Lenten Hymn

THIS IS THE FAST
Is this the fast I choose for thee
Of ashes, tears and empty misery?
Or rather this: To share abundant bread
That all my children will be loved and fed.

Why do you fast, yet still not see
Your sisters suffering in poverty?
Their children cry, and still you do not hear;
Their fathers bowed and broken by their fear.

This is the fast I choose for thee
Of justice, peace and human liberty
Not forty days, but all your yearning years
My love will wipe away all human tears.

Break, bless and eat; then drink this wine
The fast I choose makes ev’ry midnight shine
You shall be called restorers of the streets.
Arise, now shine! And make your fast complete.

TUNE: Truro (Live Into Hope!; Christ is Alive!; Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates)

Sometime a Day Off Happens

Trying to do anything beyond bodily necessities for 40 consecutive days is tough. Writing is not a bodily necessity, and it does take time no matter how much or little one does.
I've been on the road all day. Though I enjoy it, driving is rather mind numbing and it's tough to write with a numb mind! I'm sure I've written at least parts of sermons -- if not the whole of some -- in that condition.
So when a day off happens I'll just take it and not try to wake up the brain this evening. Instead, I'll enjoy watching Olympic athletes who have undoubtedly practiced when their bodies and brains were numb.
I make no claims for being a medal-winning writer.

Time Is But a Stream ...

"Paternity is a relationship to a future that is not your own." So said the great Emmanuel Levinas in an essay that I was working over as I drafted my doctoral dissertation 19 years ago.
Oh, and 19 years ago, today, our first child was born. (Happy birthday, Bud!)
As our first son grows into adulthood I gain more personal understanding of Levinas' insight.
My mother has often said to me that she has no trouble imagining the past that came before her birth but that she has a hard time imagining the world going on without her. She tells me that imagining a future that is not her own is difficult to do.
Parents can dream their children's futures, but those are not the dreams of our children. We may receive the dreams from our fathers, to borrow the title of President Obama's book, but they are not our dreams. Our children may receive our dreams for them, but they are not our children's dreams.
The relationship that we have to the future that is not ours is tenuous, but it is also inescapable and it places the primary ethical burden of history squarely on our shoulders. We are responsible to that relationship and to that future which we will not experience.
Each generation is given the opportunity and the responsibility to create the future that its children will inhabit. That's why we keep on doing the often difficult and exhausting work of trying to make peace in a world addicted to violence, and to do justice in a world of structured injustice.
That's why the work on health care reform is so important. One way or another we are going to decide what kind of system our children will inherit, what kind of costs they will face, what burdens of ours they will carry.
Oh, and it's why I'm watching the stupid summit thing today when I could be getting more productive work done!

Bread and Stories

I noted over the weekend that National Capital Presbytery on Saturday endorsed three overtures that originated with Clarendon's session. (A friend in Minnesota says that must be a record for one session for a single General Assembly. To which I could only say, "who keeps such records?") In any case, I did not note that the meeting Saturday was remarkably grace-filled and much less antagonistic than most meetings where the church gathers to debate sexuality-related issues.
Some of the lack of rancor may have to do with debate fatigue and the clear sense that in National Capital Presbytery the issues are settled. Some of it last weekend may have been the relatively low attendance, due to the hastily rescheduled Saturday meeting. (The last time we voted on ordination issues there were more than 300 votes cast. Saturday it was about 135 or so.)
But I think two larger reasons for the comity prevailed.
The meeting ran from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., and there was no provision made for lunch beyond, bring something to tide you over. When we learned of that, the board of the Presbytery's More Light chapter decided that we would bring food for everyone. So we organized sandwiches and snacks and gave them away to everyone.
Followers of Jesus know how important breaking bread is to our tradition. It is the way that we build relationships, and the sharing of bread may have helped some who disagree with us to see us as more than shrill opponents of the status quo.
While some may raise a question about the meeting organizers' lack of a lunch plan, no one should question their plans for the meeting itself. Framed entirely within a worshipful context, the gathering consisted largely of story telling around tables of six.
We were asked, initially, to share briefly a story that illuminated one of the proposed overtures. (There were five proposals to be voted on, two of which related to GLBT concerns, one on nonviolence, one on the Charter of Compassion, and one on Middle East affairs. All but the last were approved.)
I told the story of my friend, Joe. Most folks have a "first gay friend," and Joe is mine. At least he was the first out gay friend. One of my friends from kindergarten is gay and two of my hallmates from college are gay -- and have been together for more than 20 years.
But Joe was the first man who was out within our circle of friends in our Chicago days. He is a big, boisterous man -- a bit like a Labrador Retriever crossed with a Saint Bernard. He is a dangerous man to sit next to during while watching the Bears on TV -- especially in that Super Bowl year.
Joe attended an evangelical church in Chicago, and regularly told us, sometimes close to tears, about how his church condemned homosexuals. He was deep in the closet in that congregation, of course, but he loved its worship and his friends from the choir and he simply could not imagine that there might be a church that would welcome him fully so he continued to go, try to worship and come home feeling beaten up. This was at the height of the AIDS crisis, and the gay community as a whole was under assault from so many corners. As I recall those days and Joe's Sundays in them, I know that our repentance is long overdue.
Telling his story is far short of that, but it's what I could offer Saturday morning.
Others around the table shared their own stories. Our table reflected the voting pattern of the Presbytery as a whole on these issues over the past several year. Four of us were on the liberal side and two on the conservative side. The liberals' stories were about gay friends, neighbors or family members and about the experience of feeling excluded. The conservative stories were about struggles to remain faithful to strictly interpreted Biblical standards of behavior.
There was passion aplenty in the stories, but more importantly, there was an equal dose of compassion in the listening.
I am convinced, and the past 30 years of American experience seems to bear this out, that when the stories of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons are told with honesty and heard with empathy that people are moved and positions changed. As Harvey Milk put it, "when they know that they know one of us then they vote with us."
That is not one hundred percent accurate, to be sure, but it is the truth nonetheless.
How can something that is not one hundred percent accurate still be the truth? I suppose that is part of the point. Stories can be true without being told with complete accuracy or perfect fidelity to whatever passes for the accepted history.
In the end, all we really have is the stories that tell us who we are and allow us to share that with others.
As Norman MacLean wrote in Young Men and Fire, his beautiful story of the tragic Mann Gulch fire of 1949, "If there is a story in Mann Gulch, it will take something of a storyteller at this date to find it, and it is not easy to imagine what impulses would lead him to search for it. He probably should be an old storyteller, at least old enough to know that the problem of identity is always a problem, not just a problem of youth, and even old enough to know that the nearest anyone can come at any give stage to finding himself is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself."
The problem of identity is always a problem. We find ourselves in the stories that tell us who we are. If we are honest with ourselves we will also confess that we are often too busy constructive our own stories to listen carefully to the stories others tell of themselves (much less the ones they tell of us). Moreover, because our identities themselves are at stake in the telling of stories, we most often find it far easier and more comfortable to exchange arguments and propositions and talking points.
So we remain divided and alone staring across vast chasms of disagreement or simply of lonely ignorance yearning for someone to ask us, "tell me your story."

