Presbytery News

National Capital Presbytery voted today to submit several overtures to this summer's General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Three of the overtures originated in my session and they call on the assembly to
1) delete the section of our church's constitution (Book of Order) that blocks the ordination of gay and lesbian candidates for ministry and other church offices;
2) change the wording of the church's directory for worship in the section on marriage to be inclusive of same gender couples;
3) call the entire church into a season of discernment on nonviolence and address the question of whether just war theory is an adequate response to contemporary war.
The nonviolence measure passed on a voice vote. The other two were counted and each passed by substantial margins.
It did not surprise me that the ordination overture passed by 2 to 1. NCP has supported this effort consistently for many years, and I believe this measure will pass the assembly again this summer. That the marriage amendment passed by roughly 80-50 did surprise me a bit. We have not voted on this issue here, and there remains so much anxiety and confusion around it. I doubt the assembly will endorse it, but only time will tell.
In the meanwhile, it looks like I'll be off to Minnesota this summer.

God loves dust

We are about to lose one of the elders of our community who is lingering near death today. When it comes, death will arrive as a friend to a man who has suffered the cruel symptoms of Parkinson's for many years and its accompanying dementia for the past several.
He is a few miles further down the road my father is traveling, and thus the end of his life strikes me in a more personally felt way than is often the case.
Being often with the dying was just one of the many things I did not fully consider when I finally surrendered my wrestling match with God over the whole ministry thing.
I don't know what I would have thought had I considered that reality 15 years ago. Perhaps it would have seemed frightening or overwhelming. I don't think I was wise enough to imagine that it would be a privilege.
Now I know better.
To be sure, it is still overwhelming to stand close to the unfathomable mystery of death, but it is not frightening, and it is mostly a humbling privilege.
The spirit is present in the company of death, brokenhearted in some cases I believe, filled with gratitude in others, and graciously welcoming in all.
We are dust, and to dust we shall return. But it seem abundantly clear that God loves dust.

Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin ...

Google that phrase and you get about a million hits. I didn't read most of them. Duh.
But the first couple of pages were, as one would expect, about either GLBT concerns or the origins of the phrase itself. I did find one riff on loving Mac users but not the sin of using Macs -- or maybe it was PC users. But I digress.
Gandhi actually said "hate the sin but not the sinner" in his autobiography long before the phrase's contemporary usage, and Augustine offered a variation on it -- Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum, “with love for humankind and hatred of sins,” (Letter 211) -- about 1,500 years earlier -- more or less.
It's instructive to look back to Augustine, for whom the sin of wrong belief was critical. Like so many defenders of the Roman church, he took up "the problem of the Jews," about whom he wrote, "the Lord Jesus Christ distinguished between His faithful ones and His Jewish enemies, as between light and darkness." On the other hand, while many in the church were calling for the death of Judaism -- and, thus, of the Jews -- Augustine gave voice to a more temperate perspective best captured in his phrase, taken from the Psalms, "do not slay them." Let them survive but never thrive for their existence bears witness to the prophecies about Christ in their own scriptures, he argued.
For a thousand years across Europe popes and bishops resorted to Augustine as they preached against the Jews as enemies of Christ, and again to Augustine when they tried to stop mobs of Christians -- inspired by their preaching against the Jews -- from killing Jews.
Those popes and bishops found themselves in the same impossible tension that certain American evangelical leaders find themselves in today in the face of the proposed draconian anti-gay laws in Uganda. The steady drumbeat of Christian preaching against "the sin" of being gay helped create a context for such laws, and no amount of "loving the sinner" preaching can turn that around.
What James Carroll writes in Constantine's Sword about the church and the Jews might just as well be said about the church and homosexuals if one substitutes the word "gay" for "racial" and the phrase "Christian-GLBT" for "Christian-Jewish":

Because religious dispute was the source of racial hatred, there are sweeping implications here not just for Christian-Jewish relations, but for fundamental Western attitudes about identity itself. The modern world, which prides itself on being a repudiation of the irrationalities of a culture that could give rise to an Inquisition, was in fact forged in the fires of those irrationalities, and we can still feel their heat.

Carroll's book tries to answer one central question: is there something central to Christian faith that led inevitably to the Shoah? Given that tens of thousands of gay men were arrested by the Nazis and thousands died in concentration camps a similar question presses in on the church regarding the long history of anti-homosexual vitriol that has spilled forth from its pulpits.

