to despise it.  But there's that dualism again:  everything must be either/or, it must be neatly cleaved between good and bad, right and wrong.  It really is the fundamentalist outlook, and is itself as much a religion as any held by an ISIS soldier or the most fervent member of a KJV church where Jesus revealed his truth to us in the King's English of the 17th century.

Dualism isn't reducible to right v. wrong, nor is it responsible for such reductionist thinking.  But the allure of dualism, that there is a sacred and a profane, that the most important things in the world are either oil or water, is a misleading one.

For All the Saints

For Catholics All Saint's Day is a day to honor the saints; All Soul's Day remembers all who have died in Christ who are not considered saints.  For Protestants, the "saints" mean the clouds of witness who we believe surrounds in time and across time, as well as space.  According to most reports Samhain was one of the "thin places" in the calendar, when the dearly departed were yet close at hand, not as ghouls and ghost and goblins, but as family.

It's all about death and resurrection.  Although those terms might not mean what you think they mean.

Almighty and everlasting God, before whom stand the spirits of the living and the dead; Light of lights, Fountain of wisdom and goodness, who livest in all pure and humble and gracious souls.

For all who witnessed a good confession for thy glory and the welfare of the world; for patriarchs, prophets, and apostles; for the wise of every land and nation, and all teachers of mankind,

WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD, AND BLESS THY NAME.

For the martyrs of our holy faith, the faithful witnesses of Christ of whome the world was not worthy, and for all who have resisted falsehood and wrong unto suffering or death,

WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD, AND BLESS THY NAME.

For all who have labored and suffered for freedom, good government, just laws, and they sanctity of the home; and for all who have given their lives for their country,

WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD, AND BLESS THY NAME.

For all who have sought to bless men by their service and life, and to lighten the dark places of the earth,

WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD, AND BLESS THY NAME.

For those who have been tender and true and brave in all times and places, and for all who have been one with thee in the communion of Christ's spirit and in the strength of his love,

WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD, AND BLESS THY NAME.

For the dear friends and kindred, ministering in the spiritual world, whose faces we see no more, but whose love is with us for ever,

WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD, AND BLESS THY NAME.

For the teachers and companions of our childhood and yough, and for the members of our household of faith who worship thee in heaven,

WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD, AND BLESS THY NAME.

For the grace which was given to all these, and for the trust and hope in which they lived and died,

WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD, AND BLESS THY NAME.

And that we may hold them in continual remembrance, that the sanctity of their wisdom and goodness may rest upon our earthly days, and that we may prepare ourselves to follow them in their upward way,

WE BESEECH THEE TO HEAR US, O GOD.

That we may ever think of them as with thee, and be sure that where they are, there we may be also,

WE BESEECH THEE TO HEAR US, O GOD.

That we mave haev a hope beyond this world for all they children, even for wanderers who must be sought and brought home; that we may be comforted and sustained by the promise of a time when none shall be a stranger and an exile from thy kingdom and household;

WE BESEECH THEE TO HEAR US, O GOD.

In the communion of the Holy Spirit, with the faithful and the saints in heaven, with the redeemed in all ages, with our beloved who dwell in thy presence and peace, we, who still serve and suffer on earth, unite in ascribing:

THANKSGIVING, GLORY, HONOR, AND POWER UNTO THEE, O LORD OUR GOD.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit,

AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING, IS NOW, AND EVER SHALL BE, WORLD WITHOUT END. AMEN.

Hallowe'en 2014

Recalling the ghosts of 2007 and Bobbie Burns.

Priorities

Worrying about how evolution is being taught, of course. Why do you ask?

The Pope drew a lot of internet attention for saying evolution is not antithetical to Christianity.

He drew far less attention for saying the teachings of the gospels are not antithetical to Communism.  Or rather, that "love for the poor is at the centre of the Gospel".  I had to work to find that quote.  Maybe because it's old news by now for this pope.  The Economist jumped on him for this kind of sentiment back in June.   CathNewsUSA picked up that connection this time around. News Agency of Nigeria even picked up this story.

