Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Gay Bishops
I am old enough to remember when Gay meant happy or light-hearted.
And when the idea of homosexual bishops in the Episcopal Church would have sounded to me like having my eggs with ketchup.
Yes, I know a lot of people eat their eggs with ketchup, but in my family, growing up, such a thing was unheard of.
And that, largely, is what is at work in the gyrations the Episcopal House of Bishops is going through this week in New Orleans, as they respond to angry (and often hypocritical) cries from American and African and Latin American conservative Anglicans' demands that they close the door opened in the past few years to Gay clergy, bishops and lay people.
Putting aside the merits of the argument - which gets us into all the issues of what to make of the Bible, the nature of human sexuality, the nature of authority, and the purpose and mission of the church - the Episcopal Church has (courageously, in my view) affirmed both the reality of gay people at every level of life in the church, and regularized it.
Long after I was grown I learned that a surprising number of the clergy and bishops whom I had admired - and some I had not - were homosexual. Some were deeply closeted, some less so. I remember learning one respected and influential bishop of a major diocese had a male partner who attended diocesan events with him.
I was shocked at first.
Then a couple of colleagues who were gay explained to me the facts of gendered life. I was quite surprised. And impressed with their seriousness and compassion.
And chagrined at their having to hide one of the major facts of their lives.
It may be decades, if ever, before people from other cultures have the opportunity I did to reconsider their prejudices in a thoughtful setting, where the flames and fears of one's own uncertain sexuality are not at risk.
In the meantime I wonder if it is possible, or desireable, for the Episcopal Church to try to pretend that we have not come to an irreversible position on the matter.
And when the idea of homosexual bishops in the Episcopal Church would have sounded to me like having my eggs with ketchup.
Yes, I know a lot of people eat their eggs with ketchup, but in my family, growing up, such a thing was unheard of.
And that, largely, is what is at work in the gyrations the Episcopal House of Bishops is going through this week in New Orleans, as they respond to angry (and often hypocritical) cries from American and African and Latin American conservative Anglicans' demands that they close the door opened in the past few years to Gay clergy, bishops and lay people.
Putting aside the merits of the argument - which gets us into all the issues of what to make of the Bible, the nature of human sexuality, the nature of authority, and the purpose and mission of the church - the Episcopal Church has (courageously, in my view) affirmed both the reality of gay people at every level of life in the church, and regularized it.
Long after I was grown I learned that a surprising number of the clergy and bishops whom I had admired - and some I had not - were homosexual. Some were deeply closeted, some less so. I remember learning one respected and influential bishop of a major diocese had a male partner who attended diocesan events with him.
I was shocked at first.
Then a couple of colleagues who were gay explained to me the facts of gendered life. I was quite surprised. And impressed with their seriousness and compassion.
And chagrined at their having to hide one of the major facts of their lives.
It may be decades, if ever, before people from other cultures have the opportunity I did to reconsider their prejudices in a thoughtful setting, where the flames and fears of one's own uncertain sexuality are not at risk.
In the meantime I wonder if it is possible, or desireable, for the Episcopal Church to try to pretend that we have not come to an irreversible position on the matter.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Columbia Forum
It is an honor and an opportunity that having the UN headquarters in NYC provides to this country.
Must be a big nuisance for the NYPD.
Remember when Fidel Castro and his group cooked chickens in the fireplace of their hotel room while they were in the city for a meeting of the UN?
And what must have the conversation been like among the NYPD anti-terrorist warriors when the President of Iran (I am too lazy to stop and look up the complex spelling of his name) asked to visit Ground Zero?
Today he spoke at Columbia University.
Of course.
A great university in a country that wants the world to know that - short of inciting violence - we are willing to listen to even the most unlikely opinions. Especially from those who have a hand in shaping world events.
One of the proudest and most exciting moments of my tenure as a parish priest came when an aging English cleric took strenuous exception to some of what I had been saying in my sermons. Luckily for me he was not only meeting behind closed doors with my detractors (he was doing that, too), but he came to me to express his distress.
