He's Back!

I am a partisan Democrat.

That means that, all things being equal - which they never are - I will vote for the Democrat.

I think that marks me as a creature of a former era. Maybe you could cast me as a Roosevelt Democrat. I view FDR as the president who basically saved this nation from something we will never know. That is, had Hoover been reelected and the Great Depression allowed to take whatever course it might have taken without the New Deal (and who knows whether Hoover would have gone on in a second term as he did in his first?), this country would today likely be in a very different - and much worse - place than it is today.

Roosevelt saved the capitalist sysem, if that's what we have.

That isn't the only reason I am a Democrat. I associate the Democratic Party with caring for those who are left behind. Those who, for all sorts of reasons, never make it into the economic and social mainstream.

So the racial revolution, the women's movement, gay rights, immigrants, are all issues the Democrats are tuned to.

While, historically, the Republican Party has allied itself with those who run things, the wealthy and the powerful. I think it is important that there be a party that does that, because the prosperity of the nation depends on encouraging entrepreneurs who innovate and create wealth.

In general, because of their natural desire and ability to compete, those whom the Republican Party supports needs less help. But the laws must never become too unbalanced in either direction.

But do these historic identities of the two major parties still hold?

Can one regard Hilary Clinton or John Kerry - or maybe even Barak Obama - as true champions of those who are less equipped for the economic battle?

Is it even realistic to think that national politics - that requires candidates to cozy up to the corporations and the super rich for money to run - could provide a true lobby for those on the opposite end?

If not, if it is simply inevitable that the larger than ever gap between rich and poor, and between what those who run companies and those who work for them earn, will continue to grow, then this country is going to become a different sort of place than it has historically been. More like the banana republics we have scorned.

And the upheavel will require some realignment of the political process that I can't get my head around just yet.

In the meantime I call myself a Democrat, frustrated, nostalgic and holding.

Memory and wish make odd bed fellows.

Since I have been retired these past 10 years I have watched the stock market see saw, usually in synch with my blood pressure and spirits.

Most of what sustains me is invested.

My wish is that the markets would chug along at least as long I do. I have no wish to become a tycoon. But, as a child of a child of the depression, I have a devout wish that my money hold out as long as I do.

And I would rather not focus on it.

But when we have a day like today, when the Chinese stock market led all the others around the world down a scary slippery slope, I notice.

Not that this is anything new. I find that I cannot hold in my memory the times the markets have done what they did today. If I were to count them I suspect there have been dozens of such days in my adult lifetime.

Luckily, I have never thought I understood even remotely what drives the markets, or what makes a good investment. So I have had a financial advisor whom I have asked to invest me in diverse issues, not to beat the market but to go along with as few bumps as possible. I don't pull out when we have days like this, but if I followed my thumping heart that is exactly what I would do.

I never really understood the litany/mantra we used to recite in church at the end of a sung canticle or psalm: As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. World without end. Amen. (That Amen means, uh huh, that's right, that's the way it is.)

Well, we've been here before. Maybe this time the sky will fall. It has to some day. The mantra isn't referring, I don't think, to this planet, but to the whole shebang. But just in case today isn't the day the whole thing goes under, I think I'm going to take a long walk and look at the ocean.

My wife's war with the city of San Diego over the 200 year old evergreen across the street has been lost.

A couple of weeks ago some company - no one seems to know who they were or who hired them - came to trim the tree. They did it badly. A day later a limb they must have loosened fell and struck a wire and then a transformer causing an explosion that knocked out the power in most of our neighborhood. A couple of days later some more legitimate seeming guys arrived and began setting up their equipment to begin bringing the tree down.

Lacey first had at those poor guys and they did their throw-up-your-hands routine that says, "Hey, Lady, I just work here." So she called a local political acitivist to ask if there might be anything she could do. The woman told her to ask the tree guys if they had a such-and-so permit and, if not, to call the police.

She did that and the tree guys, saying she wasn't the first person to complain, said they weren't going to cut the tree down and retreated with their truck and all their equipment.

Lacey began her assault on the various city departments, finally ending up with the city forester.

For a couple of days it seemed that the tree might be saved.