I haven't found anything in any US news outlet; not, at least, according to Google.*

Maybe because news really is all about tittle-tattle, gossip, what is interesting now, and what isn't interesting now because it was interesting a few months ago, but we've moved on?  Or maybe it's because we'd rather fight over abstractions like the theory of evolution, than do the gritty work of enacting social justice in our own backyards.  How many average Americans would you expect to express the sentiment of this man from Denmark:

“We don’t want there to be a big difference between the richest and poorest, because poor people would just get really poor,” Mr. Drescher added. “We don’t want people living on the streets. If that happens, we consider that we as a society have failed.”

In America, we as a society have failed if we don't agree on the place of evolution in the science curriculum in public schools.

*The Pope's comments on poverty drew 6 comments at Talking Points Memo, the only website I've found that covered the story.  By contrast, the "evolution" story at Salon has drawn nearly 250 comments.  Not a scientific finding, to be sure; but clearly, where your treasure lies, there will your heart be also.  It's where our hearts are, that's the problem.

Why we can't have nice things

We interrupt whatever else it was I was going to say, to bring you this:

"What we need to do is - anyone who wants to get on a plane and come to the United States of America should go into quarantine for 21 days, take a blood test and then come to the United States," McCain said. "We shouldn't wait until they get here after they may have contaminated innumerable people. ... This has been a terrible fumbling again by this administration." McCain also wants the administration to explain why troops were sent to the Ebola zone without congressional approval. "I want to have hearings as soon as we get back as to whether our military personnel should go there," McCain said. "He didn't ask permission of Congress."

I've said before, somewhere, that this whole idea of a travel ban would mean just closing the borders, shuttering every international airport, and stopping all commerce with the outside world.  And who would house these travelers who must be quarantined so rabies can't come to the British Isles?  Oops, sorry; so ebola can't run like fire through paper across the scary-movie map of the U.S. of A?  The Senior Senator from Arizona says we should do just that to "anyone who wants to get on a plane and come to the United States of America...."  Because the world out there is scary!  And it has diseases!  and now we have to quarantine our military!

Thanks, Obama!

In the meantime, as we commemorate today the birthday of Dr. Jonas Salk, we remember that polio is running rampant in Pakistan, is in fact unchecked there.  The Pakistan government blames the Taliban, who opposes all efforts at polio vaccination in the areas it controls.  Probably something to do with the CIA, I dunno.  But hey, we can just stop everyone from coming to the US by plane until they've been quarantined for 3 weeks, right?

What's the incubation period for polio?

The Home Health Care Revolution

I hope they burned those chairs after she left.  It's the only way to be sure....

So, here's the relevant quarantine question:

If we're going to put people in quarantine for ebola, and we aren't going to forcibly detain them in a valid containment facility (Kaci Hickox spent the weekend in an "isolation tent" outside the hospital building in Newark.  I suspect that, as much as the fact she had no fever and no symptoms and no positive test for the ebola virus in her blood, is why Christie relented when she lawyered up.  Imagine how public sentiment would turn when that little fact became prominent.), do we post armed guards outside their home?

I know there are questions about whether family members must be quarantined along with the suspected patient (what else do you call someone who is wholly asymptomatic and is being detained just because of her travel itinerary?).  But what about the suspected patient?  Are police officers in hazmat gear posted outside the house at each exit to be sure she doesn't leave?  Is that feasible?  Is it even within the power to quarantine of the state?

I honestly don't know.  But we imagine "quarantine" means the rest of us are safe from exposure.  Does it?  How?  How, exactly, does that work?  Seems to me we either put the suspected patients in tents on the hospital grounds, or we leave them alone.  Sending them home to "self-quarantine" is just more health security theater; it's just a better stage setting than a tent on the parking lot.*

UPDATE:  Turns out the whole thing was a bigger farce than I'd imagined.  And I thought Texas was bad at this governance thing.  Looks like New York and New Jersey conspired at the gubernatorial level to teach us all a lesson in government as clown car.

*and if New Jersey ever gets an ebola case, how many NJ healthcare workers will have to be quarantined as a result?  Will we call the attendant tent cities around the hospitals "Christie-villes"?  'Cause you know we should....

Time, time, time, see what's become of me....

To be honest, the whole post is just an excuse for this gif.

This apparently, is what Halloween is becoming:

"I have noticed that on Halloween, what seems like 75 percent of the trick-or-treaters are clearly not from this neighborhood. Kids arrive in overflowing cars from less fortunate areas. I feel this is inappropriate. Halloween isn’t a social service or a charity in which I have to buy candy for less fortunate children," the anonymous homeowner whined.