Ash Wednesday

This has absolutely nothing to do with Ash Wednesday, but, hey, it is Ash Wednesday so I thought I'd at least note the day.
I just finished James Carroll's Constantine's Sword, and I'm sure I'll reflect some on the book itself in the coming days, but for the moment I am thinking about why I just read this book.
Carroll published it in early 2001, and I picked it up in late 2002. It sat on the bedside table for months, and resumed its place there after we moved to Arlington in the summer of 2003. I tried to read it, but couldn't get past the first 50 pages. It simply did not grab me for some reason.
In the meanwhile, I read Carroll's An American Requiem, a couple of his novels and plowed through the monumental House of War. Clearly, I like the man's writing. I find his personal reflections insightful and moving and his historical reflections fascinating and thoroughly researched. Moreover, his theological reflections are somehow both subtle and powerful.
But I read through at least four of his books without ever picking up Constantine's Sword. In fact, the book found its way to the bottom of a basket at the foot of the bed.
We rearranged our bedroom last month, and I came across the book and put it on a shelf, still with no real intention of reading it. But one evening about three weeks ago I had finished whatever I'd been reading and was looking for what would be next and I thought I'd give Constantine one more shot.
This time around I could barely put it down. I shot through it in about two weeks, and it's a dense tome.
Obviously the book didn't change, so what changed me?
Perhaps the trip that Bud and I took to Italy last spring helped bring to life the long history of the Roman church, a struggle stretched across the Italian landscape. Perhaps reading Carroll while reading Harvey Cox's The Future of Faith provided a nice balance of historical reflection and prophetic imagination.
Perhaps the time was simply right for me to bring some new thoughtfulness to the effort of reading.
Whatever it was, I'm glad for it because the book is important and it ought to command the attention of the church entering the third millennium. As to why a book speaks to a reader at one moment but not another, I have no real clue and I still think it's an interesting question.

More Snow

We would wave the white flag of surrender, but no one could see it.


Our neighbor's car is under that mound to the left.


We thought this drift looked like a gnome, or a "snome" as it were


Joy in the snow

and now for something completely different ...

Here's a little video thing I've been having fun with.

Celebrate Weather, II

Celebrate Weather

When we lived in Chicago Cheryl taught at the largest all girls school in the country, Mother McAuley. The school was locally famous for two things: its basketball team and Jenny McCarthy, who graduated and promptly posed for Playboy. Internally, the school was famous for never closing no matter how nasty the Chicago weather got.
The principal at the time, at stern sister, was fond of saying, "at Mother McAuley we don't celebrate weather."
Well I say "celebrate weather!"
After all, we have some every day.
On the other hand, the storm that is gathering steam and heading toward DC this morning looks a bit on the large size, so I hope that folks stay safe and warm and off the streets.

The More Things Change ...

Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin was Jon Stewart's guest on the Daily Show last night, and they were talking about the State of the Union address. Goodwin mentioned a classic gaffe committed by President Nixon when he delivered his last State of the Union in January 1974, about eight months before he resigned.
Nixon ignored Watergate almost entirely in the speech and, instead, laid out accomplishments of his administration (including, notably, passing the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts), and setting forth his agenda for the coming year. It was whistling past the graveyard, to be sure.
Among the things he asked Congress to do was reform welfare. He intended to ask lawmakers to end the present discredited program but instead asked them to end the "discredited president." Perhaps he was simply expressing an unconscious desire to be put out of his misery!
Having heard the story I just had to find the speech and hear it for myself. I could not find a clip of just that amusing error so I wound up listening to about half of the speech.
It was an interesting memory jog. Nixon truly was a remarkably poor public speaker and just plain bad on TV. It is amazing that he managed to get elected in the first place. It was a hoot to see all the early 70s fashions sported by members of Congress, and to note that it was a much paler and maler gathering then. The technology was amusingly ancient -- no teleprompter for one thing, and certainly no camera shot from the ceiling.
The most sobering aspect of the speech was the litany of challenges Nixon laid before the Congress. A contemporary president could recite the same list today -- and be thought ahead of his time! Health care, energy, transportation, jobs. The perennial challenges remain.
Sadly, a contemporary president who introduced programs such as those that Nixon called for in 1974 would be called a socialist by his Grand Old Party. He dared to mention gas rationing, and though he opposed it it was clear that he considered it a live option. He celebrated his administration's environmental record which included creating the EPA and signing the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. And he called for a health care reform program that was more far reaching than the one today's Republican Party dismisses as Socialist designs for death panels.
Who would have ever imagined that any liberals would look back fondly on anything associated with Richard Nixon?