But then the city forester called her, said he had been out to look and the tree was too badly damaged and threatened the electric and telephone wires. He lamented with Lacey over the death of a creature that has been here longer than anyone or anything else, except perhaps the La Jolla Indians.

He promises a mature tree will be put in its place. That means in a couple of hundred years it may reach the impressive stature of the one just cut down.

I'll be on the lookout.

What a funny issue.

More than anything, the issue of homosexuality is what has Anglican Christians around the world in an uproar. Not to mention the American electorate.

The seminary where I was trained for ordained priesthood - The Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts - has consistently, for 40 years, supported first the dignity and right of gay lay people to take a full role in the life of the church, then championed the ordination of women, then of gay men and women to be priests and deacons. And when the matter of gay marriage became an issue, the seminary was an early and passionate advocate.

I personally have evolved over the years on the issue. I either have no homosexuality in me or, more likely, have never been able to look at the issue without fear of what it might reveal - to me- about my own sexuality. Oddly, despite 5 years of boys boarding schools, 4 years of residential college and 3 years of seminary, I never knowingly was faced with the issue until I was 30 years old. In fact, as I look back, each of those places had its share - probably more than its share - of gay men. But I was, as I was about so many things, unaware.

A man whom I admired and who was a significant authority figure in my life and the church made a pass at me at a clergy conference. He was drunk and I was shocked. And angry. We never repaired our relationship.

But now I think I ought to thank him for finally waking me up to an issue that has everything to do with how we humans respect and treat each other. Over the next many years I discovered that a significant number of my clergy colleagues - many those to whom I looked for leadership - were homosexual. In those days they were closeted.

My ideas about all this have changed as I have come to know so many gay people whom I now view much the same way I do left-handed people. They come at some of the basic everyday issues from a different angle than I do.

As I have come to feel more comfortable about my own sexuality - which is as much a factor of aging and having it become a much less bodily urgent matter - it has seemed clearer that homosexuality is not only not a threat to the well-being of human community, but often a creative blessing. People who are shunned by culture often develop creative ways to sustain their wish to be included.

I was surprised at first when the move for gay marriage began. So many of my gay friends shunned most of what they saw as bourgeoise artifacts. But then i met more people who wanted - as I do - to have whatever it is we mean when we talk about a normal life.

And surely, once one has gotten beyond one's own anxiety about sexual identity, it might be a welcome thing that gay people want to be like the rest of us.

Enough heterosexual couples still have babies to keep us going. And many same-sex couples are turning out to be good parents to adoptive and in-vitro children.

But coming to this position has bee a process. And it may take time for the culture at large. But it will be.

Who knows if you can find the thread I see in this entry? If not, chalk it up to a mind that works like a kaleidoscope.

The Big Chiefs of the Anglican Church worldwide have just finished a pow wow in Tanzania. It is the first meeting of these prelates from vitrually every corner of the globe since the American Episcopal Church elected a woman as its head.

The twin issues of the ordination of women as priests and bishops, and of the place of gay men and women in the church - particularly in ordianed leadership - have been vexing the communion for many years. After decades of bragging that we understand our bonds to be more powerful than our cultural, political, ecclesiastical or theological differences, it now looks as if the disagreements may have become too deep to stay married.

They worked out a sort of agreement that we should all stand down for the 40 days of Lent, a traditional time for Christians to fast, pray and reconsider.

But it looks like a stalling tactic. Because it calls for the American church to stop blessing same sex unions and ordaining gay people as bishops, and this by September of this year or risk being expelled from the communion. And some of the prelates, notably some from Africa, refused to take communion with the woman head of the American church.

So the moment comes to face the music. I have said to my children that I hope they never have to get divorced. I did and it was perhaps the most painful thing I have ever gone through. But I am glad there is such a thing as divorce so one does not have the spend the rest of his or her life in a poisonous relationship.

I think that's where we are in the life of th Anglican Communion. I have loved being a part of a worldwide body of such breathtaking diversity. But if the price of remaining in the relationship is abandoning the move toward a more just and embracing life - including women and gay people in leadership - the price is too high.

