He's Back!

I am a player in the religion vs. science debate, especially the focus on evolution.

I can no longer say I believe in God in any way western religion seems to portray God.

But neither do I subscribe to materialism as an exhaustive description of reality.

One of the huge conundrums is consciousness. What is it and where does it come from? Does it emerge spontaneously as an inevitable property of a certain level of complexity?

Recently some have suggested that consciousness is in fact the essential property of all matter. It has been present in every cell and quark from the outset.( Outset is another unsettling mystery.) Perhaps it takes a form in sentient beings - dolphins, apes, us - that we recognize, but it is present in various forms in everything. Perhaps it is what drives reality?

I like pursuing this. It feels promising to me, allowing me to look honestly at the world without surrendering my sense of the otherness that presses in on us.

We'll see.

If I can stand back and watch - which I can every so often - healing from my accident last summer has been one of the more interesting experiences of my life.

I fell asleep at the wheel of my Ford pickup on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 5, ran off the country road I was driving in Vermont, and hit a 200 year old oak tree. I may have been traveling 30mph, my seat belt held and the air bag deployed. At first - when I woke on impact - I thought the truck was on fire. The cab was filled with smoke and there was a terrible sulphur smell.

It turned out it was the air bag that goes off with an explosive charge. I reckon it, along with the seat belt, saved me.

It may also have broken my right wrist. Or maybe I had my thumb through the steering wheel. The wrist was shattered and dislocated so my hand was down and to the left of the two bones that come down from the arm. The surgeon said when she first saw it in the accident room there was no blood supply to the hand, the main artery having been twisted shut. She was able to manipulate it so blood began flowing to my hand. At first she hoped that closed reduction might be adequate for healing. But when she looked carefully at the CT scan she decided she'd better do surgery and put in a titanium plate to secure those tiny bones in the wrist. I remember thinking how lucky I was to have gotten off with only a broken wrist.

Now, 6 months later, I am amazed at how prolonged and uncertain the recovery has been. I have been doing therapy, both at the hospital and on my own, and it clearly is far better tha it was. But it still feels as if there is a vise around my wrist.

A month ago I tried hitting tennis balls with my wife. It was too early.

In the past week I have tried again and, even though it is not pretty, I can see that my wrist is both more flexible and stronger than it was a month ago.

Almost 60 years ago I broke my left elbow playing school football. I know I had a cast, but I have little memory of it slowing down my life in any way.

I am thrilled to be using my hand almost like a normal right handed person now. For a while I really wondered if I might have to make my left hand dominant.

What is required after a certain point - 40, 50, 60? - is a new perspective. That one is able to function at all after all this time is fantastic. Letting go of those dreams of winning the U.S. Open isn't easy. But if you are not to leade a tortured life, it must be done.

Who was it who said that the wondrous thing about the dancing dog was not that he did it so well but that he did it at all?

I have not given much thught recently to Gerald Ford. When he became President I was hugely relieved that Nixon was gone. When he pardoned Nixon a month later I was enraged. As I look back I feel very differently. I suspect he knew that he was likely killing his chances to be elected in his own right. And he surely understood that having Nixon in the court dock for the next three years - as he surely would have been - would mean the nation could focus on nothing else.

So what looked like an act of slimy political trickery at the time looks like an act of sacrificial statesmanship today.

And today John Edwards announced his run for the job in 2008.

In some ways the two men seem alike to me. They both - whether validly or in a PR move - comes across as someone you would be able to talk easily with. Not full of swagger and power moves as we have grown used to in our leaders these past 6 years. And Ford adopted a panoply of Democratic agenda, reaching out to people of color, people who were power and living on the edge, finally ending the war in Viet Nam. I remember the TV pictures of him standing on the front porch of his modest split-level house the day Nixon announced his resignation, speaking quietly and seemingly candidly to reporters about this turn of events he had neither expected nor wanted.

Jimmy Carter was also a modest man and that, along with Ford's pardon of Nixon, likely won him the election.

Now John Edwards, standing in the still remaining wreck of New Orleans, with black people who have been shunted aside by the current administration, announces for President. He is choosing the issues - poverty and injustice - that this administration has pushed aside in the rush to beat up the world.