I listened to him and suggested our different views seemed to me to illustrate the poles of opinion on an issue important to large numbers of the faithful. I suggested we take our argument public, advertising and inviting the entire parish to come listen and to have their own innings.
To his everlasting credit, the English priest agreed and we had a series of lively, well attended meetings in which we acted out our version of the Lincoln- Douglas debates.
Likely few opinions were changed. But the outcome was a sense that the parish was a safe place for people to express their views and be heard.
If a great university cannot afford to provide a forum for someone seen by many as a potential enemy, then more Iraq adventures are inevitable.
So far, despite the bullying of the far right - with aid and comfort from the very highest levels of this administration - it is still quite American for a university to open its pulpit to unpopular ideas.
Must be a big nuisance for the NYPD.
Remember when Fidel Castro and his group cooked chickens in the fireplace of their hotel room while they were in the city for a meeting of the UN?
And what must have the conversation been like among the NYPD anti-terrorist warriors when the President of Iran (I am too lazy to stop and look up the complex spelling of his name) asked to visit Ground Zero?
Today he spoke at Columbia University.
Of course.
A great university in a country that wants the world to know that - short of inciting violence - we are willing to listen to even the most unlikely opinions. Especially from those who have a hand in shaping world events.
One of the proudest and most exciting moments of my tenure as a parish priest came when an aging English cleric took strenuous exception to some of what I had been saying in my sermons. Luckily for me he was not only meeting behind closed doors with my detractors (he was doing that, too), but he came to me to express his distress.
I listened to him and suggested our different views seemed to me to illustrate the poles of opinion on an issue important to large numbers of the faithful. I suggested we take our argument public, advertising and inviting the entire parish to come listen and to have their own innings.
To his everlasting credit, the English priest agreed and we had a series of lively, well attended meetings in which we acted out our version of the Lincoln- Douglas debates.
Likely few opinions were changed. But the outcome was a sense that the parish was a safe place for people to express their views and be heard.
If a great university cannot afford to provide a forum for someone seen by many as a potential enemy, then more Iraq adventures are inevitable.
So far, despite the bullying of the far right - with aid and comfort from the very highest levels of this administration - it is still quite American for a university to open its pulpit to unpopular ideas.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Instincts
This morning at the Brattleboro Farmer's Market - all the evidence you need that the 60s still holds sway in some places - I saw a woman walk by who sparked my imagination in ways so familiar and yet rare in the past couple of decades. She was perhaps in her late 50s, dressed in farm casual wool shirt and khakis, graying hair, and her rapid pace bounced her entire being as if she was barely subject to gravity.
I fell in love with her.
Which is to say I saw something in her, or I imagined something about her, that awakened something in me that I like very much. And I suppose - although this was unexamined in the moment - I imagined that she had the power in her to complete the incomplete parts of me.
She was handing out leaflets of some sort to the vendors and I swiveled in the center of the booths, watching her as if she was on a merry go round, as she walked hurriedly around the periphery, until she exited the market, hopped into her Prius ( Massachusetts plates; that took off a little of the luster of my fantasies) and drove away.
Fun.
What fun to have one's senses stirred like that on a blustery fall morning in Vermont. Especially fun now that aging has altered the experience from one of urgency to one more like experiencing a great and engaging piece of art.
Every day more I am married to my wife I am grateful for a long, deepening and rich relationship unlike anything I could have imagined when I was young. When we got married.
And now I feel free to enjoy the moments in which something much stronger than nostalgia, and less disruptive than an affair, reminds me of the pleasure of being fully human.
On a sort of unrelated subject, a pair of Huey helicopters just flew over at about 1000 feet, their second pass over our rural area in two days. I suspect the DEA also knows that Vermont has a strong strain of the 60s left in it, and they send their finest up here looking for the marijuana fields that are a staple of life here. May they have no more success than they have in shutting down the poppy fields in Afghanistan.
I fell in love with her.
Which is to say I saw something in her, or I imagined something about her, that awakened something in me that I like very much. And I suppose - although this was unexamined in the moment - I imagined that she had the power in her to complete the incomplete parts of me.