Hilary Clinton has drawn herself a line in the sand. After being asked countless times to admit that her vote to authorize force - the vote that President Bush used to justify invading Iraq - was a mistake, she finally said that if one's test for a candidate for president rests on her saying that, one shoudl look to a different candidate.

Both her stubborn refusal to say that her vote was a mistake which she regrets, and the militant way in which she has thrown down the gauntlet, leads me to think this is the dividing moment.

I admire Hilary Clinton. I supported her husband even though i didn't like his abandoning part of the historical Democratic agenda in signing the Welfare Reform Act. But her stand on her vote on the use of force, and the way she has posed the matter, make me want to search for a different candidate.

I have looked forward to our electing a woman. Hilary Clinton is not that woman.

Yesterday I sent an email to my doctor - who has also been my friend since we were 15 years old - telling him I guess it is time for me to come in for my periodic visit in which he has his way with me. Poking, blood letting, listening, questioning, all to try to discover any potentially lethal issues that may be lurking.

In my email I wrote that my ambivalence about doing this grows as I age.

I am in the middle of my 66th year. I think these bodies were designed by evolution to go around 40 years - long enough to mature, mate and launch offspring. We have, cleverly, nearly doubled the time.

But at some cost. Every day my body signals me that it must work harder just to keep going; it can't stay even. I am pretty vigorous, playing singles tennis, hiking to and from my writing station every day, ocean swimming. But I wouldn't even have mentioned those things 30 years ago.

In other words, entropy is at work in me

Some time ago I promised myself that when whatever process is going to usher me from this existence gets underway, I will not interfere. No doubt there are caveats about that promise. But that is how I would like to have it.

My doctor, who went to heroic and finally unsuccessful ends to keep his wife alive after she was diagnosed with acute leukemia, finds my attitude nihilistic. But he is my friend and he respects my views.

So why am I going to submit once again to the blood letting and humiliating probing of private orifices?

Because I am inconsistent and unable to maintain my best intentions.

After studying 21 industrialized nations, the U.N. concluded that Dutch children were the most happy, and British and American children the least.

Harvard University named historian Drew Gilpin Faust as its first female president. Britney Spears shaved her head.

Harper’s Weekly

I suppose, had I been a person of greater
intellectual rigor and moral clarity
I might have made of myself
a Luddite, a pacifist, celibate, vegetarian or embraced any number of other
sacred strategies for navigating this morass with
greater purity

but always some other aspect emerged making purity pitiful
impossible
and happiness a greased pig

Friday I slowed on my drive to town to listen to a story in which
a composer
explained the music we were hearing that sounded at first like
high-pitched squeals and clicks
Seems his father had the very first IBM computer (did he call it
an IBM 114?), a cabin sized collection of tubes and flashing lights
in Antarctica

I’m sure he said Antarctica

I never got what he was doing with that primitive version of the
miniaturized miracle
on which I am making this piece
but what finally caused me to pull off the road to
concentrate
was his description of the funeral they held for this
IBM computer
when it had exhausted its purpose

The composition we were hearing was the
dirge
the composer had written for the occasion, made mostly
of sounds
he had recorded that were
produced by the machine as it went about its work which the
composer’s father
said would have been impossible without the
awesome effort
of the machine.

He spoke with passion about his father’s love for
the machine
and the solemnity with which they revered and thanked it as it was
disassembled

A friend – about whom I have told you before – believes trees
have souls
I have never taken to the notion
of souls
of any sort
maybe because it suggests there is some invisible essence to us apart from
the rest of us

but that the whole lot – trees, computers, shoes, spiders, feces - has
inviolable integrity
whether prepared in a lab, in my gut, in a womb, the sea, a sweat shop or
a cement mixer
once assembled
stakes its own claim to a piece of reality
a unique arrangement of matter, energy added to this as yet
unpacked miracle
of being

now that strikes me as worthy - once I finish this doughnut - of
fierce focus for
40 days.

In a review in the Atlantic Monthly of a new book, "I'd Rather Eat Chocolate; Learning to Love My Low Libido," the reviewer addresses a brand new kind of women's liberation movement.