Whether the country is ready to take a radical new direction - or Edwards' own party - remains to be seen. It is hard to see how John Edwards can stand against the money of Hilary Clinton and the star power of Barak Obama. But there is a long way to go between here and November 2008.

And I never would have thought I would regard Gerald Ford - the accidental president who used to bump his head as he left Air Force One - as a great statesman?

When I was an assistant at a church in Washington, D.C. I made periodic visits to Walter Reed Amry Hospital. (I was there the day Dwight Eisenhower died.) It was 1969 - 1973, the height of the Viet Nam War and I still am haunted by some of the young men I got to know there.

One had stood up from a trench and taken a 30 caliber machine gun round in the forehead. How he survived was a mystery, to him and to his doctors. And there were many days when he wished he hadn't. Surgeons had inserted a metal plate to replace the bone that had been destroyed in his forehead. The problem was that the bone kept eroding where it was attached to the plate and every few months they would have to put in a slightly larger plate. Whether that lethal process would stop at some sustainable pont or just keep going until it ate away at brain tissue (some of which he lost when he was wounded) was still a question by the time I moved to another church in another city.

I remember another who had lost both arms and all but the upper thigh protion of his right leg. He made his way around the hospital grounds on a sort of skateboard.

Apparently President Bush paid a visit to Walter Reed yesterday.

Everything we have learned of him over the past 6 years suggests that he is oblivious to facts and realities that do not fit into what he already believes to be.

If he can spend time with those young people, mangled as a result of his decisions, without revisiting those decisions, disturbing whatever humanity may remain to him after 6 years in his august role, God help him.

Yesterday while I was in the gym trying to lift a puny 5lb weight to strengthen my wrist, the TV was tuned to Fox and the O'Reilly report.

"Prepare to enter the no-spin zone," he shouted to introduce his show, without apparently intending irony.

Then ensued an interview - argument really - with a former US ambassador to the UN, Richard Holbrook, about whether we are winning the war in Iraq.

"No," Holbrook said, "we are losing. Even the president said today that we are not winning."

"That's not true," countered O'Reilly who has just returned from a visit to American troops in Iraq. "I ate with the troops and asked them, and they said we are winning."

"What they meant," Holbrook went on, "is that they win every combat engagement they have but they do not trust their Iraqi counterparts to hold up their end of the deal."

Today I read a story about the shocking rate of post-traumatic-stress disorder among troops returning from Iraq. Even more than the horror of battle carnage and fear, their stress is being fed by an increasing sense of the futility of our Iraq adventure.

One soldier, when asked what his mission had been, said, "Pretty much to take machine gun fire and get blown up by IEDs while we kept a supply road open. I would think a human life is worth more than that."

As decision makers in Washington float more hints about perhaps sending a surge of troops - 20,000 or more, as if we had such numbers to send - is anyone considering what our goal now is in that country and whether military strength has been shown to be useful in acheiving it these past 3 years?

Yes, someone is.

The American generals who have been in Iraq are now publicly questioning whether more troops will accomplish anything other than angering Iraqis even more and increasing casualty counts.

Senator Reid said on Sunday that he might go along with a brief increase of troops.

The Democrats need to get over their fear of being branded as weak on defense and terror and listen to the people who have tried so hard and with such futility to accomplish whatever it was they were sent to do.

How can any of us, who lack access to critical information, make measured judgments about what we think our government should do as the next step in Iraq?

Based on historical retrospect, I would say information is not the issue.

In fact we know that in situations like this one, all sorts of contradictory information comes to a president.

Maybe we have to answer a terrible question:

Is our national interest in keeping a powerful presence in Iraq - and perhaps in the entire middle east - strong enough for us to continue a terrible loss of young Americans and billions of dollars to preserve?

It is no longer about overthrowing a tyrant or promoting democracy. Saddam, whose ruthlessness may have been the only thing that held Iraq together as a pseudo-nation, is gone. Democracy is a pipe dream in that land so deeply divided by ancient tribal enmity.

Oil and terrorism are the issues. We need one and are under siege from the other.

My judgment is that the matter of the oil is already lost, at least in the short run. Whether we will ever again have access to oil depends on so many unfathomable matters now that trying to calculate them is impossible.