She was handing out leaflets of some sort to the vendors and I swiveled in the center of the booths, watching her as if she was on a merry go round, as she walked hurriedly around the periphery, until she exited the market, hopped into her Prius ( Massachusetts plates; that took off a little of the luster of my fantasies) and drove away.
Fun.
What fun to have one's senses stirred like that on a blustery fall morning in Vermont. Especially fun now that aging has altered the experience from one of urgency to one more like experiencing a great and engaging piece of art.
Every day more I am married to my wife I am grateful for a long, deepening and rich relationship unlike anything I could have imagined when I was young. When we got married.
And now I feel free to enjoy the moments in which something much stronger than nostalgia, and less disruptive than an affair, reminds me of the pleasure of being fully human.
On a sort of unrelated subject, a pair of Huey helicopters just flew over at about 1000 feet, their second pass over our rural area in two days. I suspect the DEA also knows that Vermont has a strong strain of the 60s left in it, and they send their finest up here looking for the marijuana fields that are a staple of life here. May they have no more success than they have in shutting down the poppy fields in Afghanistan.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Common Sense
While I suppose comming sense (is common sense an oxymoron; is sense so particular to an individual nervous system that it can never be common?) is seldom the governing dynamic in decision making, during the mind numbing testimony of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, and the frustrating attempts of the congress people and senators to question them without making any disastrous political faux pas, I have been harkening back to an experience I remember from Viet Nam days.
I have never doubted that the differences between our disastrous Viet Nam debacle and our Iraq debacle outweight their similarities. But in one respect they are precisely the same.
In Viet Nam, the warring sides, North and South Viet Nam (with the Viet Cong having something of a southern identity) would trade holding strategic pieces of land and their fortunes waxed and waned.
When the North held a village they would try to persuade the people that they were fighting for their interests. And when the South drove them back, they would use their suasion to persuade the people they were truly fighting for their best interests.
As our presence became more pervasive, the South Viet Namese troops were often accompanied by American troops as they entered a town. Big white and black Americans standing out among those small Asians.
Now, how hard do you suppose it was for the South Vietnamese soldiers to make their case with the big armored Americans standing alongside them?
Imagine living in a town in Maryland on the border of the Mason Dixon Line during the American civil war. Northern and southern troops traded control of the town in the course of the war, each time explaining to the town's people why their side would be a better choice. But after a while, the South, needing greater strength, accepted the help of China, so when they next occupied your town, there was a brigade of Chinese troops with them.
We Americans - hooked as we are on the notion of American exceptionalism, of our essential goodness - assume that when people see us coming, they know we are there to help and make their live better.
Perhaps there was truth to that in France and Italy duirng WWII.
The world not only no longer - if they ever did - believes that, but the world no longer works as it did during the days of mighty nations warring against one another.
There is simply no way - no matter how just we may think our cause - we Americans can prevail in a struggle between ethnic groups of another culture.
I have never doubted that the differences between our disastrous Viet Nam debacle and our Iraq debacle outweight their similarities. But in one respect they are precisely the same.
In Viet Nam, the warring sides, North and South Viet Nam (with the Viet Cong having something of a southern identity) would trade holding strategic pieces of land and their fortunes waxed and waned.
When the North held a village they would try to persuade the people that they were fighting for their interests. And when the South drove them back, they would use their suasion to persuade the people they were truly fighting for their best interests.
As our presence became more pervasive, the South Viet Namese troops were often accompanied by American troops as they entered a town. Big white and black Americans standing out among those small Asians.
Now, how hard do you suppose it was for the South Vietnamese soldiers to make their case with the big armored Americans standing alongside them?
Imagine living in a town in Maryland on the border of the Mason Dixon Line during the American civil war. Northern and southern troops traded control of the town in the course of the war, each time explaining to the town's people why their side would be a better choice. But after a while, the South, needing greater strength, accepted the help of China, so when they next occupied your town, there was a brigade of Chinese troops with them.
We Americans - hooked as we are on the notion of American exceptionalism, of our essential goodness - assume that when people see us coming, they know we are there to help and make their live better.
Perhaps there was truth to that in France and Italy duirng WWII.