I was nearly through college when the birth control pill became widely available. My attitude towards sex - typical in many ways of young males born before the Baby Boomers - was, fascinated, eager and scared. A good friend's girlfriend got pregnant our sophomore year and, as was the way then, they got married. I spent a fair amount of time in their pitiful slum apartment. He got a job and went to school at night. She took care of the baby and made a little money typing his friends' term papers. It looked like purgatory to me, and I understood the reason they were in this predicament was sex.

By the time the pill had revolutionized sex - made it possible for late adolescents to do what their bodies were bursting to do - I was not only married, but had a child and a job that put me and my family under public scrutiny.

I was barely able to keep under wraps what a storm all this stirred up in me. In fact, though I stayed mostly within the required bounds, my sexual energy and hunger was oozing from my pores and there were plenty of bored women who were willing to walk close to the line with me.

And while it would be far too simple to say that was the reason I got divorced in my mid-30s, it was certainly a contributing factor. And, being legally single for a spell, I finally had a semblance of the adolesence I was too afraid to have when it was appropriate.

It was too chaotic for me and for my now 3 children and a church full of Yankees who, though as fascinated by the sexual and gender revolution as I, did not consider their pastor the best person to lead them through it.

I fell in love and married again, this time to a woman who was enough younger than I to have lived through the sexual revolution, and who was patient with my sexual illiteracy, and not with my interest in straying.

Now - 30 years later - that I am old I can watch all this with dispassionate fascination.

What "I'd Rather Eat Chocolate..." is about is what I suspect will be the next chapter in the women's movement and perhaps across gender lines. Given the choice between an evening of good sex or an evening with chocolates and a DVD, she would choose the latter.

This revolution goes a big step beyond sexual liberation. She is saying a woman needs to be free to admit - to herself and to the men in her life - that she is not necessarily eager for sex often and doesn't regard it as her duty to provide it for him. What she provides for is a life in which sex - like exercise, movies, dining out, exchanging email - takes its place alongside a lot of other things in one's life, but does not define life.

She assumes this is not true for men, that we are saturated with testosterone until we draw our last breath.

I can't speak for all men, but a lot of how she describes her feelings about sex works for me. There is ample evidence that my testosterone level is a fraction of what it was 30 years ago, and by and large, that is a relief. I enhoy my marriage more than I ever have, because, without that tension constantly in play, we are able to be much more honest with each other about how we would like to spend an evening.

The pleasure I find in ogling beautiful women is no less - maybe more now that I am clear it is about ogling - than ever. And fantasy is still great fun.

But the thought of an affair exhausts me. And I know there is simply not enough time left for me to ever connect with another woman with the depth these decades with my wife have made possible. And that maters more to me than even great sex. Of which I am no longer capable, except in my head.

It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our
way. -Rollo May, psychologist (1909-1994)

Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet. Roger Miller, musician (1936-1992)

I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as a tree…[including this one]. apologies to Joyce Kilmer

***

This morning I sent off a scrape of DNA from the inside of my cheek to an outfit in Canada, hoping to discover my ancestors before I become one.

The rain came – as ordered in Camelot – in the pre-dawn, stopping
just soon enough to let Cosmos and me stay dry on our walk
but not too soon to have eclipsed the
rainbow’s remnant that hung over the horizon
beyond which lies
Hawaii

Last week when we returned from our morning walk
the tree
across the street was under attack – the huge pine tree that must be more than 100 years old – older not only than any of us who now
live around it
but than any of the buildings or the par 3 golf course it now
borders, or the telephone and electric wires it stands accused
and convicted
of threatening

I have wondered why we haven’t taken to
the streets
as we did when Viet Nam did to us a generation ago what
Iraq is doing to us now
I speak, of course, as a man nearly two generations older, when there
is no longer a draft

but still…

remember the sycamore trees in Cambridge bordering the
banks of the Charles River along Memorial Drive?
that sometime in the early 60s – oh there they are again,
those 60s – the city proposed to cut down to make way for
widening Memorial Drive

and the people rose up, even chaining themselves to those
noble old beauties
and one of those rabble rousers rattling her chain, daring
anyone to touch her adopted tree
is the woman who has been rattling my chain these past
many decades

and who didn’t merely cluck her tongue last week when she saw the men in
hard hats and cherry pickers across the street
about to have their way with that ancient arbor that harbors the migrant
night herons

she has twice intimidated them into picking up their
orange cones and abandoning the job
while she harasses the city

as you cross the river on Memorial Bridge into Cambridge you are
struck first
by the beautiful old shade trees that line Memorial Drive and then by
the terrible traffic that crowds that busy boulevard
and you will wonder why they never widened the road

our Decider recently returned from leading a trade mission to
Viet Nam
where, unlike many of his generation, he had
never been before.