Drive-By Atheism

I was walking out of the church building with a group of friends last evening when some guy driving past rolled his window down and shouted, “Jesus isn’t real.”
We’ve all been tempted to yell rudely out the window at other people from time to time. The guy who cuts you off in traffic might merit a “yahoo!”; the woman who walks cluelessly across the street while yakking on the cell phone deserves a “hang up and walk!” But I’ve never been tempted to verbally assault someone else’s faith convictions.
I wonder what motivates that. More to the point, I wonder why atheists these days are so boring.
Come on. Jesus is not real? How silly is that. That the man, Jesus, lived is all but self-evident unless one wants to believe that within a generation of his life a series of letters and other writings attesting to his life began to spring up in various small communities throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. Oh, to be sure, nothing like contemporary history existed at the time so none survives. Moreover, the writings that do attest to him describe a poor man from a marginal background who led a ragtag group of outcasts on a somewhat Quixotic religious quest that led to a shameful execution – not the type of personage about whom history is ever written.
It beggars belief to suggest that writings describing such a life would emerge within 20 years of his death, and that small gatherings of people dedicated to living in the way of Jesus would similarly emerge. Who, if trying to found a religious movement – much less an institution – would make up a story about such a socially insignificant founding leader? Yet there is plenty of contemporaneous evidence of such writings and such communities.
So, I’m sorry Mr. Drive-by atheist, but Jesus was real.
As to the Christ of faith? Well that is, of course, a different kind of question altogether, and a much more interesting, nuanced and compelling one at that.
I find contemporary atheist dull and bombastic. They continue to slay a God who died a long time ago, and seem incapable of imagining any different image of God than the capricious, puppet master, omnipotent albeit slightly crazy old-man-in-the-beard-sitting-on-high being who rules the universe in a manner that is demonstrably unjust.
To unpack that just a bit by way of recent news, the God who protected some from the earthquake in Haiti but was somehow mindless of the 200,000 others buried under tons of rubble, is the strawman of contemporary atheism. To be sure, that God is also on the other end of the God-phone of many faithful people who often lose that faith when, in cruel blindness, this God happens to miss out saving a loved one from tragedy or disease. That God shows up all too often in the sermons at funerals of those who die tragically young and whose pastors attempt to comfort the survivors with some variation on “God just needed another angel so He called Billy home.”
Lousy theology and even worse pastoral care! But that theology describes a God at whom contemporary atheists take regular and loud aim – even out the windows of passing cars. That God is long dead, and well buried. It is a sad fact of contemporary faith that His funeral continues in houses of worship on many Sunday mornings (and on the Holy Days of other faiths as well).
The God toward whom Jesus points is a far more interesting power who works through human life in all its joys and its suffering to bring about redemption and resurrection. Where is that God amidst the rubble of Haiti? First, in the midst of it with those who suffer, but also empowering and sustaining all of those brave souls who are working tirelessly to dig out, to rescue and to restore – all those working for resurrection, for the rising up of new life from the very real deaths.
Christ lives in the midst of that suffering.
That God is known, as the Johanine literature of one of those ancient gatherings of people of way knew well, simply as love. And that is enough theology for today.

When the Walls Come Tumbling Down

Looking out the window of my study this afternoon I've been watching a large machine gathering rubble across the street. Rubble looks pretty much the same the world over, so I'm trying to imagine what it would look like if the entire block was reduced to rubble, or as in parts of Haiti, the entire community.
The rubble across the street is typical Arlington rubble: a perfectly functional older house torn down to make way for a new structure that will be too big for the lot and will sell from more than a million dollars.
It's taken more than a week to reduce the house to the current pile of bricks and insulation and dry wall. Earthquakes are much more efficient.
Somehow I think the rebuilding will be a lot quicker here, where there's a million dollars to be made, than in Haiti where so many of the hundreds of thousands of now homeless Haitians are among the poorest of the poor.
I watched Jim Wallis on The Daily Show last night. Noting the announcements this week of record setting bonuses on Wall Street, Wallis suggested that the recipients of those bonuses donate the money to the relief efforts in Haiti.
Wonder how likely that is. And do you suppose the walls of Wall Street would come tumbling down if they did? More pointedly, I wonder what I would do with a six- or seven-figure bonus? How much would I give away? Not a moral quandary I'm ever likely to face!
Meanwhile, we're collecting donations for Presbyterian Disaster Assistance at CPC, and creating health kits to be distributed by Church World Service.