Our invasion of Iraq is being portrayed by the administration as "fighting them over there so we won't have to fight them here."

I don't buy it. No doubt we are fighting many insurgents in Iraq who would love to make mayhem in the United States. And reasonable people seem the agree that our Iraq adventure has been a powerful recruiting tool for terrorists.

The ultimate solution - if it is possible to speak in those terms - will have to be political. Yes, there will always be a military piece to it. But that is to hold off the catastrophe long enough for diplomacy to get started.

Are Islamists so fixed on Jihad that diplomacy is pointless?

One hopes not. One hopes that there comes a point at which human beings' common interests merge sufficiently to stop bloodshed. If not then the whole species is doomed.

Terrorism is not new. It feels new to our continent, though it isn't.

Finally we, like the British before us, will exhaust ourselves and leave Iraq. Perhaps there are better rather than worse ways to do that. But will sending 20,000 troops to try to stabilize Baghdad cover our having to acknowledge that our original mission there was futile and ill-conceived?

One of the things I like about blogging is the understanding that it is OK to try out things here that are far from fully formed in my mind. I expect to explore further what I am writing about here today, but today I am doing a sort of automatic writing, letting my unconscious make its way onto the screen

Yesterday, for the first time since I retired as an Episcopal parish priest 10 years ago, I was the officiant - the celebrant - at the Eucharist in the church where I once worked. The Eucharist is the central liturgical action in the worship life of the the Episcopal and the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. And more and more also in the so-called confessing churches that are the heirs of the Reformation.

I will not try to explain in any detail - since my inability to do so is part of the point of what I am writing - except to say it has its roots in the story that is told of Jesus having what was likely a Passover meal with his closest followers just before he was executed. And the tradition that flows from that - with varying views about just how to understand this - is that when the church gathers to do a commemoration of that meal, Jesus - or Jesus' spirit - is uniquely present.

When I retired I was relieved not to stand before a congregation of people and do something about which I had deep doubts. I confess I was as concerned about what it was doing to me as to them. And one of the ideas I found most comforting was the teaching that the sacraments - the Eucharist being one of the 2 central sacraments - was not dependent on the character or belief of the the officiant. Ordination was the requirement, not belief. And I was ordained.

From the perspective of yesterday I would now say the issue is not that I believed too little but that I believed too much.

The image that recurs as I reflect on standing at the altar yesterday is of punching a hole in the fabric of reality.

Whether that be attached to Jesus, Moses, the Buddah or Zoroaster is of less importance to me than actually physically taking part in a ceremonial rite that challenges every human conceit about our knowledge of and place in the order of things.

Once every decade seems about the right frequency for doing something that suggests all human knowledge is proximate and that the very existence of our species - and each of us individually - is an odds-against wonder that no one could have predicted and that is totally unnecessary when viewed in light of the entirety of the universe.

Is that what the Episcopal -or Roman Catholic - church has made of the Eucharist?

No. But as I stood at that altar yesterday, it is what claimed my energy. And it was a combination of terror and ecstasy.

Amidst the growingly rancorous debate about the existence of God and organized religion (who could have imagined this at the beginning of the 21st century?), I have found myself trying to figure out how to put into words what drives me.

I no longer can support the notion of God as an entity, a being, or even a force. I love the Bible because it is such a rich record of the struggles of people over the centuries to tell stories that illuminate their lives.

And I am still drawn to liturgical worship, both because it has formed the fabric of a lot of my life and because ceremony and ritual seem like physical expressions of mystery that affects and lies beyond our conscious reckonings. And good liturgy can be fun.

But what about some sort of credal statement?

Here's mine, for the moment:

Knowing what we all now know, is it worth it, being here?

A yes is a vote for God, a no a vote against.

Not much, I'll admit. And worse for many, the response no doubt changes daily, if not hourly.

This Sunday I will preside at Divine Mysteries in an Episcopal Church for the first time in a decade. I agreed as a favor to the rector whom I like and admire. He has to be away.

But now I am looking forward to it with enthusiasm. Because I feel as if I am beyond having to swallow my integrity and cross my fingers to do this. Penetrating the layer of mystery that surrounds reality is what this is about. Not explaining or even describing it, but entering into it.

