AnotherThink

O Holy Night

2009-12-11T13:28:51Z

There's a lot of great Advent blogging going on. Roger Overton, who writes for The A-Team Blog, is doing a line-by-line devotional series on the great Christmas hymn O Holy Night.

From Roger's introduction:

The original “O Holy Night” was composed in French in 1847 by Adolphe Adam. He used the words from a French poem called “Minuit, chrétiens” (Midnight, Christians) by Placide Cappeau. It was translated into English 1855 and in 1906 became the first piece of music known to be broadcast on the radio.

Here are links to Roger's posts so far:

Introduction
The stars are brightly shining
Long lay the world in sin
Yonder breaks a new and glorious morn
Fall on your knees
Led by the light of faith

Bookmark The A-Team and visit them regularly for some good reading. (A-Team is their inside joke based on the old TV show of the same name: they love to write about Apologetics, hence, A-Team.)

A beautiful mind

2009-12-08T05:43:24Z

He was unknown, just a low-level government clerk in the Bern, Switzerland patent office with big dreams, and a big ego to match. Every morning he would arrive at his desk early and hurry through his day's work in the first few hours. Then he would remove a sheaf of papers from the drawer, spread them across the desk and lose himself in musings about some of the deepest mysteries in theoretical physics.

He had his "ah-hah" moment in 1905 when one by one the pins of the tumbler dropped into place and he could see the solutions as clearly as a photograph. Historians ever since have called this the "miracle year," when 26-year-old Albert Einstein submitted four scientific papers that would crack the Newtonian foundations of physics and open the door to the atomic age.

...science had not seen [such a creative outburst] since 1666, when Isaac Newton, holed up in his mother's rural home in Woolsthorpe to escape the plague that was devastating Cambridge, developed calculus, an analysis of the light spectrum, and the laws of gravity. — Einstein: His life and universe, Walter Isaacson, pp. 93

His first paper proposed a new theory of light, which Einstein correctly argued consisted of a stream of particles, or quanta, each containing a fixed amount of energy. This paper later earned him the 1921 Nobel prize in physics.

His next paper proposed a mathematical technique for calculating the number of molecules in a liquid, a problem that had not been successfully analyzed before.

His third paper examined the phenomenon known as Brownian motion, and from that analysis added new evidence for the existence of atoms, which were still a subject of debate at the turn of the century.

His final paper, on special relativity, produced the famous equation E=mc². It was the most daring of the four, making the dual claims that light always moves at a constant velocity of approximately 186,000 miles per second, and that time is elastic. This latter insight overturned the belief, going back to Isaac Newton, that time was an absolute, universal constant.

The obscure patent clerk was suddenly a very hot topic in the world of physics.

Einstein's name has become synonymous with genius, but it was not primarily his intelligence that made him a successful theorist. He was a prodigious reader, not only in the sciences but in history, literature and philosophy. He had amazing powers of synthesis, enabling him to grab an insight gained in one discipline and apply it to another. He was skeptical of conventions and relished the chance to challenge the status quo. And, he had remarkable powers of imagination, which enabled him to engage in thought experiments where he could often visualize solutions to the theoretical problems he was working on.

Supporting those prodigious mental gifts was a firm belief that the universe was orderly, not arbitrary. "God does not play dice," he famously exclaimed. He did not actually believe in a personal God, but he was convinced that a creative authority of some sort had built the universe on a system of laws. The structures that govern physical phenomenon were not hidden, Einstein believed, but plainly evident in the behavior of all things. The nature of things could be deduced by careful observation, and by freeing the mind of preconceptions about what might be true or false.

]]> Einstein's parents were non-practicing Jews. At some point in his childhood, young Einstein demonstrated his free-thinking nature by throwing himself into Judaism, strictly observing its laws and practices. He abandoned his faith in his teens and seems to have concluded that religion was incompatible with the secular rationalism of his time.

As an adult, Einstein was famously Bohemian and drew on the works of Spinoza, Hume and Ernst Mach for his worldview, philosophers who doubted anything that the senses could not confirm. He fell in love with a fellow student while studying at the Zurich Polytechnic. They had a child out of wedlock, a daughter that Einstein professed to love but never met, and who was later put up for adoption. Einstein's letters from that time suggest an infatuation with the idea of love and family, but an inability to make the emotional commitment required of a husband and father. Some have suggested he may have suffered from a mild form of Asperger Syndrome, but it seems more likely that he was just emotionally immature. Einstein was the Sun, and his most successful relationships orbited around his needs, his agenda, his prodigious ego. He never seems to have been able to return the favor.

Although he was convinced of the universe's meticulous design, it's interesting that he was just as certain that there could be no God behind it all. In that, he has much in common with brilliant modern skeptics like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Einstein was forever curious about the mechanics of the universe and was willing to take knowledge wherever it might lead, so long as it didn't lead to the possibility of the existence of God.

Perhaps this closed-mindedness grew from a failure of courage? Having thrown himself into Judaism as a child, he would have known better than most that the existence of God would create certain inescapable obligations on his part, obligations of the creature to the Creator.

Einstein was not without his failures of courage, in relationships as we have seen, but also in the arena of science. While writing his 1917 paper on general relativity, he realized that the equations he was proposing predicted an expanding universe, which meant that there must have been a beginning to all things, as well as a distant end when the stars accelerate away from each other. The Big Bang theory had not yet been proposed. Conventional wisdom in Einstein's day asserted that the universe was static and unchanging: it had always been and would always be pretty much as it was.