"99 Percent" felt a little bad about wanting to cancel Halloween, but worse about taxes.

"Obviously this makes me feel like a terrible person, because what’s the big deal about making less fortunate kids happy on a holiday? But it just bugs me, because we already pay more than enough taxes toward actual social services," "99 Percent" wrote.

Well, I'm being unfair; that's probably NOT what Halloween's becoming; but the international back fence that is now the internet has made available to us all the small-mindedness of some, and it's no surprise we assume it is the attitude of the many.

Or we fear it is, anyway.

But isn't fear what Halloween is all about?

I don't honestly know where Halloween came from.  Various on-line sources connect it to Samhain, the Irish harvest (except it probably had nothing to do with a harvest; see below) festival, and to celebrations that came to this country from Ireland and other European countries in the 19th century.  Seems reasonable enough, if Samhain is connected to All Saint's Day.  But New Advent is my preferred on-line source for these matters, and it doesn't connect the day to the festival.  Pope Boniface did indeed establish an anniversary on March 13 for the dedication of the Pantheon in Rome to the Virgin and all the martyrs.  Pope Gregory III consecrated a chapel in St. Peters to the saints on November 1, about a century later.  Then Pope Gregory IV extended anniversary on November 1 to all of the church sometime in the early 9th century.

Which is not quite the story you get at other internet sites, viz:

On May 13, 609 A.D., Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western church. Pope Gregory III (731–741) later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1. By the 9th century the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted the older Celtic rites.

I throw that in because, first:  why not?, and second, because close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.  Sir James Frazer seems to have started the idea that All Saint's was connected to Samhain, but the only evidence he offers is that the former is a thin overlay on the latter.  (Frazer also sold us on the connection between Mithraism and Christianity, a connection no one sees anymore.  His scholarship didn't prove to last very long, in other words.)  History indicates it seems to have been more of a coincidence than not, and that in the 7th and 8th centuries the Irish church was celebrating All Saint's on April 20.  And when Gregory moved the festival, why was he concerned with practices in Ireland?  Especially since the Irish church was fine with a date in April?  And that's all long before the 9th century, so I'm left wondering whose dates are these anyway?

The history gets more interesting when you throw in All Souls:

In the early days of Christianity the names of the departed brethren were entered in the diptychs. Later, in the sixth century, it was customary in Benedictine monasteries to hold a commemoration of the deceased members at Whitsuntide. In Spain there was such a day on Saturday before Sexagesima or before Pentecost, at the time of St. Isidore (d. 636). In Germany there existed (according to the testimony of Widukind, Abbot of Corvey, c. 980) a time-honoured ceremony of praying to the dead on 1 October. This was accepted and sanctified by the Church. St. Odilo of Cluny (d. 1048) ordered the commemoration of all the faithful departed to be held annually in the monasteries of his congregation. Thence it spread among the other congregations of the Benedictines and among the Carthusians.

Of the dioceses, Liège was the first to adopt it under Bishop Notger (d. 1008). It is then found in the martyrology of St. Protadius of Besançon (1053-66). Bishop Otricus (1120-25) introduced it into Milan for the 15 October.

No apparent connection to Samhain there, especially since October seems to have been the preferred date.  I imagine it was moved to November 2 to line up against November 1, and not to "paper over" some connection to pagan practices, which can't have been all that widespread and in need of adoption by the church in the 10th and 11th centuries.  (I highlighted the line about the German observance because it seems an obvious root for the German E&R Totenfest.  It transferred from the German Catholics to the German Protestants, probably with a strong connection through the Lutherans.  These things to persist in cultures, but it isn't always a Christian overlay on a pagan ceremony.)