The world not only no longer - if they ever did - believes that, but the world no longer works as it did during the days of mighty nations warring against one another.
There is simply no way - no matter how just we may think our cause - we Americans can prevail in a struggle between ethnic groups of another culture.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Clarence Thomas
When Georeg H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court I was equal parts bemused and angry.
Bemused because I still believe Bush - sore about having his previous nominee (whose name I have forgotten) turned down by the Senate (or did the nominee withdraw?) - nominated Thomas ro put a sharp stick in the eye of liberal America.
"You want a black Justice? I'll give you a black Justice."
And angry because we got Clarence Thomas, maybe more right wing than Scalia. And with all the baggage - pretty blond wife, member of a conservative Episcopal parish, opponent of quotas - of the old white establishment.
During the hearings on his nomination his body language and his entire demeanor, smoked with an inner anger that was clearly of longer standing than the trashing he felt he was getting in the senate hearings.
Once he was on the court his behavoir continued to have a scary rage to it. During oral arguments he virtually never spoke. Reports from the supposedly secret conference sessions with the other justices, in which they discussed cases and schedules, said he also was mostly silent. The few times he did speak, or when pieces were written about him, what came through was an abiding anger at what he felt was the condescending attitude people had towards him.
The reason he apparently opposes affirmitive action - despite, or perhaps because he himself was on the receiving end of it - is because it leaves the recipient with lingering doubt about whether he would have risen as high as he has without special treatment.
I have thought about this a lot. I still hate that Justice Thomas is on the Court. But I think I have greater compassion for the dilemma that he lives with.
I am in the middle of the novel, New England White, by Stephen L. Carter, the (black) law professor at Yale. I didn't read his first book, The Emperor of Ocean Park, but I knew it was about black Americans who rise to a place of great power and wealth in this country. Fascinated by reviews of his new book, I bought it.
If you wonder what it may feel like to be black and successful, I commend this book.
It is a fun mystery, mediocre writing (maybe a little sour grapes from me here; Carter is a full time law professor and has written two successful, fat novels, while in retirement I have managed two scrawny books that are looking to break 1500 sales), that could have been written by Clarence Thomas.
The book is filled with insider knowledge about the American power elite, which I always find fascinating, but even more, the perspective of this book, the voice of the narrator, never strays from the anger being black in America spawns. One might assume that rising to the highest places would erase the slights and subtle (and not so subtle) slurs we all know daily life brings to black Americans.
But that anger is at the heart of this book. It is a novel, but the facts of Stephen Carter's life - not unlike Clarence Thomas' - push through every page.
Read it.
Bemused because I still believe Bush - sore about having his previous nominee (whose name I have forgotten) turned down by the Senate (or did the nominee withdraw?) - nominated Thomas ro put a sharp stick in the eye of liberal America.
"You want a black Justice? I'll give you a black Justice."
And angry because we got Clarence Thomas, maybe more right wing than Scalia. And with all the baggage - pretty blond wife, member of a conservative Episcopal parish, opponent of quotas - of the old white establishment.
During the hearings on his nomination his body language and his entire demeanor, smoked with an inner anger that was clearly of longer standing than the trashing he felt he was getting in the senate hearings.
Once he was on the court his behavoir continued to have a scary rage to it. During oral arguments he virtually never spoke. Reports from the supposedly secret conference sessions with the other justices, in which they discussed cases and schedules, said he also was mostly silent. The few times he did speak, or when pieces were written about him, what came through was an abiding anger at what he felt was the condescending attitude people had towards him.
The reason he apparently opposes affirmitive action - despite, or perhaps because he himself was on the receiving end of it - is because it leaves the recipient with lingering doubt about whether he would have risen as high as he has without special treatment.
I have thought about this a lot. I still hate that Justice Thomas is on the Court. But I think I have greater compassion for the dilemma that he lives with.
I am in the middle of the novel, New England White, by Stephen L. Carter, the (black) law professor at Yale. I didn't read his first book, The Emperor of Ocean Park, but I knew it was about black Americans who rise to a place of great power and wealth in this country. Fascinated by reviews of his new book, I bought it.