Faced with such a frightful insight, Einstein lost his nerve. He could not let himself go where his intuition wanted to take him. He solved the dilemma by introducing what has been called a fudge factor, the cosmological constant, an extraneous factor whose only purpose was to lock the universe into the steady state he was most comfortable with. He resisted the idea of an expanding universe for many years until, faced with overwhelming evidence, he gave in and called the cosmological constant his greatest blunder.

The dilemma of the cosmological constant may give us an insight into Einstein's humanity. His theories had brought him face to face with the possibility of a Creator. When he realized what he was seeing, the great Albert Einstein blinked. We can all sympathize.

For all his dedication to a universe without God, for all his genius and remarkable insights into the nature of the cosmos, nothing Einstein ever discovered weakens the case for God. On the contrary, his discoveries and those that came from his groundbreaking work reveal a universe that is exquisitely ordered, inexplicably fine-tuned and so mysteriously complex that the claim that it all happened by chance is, frankly, preposterous.

"God does not play dice." The universe did not come into being through several billion years of rolling seven after seven after seven after seven after... Einstein could not bring himself to embrace a Creator, but neither could he believe that all of this beautiful complexity had happened by a very lucky roll.

The question for Einstein and all of us is this: If there is no Creator-God, just how do we explain such a beautiful mystery as the infinite night sky, life, and the remarkable human capacity to make sense of it all?

Photo credit: The Crab Nebula, from Hubble. This essay has been inspired by Walter Isaacson's excellent book, "Einstein: His Life and Universe," Simon & Schuster, 2007.

Blue whale crooners

2009-12-04T06:54:17Z

Like Italian crooners and Latin lovers, male blue whales serenade potential mates with song. Scientists have been recording these songs since the early 1960s, first in the Atlantic, then branching out to listening stations around the globe. A few years ago they reached a startling conclusion: year by year, the voices of blue whales were getting deeper and deeper.

"It's a fascinating finding," said John Calombokidis, a blue whale expert at the Cascadia Research Collective. "It's even more remarkable, given that the songs themselves differ in different oceans. There seem to be these distinct populations, yet they're all showing this common shift." Blue Whale Song Mystery Baffles Scientists, Wired Science, December 2, 2009.

The question, of course, is why? One theory being tested is that by lowering their voices, blue whale crooners make themselves appear larger than they really are. And, as everyone knows, female blue whales like their men... plus-sized.

Not surprisingly, this same phenomenon has been observed in human courtship rituals. In scientific studies at major universities, the honey-smooth basso profundo voice of Barry White singing "Can't Get Enough of Your Love, Babe" was guaranteed to send female test subjects into passion-induced seizures, whereas the chalk-board screeching of Barry Manilow's "Copa Cabana" would send them fleeing for the exits. It is a well-known fact that among humans, the deeper the voice, the bigger the swoon factor.

To test this theory on whales, cetacean researchers played Barry White's "It's Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me" through hydrophones in the northern Pacific for 48 hours straight. While the music was playing, at least a dozen female blue whales made amorous advances on a 200-ton Scripps Institution research vessel.

Next, scientists piped Barry Manilow's "I Write the Songs" into the water. Within hours, 5 whales had beached themselves and others were showing signs of acute distress, prompting an emergency decision to terminate the experiment. "It was just too cruel to continue," said a tearful Scripps Institution spokeswoman. "I consider myself a professional, but even I was about to throw myself overboard to end the pain. If they had brought up 'Mandy' on the playlist, there would have been blood in the waters."

Juvenile blue whales along the Pacific rim have recently been heard beatboxing, causing researchers to wonder if a dramatic cultural shift is underway in the deep oceans. "Like teenagers everywhere, juvenile blue whales seem to be rejecting the staid conventionality of their parents' songs in favor of the avant-garde music of the streets," suggests Dr. Lynn Esposito of Duke University's Marine Labs. "If whale musical styles continue to evolve at this pace, I expect we'll soon see a clash between the blue whale hip hop vanguard and the establishment classical purists. The kids will win out in the end, of course. Except in a few, small, traditionalist enclaves in the north Atlantic, those old whale standards will gradually fade away, signaling a sad end to a great musical era for the blue whale."

Advent: A God who answers

2009-12-03T16:18:27Z

While Zechariah was in the sanctuary, an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing to the right of the incense altar. Zechariah was shaken and overwhelmed with fear when he saw him. But the angel said, "Don't be afraid, Zechariah! God has heard your prayer. Your wife, Elizabeth, will give you a son, and you are to name him John. ... And he will turn many Israelites to the Lord their God. He will be a man with the spirit and power of Elijah. He will prepare the people for the coming of the Lord." — Luke 1:11-13, 16-17, NLT

Does God pay any attention to our prayers? Do they bounce off the clouds and rattle around the atmosphere in futility? Or is God a listening God, an attentive God, a God who hears, remembers and responds to our requests?

Luke begins his account of the Advent story with what seems at first to be a superfluous historical detail, the account of an angelic visitation to the husband of Elizabeth, who was a cousin of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

Zechariah and Elizabeth were childless and old. They had prayed for a son, but their prayers, apparently, had not been heard. I would imagine they had long since stopped praying for a child and had come to accept their situation, with regret.

But the first words out of the angel's mouth that morning were "God has heard your prayer. Your wife, Elizabeth, will give you a son..."