Another way to put it is surrender, surrender of the ego and intellect for a moment of active wonder.

Between the surprise of birth and the veil of death. Worship.

The two issues burning up the airwaves right now are the role of religion and the question of how the US ought to proceed in Iraq.

They are related.

What led us into the mess we are in in Iraq was our failure to understand the depth of issues among different groups, issues that hardly compute in our culture. Because we have a pretend religious culture - pretend because it is cover for unfettered market capitalism - we think we understand other religious convictions.

And we assume that any sane person would look at our standard of living and do whatever needed to attain it.

No doubt it is true that most people would like to be able to live their lives without fear. But middle east leaders do not gain power by promising a computer and a car to every family.

Life under Saddam was terrible for many. Life under us may be worse.

And we are foreigners with foreign values.

Until we are ready to engage in a serious look at the consequences of elevating materialism to the top of human drives, we have little hope of engaging Muslims in anything other than war to the finish.

The multi-million dollar investigation into the death of Princess Diana which was just completed, may expose as well as anything recently the bankruptcy of western materialism. Diana, the darling of the paparazzi, was assumed to have been done in by the Royal Family because they were afraid she was going to marry a Muslim.

Irony of ironies, she died in a speeding Mercedes driven by her drunken bodyguard.

We have now seen the futility of dedicating the most sophisticated weapons and soldiers in the world to the task of persuading the people of another nation to adopt our way of life. If that incredible power is not enough, what is?

This is going to require our taking on a task we have never done before; soul searching.

Increasingly, comments on the response to the Uraq Study Group's recommendations seem to come under the heading of "Blame Iraq."

Set goals and requirements the Iraq government must meet or we will withdraw.

This ugly notion won't sell outside the American electorate. The so-called government - elections notwithstanding - is a creation of our unilateral invasion and it exacerbated the already lethal historical animosities among the warring tribes. Now we know why Saddam was such a ruthless dictator. Yes, it may have been in his nature, but without terror, the country quickly becomes what it always was before we westerners gained our oil appetite - tribes with such individual histories and interests that they had no thought of joining themselves into a single nation.

Now that our dismantling of all previous structures has reignited the ancient wars, we demand the baby government either solve the dilemma or we withdraw all support.

What a mess! When we fled Viet Nam there was a clear entity ready to move in behind us. The country had long been one until the end of WWII when it was, like Korea, divided north and south. After a protracted guerilla war against the French and then against us, the stronger and more numerous north reunited the country.

And, ironically, just a few weeks ago President Bush was in Viet Nam on a trade mission. We are among their chief trading partners, these bitter enemies against whom we battled for five years losing more than 50,000 of our young men.

But it is going to be messier when we keave Iraq, because they have to battle it out among their various groups - and with many from beyond their own borders - to see who will wield the most influence in the vacuum we will have created.

Like most Americans, I want us to extricate ourselves as quickly as possible. But I doubt we are going to be able to do that until we find a way to engage many others who have scorned us because of the havoc we have created. And to think the rest of the world will buy our attempt to make some Iraqi group take the rap for what we have done, is pure fantasy.

For the past few days San Diego beaches have had a big south swell. We get these a few times a year and it makes our ocean look like the north coast of Hawaii. The old guys I see every morning as I walk the dog don't go out in this. They stand and watch and whistle as they see their younger kin drive into the barrel of an 8 footer.

It's a lot of fun.

And just about everyone would agree the San Diego Chargers are the best team in football right now. OK, you cynics, they may collapse against a wild card team in the first round of the playoffs - NFL football is unkind - but it has been a great ride so far.

The city is bankrupt, it may disappear if the ice caps melt and the sea level goes up a few feet, but today it is pretty cool to live in San Diego.

Apparently Bush ( and his sidekick Blair ) intend not to take the cover the Iraq Study Group provides for them.

Or at least, if you can believe the way Bush's response is being portrayed, he rejects the two most forceful suggestions: that we pull out our combat troops by the end of 2008, and begin talks with neighboring countries, notably Iran and Syria. And the central thesis of the report: that Iraq is a disaster and we cannot win the war.