Don't Worry, Do Happy

I had my hair cut this afternoon by a delightful young woman from China, who told me all about her grandfather and his three wives. She was curious about the mating rituals in America compared to the arranged marriages of her native land and explained how her grandfather had been unhappy with the first wife, chosen by his family. The wife understood his unhappiness so she chose a second wife for him. He wasn't happy with her either so he went out and found a third one.
It wasn't clear to me just how the living arrangements worked, but she did say several times about her grandfather that, "he didn't happy."
I loved the phrase! Happy is a verb apparently.
So, don't worry, do happy.

Connecting the Dots

Stephen Colbert put his own hilarious spin on the “underwear bomber” and the failure of the national security system to “connect the dots” and thus predict and interdict the would-be bomber.
Colbert offers up a montage of pundits (and the president) talking about the failure to connect the dots, and then notes that connecting the dots is the easiest puzzle of them all.
Connecting the dots, it seems, is not rocket science.
Actually, it's way more difficult than rocket science. Rocket scientists depend upon immutable laws of physics and gravity. They can test and retest on various scales and project from those tests what will happen on a full scale with near certainty.
Try that with human behavior.
I've been reading William Poundstone's Priceless, a fascinating book on the theory of pricing and decision making. Poundstone relates a story from Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman's formative experience of sitting in on psychoanalysts' patient conferences. One such conference, Poundstone reports, stuck in Kahneman's memory because the patient did not attend -- having committed suicide the night before. Poundstone writes:

"It was a remarkably honest and open discussion," Kahneman mordantly observed, "marked by the contradiction between the powerful retrospective sense of the inevitability of the event and the obvious fact that the event had not been foreseen."

The analysts, who presumably knew the patient well and were in quite regular conversation with him, failed to connect the dots.
The same was quite obviously the case with the Ft. Hood shooter last year. Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's behavior had, as was widely reported, raised concerns among his colleagues but others close to him were shocked at the shootings. The imam at his mosque said to CNN, "The quiet, very peaceful person coming in and out of the mosque, I couldn't believe he could have done this."
On the other hand, a Pentagon report acknowledged a failure on the part of a terrorism task force "to connect the dots" which included the major's e-mail correspondence with a radical Yemeni cleric who has also been connected with the alleged underwear bomber.
Moreover, Major Hasan's former colleagues at Walter Reed had wondered aloud about his mental stability and capacity to serve.
All of which leads to the same contradiction of a powerful retrospective sense of inevitability and the obvious fact that no one saw it coming.
We had a young friend visiting over the weekend. She is a Virginia Tech graduate who was in school when Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 students during a rampage shooting in April, 2007. As CBSNews noted, "A special state panel convened after the shooting concluded the school had misinterpreted privacy laws and had failed to connect the dots."
Our friend noted that she had several classes with Cho. "He was a little odd and very quiet," she recalled, but said she would never have thought he was likely to commit such a crime. Her recollection sounded remarkably like the ones heard so often following such shocking events. The response, "he was so quiet; I never would have thought he'd do such a thing," has become a cliche in the aftermath of these spasms of violence.
The dots, in other words, are damnably difficult to see in advance.
In a technologically advanced society such as ours it comes as no surprise that in the aftermath of an attempted terror attack we would turn to technology to protect us. In this case, the security experts are turning to the full body scanning technology to find the dots that we do not seem able to connect.
The problem is that even when all the dots are on full display connecting them -- when it involves predicting human behavior -- is incredibly difficult and inexact. Poundstone spends an entire book demonstrating that the rational actor school of economics fails miserably to explain something a fundamental to economic activity as pricing and purchasing decisions. At least when it comes to those basic decisions the rational animal is unreasonable. And if such relatively simple transaction are not subject to the predictions of reason why should we expect that far more complex human interactions would be?
On the other hand, what Poundstone ultimately demonstrates is not that it is impossible to predict human decision making with regard to price and purchase, but rather the decisions that we make are contrary to the expectations of prevailing economic theory. Perhaps what we need with respect to security is a better theory.
There are plenty of quiet, troubled, angry young men who will never shoot up their college campuses or stuff explosives into their underwear or join a terror cell. And there is the occasional seemingly well-adjusted young woman who turns out to be a serial killer.
All of which suggests that, while we can hope that the national security apparatus improves its own internal communications and ability to cut through its own red tape, we probably cannot expect that the human dots will get any easier to connect until and unless we begin to look at them differently -- not through a different scanner but through different eyes.