Advent is a season of anticipation, of awaiting the coming of Jesus. But before getting to anticipation, we have to deal with prayer. Advent is also a time to acknowledge prayers spoken, prayers heard, and prayers answered. The coming of the Messiah was an answer to the continuing prayers of a devoted people to be rescued from bondage and restored to greatness, and intimate fellowship with the Lord.

In other words, Advent tells us something significant about the Christian view of God: he is a God who hears, he is a God who remembers, and he is a God who answers the prayers of his people. Our prayers never fall on deaf ears. God is always attentive. God is active and at work in history, and also in the minute, gritty details of our lives.

]]> Zechariah's initial and very human reaction was to doubt this messenger.

Are you on drugs, Sir? Do you have any clue about the realities of human reproduction? My wife and I are old! Yes, we prayed for a child long, long ago, but it's too late now. God missed his chance. That ship has sailed.

Months later, when this same angel appeared to Mary to explain that she, a virgin, would become the mother of Jesus, he seems to have decided to nip her own astonishment in the bud:

"Your relative Elizabeth has become pregnant in her old age! People used to say she was barren, but she's now in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God." — Luke 1:36-37, NLT

Nothing is impossible with God. There's another lesson from Advent.

God does the impossible. Can a woman past her child-bearing years conceive? Nothing is impossible with God. Can a virgin have a son? Nothing is impossible with God. Can a historically insignificant people, conquered and humbled, poor and without political clout, birth the Savior of mankind and the world's most influential religion? Nothing is impossible with God.

Generations of Israelites prayed for the Messiah to come in their generation. God heard; God remembered; God answered those prayers in his own time by sending his son to be born of a virgin, in a stable, in an insignificant corner of the world. History was shaken and irrevocably altered, because nothing is impossible with God.

The central historical fact of Advent is the coming of Jesus Christ, the Messiah. But supporting that event, moving underneath and behind and through that amazing event is a God who hears our prayers, remembers our prayers, and answers our prayers. Even the ones that would seem impossible.

Illustration credit: Woodcut by Julius Schnoor von Carolsfeld, from Wels.net

Underwater Thanksgiving

2009-11-25T20:55:20Z

The headlines don't seem to offer much reason for being thankful this Thanksgiving.

My home state of Arizona is second in the nation for "underwater" mortgages, according to a Wall Street Journal report. 48% of all homeowners here owe the bank more than their homes are worth. Nationally, 23% of all mortgages are upside down, creating a flood of foreclosures and a shocking decline in housing values.

A University of Arizona law professor is counseling homeowners to simply walk away from their mortgages. Prof. Brent White argues that the government pushed Americans into home ownership as a safe, long-term investment. Now that that investment has tanked, the government's first instinct has been to rescue financial institutions and leave homeowners to fend for themselves.

"We are propping up the market on the backs of the middle class," says Prof. White. If homeowners started walking out on their loans en masse, he thinks banks might get serious about offering significant modifications to underwater mortgages. (Arizona Daily Star, "Prof: Maybe more need to walk away," Nov. 22, 2009)

It should be pointed out, on the other side of that argument, that rational adults signed up for risky mortgages of their own free will. In fairness, however, it's true that rational bank CFOs freely invested in risky mortgages, too. Washington has thrown them a life line, while letting consumers drown. Politics as usual.

Meanwhile, Arizona unemployment is 9.4%, 10.2% nationally. Arizona's rate of new job creation is near the bottom of the nation.

None of this seems to be on Washington's radar screen. Instead, Congress is continuing its love affair with FDR, its obsession with Soviet-style central-planning for national health care, its irrational hatred of fossil fuels, and its reckless determination to pile up debt faster than any civilization in history.

Which begs the question, are our leaders merely incompetent, or have they lost their minds?

Millions are out of work, thousands have lost their homes, and according to the WSJ article, a half a million borrowers are currently in default on their mortgages.

And tomorrow is Thanksgiving. How is it possible to be thankful in such times as these?

Bonnie, who blogs at the excellent Et Elle, et al., reminds us that the people who created Thanksgiving didn't have it so easy either. She has posted a fascinating excerpt from Gov. William Bradford's account of the Plymouth settlement's difficult beginnings. Writing about their desperate struggle to raise enough food to survive on, Bradford is honest about their failures:

...All this whille no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might expecte any. So they begane to thinke how they might raise as much torne [corn] as they could, and obtaine a beter crope then they had done, that they might not still thus languish in miserie.

There was no government bailout in sight. The colony was "languishing in misery." So they put their heads together, rejected the failed plans they had been following and came up with a new approach. And then, they got back to work.

The Pilgrims were thankful because they had arrived in a place that held hope for something better than they had known. It was not a place of lollypops and roses, but of hardship, suffering, death — and yet a place where there was abundant opportunity. The land was fertile, the climate tolerable, and they had succeeded, by hard work and sacrifice, to build a stable community. They had reason to hope that they and their families might prosper here.

And that they did. But not on their own. They prayed for God's mercy and gave him credit for strengthening them, supporting them, blessing them, and protecting them.

This year, more than ever, it should be clear that Thanksgiving is not really about prosperity, but poverty. When we are stripped of all the stuff that the world counts as treasure, all the stuff we lean on for support and hold dear, God still remains. He is faithful. He listens to our prayers and heals our broken hearts.

Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this: The faithful love of the LORD never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is His faithfulness; His mercies begin afresh each morning. I say to myself, "The LORD is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in Him!" — Lamentations 3:21-24, NLT

May we begin to discover, this Thanksgiving, what it means that God's mercies begin afresh each morning. If we can experience God's faithfulness in the middle of this miserable economy, then we have found something solid, something unshakable and unfailing, in which to put our hope.