While we're on the subject, Samhain is usually referred to as a "Harvest" Festival.  However, as Frazer points out (on this I find him reliable),  by November 1 the harvest is already long in from the fields.  Urban dwellers miss this point, but I remember my two years in a southern Illinois country church, and the fields were bare long before October 31.  So it's no significant date for farmers, but Frazer points out it is significant for herdsman.  November 1 (or thereabouts) would mark the time to drive the flocks in from the field for the winter.  It would be a very significant date indeed for shepherds in Ireland (and it was).  Frazer goes on to note, with no real particularity, that the time of transition from autumn to winter (i.e., time to bring the flocks in from the fields) was celebrated across Europe as a time when the departed returned to earth (probably to seek warmth, too, Frazer conjectures, as winter winds began to blow) and when witches and demons wandered free, seeking to do mischief (again, because winter in northern Europe is hard).  Frazer tends to speak in these sweeping generalizations, which makes his work less than reliable over all; but it makes sense in a Northern European climate to connect winter with death, and the coming of winter with the return, briefly, of the dead (who are, in sense, never lost to the living, so long as memory remains).  So while the connection between Halloween and Ireland is a bit obscure, except for the jack o'lanterns, which I'll accept were Irish (though probably originally made from turnips, pumpkins being an American plant).

You can get all kinds of bad information on this topic.  Here's an excerpt from "American Catholic," calling Samhain "the Lord of the Dead" and attributing the date of November 1 to Gregory III about 100 years after his papacy ended.  I haven't found that designation anywhere else.  The link to Roman rituals involving Pomona and apples is another common thread, but knowing what little I do about the Romans, the idea a festival from an obscure backwater like Ireland would become a major festival of the empire is a bit ludicrous.  After all, the Romans never became Jews, and only because Christians in the 4th century because the Emperor became one.  The Romans were syncretistic to some degree, but mostly they left local cultures alone. They certainly didn't regularly re-write their own cultures to adopt all the practices of lands they had conquered (any more than the Roman Catholic church actually absorbed lots of pagan practices.  That's more likely a bit of anti-Papist slander from 19th century Anglicans like Frazer, akin to the 15th century designation of the "Dark Ages.")

The point is, it brings me back to the "Peace Sign," which in my callow youth was identified as a Satanic symbol.  I had a pair of leather sandals with leather peace signs attached to them, and still remember the conversation with a very scared mother of an acquaintance, that my sandals were going to invite demons into my life and, more importantly, into the soul of her daughter.

You can't make this stuff up.

Turns out, of course, it was invented as a peace sign by a British anti-nukes group in the '50's (you can look it up, I can't do everything for you).  As far as I'm concerned, Halloween was invented in America in the '50's, too (I've read that's when candy makers decided to tame the holiday.  The History Channel apparently said it started in the 30's, though.  I dunno; everybody's got their version, and even scholars can't agree on how Christmas came to be what it is.  So who can say about Halloween?)  The one Ray Bradbury eulogized was as real to me as a Dickensian Christmas would be:  a product of the author's experiences, nothing more.  Do we do it "right" now?  Compared to what?  It's an excuse to wear costumes and roam the streets freely (not so freely as in my youth) and gather treats from friendly strangers (but, alas, no more the homemade kind!) and generally have a nationwide block party when you aren't yet old enough to go to a party without your parents at all.

What could be wrong with that?

It's barely that anymore, I know.  We took my daughter to other neighborhoods when she was young, because we didn't live in a neighborhood at all (we lived in a parsonage on the church grounds on what was now a very busy urban street, lined with businesses and apartment complexes as friendly and inviting as prisons).  It doesn't matter where Halloween came from; what matters is what we do with it.

I think we need to keep it for the children.  And maybe find a way to make homemade treats acceptable again.  They were always the prize in the bag of candy at the end of the night.

"We shall not cease from exploration...."

"and the end of all our exploring..."

The pastors I met in my active parish ministry were, for the most part, good people trying hard to do an almost impossible job.

Some, of course, were the man in the grey flannel suit:  simply trying to get to the end of the day and earn a paycheck the best way they knew how.  Older pastors, retiring as I came on, seemed especially comfortable in their role:  they had served congregations which had served them well in return, and as that generation (which as not really defined by a calendar, or by their numbers in society) was coming to and end, their ministries were, too.  By and large they knew that, they accepted that, they went gracefully and gratefully into retirement, often nursing some notion of what congregations should be based on what they had learned as young men.  But we all learn lessons in youth that form our outlook ever after.

The worst pastors I met were the ones too zealous in their protection of "their" church.  There was the Conference Minister who told me he voted against my ordination, because he didn't think I was fit for ministry.  A few months after I left that Conference to pastor a church in another, he was forced to resign after exposing himself to his neighbors.  He stood naked in his back door in front of a teenage girl next door.