Buckstacy!

Remember sniglets? Those made-up words that are so descriptive of everyday situations?
One of my favorites is "buckstacy" which is defined as the experience of finding money in your pocket when you didn't know any was there -- especially when putting on a coat for the first time as the weather gets colder.
I experienced frozen buckstacy today when I found a dollar where snow had melted away.
I thought immediately of the story of the old native American wisdom teacher who came to New York City for the first time to speak at a conference. One of the organizers met him in the morning to walk with him to the conference center. As they walked along the crowded sidewalks amidst the cacophony of the morning rush the old man stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and said, "hm, a cricket."
"What?" asked the organizer.
"A cricket. Don't you hear it?"
"Cricket? How can you hear a cricket with all this noise?"
The old man didn't say a thing. Instead, he simply reached into his pocket and took out some coins. He tossed them on the sidewalk and immediately dozens of people stopped still in their tracks.
"It all depends," the old man said, "on what you're listening for."
So we're talking in church this Lent about listening for God.
I've used that old tale before, but this afternoon after I picked up my buckstacy dollar it occurred to me that you have to know what a dollar looks like -- or what a coin sounds like -- before you attend to it on the street.
So, what does God sound like ... to you?

How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?

I was reminded again this afternoon that you are what you practice. It's been almost three weeks since I've braved running the streets of Arlington. More accurately, there has been nowhere other than snow-narrowed streets to run until the past couple of days when sidewalks and bike paths began to reappear.
If you practice couch potatoing you become a couch potato, and couch potatoes find that first running a bit more painful than runners do. On the other hand, having been in the practice of running it was easier to start up again than it would have been had I not been running all winter.
The season of Lent invites us to take on a practice -- a spiritual discipline, if you will. Running has been part of that for me off and on for many years. I've never found that I love it, but I have found that I need it, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually as well.
We do become what we practice, and thus I have become a runner. Putting it that way, however, raises performance expectations that are ingrained in us in this culture from childhood. To be a runner -- or an athlete in general -- carries for many of us the implicit framework of winning and losing, and because I have neither the innate giftedness nor the drive and dedication to be competitive I will never win any races nor turn in any sterling times.
I'm just happy to get to the beer and pizza after the run! Nevertheless, I am a runner.
In the same way, as David LaMotte once told me, if you make music you are a musician. It doesn't matter whether or not you make great music for others to enjoy or simply sing a lot in the shower, if you make music you are a musician. You are what you practice.
The great thing about practices, from that point of view, is that it is never too late to become something new. You can take up painting and become a painter, or writing and become a writer, or cycling and become a cyclist.
The point is not to become the best in the world, but to take the gifts you have been given, even the ones you do not discover until late in life, and make the best out of them.
So it goes with my Lenten discipline this year: to write at least a little bit every day. Not with the expectation of becoming another Hemingway or Halberstam, but with the knowledge that I am a writer because I practice writing.
Practice does not make perfect, no matter what they say, because it is not about arriving at some point and crossing some arbitrary marker that makes one a writer or runner or whatever. Practice simply makes you what you are, and that will never be perfect or complete until the journey ends.

Lent One

Tis the first Sunday of Lent. We seem to give up singing good songs for Lent in the church, making this the 40 days of dirges. I don't think this was the fast that God would choose. Indeed, Isaiah seemed to have something to say about that, but it's the end of a long Sunday and I'm much more interested in a glass of wine than the 58th chapter of Isaiah. So here are a few last shots of the snow as the great meltdown continues all around us.

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.