Finally, last night I had a chance to watch and listen to Barak Obama as he was interviewed on 60 Minutes.

I liked him. He's smart, attractive, has a sense of humor about himself, a wife who is a grown up and clearly an equal partner in their marriage.

What sort of president he might make remains unknown. His style of presenting himself appeals to me which makes me wonder if he will appeal to enough voters to be able to be elected. I felt some sadness watching this decent man who has already made more of his life than he likely ever imagined. And now can't help but be excited to imagine how far he may yet go.

I felt sadness for him, for all that lies ahead for him and his wife and two little girls. The pressures to knuckle under to money and power. The terrible things - whether lies or not - that will be whispered, then shouted about him. Already the Australian Prime Minister - who, like Tony Blair, has thrown in his lot with Bush's efforts to tame the Islamic world - has said that Osama is no doubt praying that Obama will get elected. That rhyme and alliteration will be to juicy for his opponents to pass up.

And sadness for me. So many things about this young man remind me of John Kennedy as he started out on his quest for the presidency. Knowing what I know now, having lived through the past half century, being 66 years old, having endured my own share of knocks, I know I can never again lose my heart to a public figure, no matter how compelling.

Watching and listening to Obama last night, I did have one very strong sense; that he would not have embraked on the Iraq adventure, and he would not now be looking for ways to take military action against Iran.

That alone would be enough for me to support him.

What will it be like when Hilary Clinton's minions - seeing their power and wealth on the line - begin to work him over? When the rumors about his extra-marital affairs, his Islamic name, perhaps his wife's college boyfriend who is now in prison, or subtle questions about whether he really is the father of both those little girls?

And should he somehow, miraculously, gain the nomination, imagine the Karl Rove wannabes waiting in the wings. Guiliani nor McCain strike me as the sort who would be reticent about destroying the man if that would win them the election.

I really can't conjure up what he will face.

But this is what we now have. And I am grateful - even if he doesn't fully understand what he is getting himself into - that a smart young man like Barak Obama will make a run for it.

God love him.

This morning my wife and I were listening to a report on NPR about Los Angeles' new attempts to curb gang violence.

It all sounded eerily like the reports of how the Bush administration is trying to stop the blood letting in Iraq.

With superior armament.

My wife said, "Those Latino and Asian gangs have a lot of energy. If LA was smart they would sit down with them and talk about how that energy and courage might be used for their and the city's benefit. Because going after them with weapons is only going to make things worse."

One can make the case that superior armament resolved the violence that The Axis Powers and Japan used to try to extend their control over most of the world. WWII has been called The Good War because we all see it now as Bush has tried to portray his war on terrorism, as a battle of the forces of light against the forces of darkness.

Without arguing that point, nor going back to what the Treaty of Versailles did to Germany after WWI, nor how our challenge to Japan for control of Asian trade, one can say that time has moved on. And if superior force ever was the means to resolve political difference, it no longer is.

No longer, not since the collpase of the Soviet Union, do we have a world in which differences among nations is the heart of the matter. And most of the political conflicts since WWII, between and within nations, have been either won or stalemated more by martial arts than by intimidating power.

In martial arts one learns to use the opponent's strength to one's own advantage. As soon as he makes an aggressive move, one must retreat and use that move to unbalance him.

Gandhi in India, Martin Luther King in our country, Ho Chi Minh in Viet Nam, The IRA in Ireland, the insurgents in Iraq, all understood the new situation and the new tactics.

It may be that we inadvertantly ushered in this new reality when we dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to defeat Japan without having to invade. Once the world understood there was a weapon which, if used wholesale, could well end human tenure on the globe, all out war became a more dicey affair. That no country - despite nuclear proliferation - has used a nuclear weapon since, is not a tribute to higher human morality, but to an understanding of what is at stake.