That was preceded by the Conference Minister who was forced out of his position by the Conference I had left to go to seminary.  He came to my seminary to finish out his career so he could reach retirement age with as much in his pension as possible.  On his way out, as he finally retired, he told my teachers I was unfit for ministry.  It was because I had tried to represent my pastor as his lawyer in a church investigation that almost led to his being stricken from ministry (the details of the UCC ordination and standing would take too long to explain).  It was a kangaroo court.  The Conference, through its lawyer, presented me with a document purporting to show the UCC allowed Conferences to exclude lawyers from the actual hearing.  I later learned that language had been rejected by the National Conference in favor of language encouraging a pastor to have representation in such circumstances.

And then there was the Conference Minister who cost me my pulpit; who came, without telling me ahead of time, to a Church Council meeting and denounced me in no uncertain terms.  He left for a conference on the west coast almost immediately after that, and retired within a year.  We had had, I had thought, a good relationship prior to that night.  He wouldn't speak to me that night, and I never spoke to him again.

I won't go into the church officials I dealt with trying to transfer my standing to another denomination, all of which, on paper, are quite open to such movement.  Suffice to say I have reasons to despise the institutional Church; far better reasons than Chris Hedges sums up in his article on the occasion of his ordination.

Ordination is a tricky thing.  It is determined by each denomination, based on its own determination of what validates an ordination.  I understand that in some Baptist denominations, for example, the congregation can ordain those they deem fit, and the deed is done.  The UCC is supposed to require a seminary education, but that's not the rigid requirement you might expect it to be.  I don't know what standards other denominations impose, but the idea is to determine that you have a calling to ministry and a reason to be set aside as a pastor or priest.  It is not automatic, granted upon your graduation from the right school, or based on your winning personality.  Most churches require some call to ministry; not just the mysterious "inner" call, but an actual offer of employment in what the denomination recognizes as a ministry.  A call to pastor a church is the obvious choice (it was how I was ordained; I couldn't even ask for ordination until a church wanted me to be their pastor), but there can be other calls.  There is always a lot of discernment involved, and a lot of consideration as to whether the candidate can simply handle the job of being a priest or pastor.

It ain't no golden staircase.

It can be, for the right kind of pastor.  I've known them, envied them their ease in ministry.  I couldn't emulate it.  I've known pastors, too, just trying to shepherd their flock; but their flock was more wolves than sheep (and I'm not hiding my story in this example.  I'd use the metaphor of snakes if I was doing that.)  Pastoring is a hard task, and the idea that the church and congregation should be "called" to the "Cost of Discipleship" is an engaging one for some members of the laity, but it is an absolute nightmare for members of the clergy.

Hedges cites Orwell, an atheist, and James Baldwin, the son of a pastor, for support in his analysis of the community of believers as a community of hypocrites.  Orwell despises institutions that become corrupted into the mirror opposite of what they were meant to be; Baldwin condemns the church for not being, as we learned to say in seminary, "prophetic."  The church seldom speaks truth to power because, too often, the church is the power; or wants to stay close to the power, at least.  It puts me in mind of several stories, not the least of which is Kierkegaard's description of his famous "Knight of Faith".

The moment I set eyes on him I instantly push him from me, I myself leap backwards, I clasp my hands and say half aloud, "Good Lord, is this the man?  Is it really he?  Why, he looks like a tax collector!"  However, it is the man after all.  I draw closer to him, watching his least movements to see whether there might not be visible a little heterogeneous fractional telegraphic message from the infinite, a glance, a look, a gesture, a note of sadness, a smile, which betrayed the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite.  No!  I examine his figure from tip to toe to see if there might not be a cranny through which the infinite was peeping.  No!  He is solid through and through.  His tread?  It is vigorous, belonging entirely to finiteness; no smartly dressed townsman who walks out to Freberg on a Sunday afternoon treads the ground more firmly, he belongs entirely to the world, no Philistine more so.  One can discover nothing of that aloof and superior nature whereby one recognizes the knight of the infinite.  He takes delight in everything, and whenever one sees him taking part in a particular pleasure, he does it with the persistence which is the mark of the earthly man whose soul is absorbed in such things. He tends to his work.  So when one looks at him one might suppose that he was a clerk who had lost his soul in an intricate system of book-keeping, so precise is he.  He takes a holiday on Sunday.  He goes to church.  No heavenly glance or any other token of the incommensurable betrays him; of one did not know him, it would be impossible distinguish him from the rest of the congregation, for his healthy and vigorous hymn-singing proves at the most that he has a good chest....And yet he is no genius, for in vain have I sought in him the incommensurability of genius.....And yet, and yet--actually I could become furious over it, for envy if for no other reason--this man has made and every instant is making the movements of infinity.