Seeing as how James Baker, one of the two principle authors of the report, has long been the Bush family fixer (remember how he bullied first Florida to stop counting and then the Supreme Court to support that decision?), there must be some heavy conversation among Bush family members.

Is it possible that the president is really the petulant bad boy he has often been portrayed? And that he cannot bear to admit a mistake or take advice from his father?

God save us.

In what to me is a new twist on the warnings about how we are running through nonrenewable resources, the prdiction of some is that there will continue to be fuel and air conditioning and other amenities we have all become used to, but they will become scarce and available only to the very rich.

The late 20th century may turn out to be the zenith of living standards, at least for those of us in the so-called first world.

The Chinese do not yet take TV and cars and VCRs and air conditioners for granted. But they soon will.

And if the 5% of the world's population that we in the United States make up consume 30% of the world's resources, imagine what it will be like when 2 billion Chinese begin to live as we have been living.

Now the predictions of 40 years ago, that world population was going to grow beyond the capacity of the globe to produce food enough to feed everyone, have not proved out. In fact most predictions now are that population will begin to decline in the coming decades. Recently I read an article worrying that the decline in population growth meant bad news for the world economy. It said that, historically, the world economy grew when population grew and shrank when population growth stagnated.

Guess we'll have to waith and see.

The dance around the Iraq Study Group is becoming surreal.

I haven't, and probably won't read the entire thing. But it seems clear the group set out to achieve one thing:

to provide cover for the administration to extriacte itself from Iraq in time for it to lose its potency in the 2008 presidential election.

Despite hoping for a dramtically different White House after the election, I hope the administration takes the cover.

George Will's column in yetserday's Washington Post pointed out that the so-called plan of the report - to make the Iraqi police force ready for us to pull out within 18 months - has a less than 20% chance of succeeding.

But Bush's endless mantra of staying until "the job is done", Will says, has a 0% chance.

And yes, our leaving is going to unleash even more terrible violence of Iraqi on Iraqi (though it will be reversion to ancient tribal hatreds that always made a mockery of western efforts to make them a single nation. Only a ruthless dictator could accomplish that). We will have to suffer the international outrage and national shame we have earned from our misadventure.

Being an American is going to be painful for some time to come.

What I hope will mitigate that some is the perception around the world that our country was hijacked by people who wanted to rule the world. But even so, we elected him in 2004 even if the Supreme Court elected him in 2000.

Looking back to Bush's campaign pledge when running in 2000 to be a compassionate conservative and a president who would bring us together, we will have to guard against electing another one just like him.

We went to see the movie, "The Cave of the Yellow Dog" last night.

Halfway through the movie Lacey apologized to me for bringing me to it, fearing I must be bored.

No, I said, I love it.

The few reviews I have read have been put off by its pace and lack of plot.

A family of nomads in Mongolia, three beguiling children, mother, father and a stray dog. One reviewer said it was like Lassie Come Home, only more boring. Another said if you have never seen a yurt dismantled you might want to see it; otherwise maybe not.

I have a movie I watch once a year, made in 1952 by the French director, Jean Luc Goddard, titled Contempt. It stars - get ready - Brigette Bardot and Jack Palance. I searched the internet for it after learning that part of it was filmed at a house on an island off Capri that I happened on on a long walk. I watch the movie when all the rest of my family is not home, because none of them will watch it with me.

What strikes me about Contempt and The Cave of the Yellow Dog is how hauntingly sparse they are. Aside from the georgeous fiming - more in Cave than in Contempt - very little happens. It's rather like dreaming. You - the dreamer/watcher - must fill in all the spaces.

I once wrote that watching Contempt was like watching Al Gore run for president.

What our frenetic media have done to us is to fill all the space with action.

I used to feel anxious - sometimes even stupid - because I cannot keep track of a fast-moving movie. I forget who the people are and miss most of the subtle clues.

No wonder I like this medium - writing - which one can do at his own pace.

If you are wired up like me, prefering, slow, quiet, haunting movies, you'll be enchanted with Cave of the Yellow Dog.

At least at first blush there appears to be movement on our stubborn Iraq policy at long last.