Hang Up and Drive, %&#@!

Happy New Year, a few days late.
I've enjoyed a post-Christmas staycation during which I completely unplugged from e-mail, office phones and blogging to dig into some painting, plumbing and decorating endeavors. Some folks have suggested that I miss the meaning of vacation! But, in truth, I find such work restorative, and, to be sure, I wasn't slaving away non-stop.
There was plenty of time for good eating and great visits with a steady stream of out-of-town guests that continues this week, as well.
So, just like Nixon in 80, I'm rested and ready -- if not tanned.
Headed back into the world of work yesterday only to be rudely greeted by a %#@!& taxi driver who must have been talking on his cell when he rear-ended me at a traffic light. I was taking our youngest to school and we were well stopped and waiting for the light to turn when the guy banged into us. No damage, and Hannah said, "wow! that was perfectly timed in the book I'm reading."
All of which had me wondering about how and when certain activities become socially acceptable or not. We have all kinds of hang ups in American culture about work and idle time. Vacation, we seem to believe, involves getting physically away and includes recreation understood mostly as consumers of entertainments. My time after Christmas was spent getting away mentally and being productive. I'm not suggesting that one is better than the other, just that the way we come to value one or the other is curious.
Which brings me back round to the cell-yakking cab driver.
Last evening I was sitting in the car, parked around the corner from the Metro station waiting to pick up my beloved and checking messages on my cell, when I strayed off into a mental tangent/rant on the hack who hit me and on driving while talking on the phone. My rant was interrupted when Cheryl called to say that she'd been dumped from the train a couple of stops early when %$#&! commuters did not heed the conductor's call to clear the doorways and the doors got stuck so the train had to be emptied.
So I had to drive about a mile to pick her up, which gave me plenty of time to get back into internal rant mode. I was well into my silent sermon about how drinking and driving was once perfectly acceptable, and about how safety studies show that talking on the phone while driving is as distracting and dangerous as drinking, when my phone rang.
If I was driving and someone offered me a drink I would turn it down, but I answered the phone. It was Cheryl. It was convenient. It was necessary. There are probably three or four other excuses I could invent.
What it was not was socially unacceptable.
Alas, there was no cab in front of me to rear end.

Merry Christmas from the Senate

From the U.S. Senate to 30 million Americans who will now have access to health insurance, an imperfect bill to be sure but also a significant step toward universal coverage -- merry Christmas indeed. Ted Kennedy's Irish eyes are smiling down today.