Image credit: Carlos Zaragoza, stock.xchng

What to do with a broken relationship

2009-11-24T00:39:20Z

On the heels of my recent post on Radical reconciliation, I stumbled on an interesting post by Pastor Mark Daniels, a favorite blogger who writes at Better Living. Mark links to a helpful, downloadable booklet he found at the Radio Bible Class titled What do you do with a broken relationship? You might want to take a look.

Jollyblogger health update

2009-11-24T00:26:57Z

Pastor David Wayne, a blogging friend who writes at Jollyblogger, has been battling cancer. In his latest health update he reports on his recent CT scan. "The lesions in my liver and lungs show signs of growth. The growth isn't dramatic, not like they doubled in size or anything but they did show some signs of growth." He may need to return to chemotherapy. Please remember David and his family in your prayers.

It is well with my soul

2009-11-21T17:43:59Z

Image via Wikipedia

Justin Taylor at Between Two Worlds writes:

[Tomorrow] in history, 1873, the steamship Ville du Havre was struck by an iron sailing vessel while crossing the Atlantic. 246 people died, including the four daughters of Chicago lawyer Horatio Spafford. His wife Anna survived. Just two years earlier their four-year-old son died of scarlet fever, and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 financially ruined him.

The tragedy led Spafford to write the moving Christian hymn, "It is Well With My Soul." Go read the rest.

Radical reconciliation

2009-11-20T15:48:07Z

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Wednesday his hand was extended to Hamas for reconciliation and called on his Islamist rivals to sign an Egyptian proposal to end their division. "We have agreed to the Egyptian document and we call upon Hamas to accept it without procrastination," he said. "Our hand is extended for reconciliation." — Reuters, Nov 11, 2009

Peace is only possible where the benefits of unity outweigh the benefits of animosity. If Hamas reconciles with the elected Palestinian leadership, it risks being subverted but gains organizational legitimacy and a strategic insider's advantage in determining the future of the Palestinian cause. If it rejects reconciliation, it gains a reputation for political purity but risks being marginalized and relegated to the sidelines of history.

In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, Jesus encouraged his listeners to take heart in hard circumstances (blessed are the poor in spirit and those who mourn), live rightly (blessed are the meek, the righteous and the pure in heart) and generously (blessed are the merciful).

Then he praised peacemakers in a special way, saying that by their work they will be known as God's kin.

It's easy to become jaded about the prospects for peace in the Middle East. As long as the Arabs remain committed to the destruction of the state of Israel, there can be no peace. But it is still a good thing, a godly thing, to remain hopeful and to try to lead the Arabs and Israelis towards reconciliation.

Reconciliation between individuals is no less difficult than between great political powers. Relational unity has its benefits and its costs, too. Humans are imperfect, living together creates friction, and our relationships are always a mix of joy and frustration, peace and war.

A good friend left his wife for another woman. His wife was taken by surprise; she thought they had a good marriage. He was a great father to their two small children and had seemed happy. But without any fanfare, he announced one evening that he was leaving.

I thought I might be able to reason with him, to get him to see what he was giving up, to make him see the hurt he was causing his children, to put him back in touch with the love he used to have for his wife. It didn't happen. There was something in this new relationship that was so psychologically compelling that he was unwilling to reconcile, no matter what the cost.

Yet as difficult as it is, Christians should recognize that the very core of the work of Jesus Christ on the cross was a radical attempt at reconciliation between God and all of humanity. As grateful beneficiaries of this reconciliation, we are to respond by taking this message of peace, this Good News, to others.

[God] has reconciled us to himself through Jesus Christ; and he has made us agents of the reconciliation. God was in Christ personally reconciling the world to himself — not counting their sins against them — and has commissioned us with the message of reconciliation. ... For God caused Christ, who himself knew nothing of sin, actually to be sin for our sakes, so that in Christ we might be made good with the goodness of God. — 2 Corinthians 5:18-19, 21, JB Phillips (Paul writing)

]]> The New Testament word translated here as reconciliation is katallasso, which is a term from commerce referring to the exchange of two things of equal value. If I sell 100 Mexican pesos for US dollars, I can expect to receive $7.75 at the current rate. That's katallasso. Imagine an ancient scale where the two sides are carefully brought into balance, into agreement.

It's human nature to look out for number one first. We often hold reconciliation hostage to a demand for fairness, justice, compensation for our suffering, a recognition of our rights. These are not bad things in and of themselves, but they suggest that we are too often more concerned with being vindicated than with restoring a broken relationship.

God's radical reconciliation is extravagant compared to ours. He has tipped the scales dramatically in our favor, exchanging our guilt for clemency, our alienation for fellowship, our sins for the righteousness of Christ.

In a small town consumed by blood feuds and vendettas stretching back generations, a young Christian man and his wife are trying to live out Jesus' radical katallasso. His wife explains:

Theo wanted me to marry him, but another girl had her eyes on him, too. Her father threatened to kill Theo if he married me. We got married, and the threats began right away. Late one night we were out shopping when a man came up to Theo, pulled up his shirt to show him a pistol, and said, "I have a bullet for you." I was terrified and wanted to turn him in, but Theo said, "No, we need to forgive him." Theo still greets this man with friendly words on the street. I never knew how to forgive. Theo has taught me that as Christians we have the strength to forgive.