Everything.

Frustrating for a nation that has spent the past 100 years building its place in the world until now she has no military nor commerical rival. No wonder the neo-cons saw this moment as the opportunity to cement American hegemony.

But the rest of the world has learned martial arts.

We find talking with Iraq, N. Korea, Iran, Syria humiliating. Why should we, so clearly superior, have to sit at the table with them, as if they were our equals?

Because they are. And now they have proved it.

The choices are down to just two: use all our power to annhilate anyone who opposes us; or sit down and talk about how to accomodate our mutual interests and our differences.

Which will prevail; humbling common sense, or human hubris?

This morning as I walked by the newsstand there in the right hand column was the headline the world has ben dreading for 60 years.

Israel Warns of Another Holocaust If Iran Is Not Stopped From Acquiring Nuclear Bomb

I want so badly to recite the ways in which we, the United States, has helped to bring us to this point. My reluctance to do that is not fed by fear of being called a Blame-America- First person, but by the fact that we are now here - this is the reality - and if we are to keep from the end-of-civilization conflagration that has haunted our imagination, we are going to have to come up with something more inventive than blame.

The first question must be about Israel's motives for stirring this fear, and what she hopes may result from doing it.

The first possibility that occurs to me is that Israel is preparing the world for launching a preemptive strike - perhaps nuclear - against Iran's nuclear program. She did the same thing, with notable success, against Iraq's nuclear facilities all those years ago. And while the world - absent the United States - condemned the attack, it acheived its aim.

But from what we are told about Iran's facilities today, it looks as if it might be far more difficult, perhaps impossible, to do the same thing again. One American general was quoted as saying he thought it would take over 400 perfectly aimed raids to do in Iran's nuclear program. And some of them are buried so deep that only a tactical nuclear weapon would be strong enough to reach them.

The other - even more sobering to me - possibility is that Israe believes she can frighten and goad the United States into bombing Iran. And she knows that with Bush's dwindling popularity and power the time is growing short.

This president, perhaps more than any other, has shown his willingness, again and again, to ignore not only what we can make of the popular will, but even of those who have been elected to share constituional authority with him.

Perhaps a president who was elected by another branch of government - the Supreme Court - feels this is a sign (from God?) that his mandate is not bounded by the usual restraints.

Today's headline made my skin crawl. Every Armageddon movie has used just this setting as its premise.

The one tiny ray of hope comes from my sense that Iran has designed things to go as they have. Depending on who you believe, Iran is no less than 3 and maybe as many as 10 years away from being able to fire a nuclear weapon into Israel. So in the meantime the threat is her strongest weapon.

If one concludes that it is not feasible, militarily or politically, to destroy Iran's weapons - and I hope that is what we will conclude - then what are the other options?

Diplomacy. Talking. Dealing.

This administration hates this option. This president thinks it makes him look weak and indecisive. And he has surrounded himself with people who believe we are in a narrow window of time in which our nation can use its unparalleled strength to shape a world in which we can be preeminent far into the future.

What, one wonders, would it take to persuade them that it doesn't work - that overwhelming force turns out to be of limited use when the issues before the world are not longer nation against nation? Or that we tried and failed and the time has run out?

I have not been supportive of talk of impeachment. I think we have had too much; the Clinton impeachment nearly persuaded me we need a new constitution. But if Bush continues to push his military agenda, the time has come for congress to step in. Now the survival of our species is on the line.

Evensong.

President Bush staged an impromptu visit to the Sterling Family Restaurant in Peoria, Illinois, but few of the diners wanted to talk to him. "Sorry to interrupt you," said Bush. "How's the service?"

Britain's top female paraglider was mauled by eagles. "Eagles," said a
colleague, "are the sharks of the air." Harper’s Weekly

"Something that is forgotten in all of this is people like to smoke. It's enjoyable and there's not an alternative product."
- David Adelman, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, on tobacco companies' success on Wall Street.