No wonder the Senate panel considering the Gates nomination to Secretary of Defense unanimously approved him without asking any of the potentially embarrassing questions about his past as a possible schill for his superiors. One NY Times columnist suggested the committee would have given the green light to an axe murderer if he was willing to sound different from Rumsfeld.

He had moments of near-exhilarating candor, as when he replied in response to being asked if he thought we were winning the war, No.

It is a mark of how low we have sunk that we would find such an obvious answer thrilling.

But we do. Now let's hope there is reason. We have yet to hear any concrete proposals about how we might proceed from this point. And I suspect we have yet to even imagine the recriminations and pain ahead no matter what we do. No wonder President Bush has said the issue of how to conclude our Iraq adventure is up to his successor.

If he is merely buying time, we are going to see many more Americans and Iraqis die for our lack of knowing what to do. If we do begin to withdraw, Iraqis are going to die in likely larger numbers and we are, appropriately, going to bear the anger and finger-pointing of the international community.

Whether there is any realistic possibility of engaging others in the region - Iran, Syria - in seeking some solution short of even worse bloodshed, no one can know yet. Because we have steadfastly refused to even sniff at such a possibility, probably because our government still hasn't faced up to the limits of its ability to impose some solution on our own.

We've got some ugly moments ahead. Is Robert Gates up to standing against the Bush/Cheney stubbornness? We'll see.

Robert Gates has been rejected, and narrowly confirmed by the Senate in previous incarnations.

Like John Bolton - on whom President Bush has, finally, given up, he seems to be a lightning rod.

I have a hunch about these people the president keeps appointing who are vilified and praised as if they were two different people. I think we have almost opposite views of how one goes about doing public service.

I remember a conversation I had with a man in the Nixon administration in the days when Watergate was a tiny story tucked into the back pages of the Metro section of the Washington Post. I was a young assistant in a church across Lafayette Park from the White House, the age of all the aides working for Nixon. I occasionally was invited to play tennis on the White House court. It was heady.

In the conversation one friend was discussing another friend who had opted out on being a part of the reelection group. He had told me that he smelled a rat. The person with whom I was talking said, "You might tell your friend that he better get on board if he expects a job in the next term." When I relayed the message, the first guy said, "He's probably right, but things just don't feel right to me." I reported what he had said to the first person - you still with me? - and he said, "The real problem with him is that he's not tough enough."

I felt a chill.

John Bolton was admired by his supporters for being tough. He spoke to other ambassadors at the UN as if he were an uncle teaching them important lessons. His detractors felt he was unsuited for a diplomatic post.

Bob Gates' supporters say he has always been on the right side of every issue. And that his detractors are jealous of the meteoric rise he experienced in his early days in government.

His detractors say he was always willing to do the bidding of his superiors, even if it meant jimmying the truth.

Of course it is naive to think that anyone in positions of power is immune to the temptation to curry favor from those with even more power to confer. But is it too much to ask that they have sufficient integrity to stand back and take a disciplined look at what is real?

Remember the Saturday night massacre during Watergate when Nixon ordered his Attorney General, Eliot Richardson, to refuse to hand over the notorious tapes to the court? Richardson resigned. So Nixon appointed William Ruckleshouse in his place and he, too, resigned rather than defy a court order. Until finally Robert Bork - who would be appointed and then rejected by the Senate for the Supreme Court - agreed to what he said was an order from his president that he hadn't the authority to refuse.

It has been Bush's way to send people up who are both well known opponents of the job they are being appointed to, and defiant in their position to continue in their views in the new job.

I don't know how I would vote if I was a senator considering the Gates nomination to Defense Secretary. It looks like yet another Bush smokescreen. And yet Gates himself may be realist enough to understand more of the same is no longer possible.

How much I hope the next president may want to do something more creative than thumb his nose at the American people and the government he heads.

As Democrats begin to take their place among the governing group - rather than the petulant minority they have been for a political generation - a couple of big battles are shaping up.

The first is necessarily what to do about our Iraq adventure. Likely Democrats have been hoping the Baker report was going to provide them some political cover by suggesting some form of withdrawal that Bush would reject. But early reports sound as if the Commission has fudged on making any substantive recommendations, hoping to find solutions this pig-heade administration wouldn't reject out of hand.