Christmas 2009

Gratitude is the fundamental response to creation common to all authentic religious expression, and the fundamental attitude in response to experience as well. It’s easy to feel a depth of gratitude today, for I’m sitting in a nice warm house watching the snow pile up. The tree is lit, the carols are playing, and delicious smells waft from the kitchen. There is so much for which to give thanks.
So, to celebrate Christmas 2009, I offer this thanksgiving.
For our crazy, comical family, much thanks. It’s hard to believe it’s been almost an entire year since our family played host to a couple of dozen folks who came to town on a frigid January day to witness the inauguration of President Obama. Despite the difficulties of the year, I do give thanks for the promise of that hope-filled moment, and remain deeply inspired by my dying aunt’s words on the night of his election – among her very last words: “see what we can accomplish when we all work together.”
For Bud, who has grown into his real name (Dylan) most places outside of the family, 2009 was a year of great transition. He graduated from the Clonlara School last spring, and, due to so much work at Northern Virginia Community College, he entered Mary Washington University a few hours short of being a sophomore. We have noted for him that he is pretty sophomoric already, so it seems he’s just precocious. He’s had a fine first semester in Fredericksburg exploring lots of academic options and “majoring” in ultimate Frisbee thus far.
For Martin, who finally caught up and grew taller than his older brother, it’s been a year of growing pains and celebrations. He learned a bit about consequences when some self-imposed academic struggles resulted in his missing out on summer camp. We’re not sure if that experience made the difference this fall, or if it’s the fact that his girlfriend lives in Richmond and they only get to see each other if their grades are such that their parents see fit to trek up and down I-95. Out-of-town love interests are a great bit of leverage! Obviously, the mere fact that there is such interest tells you that Martin is growing up. The fact that the interest is another sweet child of another Presbyterian pastor tells you that he is growing up well. Beyond the love interest, Martin continues to expand his artistic endeavors, adding the mandolin to his violin playing and continuing to work on his drawing and cartooning.
For Hannah, who continues to accomplish whatever she sets her mind to, 2009 was a year of holding on fast to rapidly ending childhood. Hannah did some growing up when her best friend Josie moved to Tunisia with her State Department family. We’re further grateful to live in the communication age, and Hannah and Jo have kept up a great long-distance friendship over Skype. But Hannah remains a little girl at heart, spending hours in blanket forts with one or more dogs and one or more books because, well, outside of a dog a book is a little girl’s best friends, and inside of a dog it’s too dark to read. She emerges from the forts to practice her flute, to write stories and create small art works that decorate her walls.
When the collective mood is right, as it was earlier on this snowy day, Hannah and Martin and I get our instruments out and make music together. We’ll be playing an Irish bit during the Christmas Eve service next week.
Cheryl is the master of ceremonies for this three-ring circus – sitting in the rocking chair, sipping tea, knitting and offering wry commentary on the chaos that unfolds around and interrupts her serenity. To make sure that her ringmaster credentials stay current, she added another master’s degree to her pedigree this year, completing the library science degree at Syracuse University. One more master’s and she’ll have a degree for each ring of the circus. Of course, one more master’s degree and she’ll be in the asylum, too, at least to visit her husband. She gives thanks for continuing good work at the Library of Congress. In a time when so many are struggling, to have a great job, doing work that you love with good colleagues is a great gift.
I continue to serve as pastor to the great little congregation at Clarendon, where we are still feeding the hungry, extending hospitality to the outcast, empowering the marginalized, trying to do justice and make peace, and preaching good news. The highlight of my year was reaching the respectable age of 50. I celebrated the benchmark by running a 10K. I finished it in just less than an hour. Last time I ran one I did it in 39 and change. Of course, I was 25 then! I added less than a minute per year, so by the time I run another when I’m 75 … well at that stage I’m sure I’ll be grateful if I can make it to the finish line.
On the one hand, it is difficult to sum up a year in the life of a family in a few paragraphs, on the other hand, it was a typical year in the life of a typical family. Oh, to be sure, there were interesting moments: President Obama gave his "back to school speech" at Martin's school; Bud and I spent a wonderful week in Italy to celebrate his turning 18; Hannah visited Jamestown; Cheryl and I got to see Herman Wouk honored by Jimmy Buffet -- which doesn't happen just every day.
Other than the Italy trip, these were all just perks of living in Arlington. Nothing extraordinary happened, but there were small miracles every day. Ordinary resurrections, as Jonathan Kozol calls the rising up that we do every day, mark the passing of our time. For some, in these days, rising up is an extraordinary challenge for it comes in the face of violence, sickness or grief. For we who rise up so easily, and take it so for granted, it is often easy to forget the great gift we have been given. When we remember, sometimes we are moved in gratitude to rise up singing, rise up dancing, rise up praying, rise up marching to end the violence, heal the sick and comfort those who mourn.
Despite endless wars, economic calamity, and dysfunctional politics that darken the present and threaten the future, a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overcome it.
So we rejoice and give thanks in this season of lights, and move boldly into the future bearing as much of that light as we can.
Shalom.