If you wonder what it may feel like to be black and successful, I commend this book.
It is a fun mystery, mediocre writing (maybe a little sour grapes from me here; Carter is a full time law professor and has written two successful, fat novels, while in retirement I have managed two scrawny books that are looking to break 1500 sales), that could have been written by Clarence Thomas.
The book is filled with insider knowledge about the American power elite, which I always find fascinating, but even more, the perspective of this book, the voice of the narrator, never strays from the anger being black in America spawns. One might assume that rising to the highest places would erase the slights and subtle (and not so subtle) slurs we all know daily life brings to black Americans.
But that anger is at the heart of this book. It is a novel, but the facts of Stephen Carter's life - not unlike Clarence Thomas' - push through every page.
Read it.
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Wasps
After a nearly perfect balance of sun and rain for the first two months of summer, providing perhaps the most lush growing season in memory, Vermont has dried up. It's still green here, as it always is, but we wonder what the recent lack of rain will mean for fall foliage. Opinions seem evenly divided between drought causing a spectcular array of colors as the life drains from the leaves suddenly, or a muted display.
I have been watering everything, hoping to keep them going until Lacey returns from a week of work in California. She spends several hours a day tending the gardens when she is here, and leaves threatening notes for me about what I am to do while she is away. I am terrified of everything wilting on my watch. And this being the time when things begin to slow down and prepare fo a long winter's sleep, even rain doesn't stop things from beginning to look weary. I will get defensive when Lacey makes her rounds next week, shaking her head and accusing me of having failed to water as she instructed.
As I was watering the hanging plant on the old front porch I was aware of an unusal number of wasps buzzing around me. I looked up and there was a volley ball sized nest under the porch overhang, countless wasps flying in and out on their rounds.
The news of colony collapse among domestic honey bees has been much on my mind this summer. I have an affinity for doomsday scenarios, and the notion that our species mught be brought down by the demise of the honey bee on which we depend for our food supply, has given me new pause. The hydrangia bush in front of the house has been noisy with the buzz of insects of all sorts, and when I took a close up look, there were some honey bees, along with many varieties of wasp, and even some plain old house flies, working the spectacular blossoms.
I am grateful that so many other types of creatures seem to be taking up some of the slack now that the honey bees are in trouble.
But I was not keen about having a big wasp nest attached to the house. And, having been under that roof just a few days before, I suspect they built that thing quickly. Left alone, I wondered how big it might get.
I considered calling an exterminator. But that is the sort of move that picks me off as a flatlander. I am a flatlander, but I try not to unnecessarily call atention to it.
So two nights ago I went out to the barn and picked up one of those was sprays I bought a few years ago and read the directions on the side of the can. Number 1 was not to stand underneath the nest as you spray. Both, I assume, so as not to inhale the poison as it drifts down, and to not be in the attack path as the angry wasps fall.
But the nest was 15 feet in the air and leaning a ladder against the side of the house so I would be on a rung a couple of feet from the nest, and that didn't appeal.
I carried a flashlight, went out, shined the light, aimed and fired the spray and it overcame the gravity and the 15 feet. Several wasps fell around me but I wasn't stung.
I will never get used to being the species that nukes the others.
I have been watering everything, hoping to keep them going until Lacey returns from a week of work in California. She spends several hours a day tending the gardens when she is here, and leaves threatening notes for me about what I am to do while she is away. I am terrified of everything wilting on my watch. And this being the time when things begin to slow down and prepare fo a long winter's sleep, even rain doesn't stop things from beginning to look weary. I will get defensive when Lacey makes her rounds next week, shaking her head and accusing me of having failed to water as she instructed.
As I was watering the hanging plant on the old front porch I was aware of an unusal number of wasps buzzing around me. I looked up and there was a volley ball sized nest under the porch overhang, countless wasps flying in and out on their rounds.