So it is likely going to require some political courage, someone who will take the plunge and begin to make concrete suggestions about what we ought to do. Hard to imagine that any of the potential presidential candidates will dare to do that, even though polls show overwhelming national sentiment for getting out.

Whether we leave tomorrow or after the next president is inaugerated, the result is going to be ugly and bloody. When the president insists that we will stay until the job is done, he never says what the job is. The original intention to make Iraq a model democracy that would provide and example for surounding nations, has long been abandoned. Even the old warrior Henry Kissinger said the other day that Iraq is not really a nation in the historic sense.

So will any Democrat risk his or her political life by saying aloud what we all know, that withdrawal is our only choice and it is going to be humiliating? What Bush wil be remembered for is having altered the balance of power in the oil rich middle east when it would have been unimaginable such a thing could have happened before.

And the entire matter of the so-called war on terror needs to be reconsidered, before we drive this nation right over the cliff by antagonizing the entire world. Yes, there is an awful terrorism issue to be addressed. But atacking nations we now know is not the way to meet that threat. We went on the offensive in Afghanistan because that is where the terrorist group that perpetrated the 9/11 attack on us was harbored. We had just about successfully rooted them out and destroyed their ability to do us hard, so we are told, when we turned our attention for them to attacking Iraq.

Then there are issues right here at home that have been totally neglected by this administration. The minimum wage has remained stagnant while even moderate inflation has eroded the ability of moderate wage earners to stay even. Health care is, by everyone's admission, a disaster, and even though Democrats are still understandably chastized by Hilary Clinton's abortive attempt to design a new plan at the beginning of her husband's term, the time has come for the Democrats to address the disgrace that our health care has become.

Not to mention the rape of our environment and the urgent need to find ways to provide energy that do not depend on foreign oil.

Howard Dean said over the weekend that the Democrats better not make the same mistake the Republicans made by claiming their election as a mandate. He said, We have been entrusted with some authority for the next two years, and we had better use it well if we expect to be reelected.

Sitting on their hands and hoping for Republican miscues may have provided a great election this year; now let's see if the Democrats have some horsepower.

Despite the fact that I am an Episcopal priest - retired but still in good standing - you may have been following the secession battle in our church more closely than I have.

I wonder what you think.

When I was a parish priest I fought hard to try to help maintain the church's basic unity. Not in theology or political leaning, not in polity, in government. It was akin, I thought, to the crisis in the United States that led to the Civil War. The southern states said just let us go our way and live our lives. The northern states, led by Abraham Lincoln, said this is one nation and we will do what we must to preserve the Union. Though there has long been debate over whether it is fair to say the war - in retrospect - was over basic human justice, whether there would be slavery in this nation, the issues were so volatile it is hard to imagine either a working compromise or a friendly divorce that would have worked over the long haul.

The Episcopal Church - at least at first blush - does not seem to be warring over such heavy issues.

Is the Bible the literal, inerrant word of God? Can women be priests and bishops? Should the sacraments be available to outsiders, people who have not been baptized? Are homosexual people simply people with a different stance on sexual attraction, or seriously errant people who must either be healed or shunned?

What does it mean to ordain a homosexual person a priest? Or a bishop?

The final 20 years of my active life in the parish saw increasing rancor over these matters.

Now several parishes and one diocese have voted to secede and place themselves under the authority of another jurisdiction, like an African bishop.

My first inclination is to say, Let them go. They have a fundamnetally different view of the entire enterprise; trying to keep us all together is going to mean such serious compromise by both sides that the end result is going to mean nothing. So the Episcopal Church will be smaller and poorer. Let it be.

But another part of me says No. The twin issues that have brought this matter to a head are the ordaining of a gay man to be Bishop of New Hampshire, and of a woman to be the Presiding Bishop of the United States.

We are still too close to be able to say whether issues of sexuality will one day be understood as equivalent to the issues of race that tore the nation apart - and still do. Many blacks complain that women and homosexuals are trying to ride on the coat tails of the civil rights movement when they have not experienced the same historical exclusion.