What would our relationships look like if we could practice Theo's forgiveness and live out his commitment to peace each day in our schools, our offices, our homes?

God's radical reconciliation on the cross is meant to be an example to us. Having received this generous gift, how shall we then live?

Photo credit: Dismal World

Obama's monster

2009-11-18T16:13:49Z

...nothing contributes so much to tranquillize the mind as a steady purpose... — from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

On May 21, 2003, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution extolling the historic importance of the Ford Motor Company. It lavishly lauded the ingenuity and innovation of Ford in more than 2 dozen paragraphs, such as this one:

Whereas [Ford's] innovation continued through the 1990s with the debut in 1993 of the Ford Mondeo, European Car of the Year, the redesigned 1994 Ford Mustang, and the introduction in 1990 of the Ford Explorer, which defined the sports utility vehicle (SUV) segment and remains the best selling SUV in the world; — House Resolution 100

As a satisfied Ford Explorer owner and proud citizen, I fairly burst with pride to see my Congress involving itself in such momentous matters. Other historic resolutions from that Congress praised the Messiah College men's soccer team, urged men to be better fathers, recognized "the importance of sports in fostering the leadership ability and success of women," and ordered the commissioning of postage stamps honoring autism, farm women and Texas freedom fighter Juan Nepomuceno Seguin.

With 435 members representing the 50 states and caucusing in dozens of political interest groups, the House of Representatives is a fever swamp for wacky legislation.

So it's not surprising that my local congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, a smart business woman who should know better, rushed to pass the "Affordable Health Care for America Act." If Congress was required to be as truthful about its bills as Kellogg's has to be about Corn Flakes, that misleading title alone would have been enough to kill the thing.

This is a bill that pretends to solve health care problems by taking away consumer freedom of choice, massively adding to the federal debt, and creating over 100 new government bodies that will stand between my doctor and me.

Fortunately, cooler and wiser heads reside in the US Senate, a more thoughtful legislative body that requires a 60-vote threshold to pass its own legislation. Their bill is being held up at present by 3 Democratic senators who are unhappy with various particulars. The Senate bill bears little resemblance to the House bill in the details, but still manages to restrict freedom, blow up the debt, and create a Washington-centric approach to health care planning.

When the Senate finally passes their bill — and I'm confident Harry Reid will find the right "incentives" to sway those 3 recalcitrant Senators — the House and Senate bills will be moved to a secret laboratory where they'll be carved up and stitched together like so many decaying body parts stolen from cemeteries in the dead of night. Democratic mad scientists will then attach electrodes, stand back, and hit the thing with 1,000 volts.

And amid the stench of burning flesh, Obama's monster will rise from the bloody table and stumble down the corridors of Congress, sending pages and interns screaming for safety.

It's a story of blind political ambition, unprecedented hubris, and a love affair with Washington-imposed solutions to the problems of ordinary people. Gather your children and lock your doors — a monster is about to be loosed on an unsuspecting public.

A matter of moments

2009-11-15T06:34:39Z

"The police told me that just before I got out of my car, the sniper, the younger one [Lee Boyd Malvo], had both Mr. Walekar and myself in his viewfinder," [Caroline] Namrow says. "He could see me sitting behind my windshield, and he could see Mr. Walekar standing outside his car.

"And he must have decided it was a clearer shot at Mr. Walekar," says Namrow, now 38, adding: "I still think about that. I realize how blessed I am. I think, for a matter of just a few moments, my life was saved. So I really try to enjoy my life and my children. I try to make an impact on the community I live in. I give a lot more of my time to charitable events." — Sniper's imprint, faded, remains indelible, Paul Duggan, The Washington Post

"For a matter of just a few moments, my life was saved." We rarely see life and death with that sort of bright clarity. It was just an ordinary day, and Caroline Namrow was performing a familiar and mundane ritual. There was nothing to distinguish that day from any other, until the man standing beside her was shot dead and the sickening realization hit: that could have been me.

The survivors of the Ft. Hood massacre will forever live with the knowledge that their lives were arbitrarily saved by the briefest of moments, while others died by the same tiny margins. Such an event makes death seem capricious, and life all the more precious.

In the summer and fall of 2002, leading up to October's terrifying DC rampage, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo took turns lying prone and hidden in the trunk of a Chevy, silently peering through the scope of a rifle, choosing whom they would let live and who would die. By the time they were caught, they had executed at least fourteen people and wounded seven.

Malvo received life in prison for his cooperation against his partner. His own life was apparently quite precious, as he used his knowledge of their crimes to save himself from death. Muhammad made no such deal and was executed by the state of Virginia this week. He died in silence, without acknowledging his crimes or his guilt.

We live in a cruel and chaotic world. Life thrives abundantly, and yet is surprisingly fragile.

The thwop-thwop-thwop of rotor blades clawing the pre-dawn air woke me this morning as a medevac chopper flew north over my home, no doubt responding to an urgent call from the scene of some life and death situation.

For a matter of just a few moments... Death is always uncomfortably near.

At such times, we are forced to open our eyes to the fragility of our lives, and the fact of our own mortality. We are slapped in the face with those discomfiting questions about God, eternity and the ultimate fate of our souls. Gazing into an open casket, it is painfully obvious that the person lying there has lost his personhood. Where did it go? Has it vanished forever, or merely been transported elsewhere?

]]> The casket descends into the hard ground and the living are forever cut off from someone who breathed and spoke and laughed and loved. Something inside of us is repulsed at the finality of that loss. We want there to be more. There ought to be more.