Johannes de Silentio, Fear and Trembling, tr. Walter Lowrie.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1973, pp. 50-51.

What truth would you speak to which power to effect the result of Kierkegaard's description?

de Silentio's insistence on the absolute normality of the character of the Knight of Faith is instructive, but it is little commented on.  Most people know this book at all for its title (which inspired Hunter Thompson's "Fear and Loathing" in both Las Vegas and on the 1968 presidential campaign trail) and the concept of the "leap of faith."  Almost everyone gets both ideas wrong.  It was Paul who advised his churches to "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling," because they were dealing with the living God in their perfectly ordinary lives (when Paul wrote the priest was still going into the Holy of Holies one day a year with a rope tied to his ankle so his lifeless body could be dragged out if the Creator of the Universe cast a glance in the unfortunate mortal's direction).  And the "leap of faith" is not a leap across reason into fantasy; it is absolute trust in the Absolute (de Silentio's term), producing, as Eliot would later say, "a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything."  But the price paid is one's life gained; else there is nothing to Christianity but endless sacrifice.

And what fresh hell is that?

I'm a bit non-plussed, having read Hedges' essay, why he wanted to be ordained.  So he could purify the church?  So he could prove himself holier than them?  So he could finally get what he had wanted so long ago, no matter how bitter he is now?

It's not that I directly disagree with this quote from Baldwin:

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns, and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.

I mean, you could make a fine sermon from Ecclesiastes on that.  But you can't preach the gospel, the "good news," from it.  You can't preach on a weekly basis against "the self-love in American society," at least not without first examining your own self-love that convinces you you have the voice and position of the prophet, with none of the disabilities appurtenant thereto.  The prophets who most vehemently denounce Israel also argue with God about the truth they are called to testify to, and the price they pay is high:  Jeremiah wails, Ezekiel suffers from hallucinations and has himself bound and rolled in ashes, Hosea marries a prostitute, Amos objects that he is just a dresser of sycamore trees.  Few of the prophets enjoy privilege and comfort and the pleasure of telling everyone they are wrong.  The prophets speak to the community and speak from the community, and like Jeremiah, whose head should be a fountain so it could produce all the tears he wants to shed for Israel, they suffer for the community.  They don't get to stand apart from it.  Baldwin and Orwell may have felt compelled to lead their lives; but it is the community that pronounces their proclamations valid or invalid.  No prophet gets to self-verify their truth.

We call those people mad; not prophets.

Hedges chooses a ministry that puts him on the edge of society, among people perhaps more willing to give up their "totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations" because those things have been taken from them already.  It is a valid ministry; I am glad he has found it.  But it isn't the only ministry; and the irony of denouncing the institution even as it ordains you, even as it publicly approves of your ministry and formally recognizes it as a ministry, as something set apart, as something valued by the community, is not to be ignored.

It is easy to snipe at the community of believers; to call it a community of hypocrites and lukewarm believers, to condemn it as the problem rather than the solution.  It is even easier to think your convictions alone are valid, and are validated the more they are not commonly accepted and widely enacted.  That is the Romantic illusion; the notion that every man and woman is her or his own Byronic hero.  de Silentio's Knight of Faith is neither Byronic nor a hero; he is presented, in fact, as the exact opposite of the Romantic ideal.  He is bourgeois to his toes, the better to humble himself and be servant of all, if not truly last of all.  But then again, playing the 19th century Danish version of the man in the grey flannel suit, perhaps the K of F is last of all, after all.  Certainly he has achieved what the prophets could not (well, what some of them could not; every person's path is different, isn't it?).  Kierkegaard himself would denounce "Christendom," but he still had planned to take a country parish in Denmark, and live a quiet, non-public life.