******

Sunday afternoon, as most of this country and a not inconsiderable portion of the rest of the world was worshipping at the shrine of NFL’s Super Bowl, a handful of us stole into a small darkened chapel where we intoned Evensong, a sublime remnant of medieval monastic piety.

This morning on my walk up the hill to my writing station a breeze brought a scent from some flower I couldn’t identify but so familiar that it evoked memories in me that hadn’t stirred for years.

I have been following the increasingly shrill attacks on the God hypothesis by Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. We seem to be in one of our periodic paroxysms about this ancient conundrum.

Whether, had the terrorists who guided those planes into buildings been named Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols rather than Mohammed, we would be having this debate, who can say?

But here we are, and as it always has, the issue has metastasized. Not only are our leaders – having themselves adopted primitive religious expression,
warning that we are engaged in a monumental battle of civilizations, but the weeklies carry cover stories about whether believing in God can be sustained in the light of 21st century science.

I am a member of a Starbucks Salon where the question of God is at the heart of our conversation. Along with the inevitable disastrous end of trying to control the world.

The sense of wholeness I experience from being immersed in Evensong -quite apart from whether one believes in God - makes me wonder whether, like the redolent flower, it may be wholly attributed to the architecture of one’s brain. Or whether it matters.

I am sympathetic with Dawkins and Harris wanting to demolish the strident claims people make about their claim on divine certainty. Islamic, Christian, Jewish, the claim to know God and God’s will is not simply arrogant, but intellectually untenable.

If it is possible to isolate the issue in western civilization that has most puzzled, then irritated Islam, Asia, it may be the emergence of the strident ego. If our highest achievement has been to prize each person as valuable and unique, with indelible dignity, the cost has been high, leaving us each in the center, the place once reserved for God. As if the well-being of the universe requires my creative powers. Forever.

Somehow the esthetics and medieval sensibility of austere monastic worship work like alchemy on my consciousness, altering the insult of mortality on ego to wonder so spacious in cannot be contained.

Sunday evening, about half way through the second quarter of the Super Bowl, a handful of us repaired to St. Mary's Chapel on the campus of the the Bishop's School in La Jolla to sing Evensong.

The music director and a small group of professional singers from St. James Church do this once a month during the winter. They chose St. Mary's Chapel because of its size - it holds maybe 150 people - the excellent acoustics, and because it has the ambience of a medieval monastic chapel.

During my 30 years as a parish priest I did my part to make contact with people formed by the late 20th century. We introduced the new Prayer Book with its updated language, began using bibles recently translated into language more like contemporary usage, ordained women priests and bishops. Innovative liturgy that included pop music and vestments designed by hip designers.

I thought it was exciting. And necessary.

But once I was no longer responsible for a parish church I found I quickly reverted to archaic worship. And to no worship.

I have followed with interest and some sympathy the debate about the existence of God, especially the militant attacks on the god hypothesis by positivist scientists. I wrote my senior thesis in seminary - when the debate about God language was raging, especially among logical positivists - about whether it is possible to use language about God with any integrity, with any confidence that your language has a reference in which one may have confidence.

My conclusion was No. What I took that to mean is that it is not possible for religious people to persuade others either that God exists or that when they speak of God they are confident the understand what they are speaking about.

I still hold that view. And, with Paul Tillich, I believe God does not exist. Which means that there is no such entity, no being with an independent existence.

Now I also believe the notion of the ego, the separate self, is an illusion. And that one of the goals of religion is to provide enough confidence so the ego/self can be let go, surrendered to the mystical vision of the wholeness of everything.

When we intone the monastic office of Evensong, my willingness to release my death grip on life, on myself, on my prerogatives, goes deeper. A neurologist might be able to locate the place in my brain where electrical and chemical transactions put me into that posture.

The god so militantly rejected by Sam Harris is well let go. Harris himself has described sublime moments in which he has felt a mystical sense of being at one with everything. But, he objects, that proves nothing about the existence of God.

Quite so.

I know not everyone - maybe very few - share my response to these medieval forms. No doubt the existence of God and the hope of life after death - not to mention the competition for who, which religion, has it right - will continue to be the focus of western religion. Maybe until we annihilate each other.