Law and Order and Responsibility

It seems that Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly is ticked off at the producer of NBC's Law and Order, Dick Wolf, because in a recent episode of the show the actions of a character who aims to kill the children of immigrants are explained, in part, as due to the hatred spread by pundits such as O'Reilly, who was named in the show.
I don't know that I've ever seen an entire episode of the show, so I don't know what kind of agenda it might put forth. The little bits I've seen did not lead me to believe it was right wing agitprop like "24" or pushing a liberal agenda, a la The West Wing.
I can understand O'Reilly being angered at being called out, and I don't watch his show ever so I can't say much about it behind clips. From the clips I would say O'Reilly is not in the same league as others named in the show such as Glen Beck or Rush Limbaugh.
But that's for others to decide, and apparently the Law and Order folks lump them all together.
Personally, I'm all for all of them having the right to speak their minds, but I also believe that we are responsible for what we say and how we say it. The only reason we have Constitutional protections on speech is because we believe firmly that speech makes a difference.
It's OK to yell "fire" in a crowded theater if you're an actor and it's in the script. It may even be OK to yell it if there is, indeed, a fire -- although something a bit calmer might be more helpful.
It's altogether another thing if there is no fire, or if the fire is, say, a match used to light a cigar. (OK, I know, no smoking, but even someone as turned off by smoking as I am shouldn't yell "fire" at a lighter.)
A lot of today's bloviators strike me like that: they are screaming their heads off trying to whip up a frenzy about threats that don't amount to much more than a flick of the Bic (now there's an old reference).
It's remarkable, for example, how quickly both left and right play the "Hitler" card in their arguments. When you get to the point of comparing your opponents to Hitler and the Nazis -- which so many do in about two steps -- then what you are suggesting is that it is justified to use violence to stop the other side. I've tried to avoid the rhetorical temptation, though I've succumbed once or twice over the years -- usually in the guise of "I'm not suggesting that they're Nazis, but the way they goose step scare me ...". That we use that kind of rhetoric over issues such as reforming health care or immigration laws is just plain sad.
The sadness turns to tragedy if followers take up arms in response to the clarion calls. The same holds for makers of violent entertainment when its consumers reenact it in the real world. Speakers are responsible for their words, and while there is no reasonable way of legally extending responsibility for how listeners respond, to deny that there is a response is to deny the power of speech.
The causality is impossible to trace, but simply resorting to "1st amendment" arguments in the aftermath of tragedy is a coward's way out.
Don't know that this has much to do with the way Bill O'Reilly's name was used, but it does have something to do with how his words may get used.

Good News

Or, at least, fun news; especially for those of us who are on the downhill side of midlife. Amidst the gloom of war stories, sex scandals and broken politics, I heard a story on NPR today about an 83-year-old woman who took her first solo flight a few weeks ago.
She told NPR that she hadn't taken her first flying lesson until after her 80th birthday, and, in fact, hadn't ever thought about learning to fly until then. She wanted to find something to stretch herself and keep her mind active.
Some older folks take up cross-word puzzles. I hope that when I reach this woman's age I have her enthusiasm for taking on something new.

Bonhoeffer on Advent

“We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God’s coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God’s coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us. The coming of God is truly not only glad tidings, but first of all frightening news for everyone who has a conscience.”

Remember What Mr. Nobel Invented ...

As they say on Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn't belong.

Just a fraction of what is expanded so obscenely on defense budgets would make the difference in enabling God's children to fill their stomachs, be educated, and given the chance to lead fulfilled and happy lives.

-- Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize acceptance remarks

This must be a world of democracy and human rights; a world freed from the horrors of poverty, hunger, deprivation, and ignorance, relieved of the threat and the scourge of civil wars and external aggression and unburdened of the great tragedy of millions forced to be refugees.

-- Nelson Mandela, Nobel Peace Prize acceptance remarks

In spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problems, it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr. Nobel Peace Prize acceptance remarks

As commander-in-chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

-- President Barack Obama's address to the nation two weeks prior to receiving the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize
As usual, the president was eloquent in his remarks accepting the peace prize, saying, "Let us reach for the world that ought to be -- that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls."
To which most human beings will say, "yes."
But in practicing an unimaginative realism, the president seems to have forgotten his own campaign slogan: "yes we can." As president, clearly Obama faces a different set of responsibilities than the rest of us, but in this crucial moment he is facing those responsibilities in the same way that each of his predecessors as commanders in chief did.
In falling back into a defense of just war, as the president did in his acceptance, he walks the same tired path that kings and despots and commanders in chief and revolutionaries all have walked; justifying their path for a thousand years in Augustine's unbiblical theory of just war.
In the end, however justified a war may seem, a just war is just war. The institution building that the president proposed is certainly important, but there is no way to peace. Peace is the way.