The news of colony collapse among domestic honey bees has been much on my mind this summer. I have an affinity for doomsday scenarios, and the notion that our species mught be brought down by the demise of the honey bee on which we depend for our food supply, has given me new pause. The hydrangia bush in front of the house has been noisy with the buzz of insects of all sorts, and when I took a close up look, there were some honey bees, along with many varieties of wasp, and even some plain old house flies, working the spectacular blossoms.
I am grateful that so many other types of creatures seem to be taking up some of the slack now that the honey bees are in trouble.
But I was not keen about having a big wasp nest attached to the house. And, having been under that roof just a few days before, I suspect they built that thing quickly. Left alone, I wondered how big it might get.
I considered calling an exterminator. But that is the sort of move that picks me off as a flatlander. I am a flatlander, but I try not to unnecessarily call atention to it.
So two nights ago I went out to the barn and picked up one of those was sprays I bought a few years ago and read the directions on the side of the can. Number 1 was not to stand underneath the nest as you spray. Both, I assume, so as not to inhale the poison as it drifts down, and to not be in the attack path as the angry wasps fall.
But the nest was 15 feet in the air and leaning a ladder against the side of the house so I would be on a rung a couple of feet from the nest, and that didn't appeal.
I carried a flashlight, went out, shined the light, aimed and fired the spray and it overcame the gravity and the 15 feet. Several wasps fell around me but I wasn't stung.
I will never get used to being the species that nukes the others.
Friday, September 07, 2007
What're You Gonna Do?
Are you an investor in the money markets?
More than half of Americans are.
I haven't a single gambler's bone in my body. And yet I learned the habit of investing at my father's knee.
I have to say it has likely offered me a better life than I ever could have enjoyed from whatever meager savings I might have put aside from my earnings as a parish priest, a pension from the church, and Social Security.
My father watched the company earning reports, faithfully reading business news daily and keeping close touch with his stock broker. They would buy and sell (mostly buy) stocks of solid (what we now refer to as Blue Chip) companies that he thought made a good product that was useful and were run by good management.
When my mother died - she and my father divorced after 40 years of marriage - her portfolio, which he had managed all those years, enjoyed a nice profit that my sisters and I inherited. It saw my children through college and even had some left over for my old age. His own portfolio supports my step-mother who has now outlived him by 16 years.
When it came time for me to take charge of the investments I turned to a man who has now advised me for 20 years. When he got to know me he suggested that in the current investment and international financial, climate, and my personality, my sanity might be better served by investing in funds rather than trying to pick stocks.
So, with some sense of sadness at dumping my parents' long-standing efforts and wisdom, I sold all the individual stocks and bought funds that invested in many companies and other types of investments. I watch it all as diligently as I can, logging on to my account at least once a week to see that I am still solvent and that someone has not cleaned out the account when I wasn't looking.
But in truth I don't really know what I am investing in. When the guys in the locker room start their tales of companies they have been watching, I step into the shower.
The past weeks have made me grateful I am not trying to outwit the markets. My portfolio is meant to be balanced for a person like me, who wants to keep on keeping on and doesn't care about outperforming the major indexes. So it is designed not to go up as much as a fast accelerating market, and not to drop as much as plummeting market (like today's).
Pretty fine tuning that I hope stays in tune at least as long as I do.
I just sent my financial guy an email in which I quoted the old song: First you say you will, and then you won't. Then you say you do, and then you don't. What're you gonna do?
More than half of Americans are.
I haven't a single gambler's bone in my body. And yet I learned the habit of investing at my father's knee.
I have to say it has likely offered me a better life than I ever could have enjoyed from whatever meager savings I might have put aside from my earnings as a parish priest, a pension from the church, and Social Security.
My father watched the company earning reports, faithfully reading business news daily and keeping close touch with his stock broker. They would buy and sell (mostly buy) stocks of solid (what we now refer to as Blue Chip) companies that he thought made a good product that was useful and were run by good management.
When my mother died - she and my father divorced after 40 years of marriage - her portfolio, which he had managed all those years, enjoyed a nice profit that my sisters and I inherited. It saw my children through college and even had some left over for my old age. His own portfolio supports my step-mother who has now outlived him by 16 years.