I've struggled myself with the legitimacy of the church.  I finally realized any legitimacy in this world must lie outside of me, otherwise it is mere solipsism.  I cannot claim myself validated against the opinion of the world, no matter how enticing that stance may be for those of a Romantic turn.  Even in my defiance I choose for humankind;  Sartre was right.  Defiance is not liberating; it is a burden.  If I see all church members as hypocrites, then hypocrites they are, and I lose the memories of the good people I've known in churches throughout my lifetime, some of them family members, some of them long-lost friends.  No, I will not condemn.  I will seek to avoid the reflex that makes me right and those who disagree with me, wrong.  I am not holy; you do not need to stand apart from me.  If I abandon the church it is not because the church is not good enough for me; it is because I am too vain to allow myself to enter into the life of the church.  Or it is because I am not ready, again; it is because my journey takes me on a path that crosses and recrosses the path of the church, but doesn't let me settle there.

It is because I am who I am, and I don't know how to change that fundamental.

But that fundamental doesn't make me right or wrong; it makes me difficult.  Perhaps Chris Hedges is not as angry as he seems to be.  Perhaps Chris Hedges has finally found his calling and is serving the Living God and the Risen Lord in the best way he can.  Perhaps.  In fact, I'm sure of it; who am I to sit in judgment?  Neither of us can sit in judgment on the church, either.  It is what it is, as we are who we are.

The marvel is that God works through us all, in spite of everything.  Thanks be to God.

That's right, you're not from Texas....

If you were from here, you'd understand....

So a guest on the Diane Rehm show tells me Wendy Davis has been a "disastrous" candidate because she's so "out of step" with the Texas electorate.  Her failure means not one Democrat will win statewide office this November, he says.

Bollocks.

If there are any Democrats left in state wide offices in Texas, it's a fluke.  And that isn't because Democrats haven't fielded a better gubernatorial candidate than Wendy Davis.  In fact, Wendy Davis may be the best gubernatorial candidate the Democrats have fielded since Ann Richards, and Richards only won because she was fortunate in her opponent.  I remember the gubernatorial candidates before Texas became a "red" state; they were nondescript to the point of non-existent.

If Wendy Davis hasn't shown the ability to win the race, it's because, as the guest put it, she's ideologically out of step with the majority of voters; it isn't because she can't campaign.  And her loss will not lead to the loss of other Democrats.  No Democratic candidate in this state has any coattails, not even the POTUS.  Republican candidates don't even have coattails; they only have the right party designation.

Texas is still deeply conservative politically, a persistence with perplexes me if only because the population of Texas has exploded in my lifetime, and most of that growth comes from newcomers, non-natives, if you will.  And by "non-native" I mean non-native Texan.  I have a coffee mug from the 80's, when the first big influx of "immigrants" came to the state from elsewhere in the country.  It reads "Native Texan," and more than one person who saw me with it when it was new said "Yeah, not too many of those around."  But that huge shift in population didn't mark any kind of shift in politics; and it still hasn't.  Voter turnout is still low, and adherence to the "right" party is still so strong a Democrat in a state-wide race doesn't get a fair hearing and is called "out of step" with the voters simply because of party label.

Which is the way it was when I was a kid, and Texas was a solidly Democratic state.

Is Texas going to turn blue anytime soon?  Nah.  The proles are not going to rise up and shake Big Brother off their back, and poor whites and Hispanics, who should both vote and know better when they bother to vote, aren't going to re-light the fires of Texas populism (whose enduring legacy is the wreck of a state Constitution we are burdened with) anytime soon.

But we can't blame our failures on our candidates:  we can't simultaneously expect them to be Tweedledum to the GOP's Tweedledee, and at the same time be different enough to inspire younger votes and minority voters to actually vote for a government that responds to them.*

If Davis wins, it will be because she motivated people to vote on a personal level, through an effective GOTV effort.  If she doesn't, she's still mounted a more effective effort to reach voters personally than I've ever seen in Texas Democratic party politics.  If that effort doesn't force a sea change in Texas in one election, that's not reason enough to abandon it now and forever.  After all, Democrats aren't going to win races in Texas by being more conservative than the GOP.  Gotta give all those non-voters a better reason to vote than that.

*and if the current Texas voter ID law, which prevents hundreds of thousands of Texans from voting, but allows voting by mail, a GOP preference, to occur with no ID check at all, is "in-step" with the majority of Texas voters, I'd prefer a candidate who stays out of step, thank you.  It's not like the Governor can repeal that law, after all.