But I'm not so sure. More subtle, no doubt, but one day I'd bet we'll see a moral equivalence.

So maybe the Episcopal Church should firecely resist letting parishes or dioceses claim the high moral ground, saying they are following traditional biblical teaching while the so-called liberal wing of the church has led us into perfidy. Maybe we should say, You have departed from the radical openness by which the church dares to stand against the prejudices of the moment and not only include, but give power to people the world scorns.

It will be a confusing and dicey time, because in appealing to African hierarchy, they will seem to be on the side of the angels. But insofar as the Africans reject the full humanity and equal access to power of people who have been on the margins - as Jesus seems to have done - they are not the church of Jesus.

So I can't quite let go of this notion that sleep may provide a window into the way we consider reality that doesn't conform to what we normally mean by reality.

We all sleep. No one seems to know why or even what to make of where our minds go during sleep and dreaming.

Last night I felt as if I couldn't sleep. Because the hours between when I went to bed and got up - around 6 of them - didn't particularly drag, I think I must have slept at least some of the time. And because my mind - I don't know what else to call it - held its usual marathon movie screening, I bet I dreamed too.

But I can't tell you when I was asleep and when I was awake, or when I was dreaming and when my mind was surfing in some more conscious realm.

Being in the middle of a sleep study - trying to determine how I sleep and how much and how much I dream and go into REM sleep - it has become clear to me that the most sophisticated neurologists who are devoting most of their professional expertise to this matter, don't know much. They can tell when you sleep - they think - by watching your brain waves. But what sleep is, how it works and why virtually all sentient beings do it, remains mysterious.

You know the expression "died in his sleep"?

Do you suppose someone who dies in his sleep knows it?

Would you rather die in your sleep - perhaps perceiving what is happening as a dream - rather than surounded by family making farewells?

Why?

I am under study for a sleep disorder.

I will write more about the details in my next Zone Note next week (if you don't receive my Zone Notes, weekly short pieces, and would like to, email me at blayneyc@earthlink.net and I'll be glad to send them to you). In the meantime...

I might not be bothering with this had I not fallen asleep in my pickup last summer in Vermont and met an oak tree that finished off my truck and, had it not been the first truck in which Ford put an airbag, would likely have finished me as well. It wasn't the first time I have nodded off at an inopportune moment - when I was a parish priest I remember, more than once, snapping my head up as I realized I had fallen asleep as some poor soul was pouring out his heart about his woes - but this one had consequences even I could not ignore.

I tell my contemporaries that I often sleep only 5-6 hours a night and their reaction is, So, who sleeps more at our age?

During the sleep test I apparently slept several times when I thought I was still awake.

I have long wondered about the line between the waking and sleeping worlds. The people running the test asked me each time I had fallen asleep if I had dreamed. I was never sure whether my mind was making scenarios in some conscious way, or I was dreaming. And what are we to make of the dream world? Freud and Jung believed our dreams were of great significance in unpacking what is going on in our unconscious. That, of course, assumes you believe there is such a thing as the unconscious.

I do.

But a lot of controversy now surrounds these matters. My senior thesis in seminary was about the possibility of making conversation about God that had meaning. It tried to address the logical positivists who then held sway, and who said language that could not be proved has no meaning. The positivists' power over philosophy waned in the past many decades, but now there is a militant group taking aim at all religion as not only about nothing but illusion, but as doing great harm to human beings.

No doubt this is a response to our scary conflict with the Islamic world. And with the weird phenomenon of our president and his companions talking as if they believed the Bible is literally true.

We could do worse than to consider this business of sleeping and waking. Is our experience while sleeping - clearly of a different order than our waking experience - about something worth our attention? Or is it fluff, off-stage ephemera that merely distracts us from reality?

Next week I meet with the neurologist who runs the sleep study. He will interpret the data they collected from attaching sensors to every inch of my body as I slept. But what can he tell me about what I experience when I sleep? Try to sleep, he said to me each time he put me in the sleep room. Then he looked sheepish and said, Whatever that means.

I understand the attraction of positivism, the longing for certainty. But I think reality doesn't provide that comfort. I think sleeping and dreaming provide an opening into reality we don't yet know how to measure or even describe.

Labels: What's Real?