For me, time every day to be quiet and wonder, and periodic visits to archaic forms, anachronistic in the digital age, sustains me until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes and the busy world is hushed and the fever of life is over.

For the past many months I have been in an online conversation with my high school classmates as we come up to our 50th anniversary.

But the conversation is not filled with nostalgia - this was a New England boarding school modeled on the British boarding school and there isn't a lot to be nostalgic about - but about political issues. None more contentious than global climate change. We have, for the sake of civility, used the term climate change rather than warming. And maybe rightly so since some of the scenarios I have heard suggest that the melting of the ice caps (warming) will, by adding significant amounts of fresh water to the ocean, cause the currents that have been keeping the northern coast of Europe temperate, to drop and change course, perhaps triggering a new ice age on that continent.

But the heart of the argument focuses on the twin issues of whether whatever change we might be experiencing is - looked at from the perspective of the long history of the planet - part of a normal cycle little affected by the greenhouse gases we have aded to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, and whether, whatever you believe, there is much we can do to make any difference.

Because, as those who arre opposed to making a concerted effort to curb carbon emissions point out, we are talking about a major disruption in the world economy. Before we set ourselves on such a drastic course, they believe we ought to have strong agreement among climate scientists that we are the cause of climate change and we can do something to change that before it is too late.

Although it seems irrefutable to me that our burning of fossil fuels has accelerated global warming, and that there likely will be dramatic changes in the way we live on the planet as a result, it is not so clear to me that we really can reverse that.

I came away from Al Gore's movie feeling more hope about that than I had going in. But Gore is a politician and, like preachers, he will never tell us the matter is lost.

I guess where I come down is on the side of the world's governments making the gigantic expensive effort. If it fails we will be no worse off than of we had not tried. And it could be that this effort might distract us from the ancient issues that have divided us. So we go extinct more gradually and gracefully than if we, in our peculiar species self-hatred, nuked ourselves into extinction.

My senior year in high school - 1959 - I took a course in geology. The next year, as a freshman in college, because I was afraid of trying something more strenuous to fulfill my science requirement, I took freshman geology. (It was called Rocks for Jocks). In neither course, if memory serves, was the theory of plate techtonics mentioned.

I now know the theory had been proposed centuries before, and was considerd likely by many, but it had not yet gained wide enough agreement to be included in basic geology textbooks.

Although no one I knew seriously proposed the biblical calendar for the age of the earth - 6000 years - there was as yet little understanding of how the planet had formed and changed over the centuries.

In yesterday's blog I suggested that American exceptionalism - the notion that our nation was specially anointed for rewriting history as God intended, accounts for much of how we get ourselves into messes like Iraq. Starting with the earliest Europeans to settle in New England, biblical language - a city set on a hill - began to be used for what virtually every president and wannabe president has described as our vocation in the world.

Nothing in our history supports such a picture of ourselves.

We have a checkered past in having slaughtered those who were here before us while we stole the land on which they lived. We invented reasons to drive the Mexicans out of the west and southwest, as we expanded across the continent.

Not that there is any particular reason not to have done all this since this is the way we humans behave.

But to make of it a vocation, a carrying out of God's sacred plan, is what has continued to feed our grandiose picture of the role we say we have been appointed to in the entire world.

In earlier days- and oddly with a renewed energy in our own days - scientists and religious alike rejected the discoveries of those who described the millions of years that went into the formation of the earth. They rejected them not because they didn't fit observable fact - they did far better than the biblically based understanding - but because they conflicted with what they thought they were meant to believe.

The same is true of what has been called the Manifest Destiny of the United States, the belief that we have a divine mandate in the world, a unique responsibility to bring the world to its senses.

If one were to consider the history of the United States with much the same method as geologists examine the physical history of our planet - looking at each layer in its time and at how subsequent layers were laid over the top until one reached the present - it would be quite impossible to sustain this fantasy that we have been the unique nation appointed to save the world.

But just as there are those who have steadfastly refused to look at evidence that contradicts what they feel they must believe about God, time, the earth and the universe, so there are those - seemingly a majority of us and of our elected leaders - who cling to this picture of our nation as savior of the world.

I fear it will be our undoing, and, if we are determined enough to try to preserve it, the undoing of our species.