No sooner do we begin to live... than we begin to move ceaselessly towards death. ...our whole life is nothing but a race towards death, in which no one is allowed to stand still... — St. Augustine, The City of God, Book XIII

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned in Nazi Germany during WWII, and often lay flat on the floor of his cell as Allied bombers pounded the city so intensely that he felt certain he would not survive. Rather than turning fatalistic or morose, Bonhoeffer's faith transformed the nearness of death into a realization that "every new day is a miracle." Elsewhere, he contrasted Socrates' view of death with that of Jesus:

Socrates mastered the art of dying; Jesus Christ overcame death as "the last enemy" (I Corinthians 15:26). There is a real difference between the two things; the one is within the scope of human possibilities, the other means resurrection. It is not from the art of dying, but from the resurrection of Christ, that a new and purifying wind can blow through our present world. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

If Christ rose from the dead, all who put their faith in him have a reasonable hope that death will not have the final word. It means that this present life is only a prelude to something grander and more miraculous than we have ever experienced.

Jesus died. His life ebbed away over painful hours and his heart gave out. He was laid in a cold tomb where his friends wept as they said their goodbyes.

On the third day, he wiped away their tears and gave them, and us, a glimpse of eternity. That's the claim of Christianity, the most important claim in all of human history.

Each of us is racing towards death. Someday, for a matter of just a few moments, you and I will not be saved. Before that day comes, for the sake of your eternal soul, take the time to examine the claims of Jesus and decide for yourself whether death is the end, or merely a new beginning.

Get what you need

2009-11-03T18:52:15Z

Now you can't always get what you want,
You can't always get what you want,
Now you can't always get what you want,
But if you try sometimes, you just might find
You get what you need!

— Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, You Can't Always Get What You Want, 1969

The drive-through window at my local Burgerteria sends me into a minor panic. There are a dozen choices, every one mouth-watering delicious. I'm starving. I need food, but I want the right kind of food. Something memorable. Something to delight my palate without emptying my wallet. Something juicy, tangy, fresh and hot.

But what?! There are so many choices. I don't know what I want, and the woman with the screaming kids in the car behind me is fast losing her patience.

And here's the kicker: too often, the very thing I most want isn't what I need at all!

The ads on television are cleverly designed to make us want what they're selling. With the right pair of blue jeans, I could be King of the World! With the right credit card, I could live the life I deserve. With the right colored pill, all of my problems would vanish.

It's not true, of course. We know it's not true. But these claims resonate somewhere deep inside of us in an empty, aching spot that wants something, longs for something, needs something... real, something significant, something meaningful, something that will restore our hope.

We keep grasping for something that always seems to be just out of reach.

One day on a dusty road, Jesus encountered a blind man. The man thought he wanted to see. Perfectly understandable. Blindness is a tough gig. Even with today's technologies — cochlear implants, prosthetic limbs, computer speech recognition software — the blind still walk about tapping a cane and listening carefully for things that might kill them. In the first century blindness meant constant dependence on family and friends.

Sight is our most complex sense, and it can go wrong in dozens of ways. There can be complete blindness due to injury, a failure of the optic nerves, or damage to the mechanisms of the visual cortex. There can be color blindness, acute myopia, macular degeneration, cataracts, retinal detachments... We have no idea what this blind man suffered from, but Luke's account tells us that he was dependent on the crowd for information and had to be led to Jesus when he was called. It would seem his blindness was nearly complete.

I have always been struck by the question Jesus asks this man:

As Jesus approached Jericho, a blind beggar was sitting beside the road. When he heard the noise of a crowd going past, he asked what was happening. They told him that Jesus the Nazarene was going by. So he began shouting, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" ...

Jesus asked him, "What do you want Me to do for you?"

"Lord," he said, "I want to see!"

And Jesus said, "All right, receive your sight! Your faith has healed you."

Instantly the man could see, and he followed Jesus, praising God. And all who saw it praised God, too. — Luke 18:35-38, 41-43, NLT

]]> What do you want Me to do for you?

Well, Jesus, I'd love to take a few strokes off my golf game, I'd like whiter teeth and fresher breath, I could use a vacation in the south of France... Oh, and by the way, did you notice how I stumbled over here and can't exactly tell where you are? I'm blind! I want to see! I'm tired of being in the dark! What do you mean, "What do you want Me to do for you?" I want to see.

Jesus wasn't obtuse. In the accounts of his dealings with people, he typically waits for a request before acting. Most people simply approached him and stated what they wanted. The blind man had no way of knowing that he was in Jesus' presence and focused in his gaze until Jesus spoke and invited the man to make a request — yet more evidence that this man was profoundly blind.

Jesus gave the man his sight. He gave him exactly what he wanted. But was it what he needed?

Luke tells us that after the man was healed, he praised God and followed Jesus down the road, continuing to praise God. If that had been me, I think I might have run off to a nearby city to revel in my new freedom and soak in all the glorious sights that I had been missing all those years.

Not this man.

He got what he wanted — sight — but his response to that gift suggests that what he needed even more than sight was a restoration of his faith in God. He needed an experience of God's mercy, a very personal experience of God's caring and love. He needed to know that the God he had long prayed to had heard his prayers; that the God he had long worshiped in darkness was in fact living and powerfully at work in his world.

What he wanted was to see. What he needed was to have that empty place of doubt and disappointment and puzzlement inside of him filled up by the compassionate and loving mercies of the Good Shepherd.