When it came time for me to take charge of the investments I turned to a man who has now advised me for 20 years. When he got to know me he suggested that in the current investment and international financial, climate, and my personality, my sanity might be better served by investing in funds rather than trying to pick stocks.
So, with some sense of sadness at dumping my parents' long-standing efforts and wisdom, I sold all the individual stocks and bought funds that invested in many companies and other types of investments. I watch it all as diligently as I can, logging on to my account at least once a week to see that I am still solvent and that someone has not cleaned out the account when I wasn't looking.
But in truth I don't really know what I am investing in. When the guys in the locker room start their tales of companies they have been watching, I step into the shower.
The past weeks have made me grateful I am not trying to outwit the markets. My portfolio is meant to be balanced for a person like me, who wants to keep on keeping on and doesn't care about outperforming the major indexes. So it is designed not to go up as much as a fast accelerating market, and not to drop as much as plummeting market (like today's).
Pretty fine tuning that I hope stays in tune at least as long as I do.
I just sent my financial guy an email in which I quoted the old song: First you say you will, and then you won't. Then you say you do, and then you don't. What're you gonna do?
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Faith
OK, for the record, it is possible for someone - like me - to not believe in God in any traditional sense and still call himself religious.
A long time ago I saw clearly that the Bible was a fascinating and rich collection of the stories of people who have struggled to make some sense of the mystery of our being here.
Whether the ancient writers believed in a literal God - a being - I don't know. But from reading the Bible and probing my own mind and experience, I would say they either understood their stories to be metaphorical, delving into material that matters but we can't capture in the same way we can experience on a material plane, or they didn't worry about the distinction.
Since they lived before the Enlightenment and Descarte, likely the latter.
Facing full on the reality that I am a nitrogen rich piece of the universe, and will one day provide rich humous for untold new life, I find being here more profound than ever.
Let the record show.
A long time ago I saw clearly that the Bible was a fascinating and rich collection of the stories of people who have struggled to make some sense of the mystery of our being here.
Whether the ancient writers believed in a literal God - a being - I don't know. But from reading the Bible and probing my own mind and experience, I would say they either understood their stories to be metaphorical, delving into material that matters but we can't capture in the same way we can experience on a material plane, or they didn't worry about the distinction.
Since they lived before the Enlightenment and Descarte, likely the latter.
Facing full on the reality that I am a nitrogen rich piece of the universe, and will one day provide rich humous for untold new life, I find being here more profound than ever.
Let the record show.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
World Without Us
This is to alert you to a book I had read about and then forgot about until today I was in a book store and ran across, The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman.
The book's premise - or its method - is a description of the planet after we are extinct. It does not posit a nuclear war or global warning, just our disappearance, perhaps because of a virus that somehow targets the tiny piece of our DNA that separates us from chimps, our nearest realtives.
You've noticed places where we have left what surely we regarded as an indelible mark - an abandoned cement bunker, say - and seen how, after a decade or so, grass and weeds begin to grow into it, then larger things, heavy bushes, trees, until, finally, you'd have a hard time knowing it was ever there.
We have a photo of the hill that rises above our house, taken 100 years ago. Where there are now woods so thick we can't walk through them, in the picture is cleared all the way to the ridge and sheep are grazing.
100 years ago there were only half the trees there are in Vermont today.
The book will seriousl rearrange the way you think about what we are doing here and for how long.
The book's premise - or its method - is a description of the planet after we are extinct. It does not posit a nuclear war or global warning, just our disappearance, perhaps because of a virus that somehow targets the tiny piece of our DNA that separates us from chimps, our nearest realtives.
You've noticed places where we have left what surely we regarded as an indelible mark - an abandoned cement bunker, say - and seen how, after a decade or so, grass and weeds begin to grow into it, then larger things, heavy bushes, trees, until, finally, you'd have a hard time knowing it was ever there.
We have a photo of the hill that rises above our house, taken 100 years ago. Where there are now woods so thick we can't walk through them, in the picture is cleared all the way to the ridge and sheep are grazing.
100 years ago there were only half the trees there are in Vermont today.
The book will seriousl rearrange the way you think about what we are doing here and for how long.