My life is too often driven by what I want, not what I need. I'm like the guy in Janice Joplin's song, who prays "Oh, Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz. My friends all drive Porsches; I must make amends."

But what I need won't be satisfied by a better car, a cruise, or less gray in my hair. I need to worship someone bigger than myself. I need to experience purpose and meaning in my life. I need to know forgiveness, mercy and love.

What I need, what we all need, is to be touched deep down inside of our souls by that same Jesus who restored sight, and hope, to a blind man sitting beside a dusty road.

The French connection

2009-10-21T05:26:26Z

That's my grandfather, Joseph Yves Louis Lehardy. He was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, to borrow from Churchill. Both he and my grandmother died before I was born, and 4 of their 7 children passed on before my 18th birthday. His family grew up broken apart by hardship and tragedy; by the time I began asking questions about this mysterious man in the conductor's cap, no one living had any answers.

He was French, of that we were certain, but little else was clear. Joseph wasn't one to talk about his parents, his siblings, his childhood or what had led him to America.

There was a rumor that he had run up debts in Monte Carlo and fled France ahead of angry men. There was a story that he had been persecuted for his faith and had fled to Canada, then to Baltimore where he married my grandmother in 1912.

Looking for the truth, I began researching my family history. There was a wealth of data on my mother's family, but after a few years of digging I could find nothing at all about the man in the conductor's cap, besides his death certificate and a few, speculative family letters.

I began to doubt the few things I thought I knew. Perhaps he wasn't French at all? Perhaps his name was an alias he had concocted to hide his real identity?

We live in a world dominated by the tangible and concrete, a world that revolves around facts and the scientific method, a world in which mysteries are routinely battered by high energy particle accelerators until they yield to our need to know.

So I kept pressing for some clue, some fact to hang my family history on. And then one day, a seam the width of my fingernail opened in this Chinese puzzle box: I found my grandfather's sworn testimony about himself, given in exchange for his US citizenship.

There were many amazing things in that document, but topping the list was this: he had come to America from the city of Rennes, France, in late 1907.

My search had suddenly leaped across the ocean to Brittany, in the northwest corner of France.

]]> The next breakthrough was my brother's. A career in the Army had taught him how to solve difficult problems with ingenuity and persistence. Speaking not a word of French, he managed to get copies of a number of original records on our grandfather.

The French are bureaucratic geniuses, having the world's most complete set of birth, marriage and death records going clear back to the invention of cheese. They are also smart enough to know that if you ship a bunch of papers to a curious American, he'll be less likely to sully your beautiful little country with an actual visit.

Working over the Internet, my brother and I have been greedily draining the French document databases and filling in the history of my grandfather Lehardy's family. Today, most of the mysteries have been solved.

I thought of all this while reading an email I received a few days ago. The writer had read one of my essays on the historical Jesus, and voiced his skepticism this way:

There is not ONE, historical reference anywhere that confirms a divine man named Jesus... Jesus was not a popular guy amongst his peers while alive but became famous only after he died... For a guy that was supposed to be the greatest man that ever lived we have no idea when he was born, no idea what he looked like... His story parallels many previous myth gods that also claimed to be born December 25, of a virgin, died and reborn again, and spirited away.

I don't have to see something to believe it's true or not. It just has to make common sense. There is no common sense that proves that there ever was a divine man named Jesus (Yeshua).

I suspect the writer is parroting other skeptics without having done much personal research, but a great many people would agree with him, and I'd be dishonest if I didn't admit that there is nothing approaching slam-dunk proof that Jesus was the Son of God.
I had a tough enough time finding a few bare facts about my 200-year-old ancestors; solid evidence about an obscure Jew who lived over two millennia ago is very hard to come by.

But the Scriptures themselves provide even better evidence about the historical Jesus than I have thus far discovered about my own grandfather. For while there is no birth certificate for Jesus, what we have is the testimony of a group of people who claim to have known him personally, or else interviewed those who did.

Their stories are remarkably consistent with each other. And the human factors in those accounts are convincingly real. The Gospels read more like news reports than fiction. The people in these accounts are as sophisticated and unpredictable as real people should be. The conversations and events contain the stuff of real life — well, except for the miracles. But we're talking here about the Son of God, so a different standard applies.

What seals it for me is the fact that Jesus' disciples abandoned him after his execution. Their accounts are unflattering portrayals of a mass betrayal of their friend and teacher. They were terrified of reprisals and stunned, grief-stricken and demoralized, to discover that this miracle-worker was an ordinary human being, capable of bleeding and dying like everyone else.

This was a completely human response. Completely understandable. And then came the resurrection. Jesus appeared to them all, they claimed. The tomb was empty, they claimed.

Suddenly, they were a different group of men.

The resurrection changed them from a cowering, hopeless band of misfits to a unified, bold and confident group of revolutionaries. They became the founders of a new religion, they challenged the religious status quo at great personal risk, and they stayed true to their claims about Jesus and his resurrection until they themselves died, sometimes painfully at the hands of Roman executioners.

No, it isn't proof, but it's a very hard thing to explain, this radical change of heart. It's not proof, but it should make you curious enough to want to read those accounts for yourself. It should make you want to ask the question, "What did these guys see that so completely changed the course of their lives?"

It's not proof, but it's compelling evidence of something very interesting.

Flawed justice

2009-09-29T15:17:49Z

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. — Edmund Burke

When William Hawkins was 28, he was convicted of attempted sexual contact with a 12-year-old girl. It is the sort of violation most of us find odious, but Hawkins' crime actually occurred much earlier, when he was 16. Young men often do impulsive and stupid things. Hawkins was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison, served a bit more than 5 months and was released with the proviso that he register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

He seems to have tried to turn his life around. He became a trucker, got married, and at some point moved to Georgia without informing the local authorities of his past.

The State of Georgia locked him up on a parole violation, then released him a couple of weeks back. Though his wife has asked that he be allowed to live with her in Virginia, Georgia has refused to let him leave the state.

Now that he is out, Hawkins has discovered that Georgia's tough sex offender laws make it nearly impossible to find a job or a place to live. To safeguard children, sex offenders there cannot live, work, or gather within 1,000 feet of any school, park or church.

So Hawkins, and a number of other registered sex offenders, live in a makeshift camp in the Georgia woods. They sleep in tents, shower under buckets, and during the day wander the nearby city looking for work.

Attorney Sarah Geraghty of the Southern Center for Human Rights states the obvious: "requiring people to live like animals in the woods is both inhumane and a terrible idea for public safety." (Homeless Georgia sex offenders directed to woods, Associated Press.)

I have a simple solution to Mr. Hawkins' problem: He and other homeless sex offenders could go live with the acclaimed film director, Roman Polanski.

]]> Mr. Polanski, whose movies have made him wealthy enough to own large homes in both France and Switzerland, himself once lusted after an under-age girl. Unlike Hawkins, Polanski wasn't a hormone-addled teenager but a 44-year-old adult when he drugged a 13-year-old model he was photographing in his LA home and forcibly raped her.

Polanski plead guilty to a lesser crime, but fled to Europe on the eve of his sentencing. As a Polish citizen and a celebrated member of the arts community, he has lived a life of privilege in France and Switzerland these past 30 years, protected by France's tough anti-extradition laws.

Last week, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office got the Swiss to agree to arrest Polanski pending an extradition hearing. Polanski and his privileged friends are outraged.

Mr. Polanski's film, The Pianist, is one of the finest stories of Jewish suffering under the Nazis ever filmed. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for that work, and is without question a talented artist. Many are saying that he shouldn't be punished for a crime that happened so long ago. His victim says she has forgiven him.

Mr. Hawkins is neither rich nor artistic. Eighteen years after his crime, he lives in a muddy clearing in a small, nylon tent. He spends his days gathering firewood and warm clothing to prepare for the coming winter. He survives on food stamps and the generosity of friends, who might not be blamed for wondering why he is still being punished while Polanski, this darling of the glitterati, goes free.

The answer, we know, is that justice too often favors the wealthy and well-connected. The law has little in common with real justice, and frequently attempts to excise the malignancy of evil (e.g., sex crimes) with a machete instead of a scalpel.

Justice has failed William Hawkins. Long after paying for his youthful stupidity, he keeps paying and paying, beyond all reason, all sense, all that is fair.

But if possible, Roman Polanski's story is even more maddening. Polanski has not merely escaped justice; he has raped her, as surely and painfully as he raped his young victim all those years ago.

And he'll probably get away with it.

This morning, William Hawkins woke up from a fitful night sleeping on the cold ground, heated his breakfast over a propane burner, and shuffled out of the woods, looking for an opportunity to start his life over again. I hope he succeeds.

Update: Authorities have evicted the homeless sex offenders from their camp in the woods. No word yet on where they will end up. Neither Roman Polanski nor Whoopi Goldberg could be reached for comment.

Procrustean health care

2009-07-23T16:06:03Z

The British are a race of Pygmies. I first discovered this fact when my boss' comely daughter asked me to fix her recalcitrant MGB GT. I knew cars, and it seemed like a good way to score some points with my boss, and his pretty daughter.

So I took the keys and attempted to take the car for a spin.

With the driver's seat shoved all the way back and my 6' 3" frame crammed into the cockpit, my shins were wedged against the dashboard, my knees straddled the steering wheel and my head was bent 90 degrees to the right. Closing the door would have crushed my left kneecap, so I left it ajar for the short drive — very short, since with my legs bent double I could only lightly dance across the pedals with my toes.

In Greek mythology, Procrustes, a wicked blacksmith, used to invite guests to stay overnight in his home. If they were too short for his guest bed, he would stretch them to fit. If too tall, he would amputate their legs.

If the Brits had been smart, they could have increased the MG's market share by resorting to Procrustean human re-engineering...

Of the sort the President's health care plan will have to depend on. To save money and make everything efficient, a Health Commission (presumably run by a distant relative of Procrustes) will design a one-size-fits-all health model. My company's self-funded ERISA plan, which currently offers an affordable and modest package of benefits, will have to be stretched and hacked to fit Washington's ideal. Instead of deciding for myself what sort of coverage fits me best, an unelected, unaccountable Washington Health Commissar will call the shots, and I'll just have to pony up the cash to pay for it.

He'll stretch some of us on the rack and perform amputations on others. The elderly will be encouraged to do without those expensive hip replacements and pacemakers. Diabetics will all use the same, cranky, Soviet-era insulin pumps. Expensive new meds will be discouraged when old meds work pretty well. Innovation will take a back seat to saving money, getting the biggest bang for our tax dollars.

British sports cars were notorious for breaking down when you needed them most. They looked sexy on a track going fast, but peek under the hood and you'd discover an awful mess. Kind of like the British health care system of today.

And like the American health care system of tomorrow, if Congress and the President get their way.

Photo credit: Flickr, Lady Wulfrun